My Fantoms

Theophile Gautier is a dominant figure in nineteenth-century French literature and a complex and alluring one. No one so epitomized the "Bohemian artist" as this friend of Victor Hugo and Baudelaire who is credited with coining the slogan "Art for Art's Sake." At the same time, Gautier was one of the first French professional men of letters, a masterful journalist as well as an inspired proponent of the short story. Seven samples of Gautier's geniusall exploring themes of love and deathhave been brought together inMyFantoms, a book that brilliantly illuminates the subtlety and range of his singular imagination. Compiled and translated by Richard Holmes, whose investigations into the Shelley, Coleridge, and Dr. Johnson have established him as the modern master of the art of biography,My Fantomsis not so much a collection of stories as a unified work spanning the whole of Gautier's career and revealing his subtle and many faceted sensibility. From the erotic awakening of "The Adolescent" through the beautiful lament for the mad genius Gerard de Nerval that Gautier offers in "The Poet," these are tales that celebrate the senses and investigate the spirit with style and wit. "What ever would the Devil find to do in Paris?" Gautier wonders. "He would meet people just as diabolical as he, and find himself taken for some naive provincial . . ." Tapestries, statues, and corpses come to life, young men dream their way into ruin, and through it all Gautier keeps his faith in the power of imagination: "No one is truly dead, until they are no longer loved."

Théophile Gautier (1811—1872) was a poet, novelist, art critic, and one of the most prominent French Romantic writers of the nineteenth century. He originally studied as a painter but his friendship with Nerval and Hugo turned him toward a career in literature. By his twenties he had become a leading figure in the Jeune-France group, and the publication of Mademoiselle de Maupin in 1836 placed him at the heart of the Parisian literary world. Apart from his weekly journalist contributions to La Presse for twenty years, he worked on comedies, pantomimes, ballet scenarios, and produced novels, stories, and travel books.

Richard Holmes is the author of Shelley: The Pursuit, for which he won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1974; Dr Johnson and Mr. Savage, which won the 1993 James Tait Black Prize; and Coleridge: Early Visions, winner of the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1992. He lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain. He is also a professor of biographical studies at the University of East Anglia.