Lucifer : roman moderne by Maurice Magre
"Lucifer" by Maurice Magre is a novel written in the early 20th century. It follows an unnamed Parisian narrator torn between two sisters—Eveline, an austere mystic, and Laurence, a sensual rebel—while he moves through salons of spiritualism and secret rites. Haunted by a youthful pact with the Devil and drawn to an occult circle led by the charismatic Michel Kotzebue, he navigates desire, jealousy, and the uneasy border between faith and delusion.
The opening of the novel presents the narrator prowling a quiet street in Passy, projecting ominous signs onto an ordinary façade and recalling a devil’s face once etched by frost—an image that primes his fixation on fate and warning. He spies on the Saint-Aygulf home, confesses his split desire for the two sisters, then tails Laurence by taxi to Montmartre, where she drifts through cafés among hustlers and drug peddlers before vanishing briefly into a house on rue Ballu and reappearing alone. At a brasserie he encounters Kotzebue, whose veiled talk of desire and spirituality triggers a shared memory of a student-era pact with Lucifer, performed with a friend named Lévy; this memory sends the narrator into a dawn crisis about whether that ritual has secretly steered his life—his luck, loves, and wartime role as a military judge. A chance meeting with a faded former lover, Irma, deepens his melancholy, and the section closes with time passing as he follows the Saint-Aygulfs to the Riviera, where Kotzebue and his Esséniens prepare new “experiments,” leaving the narrator’s suspicions and longings unresolved. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
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About this eBook
| Author | Magre, Maurice, 1877-1941 |
|---|---|
| Title | Lucifer : roman moderne |
| Original Publication | Paris: Albin Michel, 1929. |
| Credits | Laurent Vogel, Robin Tremblay and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Books project.) |
| Language | French |
| LoC Class | PQ: Language and Literatures: Romance literatures: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese |
| Subject | French fiction -- 20th century |
| Category | Text |
| EBook-No. | 78064 |
| Release Date | Feb 27, 2026 |
| Copyright Status | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 4908 downloads in the last 30 days. |
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