Until recently I’d never read Pierre Louys’s Aphrodite, even though the titular goddess in my favorite immortal and I have a nice little hardback Modern Library edition. I guess I’m just skeptical about historical fiction, particularly the ponderous, factoid heavy "zounds" and "forsooth" variety. But Aphrodite is no Rob Roy, it’s history as fever dream, more along the lines of the Pre-Raphaelites’ impossibly lovely, mystic Middle Ages or, more to the point, the exotic, jewel encrusted paganism of Flaubert’s Salammbo. It’s beautifully written, visionary and erotic, a colorful miniature meant to be consumed not in one big gulp, but in a number of delicate, rich sips.

It’s also totally decadent, a paradigmatic example of the french variety of that strange fruit. I was inspired to read it by Jennifer Birkett’s excellent The Sins of the Fathers: Decadence in France 1870-1914. Birkett’s reading is, inevitably, political and feminist, but quite acute. As she points out, as was true with a lot of decadent literature, the supposed femme fatale, the harlot Chrysis, ends up being fatal only to herself and other women. Even though she drives the "hero," Demetrios to commit three audacious, sacrilegious crimes, in the end it is only she and two other women who pay the price while he is inspired to create a sculptural masterpiece based on her dead body. In the last account, he prefers works of art and dreams to actually female flesh – a very decadent valuation. At least in noir fiction the sailors go down with the sirens!

But the transgressive kick of Aphrodite cannot be denied, and the whole confection is so delicious that Louys can be forgiven the slightly bitter aftertaste. Here’s some scandalous selections:

It is like a purple flower filled with honey and with scent.

It is like a sea-serpent, alive and soft and open at night.

It is the refuge where man seeks rest on his march toward death.

It is a thing of awe.

It is the face of Medusa.

Here was one and what did she ask? Not love, nor jewels, but three unbelievable crimes.

A virtuous weakening could readily reduce a tragedy to the banality of normal existence.

Luminous, impalpable, supernatural, pure and naked, the vision floated above the stone, throbbing softly.

She took with her a human will in her mouth, like that little stolen rose whose stem she chewed.

Her feet remained still, her knees remained rigid and unparted, and slowly she turned her body upon her motionless hips. Rising above the sheath of her legs, her face and her two breasts were like three great flowers almost pink in the vase of her garment. She danced gravely with her head, her shoulders, and her beautiful twining arms.

No spectacle in nature, not the flaming western sky, the tempest at sea, the palm-trees, the thunder, the mirage, the mighty upheaval of the waters, seems worthy of admiration after one has seen the transformation of a woman in one’s arms. Demetrios gazed in a sort of religious terror at this fury of the goddess inherent in the feminine body, this transport inhabiting a being, this superhuman convulsion of which he was the direct cause, which he could exalt or repress at will, and which for the thousandth time amazed him.