In the  188os  a  breach opened  up between  Realists and  Impressionists on the one hand, who were committed  to the representation of  modern life, and  other  artists  whose ambition was to  flee it, to search for meaning in some essence or ideal that lay behind the mask presented by reality, and were inspired by the primitive or the exotic, by myths and legends, by the spiritual and religious, symbols which seemed to permit access to an inner or unconscious world. Their art was  modernist  in form but was  a  critique of modernity -- the materialistic  world of urbanization,  industrialization, science, secularization   and  mass  education.7   It  was  avant-garde,  grouping like-minded intellectuals seeking new literary forms and sometimes challenging bourgeois conventions by a bohemian lifestyle. One of their early haunts  was the salon of Nina de Callais, who  had  been painted by Manet in 1874 as The Woman with the Fan. The poet Paul Verlaine, who had been a clerk in the Hotel de Ville before the Paris  Commune, met the sixteen-year-old Mathilde Maute  there in 1869 and married her in order  to escape military service. She later admitted that she was 'overcome  by pity for a poor  being with disgraceful appearance and who seemed sad'.8 In fact he was a spoiled child,  alcoholic and  violent.  Obsessed  by the  brilliant young  poet Arthur Rimbaud  who  arrived  in  Paris in the autumn  of 1871, he tried  to strangle  his wife, threw  his three-month-old   baby against the wall and ran away to Brussels with Rimbaud.  In  1873  he shot Rimbaud in the hand during another 1 row and spent two years in a Belgian prison, after which his wife separated from him and Rimbaud went to Africa to trade  in ivory or guns, according  to the rumour. Briefly reforming himself, he published a collection of his own work and  that of Rimbaud  and  Mallarme, Les Poetes maudits, in  r883, which for the first time put this new generation of Symbolist poets on the map. He was then  jailed again for an attack  on his mother and spent much of the last years of his life in hospital.

For Symbolists the most important meeting-place  was the salon of  Stephane  Mallarme.  Mallarme, who made a living  teaching English in a succession  of lycees in the provinces and Paris, organized his own literary salon on Tuesdays at his house in the rue  de Rome. From 1885  it  became  the focal  point for young  writers of a new generation born around 186o  who experimented with elegar but  opaque  and  suggestive  forms of language.  Where  Verlain destroyed  bourgeois  domesticity,  Mallarme incarnated  it, although as poets they had  the  same  ambitions. 'The  wife  and  daughter embroidered under a dim lamp,'  wrote one  of  his disciples,  Paul Valery. 'He smokes a pipe in a rocking-chair, eyes half closed , voice very low. Then  suddenly his eyes are  wide open  and  he raises his voice, panting.  He  becomes a savant  in a moment,  now epic, now tragic.'9   Other disciples  of this  rarefied  salon were Jules Laforge who  died  of  tuberculosis aged twenty-seven in 1887, Henri de Regnier, Felix Feneon, Maurice Barres, the  musician Claude Debussy, the novelist Andre  Gide, the German poet Stefan Geore and 'the  execrable Oscar Wilde who should  have grasped from our mute  reprobation', said  another disciple, 'that   one  did  not come to  Mallarme's to make  speeches'.