Volupte: The Sensual Man

This is the first English translation of a pre-Freudian psychological novel. The narrator victimizes women while feeling victimized by his own sensuality.

Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804-69), who ruled French letters in the nineteenth century, established biographical analysis as a critical method. His own fictionalized biography was Volupte (1834), translated here for the first time. It is at once a roman a clef, a historical novel, and a pre-Freudian psychological novel. Disguising his relationship with Victor Hugo's wife Adele by setting the novel in the 1790s during the Breton Chouan uprising against Napoleon, he weaves together fictitious and historical personages. His analysis of the narrator's inner psychological state and the love-hate language games of courtship is framed by parallel intrigues in politics and society.