“Astarte has come again, more powerful than before. She possesses me. She lies in wait for me. December 97 My cruelty has also returned: the cruelty which frightens me. It lies dormant for months, for years, and then all at… — Jean Lorrain Copy Share Image
“But that woman is an encyclopedia! Of all vices, ancient and modern, and terribly interesting to leaf through! ” — Jean Lorrain Copy Share Image
“...the presence of others has become even more intolerable to me, their conversation most of all. Oh, how it all annoys and exasperates me:… — Jean Lorrain Copy Share Image
“The beauty of the twentieth century is the charm of the hospital, the grace of the cemetery, of consumption and emaciation. I admit that… — Jean Lorrain Copy Share Image
“His fame as an artist requires very tender care. Look what a mask of diplomacy is painstakingly formed by the whole of that fine profile; he is as wily as a cardinal. He has scented in Miss White a useful agent of celebrity, and he has come solely to harness her to the cause of his glory. It is himself… — Jean Lorrain Copy Share
“A strange girl, all phosphorous and cantharides, burning with every desire! And burning with every vice!” — Jean Lorrain Copy Share Image
“There were charming ones as well as terrible ones, that I must admit. The painter was particularly entranced by Japanese masks: warriors', actors' and courtesans' masks. Some of them were frightfully contorted, the bronze cheeks creased by a thousand wrinkles, with vermilion weeping from the corners of the eyes and long trails of green at the corners of the mouths… — Jean Lorrain Copy Share
“At this point, the sequence of my memories is disrupted. I sank into a chaos of brief, incoherent and bizarre hallucinations, in which the grotesque and the horrible kept close company. Prostrate, as if I were being garrotted by invisible cords, I floundered in anguish and dread, oppressively ridden by the most unbridled nightmares. A whole series of monsters and… — Jean Lorrain Copy Share
“The ring which you are holding, my friend, is identical to that one. I had it cut according to the model of the king's ring, and damascened in Spain. The original is still in the Escorial; it would have been pleasant to steal it, for I easily acquire the instincts of a thief when I am in a museum, and… — Jean Lorrain Copy Share
The fancies that take their monstrous birth from the spinelessness and boredom of usurped wealth bring in their wake every defect ... and though rich men's crimes escape the law, protected as they are by the cowardice of governments and people, Nature, more real than society, sets her anarchic example by abandoning the wretched time servers of Capital to the… — Jean Lorrain Copy Share
“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 any moment. What he is doing now is very dangerous, my dear, and the pleasure you take in his performance is the little frisson that… — Jean Lorrain Copy Share
Her vice takes hold of her again, but she still refrains until some moment when, gnawed by some hideous caprice, she comes aground like… — Jean Lorrain Copy Share Image
