Le Vice Errant

by Jean Lorrain

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Genres: Fiction

380 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1902

About the author

Jean Lorrain, born Paul Duval, was a French poet and novelist of the Symbolist school.

Lorrain was a dedicated disciple of dandyism, and openly gay. Lorrain wrote a number of collections of verse, including La forêt bleue (1883) and L'ombre ardente, (1897). He is also remembered for his decadent novels and short stories, such as Monsieur de Phocas (1901) and Histoires des masques (1900), as well as for one of his best novels, Sonyeuse, which he links to portraits exhibited by Antonio de La Gandara in 1893.

Reviews

[Rob Atkinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

On the basis of this novel, and the novella “Monsieur de Bougrelon” Jean Lorrain is my favorite of the fin-de-siècle French Decadents; and despite the rare editorial hiccup Brian Stableford’s translation is stellar.

After a brief introduction titled “Opium Talk” set in Corsica and introducing our narrator, this novel revolves around the sybaritic ‘court’ of a disgraced and fabulously wealthy ex-pat Russian Prince at his sumptuous villa on Mont Boron, overlooking Nice on the Côte d’Azur. It’s very anecdotal in tone, the vivid reminiscences of a Doctor Rabastens, witness to the mad scenes he evokes while he treated the prematurely vice-ruined Prince Noronsoff; all as related to the author after they gain admittance to the villa’s long neglected grounds several years after the Prince’s death . Capricious, prodigal, and shocking events at the villa and surrounds drive the narrative, as does a ‘femme fatale’, a Polish Countess Schobolenska with a checkered past and a heart of ice, who proves to be the fragile Noronsoff’s ultimate undoing. There’s also a stand-in for Oscar Wilde (whom Lorrain met in his exile) as ‘Algernon Filde’ as the novel reaches its climax. I imagine it was scandalous stuff in the very early 1900s when it was published, and it remains deliciously bad: comparisons to Neronian Rome and Byzantine excess are often made and seem apt.

Highly recommended if this is your cup of tea. I’ve picked up Lorrain’s earlier collection of short fiction “Nightmares Of An Ether-Drinker” since and expect to read everything else of his currently available in English myself, going forward.

Update: reading Lorrain’s “Masks In The Tapestry” now (February 2023) my review to follow! But I can say already it’s not his best work, despite a typically good translation from Brian Stableford. Probably published in the serial tradition of that era, these are tales that are less plot-driven than impressionistic and foggy. There’s a certain spookiness to them but they’re curiously unsatisfying. The prose is verging on purple, as in the least of the stories I encountered in “Nightmares Of An Ether-Drinker”.

[Lewis Carnelian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brian Stableford's introduction is valuable here, in which he compares "Coins de Byzance" (the major part of this multi-part work) to the Jean Lorrain's generally accepted masterpiece, Monsieur de Phocas, to which it might be called a companion-piece, by stating "it is clearly subject to to the pressure of melodramatic inflation, forced to outreach its predecessor in its bizarrerie," and, perhaps by virtue of that, the character of Wladamir, a "caricaturish monster" becomes "possessed of a fascinating moral and artistic complexity."

Indeed, and while I am tempted to quote from a particular Christ-like passage as an example, I will just say Wladamir's archetypical ennui and excess of the Decadents becomes unique under this inflation, and the Salaambo-meets-Satyricon calvalcade of his "court" just furthers this. The earlier, non-Byzance pieces, set the stage for a Poe-esque narrative of fin de siecle Nice absurdity, one that I can't help but think of Prince's Under the Cherry Moon, another blindingly decadent portrait set on the French Riviera, in a fin de siecle of it's own century.

[Sam Hicks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Delectable distress. Deleterious incense. The divine bestiality of certain narrow foreheads. Ah, Jean Lorrain.