Never have things of the spirit counted for so little. Never has hatred for everything great been so manifest – disdain for beauty, execration of literature. I have always tried to live in an ivory...

The Old Woman asked, “Here you are, dear Youth, you are looking at the Garden and do not know that it is an evil Garden. Here you are waiting for the Beautiful Woman and do...

(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...