“At the age of twenty-five I was a captain in the king's guard at Naples; we kept our own company much of the time, and lived after the manner of young men, that is, gaming and womanising, as long as our purses could bear it; and we would philosophize in our quarters when we no longer had any other resources.”
One evening in the carnivalesque world of eighteenth-century Naples a foolhardy young Spaniard, don Alvaro de Maravillas, plays the daredevil - literally - and summons the Evil One himself. Never one to miss his appointments, the Demon appears, assuming various guises before setting into the form of a charming young servant boy who turns out to be a girl. Resorting to the most human of wiles to try to win the young nobleman's affections, the Devil, as the lovely Biondetta, then lulls don Alvaro into thinking that her needs are the same as those of any other tearful young woman, and proceeds to take him for the ride of his life through Venice and back to his home in Spain. This new, annotated edition, the first modern English translation of Jacques Cazotte's The Devil in Love (1772), marks the long-awaited appearance of one of the earliest masterpieces of modern fantastic prose. A moral fable of delightful grace and narrative skill, Cazotte's 1772 novel will prove, on a par with Lewis's The Monk, a seminal work for the supernaturalist tradition and an important precursor of the French Romantics and Symbolists. Yet The Devil in Love reaches beyond, as its sophisticated play of gender shifts transforms a chronicle of fatal attraction into an ironic commentary on social and psychological mores. Gerard de Nerval's 1845 text, Jacques Cazotte: His Life, Trial, Prophecies, and Revelations, is presented as an afterword to this edition. Nerval, himself one of the most extraordinary figures in French literature, lends an intriguing appreciation of Cazotte, part biography, part literary study, and part hermetic treatise.
