Spicilège is Marcel Schwob's final testament, a compendium of critical essays that functions as both intellectual autobiography and vade mecum for anyone seeking to understand the strange, fertile territory where French symbolism collapsed into modernism. Written by a man Jorge Luis Borges called "a living library," this collection gathers Schwob's pioneering work on François Villon, the 15th-century poet-thief whose criminal life and piercing verses he rescued from obscurity, alongside essays on Robert Louis Stevenson, George Meredith, and the eccentric scholars and forgotten writers who populated his vast imagination. Here too are his investigations into medieval criminal slang, the "romantic realism" of adventure fiction, ancient Greek prostitution, and the folklore surrounding Flaubert. Yet the book transcends mere scholarship. It traces Schwob's obsessive preoccupations: the nature of individuality, the links between laughter and terror, the erotic undercurrents in literature, and the relationship between art and anarchy. Paul Valéry and Alfred Jarry both dedicated books to this man. This is where they learned to think.
