 He was initially a poet and novelist.His poetry attracted some attention and was set to music by Ernest Bloch, Gustave Charpentier, and Ernest Chausson and Nadia Boulanger.His best-known novel is "Le Soleil des morts" (1898), a "roman à clef" containing fictionalized portraits of leading avant-garde writers, artists, and musicians of the 1890s, which has been recognized as an important historical document of the "fin de siècle".