code may suggest why we eventually find wholesomeness a refreshing relief.2 But note eventually: neither the gross appeal to sensation signalled by Symons, the movement's own historian, nor the subtle oxymorons revealed by Riffaterre, one of the current critical luminaries, accounts for the tediousness of Decadent writing. Indeed, descriptions of Decadent style-and we have mentioned only two at the chronological poles-make Decadent writing sound rather interesting, even intrinsically worth reading. Personally, I would never claim that it is either entertaining or provocative; on the contrary, I would claim that not a single piece can hold our attention on its own merits qua literature. But at the same time I would claim that it is worth intensive study not just by various interdisciplinary specialists of the period but by students of language, style, and translation. Its flaws-or, perhaps more properly, its deviation from recurring norms of taste-can contribute to our appreciation of reference, association and transfer. Its pace-or its blockage of sequentiality-can contribute to our appreciation of information flow in literature and its indispensable temporality. In the end, it may well be that Decadent writers misuse the space-time components of poesy, and that misuse would help explain why we find them everlasting bores. It may well be also that a translator is best poised to realize what is being effected in Decadent expression. After all, a translator by analysis and instinct must work his way back to the source writer's attitudes in order to reproduce in another language a comparable articulative process and result. In any event, that is how I arrived at the observations which follow.3 The standing of Villers de l'Isle-Adam (1838-89) is a, if not the, quintessential Decadent, makes him an inevitable case in point. His last fully executed work L'Eve future (1880-85) is a novel so compendious that we can use it as both glossary and grammar of Decadent rhetoric. We can take our examples from the climax, the final forty pages, when Lord Ewald receives the automaton Hadaly fabricated by Edison.4 These extracts will be adequate to show first that the expression is radically iconographic lexically, syntactically, narratively. Villiers, who was simultaneously licentious and puritanical, in this novel keeps sensual reference within the bounds of conservative good taste. But if his referents here are not blatantly gross