All has been said, it seems, about symbolism. No period of literature has been explored more thoroughly; none to which the techniques of contemporary historical and critical research have been more conscientiously applied. The conditions for this exploration were highly favorable. We have all the texts at our disposal, not only in their final version, but in preliminary stages and with variations as well. The biographies of the main figures – Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé – are known in all details; there is hardly a letter ever written by them that has not been recorded. The complete editions stand as examples of scrupulous editorship. Mondor's day by day biography of Mallarmé remains a miracle of precision, in which the least eventful of all lives reveals its hidden depths and complexities, like a drop of water under a microscope. Even Rimbaud's mysterious Abyssinian adventure is accessible to the reader of his correspondence. As for the surroundings among which this poetry originated, they are close enough to us to be directly perceived. The Paris of today still contains the Paris of Baudelaire; Rimbaud's Charleville is an all too familiar picture for those who know the north of France and the secluded warmth of the apartment of the Rue de Rome could be a remembrance of our grandparents' homes. Ideological and historical trends of the period can be imagined, not like the abstract and fantastic picture which the medieval world will always have to remain for us, but in their actual, concrete presence.