Morphing Moonlight: Gender, masks and carnival mayhem- The ...

on the internet. However, the primary sources remained unavailable and had to
be consulted in Belgium. Even in Belgium, sources on the work of Giraud are
limited: the poet and his contemporaries are as liminal as the figure of Pierrot.
The decadent and symbolist artists and writers of that time in Belgium are
sorely neglected. Even some of the more famous names like Emile Verhaeren,
George Rodenbach, George Minne and Ferdinand Khnopff are are now little
appreciated outside of Belgium and France and even within Belgium sources
are reasonably difficult to locate. For artists considered to be minor, the search
becomes even more difficult. Sources for the English decadence were more
readily available in South Africa and it was a rare pleasure to be able to
consult a set of The Yellow Book and to hold a copy of The Pierrot of the
Minute in the original Beardsley designed. A grant from The Ernest
Oppenheimer Foundation, for which I was deeply grateful, allowed me to
consult the original sources in Belgium and at the British Library, bolstering
and adding support to the undertaking of this study of a ‘produit d’eau fade et
de blême farine’ (Palacio 1990: 11). 10
10 Product of tasteless water and white flour
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