"This guided tour of the erotic nether-world with which Colette was so intimately acquainted begins in the darkness and languor of a fashionable opium den, and continues as a series of unforgettable encounters with men and, especially, women whose lives have been improbably and yet permanently transfigured by the power of desire.

Lucid and lyrical, The Pure and the Impure stands out as one of modern literature's subtlest reckonings not only with the varieties of sexual experience, but with the unlikely nature of love."--BOOK JACKET.