Les Chevaux de Diomède Reading Order

Les Chevaux de Diomède (1897) by Rémy de Gourmont is the most intellectually refined of the French Symbolist novels, a philosophical Bildungsroman about the young poet Diomède Donatien's erotic and intellectual education in Paris. Gourmont was the pre-eminent theorist of Symbolism — his Livre des masques (1896-1898), his essays in the Mercure de France, his translations — and Les Chevaux de Diomède is a novel that thinks about literature and sexuality simultaneously, using Diomède's successive passions as occasions for the exploration of ideas about language, beauty, and the relationship between physical desire and intellectual creation. The title refers to the myth of Diomedes's flesh-eating mares, here used as an image for the devouring nature of erotic passion — the women who successively possess the young poet are 'the mares of Diomedes,' and the novel traces his gradual emancipation from the compulsion of desire into the freedom of pure aesthetic intelligence. Gourmont's prose is the most carefully crafted in Symbolist fiction — every sentence is worked to a precision that reflects his theoretical commitment to the independence of language from reference — and the novel is the most satisfying intellectual novel of the French fin de siècle.