Achievement and Dissipation: 1890–6

Abstract

In the spring of 1890, Symons, with Havelock Ellis, was in Paris for a second visit, where he met most of the leading writers and artists. These months, Ellis later wrote, ‘the climax of the whole early part of my life’, were passed ‘pleasantly and instructively’.¹ The two, spending much time in the cafés along the Boulevard St Michel and in the literary salons, met such figures as Huysmans, Remy de Gourmont, Taine, Mallarmé, Maeterlinck, Moréas, and Verlaine, though they missed Zola, whom they had hoped to meet. A confirmed Francophile, Symons wrote to Campbell on May 25: ‘I am by this time getting so Parisian that the thought of London fills me with horror.’²