Travel as Hunger Urge in the Works of Jean Lorrain

Abstract

Travel literature per se occupies a considerable place in the total production of Jean Lorrain, an author who is remembered primarily for his novels Monsieur de Bougrelon and Monsieur de Phocas as well as for a journalistic verve that is often cited as being the epitome of the buttocks and bosom era at the turn of the century. In addition to the volume entitled Heures de Corse,1 another more ambitious one called Heures d'Afrique,2 and the posthumous Voyages,3 the entire range of Lorrain's novelistic inspirations (some twenty in number), literally innumerable short stories and chronicles--since so many of them were reproduced by Lorrain under varying titles-is studded with situations and settings that properly may be attributed to the category of travel and depaysement.