Lawrence Hamilton has selected several spicy excerpts from an anonymous English translation of Denis Diderot‘s satiric libertine novel, Les Bijoux Indiscrets (The Indiscreet Jewels), first published in 1749). This edition, from New Urge is entitled From Their Lips to His Ear, is #6 in the Pocket Erotica series.
Denis Diderot was a highly celebrated 18th century French philosopher and editor of the groundbreaking Encyclopédie. In 1748, in need of money, he wrote a scandalous and satiric libertine allegory – Les Bijoux Indiscrets – whose hero, a sultan, is in possession of a magic ring. When aimed at female genitals, this ring prompts the private parts to speak — revealing the woman’s deepest sexual desires, experiences, and indiscretions.
In this precursor to The Vagina Monologues, the women are portrayed as powerful beings through their liberated ideas and sexuality.
Her Three Daughters by Pierre Louÿs, translated from the French into modern English by R J Dent, published by New Urge, is now available.
Synopsis: A young man moves into a new apartment and receives an advanced education in the permutations of sex from a mother and her three—surprisingly well-educated—daughters. Part memoir, part confession, Her Three Daughters is Pierre Louÿs at his erotic best.
“Louÿs’s jolly saga of sexual insatiability…is one of the handful of erotic works that achieve true literary status.” — Susan Sontag
“Among all Pierre Louÿs’s books, this is undoubtedly my favourite, the most moving, most uplifting and sometimes the most terrifying, the purest, the least artificial and the most modern. A masterpiece.” —André Pieyre de Mandiargues
“Amazing! It’s erotica, but high-quality erotica!” — Jean d’Ormesson
“One of the most moving books ever written on the fatality of desires.” —Annie Le Brun
“Here, without question, is Pierre Louÿs’ erotic masterpiece. The strength of the novel does not come from its eventual biographical value, but from the constant transgression that manifests itself within it—containing all the erotic themes dear to the writer, elevated to a singular power. We also find here the key qualities of Louÿs’ style: the liveliness of the dialogue, the precision of the language, the irony, the relentlessness with which certain obscene words are constantly repeated. This scandalous book constitutes a total profanation and derision of the bourgeois universe to which the author belonged.” —Jean-Paul Goujon
Book details:
Title: Her Three Daughters
Author: Pierre Louÿs
Translator: R J Dent
Language: English
Publisher: New Urge
Publication Date: February 13, 2023
ISBN: 979-8986922478
Format: Paperback
Pages: 340
Dimensions: 12.85 cm x 2.16 cm x 19.84 cm (5.06 inches x 0.85 inches x 7.81 inches)
In the tradition of Decadent literature, spiced with Gothic, this provocative novel takes the reader on a voyage through dream, reverie, fantasy, memory and imagination – recounting the raptures and the initiation tortures of a young woman, Gabrielle, by the Vicomtesse, the Comte and their entourage in The Domain.
Sexually explicit without being crude, The Rites of Ecstasy is the story of a woman whose libido and personality lead her to increasingly submissive behaviour – allowing herself to be sexually used, violently beaten, and physically mutilated, which ultimately leads her to discover who – and what – she really is. As Gabrielle’s submission deepens and becomes more extreme, the novel simultaneously deepens its thematic explorations of the relationship between surrender and freedom, the nature and the demands of love, and the transcendent aspects of sexual desire.
A sublime novel that explores love, subservience, cruelty and dominance. The Rites of Ecstasy is a deeply erotic literary work, and as such, Hélène Lavelle’s novel is seductive and dangerous.
This is a novel for connoisseurs of erotic literature, an adult book in every sense, an interesting and intelligent novel of ideas, expressed with eloquence, elegance and wit; beautifully written by Hélène Lavelle, and lucidly translated into sophisticated English by Valéry Soers.
“This modern classic deserves to be ranked alongside the great French erotic masterpieces, Story of O and The Image , and very few others. Not for the faint-hearted or the narrow-minded, this story of love, excess, degradation, cruelty, tenderness and beauty is for all women whose fantasies and desires embrace the intensely erotic.” — Dawn Avril Fitzroy
Title: The Rites of Ecstasy
Author: Hélène Lavelle
Translator: Valéry Soers
Publisher: New Urge Editions
ISBN-10: 1735615900
ISBN-13: 978-1735615905
Format: Paperback
Pages: 238
Language: English
Weight: 15.5 ounces (439.41 grams)
Dimensions: 6.14 x 0.6 x 9.21 inches (15.6 x 1.52 x 23.39 cm)
Hélène Lavelle has also written Le Château du Comte, which is a sequel to The Rites of Ecstasy. Details of Le Château du Comte are available here: Le Château du Comte
The Marquis de Sade’s The Self-Made Cuckold, translated from the French by RJ Dent, is a rare work sans the notorious content Sade is infamous for. Indeed, it contains no savagely violent orgies nor flagellation. This little gem is — by comparison to The120 Days of Sodom — libertine light and amusingly smutty. There is also a strain of feminism running through the book.
R J Dent’s brand-new English translation of the Marquis de Sade’s The Self-Made Cuckold, written by Sade when he was a prisoner in the Bastille in 1788, is now available as a paperback chapbook as #20 in the Pocket Erotica Series from New Urge Editions.
Georges Bataille (10 September 1897 – 9 July 1962) was a French intellectual and writer working in literature, philosophy, and the history of art. His writings included novels, essays and poetry. His subjects included eroticism, mysticism and transgression.
His fiction includes:
Story of the Eye:
Story of the Eye (L’histoire de l’oeil) is a 1928 short novel that details the increasingly bizarre sexual perversions of a pair of teenage lovers. It is narrated by an unnamed young man looking back on his exploits.
L’Abbé C:
L’Abbé C (1950) is a work of dark eroticism, centred on the relationship between two twentieth century brothers in a small French village, one of whom is a Catholic parish priest, while the other is a libertine. The novel explores issues of split subjectivity, existential angst and bad faith.
Blue of Noon:
Blue of Noon (Le Bleu du Ciel) is a blackly compelling account of depravity and violence. It is an erotic novella in which the narrator travels from city to city in a surreal nightmare, experiencing squalor, sadism and drunken encounters that culminate in incest and necrophilia. Bataille completed the work in 1935, but it was not published until 1957.
My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man:
My Mother is a frank and intense depiction of a young man’s sexual initiation and corruption by his mother, where the profane becomes sacred, and intense experience is shown as the only way to transcend the boundaries of society and morality. Madame Edwarda is the story of a prostitute who calls herself God, and The Dead Man, published in 1964 after Bataille’s death, is a startling short tale of cruelty and desire.
His non-fiction includes:
Eroticism:
Eroticism is a collection of essays on taboo and sacrifice, transgression and language, death and sensuality. Bataille examines these themes with an original, often startling perspective. He challenges any single discourse on the erotic. The scope of his inquiry ranges from Emily Bronte to Sade, from St. Therese to Claude Levi-Strauss and Dr. Kinsey; and his subjects include prostitution, mythical ecstasy, cruelty, desire and sexuality.
Literature and Evil:
Literature and Evil is an extraordinary 1957 collection of essays, which begins with Bataille’s assertion that ‘Literature is not innocent.’ Bataille argues that only by acknowledging literature’s complicity with the knowledge of evil can literature communicate fully and intensely. The literary profiles of eight authors and their work, including Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal and the writings of Sade, Kafka and Sartre, explore subjects such as violence, eroticism, childhood, myth and transgression.
There are four Betty Blues that I love – one is the novel 37°2 le matin by Philippe Djian; one is the film that was based on that novel, Betty Blue, directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix and starring Beatrice Dalle and Jean-Hughes Anglade; one is the Cesar Award-winning film poster; and the other is the Betty Blue film soundtrack by Gabriel Yared.
The novel:
The novel, 37°2 le matin, originally written in French and translated into American English by Howard Buten, is a beautifully written book, full of enigmatic and haunting writing.
It tells the story of Betty and Zorg, lovers who live in a beach-front chalet in Gruissan-Plage, near Narbonne. He works as a handyman who does odd jobs to pay the bills. As the story begins, Zorg and Betty have only been together for a week and are in a very passionate stage of their relationship.
Zorg narrates the story of their relationship. In the film he provides the voice-over. He describes Betty as being “like a flower with translucent antennae and a violet Naugahide core.” She longs for a better life and has had to quit her last job as a waitress because she was being sexually harassed by her boss.
Zorg’s boss asks him to paint the five hundred shacks that populate the beach — a fact that he keeps from Betty who thinks they only have to do one. She attacks the project with enthusiasm that quickly turns to anger once she learns the actual number. In response, Betty covers the boss’ car with pink paint.
During an argument, Betty accidentally discovers a series of notebooks that contain a novel Zorg wrote years ago. She reads it and falls in love with him even more. She then makes it her mission in life to type every hand-written page and get it published.
They move to Paris and Betty’s mental health declines, with her becoming more aggressive, violent, withdrawn and uncommunicative. Finally, she becomes self-destructive, with tragic consequences. Despite the bleakness of the plot, the tone of the novel is very warm.
The film:
The film stays faithful to the novel and has become something of a French film classic. It should really be watched by everyone who wants to have an insight into human nature and the extremes of passion.
Although I’ve now seen Betty Blue at least twenty times, I first watched Betty Blue when I was in my twenties, which is probably the best time to watch it, because it has stayed with me and etched itself into my psyche from that initial viewing.
There are a number of reasons for this: the wonderful use of colour in the film, the locations, the acting, the sex, and so on. Betty Blue is a French film that has a mature attitude to sex and death. Another very good reason I enjoy the film is the beautiful, haunting soundtrack by Gabriel Yared.
The soundtrack:
Below is a sample of Gabriel Yared’s haunting score for Betty Blue, to give an idea of just how moving the music is.
The poster:
The film poster, designed by Christian Blondel, won a Cesar award. In it, the ethereal (and sky-framed) Betty, stares into the distance, super-imposed onto and above an evening/dusk image of the beach-house in Gruissan, and it’s easy to see how it became such an iconic poster image.
So, look at the Cesar Award-winning film poster, read the powerful novel, watch the lushly-photographed film, and listen to the haunting soundtrack. It’s unusual for one piece of fiction to extend into so many other areas so successfully, but Betty Blue has done just that. It is a truly wonderful experience looking at it, reading it, watching it and listening to it.
R J Dent 