Errant Vice

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.