Library of Babel
10361 Il convitato delle ultime feste
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. Edited and with an introduction by Jorge Luis Borges
1980 I ed. .
Language: Italian
Villiers, a close to destitute gentleman, who saw himself as the sad protagonist of imaginary duels and fictions, made a name for himself in the history of French literature with his stories.
Endowed with a reckless and generous imagination and an illustrious lineage (he was descended from the first Grand Master of the Knights of Malta), Villiers cultivated a resounding contempt for mediocrity, science, progress, his era, and money. One of the masterpieces of the short story included in this anthology is La torture par l’espérance. The action takes place in a very personally reinterpreted Spain, at an unspecified time, in which Villiers subtly sheds light on a hell-like moral order. This is followed by the incredible China of L’aventure de Tse-i-la. L’enjeu hides within an affirmation common to all Protestant sects: its strength lies in the fact that the man who reveals it implicitly confesses that his soul is lost. The theme of La reine Ysabeau is once again the cruelty of the powerful, with the addition in this case of the passion of jealousy. In Le convive des dernières fêtes the appearance of a new diner sheds a shadow over the story driving it towards a dimension of horror where, incredibly, justice and madness can combine. Sombre récit, conteur plus sombre is both a cruel tale and a parody of a cruel tale, while Vera is undoubtedly the most fantastic story and the closest to Poe’s oneiric world.