Romantic provocateur, flamboyant bohemian, precocious novelist, perfect poet—not to mention an inexhaustible journalist, critic, and man-about-town—Théophile Gautier is one of the major figures, and great characters, of French literature. In My Fantoms Richard Holmes, the celebrated biographer of Shelley and Coleridge, has found a brilliantly effective new way to bring this great bu too-little-known writer into English. My Fantoms assembles seven stories spanning the whole of Gautier’s career into a unified work that captures the essence of his adventurous life and subtle art. From the erotic awakening of “The Adolescent” through “The Poet,” a piercing recollection of the mad genius Gérard de Nerval, the great friend of Gautier’s youth, My Fantoms celebrates the senses and illuminates the strange disguises of the spirit, while taking readers on a tour of modernity at its most mysterious. ”What ever would the Devil find to do in Paris?” Gautier wonders. “He would meet people just as diabolical as he, and find himself taken for some naïve provincial…” Tapestries, statues, and corpses come to life; young men dream their way into ruin; and Gautier keeps his faith in the power of imagination: “No one is truly dead, until they are no longer loved.”

A creative innovator who boldly traversed traditional boundaries separating different genres and schools, French poet Theophile Gautier was extremely influential, playing a role in shaping the styles of poets from T. S. Elliot to Ezra Pound. In this, his most acclaimed collection of verse, Gautier offers his philosophical ponderings and lyrical musings.

'Selected Lyrics' presents a short list of nineteenth-century French poets to be studied with Théophile Gautier.

The Mummy's Foot' is a gothic short story written by French writer, Théophile Gautier, author of 'Clarimonde'. The plot follows a man who buys a mummified foot in an antiques shop. It once belonged to an Egyptian princess, and it transpires that she wants it back. He is forced to make a deal. This is a classic short story in the genre and we a republishing it with a brand new introductory biography of the translator of the work, Lafcadio Hearn.

Paul d'Aspremont meets his fiancée, a young English girl named Alicia Ward. What begins as a courtly affair decends into a Gothic nightmare as Paul is reported, by a rival for Alicia, to possess the 'evil eye', a jinx that kills all those he befriends.

The Club des Hashischins ("Club of the Hashish-Eaters”), was a Parisian literary group dedicated to the exploration of drug-induced altered states of consciousness, principally through the use of hashish, a concentrated form of cannabis resin. Notable members of the club, which was active from 1844 to 1849, included Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Baudelaire, Gerard de Nerval, Honoré de Balzac, and Théophile Gautier, all dedicated to experimenting with drugs and recording drug-induced visions. Whilst Baudelaire notably produced his treatise "The Poem Of Hashish” based on his experiences at the club, the most notable record of the group's activities and experiences under the influence of hashish remains Gautier's "Le Club des Hachichin”, first published in the Revue des Deux Mondes in February 1846. This text also includes a section on the original hashishin, the assassins who served the Old Man of the Mountain, a figure later identified by William S. Burroughs as Hassan i Sabbah. Transmutation and insanity loom over Gautier as he explores a hypnagogic inner world of monstrous distortions and shadows, on a trip into the revelries of Walpurgisnacht. The result is an enduring masterpiece of drug literature.