He falls in love with his half sister’s middle son Olivier, a senior college student.
In a novel within a novel, the main character, Edouard, is writing a novel called The Counterfeiters. But what name then am I to give the rapture I felt as I clasped in my naked arms that perfect little body, so wild, so ardent, so sombrely lascivious? For a long time after Mohammed had left me, I remained in a state of passionate jubilation, and though I had already achieved pleasure five times with him, I renewed my ecstasy again and again, and when I got back to my room in the hotel, I prolonged its echoes until morning. How should there have been any question of love? How should I have allowed desire to dispose of my heart? No scruple clouded my pleasure and no remorse followed it. My joy was unbounded, and I cannot imagine it greater, even if love had been added. Every time since then that I have sought after pleasure, it is the memory of that night I have pursued. Then the guide left us and Wilde sent me into the further room with little Mohammed and shut himself up in the other with the.
Wilde took a key out of his pocket and showed me into a tiny apartment of two rooms… The youths followed him, each of them wrapped in a burnous that hid his face. He describes an adventure he had with Oscar Wilde: That such loves can spring up, that such relationships can be formed, it is not enough for me to say that this is natural I maintain that it is good each of the two finds exaltation, protection, a challenge in them and I wonder whether it is for the youth or the elder man that they are more profitable. The pederasts, of whom I am one (why cannot I say this quite simply, without your immediately claiming to see a brag in my confession?), are much rarer, and the sodomites much more numerous, than I first thought. I call a sodomite ("The word is sodomite, sir," said Verlaine to the judge who asked him if it were true that he was a sodomist) the man whose desire is addressed to mature men. I call a pederast the man who, as the word indicates, falls in love with young boys. he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1917. A brilliant writer, and a major influence in the 20th century, subtle, especially in describing relationship, and sophisticated. Mostly it’s about the original, the real as opposed to the copy or the false.
One is constantly having to look up who such & such a person is. Published in 1925, it’s a complex novel with, all told, 29 characters in interlaced relationships. Am reading André Gide’s, The Counterfeiters, or as he would have it, Les Faux Monnayeurs.
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