Three Flowers and The King of Siam’s Amazon
Jane de La Vaudère
translated by Brian Stableford
In La Vaudère’s first venture into exotic erotica, the Java-set Three Flowers of Sensuality (1900), we follow Stéphane, a French artist abroad, and his adventures with three dancing girl sisters who have been kept and raised in closed religious communities dedicated to the celebration of female deities. In the second novel in the present volume, The King of Siam’s Amazon (1902), which might have been partly inspired by Octave Mirbeau’s Torture Garden, we are confronted with La Vaudère’s most extreme and nightmarish tale, which, in its deployment of atrocious imagery, makes Mirbeau’s novel look tame.
The two novels contained herein display the idea of extreme amour in two different, but equally striking ways; although remarkable individually, they are even more remarkable in juxtaposition, especially as the author seems to have moved from the composition of one to the composition of the other almost without psychological transition. Both remain fascinating, although the one that the author and her contemporary readers presumably regarded as the more shocking of the two, The King of Siam’s Amazon, is likely to seem less disturbing today than its companion, given the manner in which moral sensitivities have shifted in the interim.
About the Author
Jane de La Vaudère was baptized Jeanne Scrive and was married to Camille Gaston Crapez, who began styling himself Crapez de La Vaudère after inheriting the Château de La Vaudère from his mother. Her prolific literary work is very various but she was assimilated to the Decadent Movement firstly because of two scandalously scabrous Parisian novels, Les Demi-Sexes (1897) and Les Androgynes (1903), and, more pertinently, because of a series of accounts of moeurs antiques, some of which—notably Le Mystère de Kama (1901)—set new standards of excess.
Other books by Jane de La Vaudère :
The Demi-Sexes and The Androgynes
The Double Star and Other Occult Fantasies
The Mystery of Kama and Brahma’s Courtesans
The Witch of Ecbatana and The Virgin of Israel
Syta’ s Harem and the Pharaoh’s Lover
Paperback, 302 pages. Release date: November 19, 2019
ISBN-13: 978-1-64525-018-0
Price: US$23.00
Hardcover, 304 pages, limited to 70 copies
Release date: November 19, 2019
Price: US$38.00