Une Femme Curieuse, L’arte de Séduire les Hommes. Paris, Société d’Edition et Publications, Librairie Felix Juven, 13, Rue de l’Odeon, 13. Ca. 1910.
(120 x 180 mm) pp. 286. With many full-page plates in various color schemes of red, green, and taupe, black and white; and more black and white vignettes embedded in the text. Art deco tail pieces. Some browning to the foredges but not unattractive. Bound in green half calf, with title in gold on red leather, green, red and taupe marble paper on covers. Some bumping to corners, some browning along the top. Faint reader marks in the margins marking a few interesting passages.
Overall VERY GOOD condition.
This book is more of a memoire and abstract-advice than a step-by-step guide to, well, seducing men. The anonymous author explains in her preface that she has “tried in these pages to liberally say [her] sentiment on Love, to recount true histories, of which [she] thinks to draw a profitable lesson, [she] spoke of physical love with the same truth as [she] spoke of sentimental love.” The first chapter explains her earliest encounter with love— at the age of 8— wherein she gazed upon a the son of the mass-choir organizer and he gazed back with “une indifférence infinie.” She loved the role he played (In the Mass? In her life?), his ecclesiastical vestments (I mean, who doesn’t love a cassock?), and his participation in the divinity (again, in the mass? Or in the divinity of love?). The next “object of her cult” is the preacher himself, followed by a professor of literature whose presence made it nearly impossible to recite her lessons. Finally, at the age of 13, she receives her first kiss, which enflames her heart and her curiosity to understand love— and thus produces this book.
She comes in hot with takes such as “in the war engaged between men and women, it is not the strongest who triumphs, it is the one with the conviction to be, and who believes that they are the strongest.” She reflects on her memories, such as one of the preacher on whom she had a crush. “The world is an abyss of debauchery and impurity, he claimed once in his preachings during the retreat before [her] first communion,” but, with her adult-wisdom she sees that “the sensual demon which seemed to want exorcism by his curses, and which had to burn under his robe, is, in fact, the master of bodies and souls.”
It’s a rollick through turn of the century French sexuality & sensuality without being gauchely pornographic but more introspective and curious about the power of attraction and love.
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