Théophile Gautier's 1835 novel of desire and disguise, remembered for its preface's defence of art for art's sake. Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and art and literary critic. While an ardent defender of Romanticism, Gautier's work is difficult to classify and remains a point of reference for many subsequent literary traditions such as Parnassianism, Symbolism, Decadence and Modernism. He was widely esteemed by writers as disparate as Balzac, Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers, Flaubert, Pound, Eliot, James, Proust and Wilde. (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0)