Jean Lorrain - O Senhor de Bougrelon

Regarding "The Lord of Bougrelon," André Breton wrote: "I see nothing equivalent to this admirable work in our literature. One of those gods of poetry that we, in short, have recently discovered." His admiration is understandable; because Breton considered the "decadent aesthetic," with its "mystical and madly disturbing sensuality," an essential element of surrealist poetics. But The Lord of Bougrelon is also, seeing it less complicated by its hallucinations, a transformer of poignant realities into nobility, a perverse and tormented aesthete, a being of hesitations between human ugliness and the splendor of art; and he has an inner fire that he blows to reject reality. "The noblest insolence of Jean Lorrain," said Philippe Julien in 1887. His name was Paul Duval in 1855, when he was born, and he preferred to be known in literature as Jean Lorrain. In 1884, Jean Lorrain was already a journalist in the capital; A hated journalist, sometimes intellectual, sometimes worldly, with poisoned arrows. He died on June 30, 1906; in Paris, unexpectedly, with a perforated colon.