Le Roi au Masque d'Or

A series of linked, often macabre tales built around masks and disguises presents a parade of strange figures—a gilded-masked sovereign, a fur-muzzled savage, pestilent routiers, lepers, embalmers, eunuchs, assassins and pirates—moving through Italianate locales such as empty cities, baths and plague-haunted streets. Narrators and companions adopt false faces and sudden roles, encountering decay, desire and violence, while the narrative binds episodes by likeness and contrast. The work meditates on identity, tradition and the thin continuities that connect disparate lives across time and even across species.