And then I recalled those mysterious stories about the waxworkers of the middle ages and the public reprobation attached to their trade. Did they not live in cellars, in the eternal twilight propitious for enchantments...

His fame as an artist requires very tender care. Look what a mask of diplomacy is painstakingly formed by the whole of that fine profile; he is as wily as a cardinal. He has scented...

8 April 1891The obscenity of nostrils and mouths; the ignominious cupidity of smiles and women encountered in the street; the shifty baseness on every side, as of hyenas and wild beasts ready to bite: tradesmen...

(Priests) cheapjack merchants selling paradise

There is nothing to be found in human eyes, and that is their terrifying and dolorous enigma, their abominable and delusive charm. There is nothing but that which we put there ourselves. That is why...

Astarte has come again, more powerful than before. She possesses me. She lies in wait for me.December 97My cruelty has also returned: the cruelty which frightens me. It lies dormant for months, for years, and...

You see, the strangeness of my case is that now I no longer fear the invisible, I’m terrified by reality.

One encounters in the streets, late at night on the evenings of fetes, the most strange and bizarre passers-by. Do these nights of popular celebration cause ancient and forgotten avatars to stir in the depths...

At this point, the sequence of my memories is disrupted.I sank into a chaos of brief, incoherent and bizarre hallucinations, in which the grotesque and the horrible kept close company. Prostrate, as if I were...

To dream! Such dreams certainly make life more worth living… and only dreams can do that for me.

Look, de Mazel, you’ve known him for years – hasn’t he been known to sleep for forty hours in two days?’ ‘Forty hours?’ ‘Certainly. He awoke at meal times, just to take nourishment, and afterwards...

The Marquis de V… – whose falsetto voice and little watery eyes I have always detested – was saying to me with a wicked smile: ‘Then again, the master gymnast might break his neck at...

The beauty of the twentieth century is the charm of the hospital, the grace of the cemetery, of consumption and emaciation. I admit that I have submitted to it all; worse, I have loved with...

Her vice takes hold of her again, but she still refrains until some moment when, gnawed by some hideous caprice, she comes aground like a mournful wreck ruined by lust, in the midst of her...

The ring which you are holding, my friend, is identical to that one. I had it cut according to the model of the king’s ring, and damascened in Spain. The original is still in the...

In the course of my life I have had pre-pubescent ballerinas; emaciated duchesses, dolorous and forever tired, melomaniac and morphine-sodden; bankers’ wives with eyes hollower than those of suburban streetwalkers; music-hall chorus girls who tip...

But that woman is an encyclopedia!Of all vices, ancient and modern, and terribly interesting to leaf through!

It is said that one of his acquaintances – an old school-friend and a painter as highly-valued and as fashionable as himself – became an idiot in less than two years as a result of...

The fancies that take their monstrous birth from the spinelessness and boredom of usurped wealth bring in their wake every defect … and though rich men’s crimes escape the law, protected as they are by...

A strange girl, all phosphorous and cantharides, burning with every desire! And burning with every vice!

The madness of the eyes is the lure of the abyss. Sirens lurk in the dark depths of the pupils as they lurk at the bottom of the sea, that I know for sure –...

It is the sheer ugliness and banality of everyday life which turns my blood to ice and makes me cringe in terror.

But this is till the same girl who once lived in the steppes, wild and indomitable. Even when she ceased to play in the falling snow, the snow continued to fall within her soul. She...

Against a set of desolate scenery, amid spectral crags and livid mountains of ash, beneath the funereal daylight of slopes illuminated in blue, she personified the spirit of the witches’ sabbat. Morbid and voluptuous, sometimes...

…the presence of others has become even more intolerable to me, their conversation most of all. Oh, how it all annoys and exasperates me: their attitudes, their manners, their whole way of being! The people...

Then Chameroy spoke. ‘You always put the blame on opium, but as I see it the case of Freneuse is much more complicated. Him, an invalid? No – a character from the tales of Hoffmann!...

March 1898What a strange dream I had last night! I wandered in the warm streets of a port, in the low quarter of some Barcelona or Marseille. The streets were noisome, with their freshly-heaped piles...

I had, therefore, to resign myself to commissioning a duplicate from a jeweller in Madrid. They did the work very nicely. The claws are curiously shaped, but the true marvel is the stone; it is...

The charm of horror only tempts the strong