Long after he was dead, French poet Charles Baudelaire inspired a Decadent Movement in France, which became definitive of fin de siecle sensibility. One of the historical and influential links between Baudelaire and the new Decadents was the Comte de Villiers de l"Isle Adam, who called the first of his own collections of Decadent prose Contes cruels, because they spurned conventional means of attaining literary closure by celebrating "the irony of fate" -- the capacity that the course of events has for thwarting human ambition in a frankly mocking fashion. "Because it became so firmly linked to the notion of the fin de siecle, the Decadent Movement did not survive the end of the nineteenth century in France and Decadent literature became increasingly unfashionable thereafter -- but it was, by definition, a literary species guaranteed to thrive on its own unfashionability. The stories collected here have been woefully unappreciated, even when they have succeeded in reaching print...