Lord Henry had sent him a book, a French novel without a plot, about a young Parisian who spent his life trying to realise in the nineteenth century every passion of every century but his own. It was the strangest book Dorian had ever read. For years he could not free himself from its influence. He ordered nine copies bound in different colours to suit his moods. The hero of the book became to him a kind of prefiguring type of himself, and the whole book seemed to contain the story of his own life, written before he had lived it. He never sought to free himself from it. He bought its poison as a man buys a drug.