Ma petite ville ; Le miracle de Bretagne ; Un veuvage d'amour

The adventures of Jean Lorrain supplied the raw materials for a wide range of chronicles under many pseudonyms in various newspapers, the longest running (1895-1905) of which appeared in Le Journal. These columns were often unflinchingly harsh: the voyeur of the fin de siècle period had a sharp eye, a piercing pen and a malevolent attitude. He was easily annoyed, was prone to jealousy and tended towards caricature. The result was a colourful, often comical, sometimes shocking image of a decadent world in an exaggerated style. Lorrain brought to light that which Proust would later hold back. He was the best-paid journalist of Paris in 1896.

He was introduced to the journalistic milieu around 1873, when he met Judith Gautier, the writer Théophile Gautier's daughter. He was a hack and an ether addict. His articles caused a great deal of controversy. He insulted actresses who refused to act in his plays. Caricatures appeared of Lorrain as an effeminate athlete covered in jewellery. In 1897 Lorrain engaged in a duel with Marcel Proust, which wasn't his first duel. In 1886 he refused to engage in a duel with Guy de Maupassant, who thought he recognised himself in Lorrain's novel Très russe, and in 1887 he came face to face with journalist René Maizeroy. In 1888 he managed to escape from a duel with Paul Verlaine. The duel with Proust appears to have been stylized: both fired a bullet, but nobody was hurt, and their enmity evaporated instantly.

A decadent mother's child

Lorrain's best-known novels are Monsieur de Bougrelon (1897), Monsieur de Phocas (1901) and La maison Philibert (1904); as for his countless collections of stories, sketches and fairy tales, the votes are equally divided. This doesn't apply to his poems and plays: they didn't make it; his work for the theatre failed right away, due in part to Sarah Bernhardt, who enjoyed having Lorrain among her staff of writers, but who didn’t like his plays. This was a shock to Jean Lorrain, who worshipped her in spite of his distaste for women. Oddly enough, the people he truly cared about were all women: the genius Judith Gautier, chanteuse Yvette Guilbert (famous from the posters that Toulouse Lautrec made for her)- Lorrain wrote lyrics for her- the 'grande courtisane' Liane de Pougy, the young writer Colette, whom he promoted actively. But above all he loved his mother, the mirror image of the empress Eugénie; she followed him from Fécamp to Paris and ultimately to Nice, where he spent his final years, destroyed by the drinking of ether, but still relatively enjoyably.

This decadent tearaway originated in a highly sedate French village: Fécamp, where he was born as Paul Duval on 9 August 1855. But it was an age of eccentric behaviour: for example, the English poet Swinburne, who landed in the vicinity of Etretat around 1867, and who had the reputation of being a sadomasochistic opium addict who shared a house with a monkey (whom he ended up eating). It is uncertain whether this influenced the young Lorrain, but eccentric figures were sometimes awarded a place in his important novels, as with Bougrelon and Phocas.

Bibliographical description

Description: Ma petite ville ; Le miracle de Bretagne ; Un veuvage d’amour / Jean Lorrain ; ill. à l'aquarelle de Manuel Orazi, grav. à l'eau-forte par Frédéric Massé et impr. sur coul. ; vignettes décoratives de Léon Rudincki [i.e. Rudnicki]. - Paris : Société française d'éditions d'art, 1898. - [49] p. : ill. ; 25 cm

Printer: Édouard Crété (Corbeil), Taneur, Jean Saudé

Edition: 300 copies

This copy: Number 97 of 250 on Rives

Bibliography: Carteret V-124

Shelfmark: KW Koopm A 463

References

• Ghislain de Diesbach, Proust. Paris, Perrin, 1991
• Pierre Léon Gaulthier, Jean Lorrain: La vie, l’oeuvre et l’art d’un pessimiste à la fin du XIXe siècle. Paris, Lesot, 1935
• Hélène Huet, Mapping Decadence [online source]
• Philippe Jullian, Jean Lorrain ou Le satyricon 1900. Paris, Fayard, 1974
• Jean Lorrain, Verhalen van een etherdrinker. Antwerpen, Exa, 1986