Nathanael West slips an archaism into the mannered, allusive novella The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931):
… all would agree that “Life is but the span from womb to tomb; a sigh, a smile; a chill, a fever; a throe of pain, a spasm of volupty: then a gasping for breath, and the comedy is over, the song is ended, ring down the curtain, the clown is dead.”
Easily decodable from context, borrowed from French, is volupty (stress on the first syllable), but what’s sort of interesting is that it leaves little online trace. It’s a word on the verge of extinction. The 1913 Webster dismisses it as “Voluptuousness. [Obs.],” the OED also marks it “Obs.” while Webster II (1960) gives it some life as “Pleasure; now, usually, sexual pleasure.” Harold P. Simonson, in his Beyond the Frontier (1989), slaps a sic on his quotation from old Nat.