Nightmares of an Ether Drinker by Jean Lorrain

This is a minor but engaging addition to the library of decadents and symbolists in English. Lorrain was an extreme figure even in decadent Paris: a powdered. “Oriane Vanquished” even manages to bear up under an inevitable comparison to Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” Unfortunately, the subtly bawdy “The Old Duke’s Daughters” is marred by anti-Roma prejudice that’s nasty even for its time period. The literary figure most closely associated with ether in fin-de-sicle France was the novelist, poet, journalist, and short-story writer Jean Lorrain (18551906), whose collection of dark and sardonic tales was published in 1895 under the title Nightmares of an Ether-Drinker. The several fairy tale retellings pall eventually, but Lorrain’s version of the French legend of Melusine is quite fine. Symbolist works, such as “The Prince in the Forest,” contain spectacular visual imagery that represents philosophical meaning without ever lapsing into simple allegory. The stories in this collection have a slight air of being left over, and there are no spectacular individual works, but their overall effect is rich, strange, and gorgeous. Snuggly Books publisher Stableford is systematically rectifying this, and already produced versions of Lorrain’s most critically acclaimed pieces in Nightmares of an Ether-Drinker and The Soul-Drinker and Other Decadent Fantasies. Lorrain (1855–1906), poet, novelist, travel writer, librettist, and satirist, is today known best to English speakers for once having fought a duel with Marcel Proust, and has been very little translated.

Nightmares of an Ether Drinker by Jean Lorrain