It was in May, 1892, that, having crossed the streets of Paris from the hotel where I was staying, the Hôtel Corneille, in the Latin Quarter (made famous by Balzac in his superb story, _Z. Marcas_,) I found myself in Le Jardin de Paris, where I saw for the first time La Mélinite. She danced in a quadrille: young and girlish, the more provocative because she played as a prude, with an assumed modesty; _décolletée_ nearly to the waist, in the Oriental fashion. She had long, black curls around her face; and had about her a depraved virginity.
And she caused in me, even then, a curious sense of depravity that perhaps comes into the verses I wrote on her. There, certainly, on the night of May 22nd, danced in her feverish, her perverse, her enigmatical beauty, La Mélinite, to her own image in the mirror:
"A shadow smiling Back to a shadow in the night,"
as she cadenced Olivier Métra's _Valse des Roses._
It is a fact of curious interest that in 1864 Poulet-Malassis was obliged to leave Paris--on account of his misfortunes as a publisher, in regard to money, and for various other reasons--and to exile himself in Brussels: still more curious that Baudelaire--drawn, perhaps, by some kind of affinity in their natures--followed him sooner than he had intended to go. Malassis lived in rue de Mercedes, 35 _bis,_ Faubourg d'Ixilles. In those years both saw a great deal of the famous, perverse, macabre Félicien Rops.
Malassis, naturally, was obliged, in his expedients for living as he used to live, to publish privately printed obscene books; some no more than erotic. As Baudelaire hated, with his Parisian refinement, that kind of certainly objectionable literature, on May 4th, 1865, he writes to Sainte-Beuve: "As for Malassis, his terrible affair arrives on the 12th. He believes he will be condemned for five years. What there is grave in this is that that closes France for him for five years. But that cuts him for a time from his ways of living. I see in it no great evil. As for me, who am no fool, I have never possessed one of these idiotic books, even printed in fine characters and with fine engravings." As a matter of fact, Malassis was condemned in May, 1866, to one year's imprisonment for having privately printed _Les Amies_ of Paul Verlaine--a book of sonnets, attributed to an imaginary Pablo de Herlaguez.