Fards and Poisons, originally published in 1903 and here made available for the first time in English in a translation by Brian Stableford, is one of the more eccentric works of the ever-eccentric Jean Lorrain. Defying the standard narrative expectations of short stories, the items in this volume might be seen as a series of gossipy character sketches, of actresses and mystics, gigolos and dowagers, of an entire rogues gallery of fin de siecle types, which help explain how the author gained a reputation for corrupting public morals by literary means. Resembling fragments excised from a kind of endless series of conversations, the result is a strange literary collage that is perhaps the most quintessential of Lorrain’s works: the slice of his life that pins his own literary persona most precisely, like a lepidopterist’s long pin.

Included in the current volume, and for the first time republished since its initial appearance in Le Journal, is also the short story Victim , for which Lorrain was disastrously sued, and convicted of, libel, the court imposing a massive punitive fine on the author and sentencing him to two months imprisonment, though the rulings were later overturned.