PREFACE 
15 
blessing of the officiating bishop, “ I renounce for ever 
this idolatrous church ”  ;  and was quietly removed. 
He told Mathilde Doriac that he had been to Eton 
and Cambridge—neither institution, however, preserves 
any record of such admission.  The imagination of 
George, indeed, is tremendously fertile with regard to 
events in his own life.  His own story is that he entered 
Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1856, and was sent 
down two years later for an article which he had 
contributed to some University or College Magazine. 
No confirmation of any sort is to be found anywhere 
with regard to these or any other statements of our 
author.  There is, however, no doubt that in 1861 
he quarrelled with his family ;  went over to Paris, 
where he settled down, at first, like every tufthead, 
somewhere in the Quartier Latin ;  later, with Mathilde 
Doriac, the noble woman who became his mistress and 
held to him through all the terrible tragedy of his 
moral, mental, and physical life, in the Rue du Fau-
bourg-Poissonnière.  At his house there the frightful 
scenes of ’68 took place, and it was there too that he 
was apprehended after the murders which he describes 
so faithfully in “ Abysmos ”.  He had just finished this 
poem with a shriek of triumph, and had read it through