Julius Levallon

In the late 1890s, a long-delayed letter in Basel jolts a narrator back twenty years, reopening memories of Julius LeVallon, the boy who once seemed to embody fate itself. Their first meeting at an English school was charged with uncanny recognition: Julius, pale and luminous-eyed, appeared to awaken buried inner worlds of childhood grandeur, secret adventure, and the unsettling sense that they had known each other before. As the story deepens, philosophical reflections on memory and consciousness, drawn from Plotinus and other thinkers, frame the novel's central mystery: whether the soul preserves traces of former lives beneath the surface of ordinary existence. LeVallon presses the narrator to remember "the Other Places," and fragments of ancient landscapes, rituals, messengers, and battlefields surge back as if from a real past rather than imagination. In a schoolroom where even authority seems diminished by Julius's presence, the bond between the two boys grows into something intimate, dangerous, and profoundly spiritual. Later, in a secluded mountain valley, the narrator is drawn into LeVallon's belief that lonely places can open the mind to hidden powers. There he encounters a sunlit world of strange vitality, a cheerful "Dog-Man," and a woman whose unexpected plainness gives way to a deeper, elusive force, as the novel weaves memory, destiny, reincarnation, and the mysterious continuity of the soul into a haunting, dreamlike tale. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.