Browsing the Tribune de Geneve, online edition of the newspaper of record of Geneva, my favorite ex-hometown, I learn posthumous news of the great Jacques Chessex, the Swiss writer whose death I commemorated in a previous post. Chessex's last book, Le dernier crâne de M. de Sade (Mr. de Sade's Last Skull)–which he finished on the morning of the 9th of October last, collapsing later that same day of heart failure while shouting down a heckler at a reading in the Swiss spa of Yverdon-les-Bains–will be sold in a plain brown wrapper containing the label "For Adults Only," such is the explicitness of the Sadian (as opposed, one hopes, to sadistic) passages therein, revolving around the "divine Marquis." According to the Tribune, the book is composed of 35 brief chapters recounting the final months of de Sade's life, in 1814, year of Elba, describing how the skull referred to in the title came to be in the possession of the narrator, a literary doctor of Chekhovian, if not Sadian, stripe. Grasset, the publisher, is gambling on a successful first run of 25,000 copies. (That's as many as there have been Killoyles sold, ever.) I once arranged to translate some of Chessex's stories, with his blessing. If no translator's lined up, I might give this one a shot, if it's not too, well, faithful to its subject. And if my French still holds up.