Monsieur de Phocas Reading Order

Monsieur de Phocas (1901) by Jean Lorrain is the most desolate of the French Decadent novels, a portrait of the aristocrat Fréneuse's obsession with the color green in eyes and gems, his descent through the demimonde and the aestheticist world of fin-de-siècle Paris, and his final dissolution into pure sensation without object. Lorrain was the chronicler of fin-de-siècle Paris's underworld — his journalism for Le Journal described the bals masqués, the morphine addicts, the theatrical demi-monde, the artistic bohemia — and Monsieur de Phocas draws directly on that journalism to produce the darkest portrait of Decadence in French fiction. Where Huysmans's Des Esseintes is a melancholy aesthete who constructs an artificial paradise, Lorrain's Fréneuse is a figure beyond aestheticism, past the point where beauty provides any consolation: the novel documents the failure of aestheticism as a spiritual strategy, the dissolution of the self when sensory experience loses its meaning. The green eyes that obsess Fréneuse — in women, in jewels, in the faces of androgynous boys — are at once an aesthetic object and an emblem of death (green is the color of decay, of absinthe, of the supernatural). Lorrain's prose is deliberately fevered and excessive, and readers must be willing to inhabit a consciousness that is, in the clinical sense, disintegrating.