‘We Must Find Out If We Are Still Alive!’: Sex Apocalypse and How to Survive It in La Messe dorée

Abstract

Sunset. A black car drives, in the slowly fading light, across a flat and featureless plain outside Paris. We hear, as if from far off, the low plaintive wailing of a flute, the soft insistent throbbing of a drum. Some words flash onto the screen. ‘Wanting to lose myself in you, I long for death.’ They come from the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic St. Teresa of Ávila. The car pulls up outside an ornate Art Nouveau villa of pale rose-tinted stone, with round turrets at the corners and a sweep of marble steps in front. A chauffeur gets out and opens the rear door for a young blonde woman. She is dressed in white; a diaphanous orange scarf floats about her neck. She climbs the steps to the front door of the house, where an elderly maid tells her she is the first guest to arrive. With her we enter the world of La Messe dorée.