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Astral amour by Willy (Henry Gauthier-Villars, 1859-1931, Colette’s husband) was originally published as an eight-part serial in the Nouvelle Revue between December 1900 and April 1901 and was never reprinted in book form. As an account of the social and psychological aspects of the occult revival in the 19th century, Astral Amour does have the…
The Crocodile (1792) is a brilliant epic, one of those rare books of which one can say that no one ever wrote anything else like it. The eponymous Crocodile is an attempted saboteur of the Divine Plan, an instrument of the Adversary, who claims to have created and shaped the universe–but who is, after all,…
The Apocryphal Napoleon (1836) by Louis Geoffroy, a French Magistrate, is celebrated as the first extended exercise in “alternate history.” In it, Napoleon succeeds in subduing Russia in 1812, invades England in 1814 and goes on to become the enlightened ruler of the world. The book details with great and methodical precision the conquest of…
“Instead of the lugubrious silence of a necropolis,” Miss Slow said, “there are songs and cries, a whole concert that gives the illusion of life in a magical city!” In The Perfume of Lust (1905), a ship is trapped in the waters of Atlantis when a submarine eruption returns the lost continent to the surface,…
Brian M. Stableford’s latest novel, The Mirror of Dionysus, explores the mystery of the origins of the immortal Axel Rathenius, who lives on the artists’ colony of Mnemosyne, an island off the northern coast of what in our world is called France, in the Everlasting Empire, 2,000 years after the birth of the Divine Caesar……
“Phantoms” (1885) is a classic study of a haunting, in which the narrator refuses to admit that the apparitions from which he suffers can be anything but hallucinations, but then ties himself in knots trying to explain them in terms of his own psychology, which he claims unconvincingly to be free from guilt. The story…
The Police Agent (1867) is a milestone in the development of crime fiction. Its eponymous hero, the cunning Mr. Porion, a.k.a. Père Cinnamon, does not employ his detective skills to pursue a vampire-like serial killer intent on bleeding children, but rather to protect him, while simultaneously serving other predatory aristocratic interests, such as providing the…
Nicolas-Edmé Restif de la Bretonne (1734-1806) produced over 180 books, totaling some 57,000 pages, many of them printed by his own hand, on almost every conceivable subject. Praised in Germany, he was mostly forgotten in France until being rediscovered by the Surrealists in the early 20th century. Several of his most important works are being…
Nicolas-Edmé Restif de la Bretonne (1734-1806) produced over 180 books, totaling some 57,000 pages, many of them printed by his own hand, on almost every conceivable subject. Praised in Germany, he was mostly forgotten in France until being rediscovered by the Surrealists in the early 20th century. Several of his most important works are being…
The Man Who Married a Mermaid (1949) tells the picaresque story of a sailor, Père Olifus, who first marries a mermaid, then embarks upon a series of voyages to a semi-mythical Far East where he enjoys various economic opportunities, but remains plagued by the vengeful astral form of the mermaid wife he left behind. Master…
The Angel Asrael (1832) is the most revealing and the purest of S. Henry Berthoud’s fantasies, and a significant early contribution to what became the great Romantic and Symbolist tradition of “literary satanism,” in which writers deliberately adopted a stance removed from orthodox Christianity in order to reappraise the character of Satan. As might be…
The Human Paradise (1930) is a scathingly sarcastic satire in which God offers to grant wishes expressed unanimously by the entirety of humankind. The wishes voiced are carefully extrapolated in such a way as to suggest that, however effective individuals might be at screwing up their wishes, a committee composed of the whole human race…
The End of Atlantis (1926) extends a rich tradition of French literary fantasies redeploying the myth of Atlantis; it is a historical melodrama, an adventure story and a heroic fantasy depicting the fall of the great and marvelous Empire of Atlantis. The novel is more sophisticated than most Atlantean fantasies. Its account of the fall…
The Beauty and the Beast by Madame Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve was first published in 1740 and later abridged and rewritten by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont in a better-known version in 1743.The main interests of Mme de Villeneuve’s story are two sections, one in which the Beast explains how he came to be transformed and…
Arrival in the Stars is a product of the aftermath of the Great War, and it deals directly with one of the widespread psychological effects of the war: a resurgence of interest in spiritualism. It is an extended conte philosophique seriously addressing the question of life after death as it was conceived at the time…
In The Green Eyes (1872) young Albert Dumesnil wonders if the soul of his recently departed uncle has not reincarnated itself in the old man’s cat, Freyschutz. The text is carefully ambiguous in its presentation of the narrator’s account, always leaving open the possibility that the strange circumstances are the results of obsessive delusion and…
