were beyond his comprehension,» and he confessed that he preferred Dumaspère. Yet he «took
such a pleasure in seeing him,» for, he added, «though I never understood very much of what he
wrote, what a treat it was to hear him speak!» He produced a frontispiece for one of his Pages,
and the resemblance has already been noted between a nude woman by Renoir and that described in
Mallarmé's Phénomène futur, -- «Some original and naïve folly, an ecstacy in gold, I know not
what! in her parlance, her hair, folded with the grace of stuffs around a face lit up by the sanguinary
nudity of her lips... And the eyes, comparable to rare stones! which are not worth the look coming
from her happy flesh...» The poet of the azure, whom Victor Hugo called his «dear Impressio-
nist poet», and to whom the autumn appeared as though «scattered with freckles», just as La
Promenade or La Balançoire are strewn with touches of gold, was also the author of that poem of
Rubens-like procreation and fleshly deception, after the manner of Watteau, -- L'Après-midi d'un
Faune. But Renoir's nymph did not steal away. The Saône, she threw herself into the arms of
the Rhône. Venus, chosen by Paris, -- she hesitated no more than the shepherd, she advanced
without even knowing Rubens' hesitations, -- and Bonnard's violence was useless. Renoir was the
offering without ceremony, and amiable. But the faun, seeing «an animal whiteness at rest, undu-
lating», «on the blue-grey gold of distant verdure», or admiring «the splendid bath of hair»
which disappeared amidst brightness and quivering, «O! ye gems!» seems to describe, under the
form of naiades, the women-bathers of Cagnes.

Verlaine's grossness was no more to Renoir's taste than Mallarmé's cerebral perversity. Renoir
was neither fin de siècle, nor fin de race. The pantheistic appeals and efforts towards virility of an
effeminate period he transcribed into a quiet and healthy plasticity; and thus he held aloof from
that decadence whose very name he was ignorant of. He had no need to evoke either the robing-room of
Italian comedy, or the masks of the buried past, but was content with a reality as devoid of despair
as it was of the idea of forfeiture. To him the flesh had never had the taste of «bitter fruit»
which Verlaine experienced; the nobility of Man and his body was intact in the mind of Renoir.

Yet Verlaine and Renoir viewed the human form with similar eyes. They described woman
whilst noting the same beloved features, and so long as the poet held himself aloof from vice there
was a sensual brotherhood between them. As soon as the oval of a face was sketched in, Renoir
placed the light of the eyes; whilst Verlaine strove primarily to be «rich with beautiful eyes»,
«to believe in large eyes», and to seize «the profound brilliancy of eyes». Invisibly they were both
of them attracted by that liquid brightness, when the picture had been barely begun; and the poet,
in his L'Amoureuse du Diable, dedicated to Mallarmé, shows her to us: