Jay Rothermel’s Reviews > Monsieur de Phocas > Status Update

‘He has in his house certain carefully-prepared cigarettes which provoke the worst debauchery. The young Duchess of Searley was dead in six months, in consequence having breathed the scent of certain strange and heady flowers during her sittings.'

‘Be forewarned that alongside the beings of instict and passion to which the dockyards and harbours of a great coastal town give birth, there are creatures of lust and perversity too: frightful products of cosmopolitan lust and the ennui of civilization, much like the bejewelled ghouls whose presence here you find so oppressive."

‘For me, it was the eyes which were particularly disquieting – those pale blue eyes, hard as diamond. They had such a frosty gleam they might have been made of lapis lazuli or steel, those eyes. And the stress of their regard!

From the Introduction:

[....] He was found unconscious in his bathroom on 28 June[19006], having perforated his colon while giving himself an enema. He was removed to hospital and his mother hastened from Nice to sit with him, but he died without regaining consciousness two days later.