"What is that cloud, called Sixtine, which comes to trouble my royal indifference and to conceal my sun--death? I do not want to go to sleep in the shadow of her beauty...."

Hubert Entragues, aesthete and litterateur, conceives a passion for the ethereal Sixtine in this "cerebral novel" of 1890. The romance remains largely imaginary, a passion localized in the skull of the intellectual Entragues. Alone with his thoughts and his literature, the narrator's baroque reflections careen from lyrical exaltation to sullen despondency according to the inscrutable actions of his elusive...