SOURCE: A preface to The She-Devils (Les Diaboliques), translated by Jean Kimber, Oxford University Press, London, 1964, pp. xvii-xviii.

In the following essay, which originally accompanied the first edition of his short fiction collection, Barbey discusses the intent of the stories in The Diaboliques.

Here are the first six. . . .

If the public likes them, and finds them to its taste, I shall shortly publish the other six, for there are a dozen of these tales in all.

Naturally, with a title such as Les Diaboliques, they cannot lay claim to being a book of prayer or of model Christianity. They are none the less the work of a Christian moralist, but a moralist who prides himself on truthful, if extremely bold, observation, and who believes—this is his own very individual poetic credo—that powerful painters can paint anything, and that their painting is always sufficiently moral when it...