Argentine

<p>This third and final collection of Comte de L’Estoille’s works features Les Amoureuses a collection of short prose poems and dramas including “Gyptis” a tragedy set within the context of L’Estoille’s pseudohistory of Gaul and “Marthe” and “Rosalie” both resentful responses to the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. It also contains the more upbeat “Argentine” and “Lemmi Kainen” both reflective of a burst of interest in Scandinavian mythology among French neo-Romantic writers borrowing motifs from Hans Christian Andersen.</p><p><br />As an eccentric representative of the literary avant garde L’Estoille was always perhaps a little too and paradoxical but that is not a bad thing in a Decadent artist. He was a maverick even within that motley maverick school but for connoisseurs of the unusual that serves only to make him even more interesting as a writer and as a man.</p>