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...

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...

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!...

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...

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...

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 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 –...

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.

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...

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...

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...

I have no idea how long Quisser was gone from the table. My attention became fully absorbed by the other faces in the club and the deep anxiety they betrayed to me, an anxiety that...