Remy de Gourmont was the most celebrated literary theorist and practitioner of the 1890s in France. His work is the epitome of the fin de siecle. The stories here translated are taken from his collection Couleurs. Although published in 1908 these works, which de Gourmont compares to prose poems, are too highly perfumed for the twentieth century, their cynicism and amoral paganism situates them firmly in the decade before - the decade of Decadence and moral decay.