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having previously been an innocent and healthy country girl. Her protestations to this effect were not conspicuously backed up by her lifestyle – she married the editor of the Mercure de France , which was hardly a Decadent journal, and seems to have lived a perfectly respectable life as Madame Vallette – but her novels present a spirited defence of uninhibited eccentricity. They were considered indecent in her day, and it is only now – when she can be hailed as a rediscovered proto-feminist – that they are beginning to appear in English translation.
    Rachilde’s novels offer a series of paradoxically forceful and conscientiously Decadent heroines, most of whom are triumphantly unredeemed even by death. Nono (1885) features a promiscuous female dandy prone to murdering inconvenient lovers. La Marquise de Sade (1887), embarks, as one would expect, on a career of orgiastic sadism. Monsieur Vénus (1889), as its title implies, has a somewhat androgynous heroine, who instals the mummified corpse of one of her lovers on a couch in her boudoir. La jongleuse (1900; tr. as The Juggler ) is emotionally torn between two lovers, one of whom is a Greek vase.
    Monsieur Vénus obtained for its author the by-then-rare accolade of being charged as a danger to public morals, and perhaps she was, if only because she helped to free literary representations of female sexuality from the morass of male pornographic fantasy – a crusade taken up by Colette while she was freeing herself from exploitative collaboration with her husband Willy. Although it is the grotesquerie and luridness of much of her work which first attracts attention to Rachilde she was not without a sense of humour, and her critical work includes some notable essays on Symbolist and Surrealist writers. Her career continued well into the twentieth century, and although she toned down the sexual bizarrerie of her books even Jeux d’artifice (1932) still preserves recognisable Decadent affiliations.
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    Catulle Mendès was one of the few writers who had built a considerable literary reputation before getting involved with the Decadent movement (and who may have spoiled it in the eyes of some later critics by doing so). His Revue Fantaisiste had provided an early showcase for the Parnassians and his own verse in that vein had attracted some praise; he had also been briefly married to Gautier’s daughter. The novels of his Decadent period are, however, fairly close in spirit to Rachilde’s, showing a similar interest in the grotesque and an apparent determination to overlook nothing in rendering exhaustive analyses of the particular corruptions to be featured.
    Mendès first Decadent novel Zo’har (1886), is a baroque study of incest. Méphistophéla (1890) offers an account of a Lesbian career far less dreamily Romantic than any treatment of the theme in the work of Baudelaire or Pierre Louÿs. La Première Maîtresse (1887) includes several excursions in which the central characters go hopefully into the Paris slums in search of new sins (but even the Decadent imagination was unequal to the task of discovering one which was really new).
    A different side of Mendès is, however, displayed by his short fiction and brief essays offering advice on the game of love, many of which are collected in Lesbia (1887). Here the author parades a slick and archly humorous cynicism, which takes it for granted that deceit is the lifeblood of romance and presents a series of pointed examples of calculated insincerity. This is Decadence at its lightest and least serious, but it still contrives to provide a challenge to conventional representations of the inclinations of the human heart.
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    The writer who searched more avidly than any other for new sins to add to the catalogue of Decadence was Jean Lorrain (Paul Duval), a prolific contributor of verse and prose to the Decadent periodicals, whose numerous short stories include many intense and striking evocations of