Jean Lorrain 28 min read

When the queen gives birth to a frog, the court is thrown into consternation, the strange beginning of a dark and lavishly illustrated fairy tale of a mandrake and a monstrous birth.

Jean Lorrain's 1899 'The Mandrake' is a decadent, richly illustrated French fairy tale steeped in the macabre. Ornate, eerie, beautiful. Read it for a jewel of fin-de-siècle French decadence, a fairy tale as gorgeous as it is grotesque.

In its time

Published in 1899, during the 1890s, wells arrives.

Reading it

28 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

Marcel Pille