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 first went to Paris. He entered the studio of Rioult for a period. "He had the painter's eye," writes Huneker, "the quick retentive vision, the colour sense, above all the sense of composition." The creator of Une Nuit de Cléopâtre was certainly a painter, and when Fokine arranged this picture-poem as a Russian ballet he had but to follow the suggestion of the painter-poet. Huysmans was a descendant of a long line of Dutch painters, one of whom, Cornelius Huysmans of Mechlin, has a certain fame among the lesser landscape artists of the great period. Huneker writes: "Joris-Karl Huysmans should have been a painter; his indubitable gift for form and colour were by some trick of circumstance transposed to literature." Remy de Gourmont called him an eye. His description of the carcass of a cow hanging outside a butcher shop is certainly the work of a painter: "As in a hot-house, a marvellous vegetation flourished in the carcass. Veins shot out on every side like the trails of bind-weed; dishevelled branch-work extended itself along the body, an efflorescence of entrails unfurled their violet-tinted corollas, and big clusters of fat stood out, a sharp white, against the red medley of quivering flesh." But it seems unnecessary to particularize: A Rebours, La Cathédrale, Là-Bas, all are painted