Monsieur de Bougrelon

Fiction. LGBT Studies. French Literature. Translated from the French by Eva Richter. In Jean Lorrain's MONSIEUR DE BOUGRELON, an eccentric, outmoded dandy leads ennui-filled French tourists around misty Amsterdam. Guiding them through sailors' bars, whorehouses, and costume galleries, Monsieur de Bougrelon recounts hallucinatory stories of his past and delves into his heroic friendship with his aristocratic companion Monsieur de Mortimer.

MONSIEUR DE BOUGRELON is a unique character: loquacious, proud, a leftover from an earlier age, wearing garish outfits and makeup that drips. To his speechless audience, he waxes nostalgic about his life as an exile in Holland, as well as what he calls imaginary pleasures - obsessions with incongruous people, animals, and objects. These obsessions are often sexual or border on the sexual, leading to shocking, surreal scenes. MONSIEUR DE BOUGRELON also enthuses over his beautiful friend Monsieur de Mortimer, making this novella one of the rare works of the nineteenth century to broach homosexuality in a meaningful way, years before Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet.

Originally published in French in 1897, MONSIEUR DE BOUGRELON is now available in English translation for the first time. Its inventiveness and sheer decadence find kindred spirits in the novels of Comte de Lautréamont, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and even Louis-Ferdinand Céline, while the novella's indulgent language and unconventional vision of art and sex embody the best of fin-de-siècle literature. It is, in the novella's own words, a true boudoir of the dead.