Writers such as Marcel Proust, Jean Cocteau and André Gide have praised him as one of France's greatest novelists.[143] In his native France, he has been and is still often praised by literary critics as a master of French style whose novels were written with elegant verve and a superb sense of irony.[144] French critic Pierre-Louis Rey and British historian Michael D. Biddiss have both decried the tendency of French critics to sever Gobineau the racist from Gobineau the novelist, maintaining his novels reflect his racial theories just as much as the Essai.[144] Gobineau's 1874 novel Les Pléiades is concerned with a few exceptionally talented people who are examples of "ethnic persistence" in Europe surrounded by vast masses of morons.[144] In his introduction to Les Pléiades, Gobineau says the purpose of the novel is to advance the theory "that there are no longer classes, that there are no longer peoples, but only—in the whole of Europe—certain individuals who float like the wreckage upon the flood".[144]