Three Flowers and The King of Siam's Amazon

In La Vaudère’s first venture into exotic erotica, the Java-set Three Flowers of Sensuality (1900), we follow Stéphane, a French artist abroad, and his adventures with three dancing girl sisters who have been kept and raised in closed religious communities dedicated to the celebration of female deities. In the second novel in the present volume, The King of Siam’s Amazon (1902), which might have been partly inspired by Octave Mirbeau’s Torture Garden, we are confronted with La Vaudère’s most extreme and nightmarish tale, which, in its deployment of atrocious imagery, makes Mirbeau’s novel look tame.

The two novels contained herein display the idea of extreme amour in two different, but equally striking, ways; although remarkable individually, they are even more remarkable in juxtaposition, especially as the author seems to have moved from the composition of one to the composition of the other almost without psychological transition. Both remain fascinating, although the one that the author and her contemporary readers presumably regarded as the more shocking of the two, The King of Siam’s Amazon, is likely to seem less disturbing today than its companion, given the manner in which moral sensitivities have shifted in the interim.