Celia recommends Monsieur de Bougrelon by Jean Lorrain:

Have you ever entertained the suspicion that vegetables are slightly demonic? Do you look at the carrot with forked roots and find it a little perverse? And how do you feel about the Boschian delights of asparagus? Have you looked into a jar of fruit preserves and wondered if it had a soul? Are you entranced by articles of clothing, absent their wearers?

Jean Lorrain’s Monsieur de Bougrelon is a savage little novel about a group of friends vacationing, at the turn of the century, in Amsterdam, but it’s not really about travelers so much as it is about the experience of being taken in by the bizarre soul of a place, of allowing yourself to believe the kind of grotesque stories that shouldn’t fool anyone. Our travelers (who spend the duration of the novel unnamed and unnumbered, just a kind of collective seeing eye) meet the novel’s hero, one Monsieur de Bougrelon, an aging, cadaverous, destitute dandy, who offers to give them a tour of the city, dining out on their dime and showing them the decaying wonders of a bygone era. He’s an overpowering presence, launching into monologues about the changing times, telling stories about lost friends and lovers, disappearing, as far as anyone can tell, into smoke at the end of the night, like a kind of suave ghostly tour guide.

Of course he isn’t what he seems. And some of his sights are wondrous—there are those fascinating, satanic pickles, which he finds more delightfully obscene than the brothel the travelers meet him in, and the museum of clothing that he calls the boudoir of the dead, lovingly lingering on “crushed velvets that were bleu de roi and myrtle green, the jerkins of heroic shepherds, fantastical colors from zinzolin to green celadon.” He has an exquisite sense of the particularity of the objects around him—the lady’s embroidered gown, the dandy’s corset, the perfume scented with bergamot or almonds.

If you have a sense of the beauty and the hidden life of objects that were once touched and worn by people, whose ghosts seem to linger although the objects themselves have fallen out of use, it’s hard not to be seduced by Monsieur de Bougrelon’s rapturous monologue. But the old dandy’s care for the lives of things doesn’t extend to people. Again and again, his stories take a turn towards cruelty. He humiliates a girl at a brothel by telling her that she smells. He perversely delights in describing the rape of a woman who he claims was a dear friend. Where he brings life and spirit to the objects that make up his world, he conversely has a sense of people only as objects, transforming the worst kinds of misery into something that can be consumed by a set of careless travelers as an aesthetic experience. It’s a grotesque, lovely, vicious story, a cautionary tale about what stories can be and do. How much, you wonder, of what Monsieur de Bougrelon has told this group of tourists was ever true? And what are they now guilty of, that they believed it?