About the book: 1927 / The life story of a talented, unprincipled young man, a pleasure seeker and libertine, a Parisian journalist in the first decades of the 20th century. “I tried everything in life: love, play, stimulants, hypnotism, work, idleness, theft; I saw women of all races, and men of all colors and shades. There’s only one thing I don’t know...” After his final conversion to Catholicism in 1948, the author renounced his early books, including “Cocaina,” banned their republication, and, moreover, withdrew the remaining copies from sale.