Les Diaboliques Reading Order

Les Diaboliques (1874) by Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly is a collection of six scandalous tales of 'diabolical women' — women who commit crimes of passion, revenge, cruelty, and desire so extreme that Barbey presents them as genuinely supernatural, as though only diabolic intervention could explain what women are capable of. The collection was immediately seized by the public prosecutor, who found it obscene; Barbey successfully argued that the stories' moral was conservative (sin leads to damnation) and the prosecution was dropped, but the book's notoriety made it one of the defining texts of pre-Decadent transgression. The tales include 'Le Rideau cramoisi' (a young officer's mistress dies in his arms during sex and he calmly carries her body back to her room), 'La Vengeance d'une femme' (an aristocratic woman becomes a prostitute to dishonor her husband), and 'À un dîner d'athées' (a jealous husband feeds his wife's lover's heart to his wife at dinner). Barbey was a monarchist Catholic who viewed the modern world as an abyss of mediocrity; his Diaboliques are excessive precisely because he believed modern life had suppressed the passions that created genuine sin and genuine nobility. The collection influenced Huysmans, Mirbeau, and the entire Decadent tradition, and its tales of women as vehicles of destruction anticipate the femme fatale as a cultural obsession.