Errant Vice, here presented in English for the first time in a translation by Brian Stableford, is one of the key compositions of the Decadent Movement. A blackly comic novel starring Count Wladimir Noronsoff, the last of an accursed branch of a Russian aristocratic family, this is arguably the most outrageous of Jean Lorrain's works, with a richness of perversity and a quasi-imperial craziness in which the Côte d'Azur is an arena where echoes of Byzantium resound. This is a novel of fascinating moral and artistic complexity which, with its horror and sadness, humor and tragedy, is the climax of the author's career.
Author
Jean Lorrain, born Paul Duval, was a French poet and novelist of the Symbolist school. Lorrain was a dedicated disciple of dandyism, and openly gay. Lorrain wrote a number of collections of verse, including La forêt bleue (1883) and L'ombre ardente, (1897). He is also remembered for his decadent novels and short stories, such as Monsieur de Phocas (1901) and Histoires des masques (1900), as well as for one of his best novels, Sonyeuse, which he links to portraits exhibited by Antonio de La Gandara in 1893.
