The following year (1885) saw the publication of a parodic volume, The Deliquescences, by one ‘Adoré Floupette’, written by two poets – Vicaire and Beauclair – as a send-up of their ‘Decadent’ contemporaries. As Appendix II of contemporary reviews and responses shows, some of Huysmans’ readers thought of Against Nature as at least in part parodic.

18. For an account of images and representations of women in this period, see Shearer West, Fin de Siècle: Art and Society in an Age of Uncertainty (London: Bloomsbury, 1993).

19. Ezra Pound, ‘The Approach to Paris’, New Age, 9 October 1913.

Further Reading

EDITIONS OF AGAINST NATURE

A Rebours (Paris: Charpentier, 1884). First edition.

A Rebours (Paris: A. Lepère, 1903). Limited edition (130 copies) with ‘Preface written twenty years after the novel’.

A Rebours appears in volume VII of the Oeuvres complètes of Huysmans (Paris: Crès, 1929; reprinted Geneva: Slatkine, 1972). There are two outstanding modern editions: Marc Fumaroli’s (Paris: Folio/Gallimard, 1977), and Rose Fortassier’s (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1981).

ON HUYSMANS

Baldick, Robert, The Life of J. K. Huysmans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955).

Banks, Brian R., The Image of Huysmans (New York: AMS Press, 1990).

Beaumont, Barbara, (trans.), The Road from Decadence: From Brothel to Cloister. Selected Letters of J. K. Huysmans (London: Athlone, 1989).

Borie, Jean, Huysmans: Le Diable, le célibataire et Dieu (Paris: Grasset, 1991).

Cogny, Pierre, J.-K. Huysmans à la recherche de l’unité (Paris: Nizet, 1953).

Grojnowski, Daniel, À Rebours de J.-K. Huysmans (Paris: Gallimard/Foliothèque, 1996).

Huneker, James Gibbons, ‘The Pessimist’s Progress’, in Egoists: A Book of Supermen (New York: Scribner, 1909).

Lloyd, Christopher, J.-K. Huysmans and the ‘Fin-de-siècle’ Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, c.1990).

BACKGROUND AND CONTEXTS

Birkett, Jennifer, The Sins of the Fathers: Decadence in France, 1870–1914 (London: Quartet, 1986).

Griffiths, Richard, The Reactionary Revolution: The Catholic Revival in French Literature 1870–1914 (London: Constable, 1966).

Hustvedt, Asti (ed.), The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy and Perversion from ‘Fin de Siècle’ France (New York: Zone Books, 1998).

McGuinness, Patrick (ed.), Symbolism, Decadence and the ‘Fin de Siècle’: French and European Perspectives (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000).

Pierrot, Jean, The Decadent Imagination 1880–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

Praz, Mario, The Romantic Agony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951).

Spackman, Barbara, Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D’Annunzio, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).

Symons, Arthur, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London: Constable, 1911).

West, Shearer, Fin de Siècle: Art and Society in an Age of Uncertainty (London: Bloomsbury, 1993).

Note on this Translation

I have used Volume VII of Huysmans’ Œuvres complètes (Paris: Crès, 1929), in which certain errors contained in the first edition and in the standard Fasquelle edition have been corrected.

Huysmans’ style, which Bloy described as ‘continually dragging Mother Image by the hair or the feet down the worm-eaten staircase of terrified Syntax’, is one of the strangest literary idioms in existence, packed with purple passages, intricate sentences, weird metaphors, unexpected tense changes and a vocabulary rich in slang and technical terms. I have tried to achieve the same effect, using the same constituents, in this English translation; and it is only fair to warn the reader that he may find that the resultant mixture, like the French original, is best taken in small doses.

I should like to thank the Delegates of the Clarendon Press for permission to reproduce passages I had already translated in my Life of J.-K. Huysmans (Oxford, 1955); my long-suffering friends and colleagues for help with the terminology of a wide range of subjects

Robert Baldick
May 1957

I would like to thank Margaret Bartley, Robert Mighall and Jonathan Patrick for their help and advice at various stages of this edition.

Patrick McGuinness
2003

AGAINST NATURE

I must rejoice beyond the bounds of time… though the world may shudder at my joy, and in its coarseness know not what I mean.

Jan Van Ruysbroeck1

PROLOGUE

Judging by the few portraits preserved in the Château de Lourps1 the Floressas Des Esseintes family had been composed in olden times of sturdy campaigners with forbidding faces. Imprisoned in old picture-frames which were scarcely wide enough for their broad shoulders, they were an alarming sight with their piercing eyes, their sweeping mustachios and their bulging chests filling the enormous cuirasses which they wore.

These were the founders of the family; the portraits of their descendants were missing. There was, in fact, a gap in the pictorial pedigree, with only one canvas to bridge it, only one face to join past and present. It was a strange, sly face, with pale, drawn features; the cheekbones were punctuated with cosmetic commas of rouge, the hair was plastered down and bound with a string of pearls and the thin, painted neck emerged from the starched pleats of a ruff.

In this picture of one of the closest friends of the Duc d’Epernon and the Marquis d’O,2 the defects of an impoverished stock and the excess of lymph in the blood were already apparent.

Since then, the degeneration3 of this ancient house had clearly followed a regular course, with the men becoming progressively less manly; and over the last two hundred years, as if to complete the ruinous process, the Des Esseintes had taken to intermarrying among themselves, thus using up what little vigour they had left.

Now, of this family which had once been so large that it occupied nearly every domain in the Ile de France and La Brie, only one descendant was still living: the Duc Jean des Esseintes, a frail young man of thirty who was anaemic and highly strung, with hollow cheeks, cold eyes of steely blue, a nose which was turned up but straight and thin, papery hands.

By some freak of heredity, this last scion of the family bore a striking resemblance to his distant ancestor the court favourite, for he had the same exceptionally fair pointed beard, and the same ambiguous expression, at once weary and wily.

His childhood had been overshadowed by sickness. However, despite the threat of scrofula and recurrent bouts of fever, he had succeeded in clearing the hurdle of adolescence with the aid of good nursing and fresh air; and after this his nerves had rallied, had overcome the languor and lethargy of chlorosis and had brought his body to its full physical development.

His mother, a tall, pale, silent woman, died of nervous exhaustion. Then it was his father’s turn to succumb to some obscure illness when Des Esseintes was nearly seventeen.

There was no gratitude or affection associated with the memories he retained of his parents: only fear. His father, who normally resided in Paris, was almost a complete stranger; and he remembered his mother chiefly as a still, supine figure in a darkened bedroom in the Château de Lourps. It was only rarely that husband and wife met, and all that he could recall of these occasions was a drab impression of his parents sitting facing each other over a table that was lighted only by a deeply shaded lamp, for the Duchess had a nervous attack whenever she was subjected to light or noise. In the semi-darkness they would exchange one or two words at the most, and then the Duke would unconcernedly slip away to catch the first available train.

At the Jesuit school to which Jean was sent to be educated, life was easier and pleasanter. The good Fathers made a point of cosseting the boy, whose intelligence amazed them; but in spite of all their efforts, they could not get him to pursue a regular course of study. He took readily to certain subjects and acquired a precocious proficiency in the Latin tongue; but on the other hand he was absolutely incapable of construing the simplest sentence in Greek, revealed no aptitude whatever for modern languages and displayed blank incomprehension when anyone tried to teach him the first principles of science.

His family showed little interest in his doings. Occasionally his father would come to see him at school, but all he had to say was: ‘Good day, goodbye, be good and work hard.’ The summer holidays he spent at Lourps, but his presence in the Château failed to awaken his mother from her reveries; she scarcely noticed him, or if she did, gazed at him for a few moments with a sad smile and then sank back again into the artificial night which the heavy curtains drawn across the windows created in her bedroom.

The servants were old and tired, and the boy was left to his own devices. On rainy days he used to browse through the books in the library, and when it was fine he would spend the afternoon exploring the local countryside.

His chief delight was to go down into the valley to Jutigny, a village lying at the foot of the hills, a little cluster of cottages wearing thatch bonnets decorated with sprigs of stonecrop and patches of moss.