(visions) of strange cities, of sandy plains, of gigantic ruins, of midnight skies with strange bright constellations, of mountain-passes, of grassy nooks flecked with the afternoon sunshine through the boughs: I was in the midst...

The exotic and the erotic ideals go hand in hand, and this fact also contributes another proof of a more or less obvious truth – that is, that a love of the exotic is usually...

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...

On the third day Vera said:’I love your body because it is beautiful. But I do not know your soul. I do not know whether there is a soul. Nor is it necessary for me...

The conventional use of words and of narrative structure is deliberately subverted in decadent fiction; language deviates from the established norms in an attempt to reproduce pathology on a textual level. With its emphasis on...

It is precisely, if paradoxically, because reversal is in the service of repetition (so as to ensure, alongside its companion strategies, a dizzying proliferation of citations) that it gains a subversive power rather than remain...

He asked her, ‘Why do you feel sorry for me, Old Woman?’The Old Woman stood beside him and looked out the window at the Garden, so beautiful, flowering and everywhere illuminated by the rays of...

I’ll drink your champagne. I’ll drink every drop of it, I don’t care if it kills me.

Poverty fled, she who gives birth to virile men.

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...

I came there again another time. And I looked many times again. I was filled with consolation, with my consolation.The thirty-three abominations were truthful. They were the truth. They were life. The sharp fragments of...

Adornment, exoticism, affectation are all willed decadent strategies meant to pervert the texts they made. Decadent texts often live in their descriptive excursions, in their evocation of dreams, mysterious places and states of mind, in...

Give people the power of the gods, and they’ll eventually run down like wind-up toys for lack of reasons to go on.

Thus spoke the Beauty and her voice had a cheerful ring, and her face was aflame with a great rejoicing. She finished her story and began to laugh quietly, but not cheerfully. The Youth bowed...

It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among...

Hidden away behind the closed doors of aristocratic and bourgeois privilege, concealed under those ultra-respectable masks of black frock coat and veil, the green glow of corruption flickers into sight, steadies, and spreads everywhere, fostered...

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...

I often think about this, that is, I imagine to myself that here is Vera, dead, totally motionless, lying on the table, in a coffin… and I too, of course can no longer live. But...

against nature,” the deviant or pervert becomes a hero or heroine in decadent fiction.

The habit is now confirmed in me of spending the greater part of the day in sleep, while by night I wander far and wide through the city under the sedative influence of a tincture...

Night fell. The full moon shone sweetly and tremulously, bewitching and foreboding with rays which were cold and funereally silent. The heart of the Youth was filled with an apprehensive fear as he went up...

Endless love and voluptuous appetite pervaded this stifling nave in which settled the ardent sap of the tropics. Renée was wrapped in the powerful bridals of the earth that gave birth to these dark growths,...

The decadent artist markets other people’s pain

You’re like a lighthouse shining beside the sea of humanity, motionless: all you can see is your own reflection in the water. You’re alone, so you think it’s a vast, magnificent panorama. You haven’t sounded...

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!...

No, no, don’t let my vulnerable heart share in this sacrifice to lust! Let him disgust me before pleasing me! Let him be what others have been, an instrument that I can break before becoming...

Inside my soul a treasure is buried.The key is mine and only mine.How right you are, you drunken monster!I know: the truth is in the wine.(“The Unknown Lady”)

Depravity and decadence are two sides of the same coin.

From the fourteenth to the nineteenth century we have merely been expending the incalculable treasures discovered then and using up the great supply of energies gathered up to that time. Hence, modern history is the...

Because I’m a Karamazov. Because when I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I’m even pleased that I’m falling in just such a humiliating position, and...

The Man Who Made Wax Heads”) the consummate achievement of decadent art is caught in miniature. The genius of the artist entangles perpetrators and victims in a sticky web of perverse delights, in which exploitation...

The blood of my motherland waters a magic plant that cures all ills. That plant is art, and sometimes art needs corruption as a kind of fertilizer

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...

A very special case. A few years more, and that pretty creature who you love too much, I think, will, without ever loving them, have known as many men as there are beads on her...

The mirror’s light sparks in the eyes,And horrified, my lids drawn tight,I step back to that realm of nightWhere not a single exit lies…(Untitled: “I pass away this life of mine…”)

Two times twice now, I have been called arrogant, by the decadent.I’d rather be overly self confident, rather than overly self indulgent.

The pleasure of being a scoundrel can be adequately savored in silence.

Decline is also a form of voluptuousness, just like growth. Autumn is just as sensual as springtime. There is as much greatness in dying as in procreation.

Everyone in a decadent society, Lorrain urges, is guilty. Everyone loves masking murder and everyone takes masochistic pleasure in the risk of discovery and punishment.

Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion...

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...

I am the Empire at the end of the decadence.

The baronet, in his old age, had been cast up by his vices on the shores of melancholy; heavy-eyed, grey-haired, bent, he seemed to pass through life as in a dream.(“The Undying Thing”)

We are precarious. Which is to say some good things (accumulation of diverseknowledges, skills and abilities through work and life experiences in permanentconstruction), and a lot of bad ones (vulnerability, insecurity, poverty, socialexposure).

Ah! I wish I had the courage to work for the debasement of my contemporaries. What good work it would be to defile their daughters: to insinuate something obscene into the infantile hands which caress...

I think Gummy Bears should be the universal symbol for peace, because peace leads to prosperity, prosperity leads to decadence, and decadence leads to diabetes.

In this image (watching sensual murder through a peephole) Lorrain embodies the criminal delight of decadent art. The watcher who records the crimes (both the artist and consumer of art) is constructed as marginal, powerless...

If rape or arson, poison or the knifeHas wove no pleasing patterns in the stuffOf this drab canvas we accept as life -It is because we are not bold enough!

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...

Wie ich heimschritt bemerkte ich mit einemmal vor mir meinen eigenen Schatten so wie ich den Schatten des anderen Krieges hinter dem jetzigen sah. Er ist durch all diese Zeit nicht mehr von mir gewichen...