Nightmares of an Ether Drinker by Jean Lorrain

Portraits and cartoons show the dandy but fail to communicate the reek of ether-he was an addict throughout his later years-which attended his presence.

I say that Lorrain is unknown but only to the general reader to anyone familiar with fin-de-siècle Paris he’s an unavoidable presence, a chronicler of the city’s excesses and also one of the great characters of the period. Jean Lorrain (1898) by Antonio de la Gandara.

If Lorrain is a neglected figure in contemporary France, he’s hardly known at all in the Anglophone world which is why the news last month of the first English translation of Monsieur de Bougrelon was so welcome. From his first poems, Modernités, this fin-de-siècle Petronius evoked the whole life of Montmartre: transvestites, lesbians, go-betweens, outrageous bluestockings, failed poets declining into pimps, wrestlers, part-time gigolos for either sex.Īmong the books that Philippe Jullian wrote about notable fin-de-siècle personalities is a biography of Jean Lorrain (1855–1906), a volume which-to my continual frustration-has yet to be translated into English. A brilliant journalist with an eye that missed no blemish, no absurdity, but could fill with tears on seeing beauty in a picture, a profile, a gown. He spent five years of his life in Montmartre, five years that were also the most dazzling ones for the hill whose chronicler he became. In 1881 there arrived from Normandy a good-looking young man with an unfortunate habit of painting his face: Jean Lorrain.

Nightmares of an Ether Drinker by Jean Lorrain