The Perfume of Lust

"Instead of the lugubrious silence of a necropolis," Miss Slow said, "there are songs and cries, a whole concert that gives the illusion of life in a magical city!" In The Perfume of Lust (1905), a ship is trapped in the waters of Atlantis when a submarine eruption returns the lost continent to the surface, and its crew and passengers are subjected to strange mental influences that stimulate their erotic impulses. Gaston Danville's characters are haunted by memories, unconscious impulses and the poignant emotions provoked by those internal spurs. He based his accounts of delusion and obsession on what he took to be sound theories of positivistic psychology which added an extra dimension of cruelty to his fiction and an extra dose of intensity to his eroticism.