Beyond its habitual meaning, this term is applied to a literary movement whose representatives, inscribed within the symbolist nebula, cultivate a deliberate pessimism laced with humour and mobilised for provocation. ‘I am the empire at the end of decadence,’ wrote Verlaine (1844-1896) in Le Chat noir in 1883: he thus expressed in his manner a sensibility which would irrigate the work of young poets such as Laforgue (1860-1887), who treats the more familiar subjects of existence with melancholy or ironic detachment. A ‘fin de siècle’ atmosphere which Paul Bourget (1852-1935) traces back to Baudelaire (1821-1867), amongst others, and in which he detects a degeneration of classical language: ‘a decadent style is that in which the unity of the book breaks down to be give way to the independence of the page, where the page breaks down to give way to the independence of the sentence and the sentence gives way to the independence of the word’ (Essais de psychologie contemporaine, 1883).