After his marriage to a psychiatrist nine years his senior, Jouve's work, once marked by the great Christian mystics, became grounded in the Freudian unconscious, site of the conflict between Eros and Thanatos. "Helene" is the story of a sixteen-year-old boy's passion for an older woman. Originally published in 1934, it is considered the high point of Jouve's prose career.
"

Paulina -- said to be the most beautiful woman in Milan -- enters a passionate affair with a married man. Her love for Count Michele Cantarini is all-consuming, yet Paulina is plagued by its impurity in the eyes of her family, of society, of God. The death of her father, and the subsequent death of the Count's wife, send Paulina into an abyss from which neither her love for Michele nor her faith can rescue her.

Set in Switzerland during the first decades of this century, The Desert World focuses upon the troubled relationships uniting three remarkable characters: Jacques de Todi, the homosexual son of a pastor; Luc Pascal, a French poet; and Baladine Nikolaievna, a mysterious and fascinating Russian woman involved with them both. This novel is a potent exploration of the destructive power of sexuality and the interrelationships between love and death.

A masterpiece of erotic fiction and psychological study, Hecate is the first of two novels tracing the carnal and emotional liaisons of Catherine Crachat, a Parisian actress.

Hecate recounts the debaucheries and betrayals of a vicious love triangle: Catherine and her young lover, Pierre, part ways in Paris, onto be drawn separately to Vienna and into a web of lust and intrigue spun by the Baroness Fanny Felicitas Hohenstein. Desired by both Fanny and Pierre, Catherine must choose between joining the threesome, or losing both friend and former lover. When Fanny and Pierre...

Pierre Jean Jouve's novels Hecate and Vagadu trace the carnal and emotional liaisons of Catherine Crachat, a Parisian actress. Vagadu continues the saga of Catherine Crachat begun in Hecate. Having returned to Paris after a sojourn in Vienna that has been fraught with emotional entanglements and the taint of death, Catherine seeks new relationships that will give her life meaning, but she finds that no one is who he or she appears to be. In an emotional tumult, events - both real and imagined - spiral out of her control, and Catherine must reconcile herself to a past in which love and death,...