A number of the characters invented by Jean Lorrain (1855-1906) discover their authentic selves through the expression of a sexual attraction disapproved of by bourgeois mores: adulterous temptations, homosexual, fetishistic, zoophiliac, and murderous ones even. More than a catalogue of end-of-century “perversions”, his stories stage this difficulty in being oneself in a theatrical world where wearing a mask seems to be the norm. It is indeed gendered identities and regular sexualities that fracture in the face of the brute and irrefutable force of desire. But the individual and libertarian spirit blowing through these pages, seemingly refractory to any kind of social constraint, is modulated and even inhibited by the fear that uninhibited jouissance might give licence to a capricious, evil or monstrous self. This paper purports to expose this unresolved tension underlying a number f Lorrain’s fictions, a tension between the need to be loyal to oneself, the refusal of gendered institutional frameworks, and the difficulty in finding a humanly acceptable path through existence.