canonical authors’ literary production from other epochs reflected the flaws of their eras. In her fourth chapter,“On Foreign Taste,”Tsien explains how writers determined that foreign taste was inferior to French taste due to national character, the dominance of figurative versus literal language, climate, and stylistic extravagance. In the final chapters, “The Obscure, or Enigmas and the Enigmatic” and “The Disorderly” Tsien succeeds in resurrecting forgotten literary genres, such as the enigma, which had been marginalized by the literary establishment, because it contradicted the linguistic principle of clarity. Not only did readers of the Mercure ‘waste’ their time by trying to figure out the answers to these riddles, but they submitted their own enigmas to the journal, only further polluting the French language. The Mercure was like conversation due to its random format, which according to Buffon in his Discours sur le style was a feminine strength, because it was disorderly and whimsical. The Bad Taste of Others is a refreshing and highly erudite study of eighteenth-century aesthetics. Tsien convincingly argues that the intellectual elite used mauvais goût as a rhetorical weapon in order to marginalize anyone or anything that contradicted their views on taste. Her greatest contributions are to have urged scholars to reevaluate mainstream authors’ participation in this conversation, with a particular emphasis on Voltaire, and to have resurrected popular forms of literature from the period that have been largely forgotten. This book is useful to the eighteenth-century literature specialist and historian of linguistics, since it is both a comprehensive survey of eighteenth-century aesthetics and an analysis of linguistic prescriptivism in the French tradition. Christopher Newport University (VA) Michael J. Mulryan Ziegler, Robert. Satanism, Magic and Mysticism in Fin-de-siècle France. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. ISBN 978-0-230-29308-3. Pp. 229. $85. Ziegler uses J.-K. Huysmans’s spiritual life as it developed after his‘gaudy masterpiece ,’ À rebours, and the dreams of En rade, as a flare for negotiating the supernatural world of the fin-de-siècle. Ziegler moves quickly into the serious literature growing from Palladism, esoterism, the Magus, the Kabbalah, Guaïta, Papus, Péladan, and others. This Satanism breaks into groups motivated by perversion, or greed, or objective consideration of the occult, or, indeed, those denying Lucifer’s existence. The portrayal of the devil varies between a ridiculous anachronism and a terrifying goatsovereign embodying ignorance and vice. Huysmans and Guaïta agreed, however, that “only art could save the Evil One imperiled by sophisticated cynicism”(18). For both, Satan was simply evil, as much the absence of good or God as anything else. After exploring the depths of Satanism, Huysmans thoughtfully moved from black magic, as Barbey d’Aurevilly predicted, to Christianity. He considered his day’s evidence of spirituality, and surely because of his disdain for the hoi polloi aided the fraudulent creations of hoaxers, like Léo Taxil, who portrayed Satan and Satanism in minutely234 FRENCH REVIEW 87.4 Reviews 235 described fictive orgies, with infanticide, cannibalism, incest, bestiality, as well as traditional witches’Sabbaths at country crossroads at midnight.Appalled fin-de-siècle audiences shivered and lapped it up. As many intellectuals recognized, however, such ridiculous stories had a deplorable, heretical result: they brought the existence of Satan into question. Huysmans’s pilgrimage was by no means ended. He slowly passed through an elitist view of the creation of the Magus, the superior person committed to ascetic self-perfection through white magic and arcane knowledge. Eliphas Lévi and the flamboyant Sâr Péladan increasingly denied this knowledge to the profane. Using the tools of telekinesis, magnetism, divination, and electricity, the Magus attempted to rise reborn to the reconciliation of science, faith, and indeed art. The various esoteric traditions of the Kabbalah, the Tarot, and Rosicrucianism occupy significant portions of the intellectual life of the period, as of Huysmans’s life. Huysmans’s next and final stop was in a mystical Catholicism that ended in dolorism, the belief that the suffering of believers was necessary to complete the redemptive work of the suffering Christ, in order to bring him back in glory. Vintras and Hello, using the doctrine of...