« "The Tale of the 672nd Night" also consists of two strikingly disparate parts, a first part describing the beautiful and rather vain lifestyle of a Dorian Gray lookalike, and a second part that brings to pass the ignominious fall of the handsome hero. "we must not degrade life Hofmannsthal urges, "by tearing character and fate asunder and separating [Wilde's] misfortune from his fortune" ("Sebastian Melmoth'' 304). Oscar Wilde's refined dandy's life is not separate from the ignominious prison bath that he was forced to use after ten other convicts and that, Hofmannsthal muses, was already somehow contained in the aesthete's love of luxury: "his limbs which toyed with orchids and lounged among cushions of ancient silks were in reality filled with an awful longing for the ghastly bath from which, however, at its first touch, they shrank in nauseated repugnance" (304). Likewise, we may infer, the squalid end of the merchant's son is not to be torn asunder from his beauteous beginning. »
 
JULLIEN, Dominique. Translating Destiny: Hugo von Hofmannsthal's 'Tale of the 672nd Night", New York University Press, 2013, p. 183-184.