Books - Gavinicuss Books

Monsieur de Phocas

By: Jean Lorrain, translated by Francis Amery
$14.95
Decadence by Dedalus ( 1994)
ISBN: 0781802105

"With Ethal's friends, grotesque, ageing decadents, Phocas for the first time tastes opium. He experiences the pleasure of absolute degradation, and the double pleasure of being both observer and observed, dominant subject and passive object. As the opium takes effect, the naked Javanese dancers at the orgy vanish in a swirling cloud, to be replaced by a dark lamplit street where the two thieves carefully saw at a woman's throat with a delicate knifeblade. From this cruel vision, Phocas soars into dizzy flight from which, suddenly, he plunges to destruction, into oozing depths where clinging vampires suck his blood, until he almost swoons into spasms. The mysterious, vicious, double is on the threshold of existence: Phocas sees himself as Gilles de Retz in the forrest of Tiffauges, haunted by obscene desires." - Jennifer Birkett in Sins of the Fathers

Monsieur de Phocas ranks with A Rebours as the summation of the French Decadent Movement. Modelled on The Portrait of Dorian Gray, it drips with Evil and certainly would have been unpublishable in fin de siecle England.