"When, in the autumn of 1889, the small group which proposed to found the Mercure de France thought first of adding several collaborators to its number," while one went off in search of Jules Renard, another invited Julien Leclercq and a third promised the assistance of Albert Samain,—the late lamented Louis Denise, who was at that time cataloguer of the Bibliothèque Nationale, said to us:
"There is at the Library an extraordinary man who knows everything. He has already published ten volumes and a hundred articles upon every conceivable subject."
"We don't need a scholar, nor a polygraph, but rather a writer who'll be one of us."
"'All he asks is to be one of us,'" declared Denise. "'He is filled with admiration for Mallarmé and swears only by Villiers de l'Isle Adam. At the present moment he's writing a novel that will be a revelation.'
"'Bring along your prodigy.
"That prodigy was Remy de Gourmont.
"We did not know him, not even by name, despite his vast literary labors. He lived in seclusion. He did not frequent any of our literary rendezvous. He was never seen at the François Ier, nor at the Vachette, nor at the Voltaire, nor at the Chat-Noir, nor at the Nouvelle-Athènes. He had not written for any of our little reviews, of which he was later to become the well-informed historian. His signature had not appeared in the columns of Lutèce, la Vogue, the Decadent, the Symboliste, the Scapin, the Ecrits pour l'Art, nor in la Pléiade.
"But if we did not know him, he knew us all, together with the Acadiens, the Lapons, the Italian verists, the English novelists, the American humorists, the Jesuits, balloons, volcanos, the thousand subjects upon which his learning and his curiosity had exercised themselves. In publishing houses whose existence we did not suspect or in papers we were hardly familiar with, we, too, in conjunction with the still obscure and mysterious esthetic movement which we aspired to represent, formed the object of his labors and his meditations. This newcomer knew more about our interests than we did ourselves. He had read our most insignificant essays. He shared our enthusiasms, our antipathies, participated in our intellectual research, discerned our tendencies, penetrated into our intentions, which already he was arranging to formulate, and to formulate for us with as keen a perspicuity and clarity as were permitted by the concerted imprecision of our thought and the hazy, delicately shaded, sublimated art that we had just established.
"From his very first pages in the Mercure de France,"—those Proses moroses which were so perfect in form, so rare in expression and of such singular subtlety,"—he revealed himself as an expert artist in the new coloring, and produced exquisite models of the refined genre which charmed us. In that same year, 1890, he published through the firm of Savine the novel that Denise had spoken about to us," that Sixtine which at once consecrated him as a coming master in the exacting eyes of our cenacles. 'A novel of cerebral life,'—a precious subtitle,—and one could find nothing better to suggest the full significance of this book, which is of disturbing originality. Nothing took place in it which the regular public calls by the name of 'action'; everything in it, was, indeed, 'cerebral.' It was filled with a minute, probing analysis. The hero did not love so much as he observed himself in the process of loving. It was charming, complicated, and marvellously written.
"At the times of its appearance the reaction against naturalism and the so-called 'psychological' school of Bourget was at its height.... Symbolism had been born,—musical, suggestive, indirect. But if symbolism had produced its work, it had not yet found its formulas. There was interminable and indefatigable discussion as to just what symbolism was. And it was Remy de Gourmont who undertook to define it. He himself brought to it perfect and delicate products. Among these, in poetry and prose, were les Litanies de la Rose, Lilith, le Fantôme, Fleurs de Jadis, Hieroglyphes and the dramatic poem Théodat, which was given at the Théâtre d'Art at the same time as Maeterlinck's les Aveugles, Laforgue's le Concile féerique and that Cantique des Cantiques by Renaird, which was accompanied by a luminous, fragrant musical score so that, by an appropriate harmony of sounds, voices, colors and perfumes, all the senses might be conjointly struck by the same symbol."