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cold by design, capable of selling the universe for a quarter of gold at his pleasure. . . . All Europe has admired his oriental magnificence; the universe, after all, knew that he spent four million every season. . . .
The parallel is disturbing, but does not need philological verification: the prototype is scattered in hundreds of pages of a literature at first and second hand, and, after all, a whole vein of British decadence could offer Fleming the glorification of the fallen angel, of the monstrous torturer, of the vice anglais. Wilde, accessible to any educated gentleman, was ready to suggest the head of John the Baptist, upon a plate, as a model for the great grey head of Mr. Big floating on the water. As for Solitaire, who withheld herself from him though exciting him, it is Fleming himself who uses, as the title of a chapter, the name of "allumeuse": her prototype reappears time and again in d'Aurevilly, in the princess d'Este of Péladan, in the Clara of Mirbeau, and in the Madone des Sleepings of Dekobra.
On the other hand, Fleming cannot accept for woman the decadent archetype of la belle dame sans merci, which agrees little with the modern idea of femininity, and he mixes it up with the model of the persecuted virgin. And it seems that he has taken into account the suggestions given one hundred years ago by Louis Reybaud to the future writers of a good feuilleton: "Take, sir, a young woman, unhappy and persecuted; add to it a brutal tyrant. . . ." But Fleming probably did not need those recipes; he had enough wit to discover it by himself.
However, we are not here concerned with a psychological interpretation of Fleming as individual but with an analysis of the structure of his text, the relationship between the literary inheritance and the crude chronicle, between nineteenth-century tradition and science fiction, between adventurous excitement and hypnosis, fused together to produce an unstable patchwork, a tongue-in-cheek bricolage, which often hides its ready-made nature by presenting itself as literary invention. To the extent to which it permits a disenchanted reading, the work of Fleming represents a successful means of leisure, the result of skillful craftsmanship. To the extent that it provides to anyone the thrill of poetic emotion, it is the last avatar of Kitsch; to the extent that it provokes elementary psychological reactions in which ironic detachment is absent, it is only a more subtle, but not less mystifying, example of soap opera.
Since the decoding of a message cannot be established by its author, but depends on the concrete circumstances of reception, it is difficult to guess what Fleming is or will be for his readers. When an act of communication provokes a response in public opinion, the definitive verification will take place not within the ambit of the book but in that of the society that reads it.

 
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