Argentine

This third and final collection of Comte de L’Estoille’s works features Les Amoureuses, a collection of short prose poems and dramas, including “Gyptis,” a tragedy set within the context of L’Estoille’s pseudohistory of Gaul, and “Marthe” and “Rosalie,” both resentful responses to the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. It also contains the more upbeat “Argentine” and “Lemmi Kainen”, both reflective of a burst of interest in Scandinavian mythology among French neo-Romantic writers, borrowing motifs from Hans Christian Andersen.

As an eccentric representative of the literary avant garde, L’Estoille was always perhaps a little too and paradoxical, but that is not a bad thing in a Decadent artist. He was a maverick even within that motley maverick school, but for connoisseurs of the unusual, that serves only to make him even more interesting as a writer and as a man.