Pitigrilli heads the list of forgotten writers whose disappearance from memory was the result of excessive fame in their own time, in this case the 1920s and 30s. Pitigrilli’s rediscovery today is due to a man with a heroic capacity for scavenging the refuse heap of minor literature: Umberto Eco. He was the one to realise that this obscure purveyor of forbidden fruit was actually a writer who was ‘pleasurable, savoursome and quick, full of fireworks’ and above all ‘pure author’. And in fact one does get that impression reading this book with its unmistakably D’Annunzian atmosphere, its potently decadent style broken by flashes of irony and disenchantment and its story that exhales an open-minded, worldly-wise frivolity.


The main character, a successful young journalist called Tito, is frustrated by small-town snobbery, leaves for Paris and discovers there the way to indulge in ‘the sweet voluntary death that each of us in different tones and with different words desires’: cocaine. From the irresistibly seductive drug his passion stretches to a woman who takes on in his eyes a thousand qualities, creating a dependency he cannot escape — thus he is doubly poisoned. But the real evil is a perverse form of passion, of loving. Maud’s libertine nature excites his jealousy, a desire to possess her that she won’t submit to not only because she is emancipated but also because she, like him, comes from an environment without values, in a state of moral decomposition.


The book justifies the attention of a contemporary reader; it’s a highly enjoyable expedition into a world that is pure surface, sterile aestheticism. Here we move through smoky rooms, amongst Oriental fabrics in an atmosphere of absolute luxuriousness and languor blown apart from time to time by Pitigrilli’s sardonic comments.

‘What an intelligent woman, he said to himself. With what purity and simplicity she described to me how it happened that first time. It was hot, there was a man available, she was excited, she wanted him, she gave herself to him without making a noise, without pretending. Other women say: The man was a coward, I was a child, I knew nothing, I understood nothing, he took advantage of me. Or: He gave me something to drink, I don’t know what and I went to sleep. When I woke up... Or they say: My mother was dying, we had no money for medicine, or the doctor, or even a coffin.... And they say: Oh, if only I’d known, oh, the revulsion, the hatred I feel for that man and the loathing I feel for myself.

Instead (Tito went on to himself) this delicious Maud talks about the first time as she would about her first communion, if that were worth talking about. She attaches no importance to that physical episode, that superficial incident, that harmless, simple, quiet event about which poets, moralists, judges at all times and in all ages have made such a fuss. That minor act of nervous release that had led to savage injustices and idiotic philosophical outpourings, in the name of morality; that natural interplay of two bodies that appears so different depending on whether it happens before or after a carriage ride to the town hall, and is considered decent and honourable if it is done in one bed and wicked if it done in another.’ pp87-88