An Encounter with the Author

A short story for La Société des Amis de Gabrielle Wittkop

“Given that she has been dead some twenty years, it should be of no surprise that I first encountered Gabrielle in a cemetery. That it is not the cemetery in which she is interred rather might be. That she was upright, coiffed, and dressed in a voluminous fur coat, certainly so …”

Here's a short tale of an encounter with the author, written for Le Mythe Wittkop series on the website of La Société des Amis de Gabrielle Wittkop, along with a translation into French by author Charles Roux.

You can read it, along with offerings from Charles, Lou Syrah and Grégory Le Floch, here.

*

Gabrielle Wittkop (1920–2002), self-styled heir to the Marquis de Sade, was a writer and translator whose remarkable series of novels and travelogues are laced with sardonic humour and dark sexuality, with recurrent themes of death, decay, disease, and decrepitude. Her first novel, The Necrophiliac, appeared in 1972. She committed suicide aged 82, following a lung cancer diagnosis.

Detail of a collage by Gabrielle Wittkop.

---