PREFACE

These stories have been written and collected to serve primarily as an introduction to the art of libertinage.  To this end, the stories shall take the form of autobiography, drawn from my own personal experiences, and supplemented by occasional literary references germane to my theme.  I should like to think that many years from now, being old and grey, I will look back on my life, as did Captain Charles Ryder, and conclude that, “I was in search of love in those days, and [that] I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.”