Release date is 2025-11-27

Laurent Vogel (This file was produced from images generously made available by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF/Gallica))

"L'heure sexuelle" by Rachilde is a novel written in the early 20th century. It is a decadent, psychological exploration of desire in Paris, following a neurotic writer, Louis Rogès, torn between two cultivated lovers—Mathilde Saint-Clair and Julia Noisey—and a sudden, overwhelming fixation on a streetwalker who evokes Cleopatra. The book dwells on erotic obsession, beauty as an “object of art,” and the uneasy traffic between aesthetic reverie and moral reality.

At the start of the novel, a sleepless Louis wanders into a foggy night after hallucinating an Oriental vision and fixating on a small bust of Cleopatra in his room. In the street he is seized by a jeweled, emaciated prostitute whose eyes overwhelm him; he follows her to her room, adores her as an icon rather than a body, and is abruptly dismissed when she refuses to “gift” him her illness. The next day he sends her ivory-white roses and learns she has been taken to the hospital, which deepens his troubled exaltation. He then dines with Mathilde, whose refined music and bourgeois calm leave him restless, and later entertains his other lover, the volatile Julia. A Friday gathering with his friends Andrel, Massouard, and Jules Hector turns into a debate on passion as the engine of art, the “object” that ignites creation, and male cowardice before social rules—until Julia bursts in, disrupting their sanctuary and exposing Louis’s entanglements. The opening thus sets the tone: sensory excess, self-scrutiny, and the collision of fantasy, flesh, and art. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: Paris: Mercure de France, 1900