Kirjahaku

When the rich and well-connected Raoule de Vénérande becomes enamoured of Jacques Silvert, a poor young man who makes artificial flowers for a living, she turns him into her mistress and eventually into her wife. Raoule’s suitor, a cigar-smoking former hussar officer, becomes an accomplice in the complications that ensue.A writer and cultural arbiter of a salon in France from the early 1880s until 1930, Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery) won celebrity with this scandalously decadent novel. An inversion of the Pygmalion story, the book was judged to be pornographic, and a Belgian court sentenced its author (in absentia) to two years in prison. Verlaine congratulated Rachilde on the invention of a new vice.

“A captivating exercise in intriguing symbolism.” —John Taylor, Times Literary Supplement When Jean Maleux, a young sailor, is appointed assistant keeper of the Ar-Men lighthouse off the coast of Brittany, he is drawn into a dark world of physical peril, sexual obsession and necrophilia. The lighthouse is home to the eccentric, embittered keeper Mathurin Barnabas: an irascible and grizzled old man who appears to be more animal than human. Time passes in alternating stages of mind-numbing monotony and bouts of horror as our hero struggles against the endless assaults of wind and loneliness, with only his duties and his mute companion for distraction. The sea evolves into a wild force and the lighthouse itself into a monster that Jean must tame if he is to survive. First published in French in 1899 and never before translated, The Tower of Love will be of keen interest to readers of Decadent, Symbolist and Romantic horror fiction. Rachilde was the pen name of Marguerite Vallette-Eymery (1860–1953). She was the only female writer for the literary journal Le decadent. Melanie C. Hawthorne is a professor in the Department of Global Languages & Cultures at Texas A&M University. She is the translator of Rachilde’s novels The Juggler and Monsieur Vénus.