Gaston Danville’s The Perfume of Lust (Le Parfum de volupté)

Gaston Danville’s The Perfume of Lust (Le Parfum de volupté), published in 1905, is a kind of lost civilisation tale (involving Atlantis) but not at all typical of that genre. This is definitely not pulp fiction or straightforward adventure fiction. This is much more arty and more literary. Danville had an intense interest in the latest psychological theories of his day and that interest is reflected in this novel.

Gaston Danville was the pseudonym used by French author Armand Blocq (1870-1933). He’s hard to classify. He had links to both the Naturalist and Symbolist movements, two literary movements that were bitterly opposed. There’s also some very obvious influence of the literary Decadence of the fin de siècle.

The Perfume of Lust has a setup that could easily have been used as the basis for a rollicking adventure tale but Danville had other fish to fry.

This is a story related at third hand. This is a story related by a man named Robert Toby to his friend Vincent Tricard who then related it to the narrator of the novel. The narrator is of course then passing it on to the reader so maybe it’s a tale told at fourth hand. Neither the narrator not Vincent Tricard are convinced that the story is true but at the same time they don’t dismiss the possibility. We have to consider the possibility that it’s a tall tale, or a dream, or an hallucination or that it’s all quite true. This ambiguity is never resolved. Perhaps we never can tell dreams from reality anyway.

Robert Toby is a passenger on the steamship Dauphiné. The ship is hit by a gigantic wave. It survives but it is left rudderless and drifting. Repairs are eventually effected and then things start to get strange. The ship encounters an island where no island has ever been before. The Dauphiné finds itself stranded in a large bay surrounded by reefs, unable to regain the open sea.

It appears that some undersea earthquake or volcanic eruption has brought the seabed to the surface and created a new island. The strangest thing is the city. It appears to be an ancient city that sank beneath the waves sometime in the distant past. It might even be Atlantis.

Danville’s interest does not lie in the story itself but in the effects the island has on the passengers and crew of the Dauphiné. Psychological, emotional, sensory, sensual and erotic effects. Danville emphasises the influences of scents and textures and sounds which provide a kind of sensory intoxication.

The passengers certainly have their erotic instincts aroused. Danville mostly describes their erotic experiments obliquely. This was probably not for censorship reasons (writers such as Pierre Louÿs were going much much further at around the same time). It’s more likely that Danville was fascinated by the erotic but not entirely comfortable with such things. There’s a very strange orgy scene in which the participants get very excited but they don’t seem to actually do anything.

In some ways this works in the book’s favour. It’s not simply about sex, it’s about eroticism and sensuality in a much broader sense.

There’s also a sense in which the Dauphiné’s passengers have found a king of paradise but it’s a paradise that might not be good for them and which might be taken away from them. There’s a brooding sense of doom and melancholy. The undersea seismic activity has not ceased. This island and its mysterious exotic lost city suddenly emerged from the waves but there’s no way to know if it will remain in existence for a week or a year or a century. There’s no way to know if escape from the island is possible. These uncertainties add a certain spice to the island’s pleasures.

This is technically science fiction, of a sort, but it’s a novel that might well mystify most science fiction fans. It found it oddly mesmerising. Recommended, but maybe not to everyone.

This is one of the many French science fiction, fantasy and decadent works that have been translated (or to use his preferred terminology adapted) by Brian Stableford.