Monsieur de Bougrelon

“To have had the happiness of loving a place, and there to have known the joy of living and letting live; to have had such vertigo from a feeling that you could pass your shivers to others, and then dare to return, to hope to revive the dead without thinking for a minute that the irrevocable hour turns everything that we live into dust and nothingness, that the past is a mass grave, and that, outside of our heart, everything down here is a sepulcher!”

This novella is a great find: a perfect example of French Decadent prose. Make sure to read the afterword by translator Eva Richter, whose love and knowledge of Decadent literature revives the heart.