What do you think?
Rate this book


160 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1978
I make my planned detour none the less via the fashion boutique with the double-exit trying-on cubicles to check that everything is in place. The young brides and communicants in their immaculate tulle dresses are still smiling with the same air of innocence – tender ewes awaiting the sacrificial knife – figures or costumes whose freshness comes as a surprise in the landscape of demolitions and ruins dominated by this small and apparently intact building in dubious Directoire style.
She stands facing the audience, legs slightly apart, gazing with an air of studious reflection at the elegant couturier-slaves as they lay at her feet the frills and furbelows of the sacrifice. All she is wearing as yet are the long black gloves – one placed on a hip and the other supporting the chin with fingers splayed – and stockings that stop at the top of the thigh in garters, each of which is decorated with a gold-centred rose.
"In [his 1955 novel] The Voyeurs, the only difference between fact and fiction is that I did not kill the woman. A psychoanalyst once told me that it was useful that I had written the novel so I did not need to perform the murder. Similarly, lots of my books feature 13-year-old girls getting fucked. That doesn't mean I have done so." Are your films autobiographical? "They grow from my fantasies, yes. But if you are asking me if I have chained a slave to a bed in a room in Marrakech, I would say your question is ridiculous."