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Five years before the journal dedicated this issue to ‘the Symbolism of Jean Moréas’ the daily newspaper Le Figaro had published the poet’s manifesto, ‘Symbolism’. Its timing was calculated with maximum impact to steal the limelight from rival poet René Ghil, whose recent treatise on French poetry, Le Traité du verbe (1886), had been endorsed with a preface from Mallarmé. Moréas, in turn, modeled his own aesthetic doctrine on Mallarmé’s devotion to the Idée in poetry. 11 However, by praising Moréas in 1891, he was not altogether renouncing his former position, for it was the poet’s ability to combine innovation in 8 9 10 11 ‘cherche à vêtir l’idée d’une forme sensible qui, néanmoins, ne serait pas son but à elle-même, mais qui, tout en servant à exprimer l’idée, demeurerait sujette’.

We know that Manet was on his mind at the time of the Mallarmé portrait, since in 1891 he executed a copy of Olympia (1863), one of the paintings of which he took a photograph to Tahiti. 31 He must also have seen Baudelaire’s translation of ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, for he quoted from it in the ‘Notes d’Edgar Poe’, which he copied into Cahier pour Aline (1892–3) and later into Diverses choses.  103–4.  37–57. 29 The definitive 1876 Derenne edition of L’Après-midi d’un faune, illustrated by Manet, followed two earlier stages of the poem, dating from 1865 and 1875.

44. , p. xix, for details of further attacks.  1–4 (first published in Le Temps, 21 December 1890).  2. 13 A banquet in honour of the poet’s latest publication, Le Pèlerin passionné (1891), followed in early February. When, only a few months later, Moréas announced the death of Symbolism and the foundation of the Ecole romane française in collaboration with Charles Maurras, future founder of the far-right Action Française, little but the name had changed, for his devotion to the revival of Greco-Roman culture had been equally apparent in the extracts of his verse published in La Plume.