SOURCE: "Gautier the Storyteller," in Théophile Gautier, Twayne Publishers, 1975, pp. 107-32.

Grant is an American educator and critic. In the following excerpt, he discusses the defining characteristics of Gautier's "Oriental" stories, asserting that they stem from a "desire to escape from daily reality into ancient cultures endowed with finer esthetic sensibilities and a greater degree of permanence than modern bourgeois France."

Viewed as a whole, Gautier's contes and nouvelles fall roughly into two groups. One consists of tales of the fantastic, the other of evocations of exotic Oriental splendor. We shall deal with the latter. . . . The Oriental stories all have a common inspiration: Gautier's desire to escape from daily reality into ancient cultures endowed with finer esthetic sensibilities and a greater degree of permanence than modern bourgeois France. Each of the individual stories, then, offers some variation of this quest for a distant ideal.

Gautier's dream of...