Simone, aimes-tu le bruit des pas sur les feuilles mortes?
Viens; nous serons un jour de pauvres feuilles mortes.
Viens; déjà la nuit tombe et le vent nous emporte.
Simone, aimes-tu le bruit des pas sur les feuilles mortes?
"Le bruit des pas sur les feuilles mortes"—such indeed must be, at the last, the wisdom of this great harvester of human passions and perversions.
"Feuilles mortes," and the sound of feet that go by; that go by and return not again!
Remy de Gourmont leaves in us a bitter after-sense that we have not altogether, or perhaps even nearly, sounded the stops of his mystery. "The rest is silence" not only because he is dead, but because it seems as if he mocked at us—he the Protean critic—until his last hour.
His remote epicurean life—the life of a passionate scholar of the Renaissance—baffles and evades our curiosity.
To analyse Remy de Gourmont one would have to be a Remy de Gourmont.
He is full of inconsistencies. Proudly individualistic, an intellectual anarchist free from every scruple, he displays an objective patience almost worthy of Goethe himself in his elaborate investigations into the mysteries of life and the mysteries of the art that expresses life.
Furiously enamoured of thrilling aesthetic sensations he can yet wander, as those who know his "Promenades" can testify, through all manner of intricate and technical details.