The Devils

Jules-Amedée Barbey D'Aurevilly Le Diaboliche

To approach the reading of Le Diaboliche you have to start from the figure of the author, provincial moved to Paris and in love with English Dandism, so much so that among his early works there is a libretto on Lord Brummel. It pushes him an aspiration to sliced sophistication that in him reaches aspects of challenge to society through an extreme of the figure of the dandy. He dressed conceitedly and almost out of fashion and boasted of intense sexual activity, even against nature, and anticipated the ranks of decadent beautics at Baudelaire. The women he describes in his short stories also anticipate the later figures of femme fatale, the ranks of Salome, Circe and Lilith, powerful subjugating even when they are and show themselves naïve.

The book consists of six stories linked by a fil rouge made of refined environments, outrages, crimes and exhausting sensuality, while in the air the sulphurous smell of the morbid and the diabolical is sniffed.

The stories flow slow because they belong to an era when sensuality was made up of long times and held back to explode.

Review by A.S.