Isidore was a reader of Edgar Allan Poe and particularly favored Percy Bysshe Shelley and Byron, as well as Adam Mickiewicz, Milton, Robert Southey, Alfred de Musset and Baudelaire. During school he was fascinated by Racine and Corneille, and by the scene of the blinding in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. According to his schoolmate Paul Lesp*s, he displayed obvious folly ``by self-indulgent use of adjectives and an accumulation of terrible death images'' in an essay.
Sophocles
Paul Lesp*s