Against Nature

piece of neurotic craziness which will, I believe, be something new, but which will necessitate my immediate confinement in the Charenton mental asylum.

he tries to find a way of replacing the monotonous boredom of nature by means of artifice, he amuses himself with authors from the exquisite and penetrating Roman decadence

a letter to Stephane Mallarmé of 27 October 1882, in which he asks the poet for help in finding copies of his books, as he wants to refer to some of his poems:

I am in the process of hatching a pretty unusual story, the subject of which is as follows: the last scion of a noble line takes refuge – out of disgust at the Americanisation of life, out of contempt for the aristocracy of money that has invaded us – in complete solitude

divided his time between re-reading Baudelaire and planting ‘almost artificial’ flowers in a garden in which ‘nothing has the air of being real’ – provided a rich fund of source material for the novel.

Chateau de Lourps for the first time, a partially ruined chateau which not only served as the model for des Esseintes’ ancestral home in Against Nature, but also formed the backdrop to Huysmans’ subsequent novel En rade (At Harbour) of 1887.

Catholicism that he would later fully embrace following his conversion in 1892

ended with the same prophetic challenge he had made years before to Baudelaire on the publication of Les Fleurs de mal: that after such a book, there logically remained only the barrel of a gun or the foot of the Cross: ‘Baudelaire chose the foot of the Cross; but what will the author of Against Nature choose?’

Barbey d’Aurevilly’s infamous review

in the late 1870s he had exalted the modern as the proper subject of art, but by the end of the 1880s he saw it as synonymous with crassness and ugliness – there is a certain ambiguity at the heart of the novel

Against Nature was what happens when the strict morality of the Church is relaxed and the individual is left to his own devices