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[Footnote 24: The Transatlantic Publishing Co.; 1895.]

“Purple and Fine Women”[25] is a misnamed book. It should be called “Philosophic Fables.” The first two stories are French in form. Paul Bourget himself is the hero of one of them! In “The Princess of the Sun” we are offered a new and fantastic version of the Coppelia story. “The Dear Departed” finds Saltus in a murderous amorous mood again. In “The Princess of the Golden Isles” a new poison is introduced, muscarine. Alchemy furnishes the theme for one tale; the protagonist seeks an alcahest, a human victim for his crucible. We are left in doubt as to whether he chooses his wife, who wears a diamond set in one of her teeth, or a gorilla. There are dramas of dual personality and of death. Metaphysics and spiritualism rise dimly out of the charm of this book. There is a duchess who mews like a cat and somewhere we are assured that Perche non posso odiarte from La Sonnnambula is the most beautiful aria in the Italian repertory. Here is a true and soul-revealing epigram: “The best way to master a subject of which you are ignorant is to write it up.” Certainly not Saltus at his best, this opus, but far from his worst.

[Footnote 25: Ainslee; 1903.]

“The Perfume of Eros”[26] is frenzied fiction again; amnesia, drunkenness, white slavery, sex, are its mingled themes. There is a pretty picture, recognizable in any smart community, of a witty woman of fashion, and a full-length portrait of a bounder. “The Yellow Fay,” Saltus’s cliche for the Demon Rum, was the original title of this “Fifth Avenue Incident.” Romance and Realism consort lovingly together in its pages. There is an unforgetable passage descriptive of a young man ridding himself of his mistress. He interrupts his flow of explanation to hand her a card case, which she promptly throws out of the window.

[Footnote 26: A. Wessels Co.; 1905.]

“‘That is an agreeable way of getting rid of twelve thousand dollars,’ he remarked.

“Yet, however lightly he affected to speak, the action annoyed him. Like all men of large means he was close. It seemed to him beastly to lose such a sum. He got up, went to the window and looked down. He could not see the case and he much wanted to go and look for it. But that for the moment Marie prevented.”

“The Pomps of Satan”[27] is replete with grace and graciousness, and full of charm, a quality more valuable to its possessor than juvenility, our author tells us in a chapter concerning the lost elixir of youth. Neither form nor matter assume ponderous shape in this volume, which in the quality of its contents reminds one faintly of Franz Blei’s lady’s breviary, “The Powder Puff,” but Saltus’s book is the more ingratiating of the two. Satan’s pomps are varied; the author exposes his whims, his ideas, images the past, forecasts the future, deplores the present. There is a chapter on cooking and we learn that Saltus does not care for food prepared in the German style … nor yet in the American. He forbids us champagne: “Champagne is not a wine. It is a beverage, lighter indeed than brandy and soda, but, like cologne, fit only for demi-reps.” But he seems untrue to himself in an essay condemning the use of perfumes. His own books are heavily scented. With the rare prescience and clairvoyance of an artist he includes the German Kaiser in a chapter on hyenas (in 1906!); therein stalk the blood-stained shadows of Caligula, Caracalla, Atilla, Tamerlane, Cesare Borgia, Philip II, and Ivan the Terrible. The paragraph is worth quoting: “Power consists in having a million bayonets behind you. Its diffusion is not general. But there are people who possess it. For one, the German Kaiser. Not long since somebody or other diagnosed in him the habitual criminal. We doubt that he is that. But we suspect that, were it not for the press, he would show more of primitive man than he has thus far thought judicious.” Has Mme. de Thebes done better? Saltus also foresaw Gertrude Stein. Peering into the future he wrote: “When that day comes the models of literary excellence will not be the long and windy sentences of accredited bores, but ample brevities, such as the ‘N’ on Napoleon’s tomb, in which, in less than a syllable, an epoch, and the glory of it, is resumed.” Saltus forsakes his previous choice from Bellini and installs Tu che a Dio as his favourite Italian opera air. Here is another flash of self-revealment: “Byzance is rumoured to have been the sewer of every sin, yet such was its beauty that it is the canker of our heart we could not have lived there.” Always this turning to the far past, this delving in rosetta stones and palimpsests, this preoccupation with the sights and sins of the ancient gods and kings. A chapter on poisons, another on Gille de Retz, which probably owes something to “La Bas,” betray this preference. He playfully suggests that the Academy of Arts and Letters be filled up with young nobodies: “They have, indeed, done nothing yet. But therein is their charm. An academy composed of young people who have done nothing yet would be more alluring than one made up of fossils who are unable to do anything more.” Herein are contained enough aphorisms and epigrams to make up a new book of Solomonic wisdom. Hardly as evenly inspired as “Imperial Purple,” “The Pomps of Satan” is more dashing and more varied. It is also more tired.