Gamiani

Gamiani, ou Une Nuit d'Excès, was the first really important work to come from the French presses of the 19th century. It is still one of the most erotically explicit works to come from any French press. Its author is supposed to have been Alfred de Musset, and the eponymous heroine a portrait of his lover, George Sand.

A young man observes her and a young girl, obligingly named Fanny, engaged in their lesbian bed. Having watched them and provoked by their gay abandonment, he reveals himself, joins them, and they spend the night alternately sharing their intimate histories and their bodies in orgies of almost religious intensity.Unsurprisingly religious, as the stories they tell include the rape of one in a monastery and the nearly fatal debauchment of another in a convent, as well as encounters with a number of animals; a ménagerie à trois, as it were.

Their night of excess is both explicitly aural and explicitly oral, and ends (newly translated from the original French) in the Countess Gamiani's gasps: "I am dying in an agony of pleasure, an agony of suffering... I can't stand it any more."

Simultaneously the four of us achieved the most wonderful sensations, climaxing together and each of us experiencing an intense orgasm. What ardent enjoyment of taste to my palate! What delicious, intoxicating overflow in my entrails! Can you conceive these excesses? Just think of it! To suck in one's mouth all of a man's love juice and strength, to drink it down impatiently, to swallow it in waves of foam both warm and bitter, and at the same time to feel a double jet of flame enter your body by its two lower orifices at once. It is a triple pleasure, impossible to describe adequately...

The Illustrator

The Scarlet Library edition, like the original French edition, is as much a volume of erotic illustrations as a short piece of erotic fiction. The 12 newly commissioned illustrations in pen and ink are by Vania Zouravliov, who was born in Russia, studied in Edinburgh and is now widely commissioned in the UK. His work is in the collections of Isabelle Adjani and Vladimir Ashkenazy. The strength of his drawing, as this edition shows, has all the vigour of youth.