CHAPTER FIVE: A REBOURS

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By this time Huysmans had begun to realise that objectivity was not his forte. Not for him the creation of a 'gallery of characters'; there is in his whole oeuvre no Pickwick, no Mr. Micawber, not even a Becky Sharp. His characters, in his most successful and typical works, are simply aspects of his own personality; his-hero is himself. Before A Rebours, however, his heroes had been diminutions of him self. What if he were now to attempt an enlargement? Folantin had been a Huysmans without talent and with even less money than his creator. What if his next hero should inhabit a larger instead of a smaller world and should enjoy an income a hundred times as much as Huysmans was receiving from the Ministry of the Interior? What would he do with such an income? Huysmans began to dream, and the result of his dreaming was one of the most remarkable books of the nineteenth century.

It was also one of the most influential. 'A Rebours', says Mario Praz, in that remarkable work of literary and psycho logical penetration which he called The Romantic Agony, 'is the pivot upon which the whole psychology of the Decadent Movement turns; in it all the phenomena of this state of mind are illustrated down to the minutest detail, in the instance of its chief character des Esseintes. "Tous les romans que j'ai ecrits depuis 'A Rebours' sont contenus en germe dans ce livre",
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Huysmans remarked. Not only his own novels but all the prose works of the Decadence, from Lorrain to Gourmont, Wilde and D'Annunzio, are contained in embryo in A Rebours.'1

We have said that des Esseintes is simply Huysmans him self transported into a larger world; but with such a world Huysmans was entirely unacquainted. His treatment of his hero is therefore merely perfunctory until des Esseintes abandons le monde and becomes a hermit of aesthetic mysticism. Yet although des Esseintes is Huysmans, an excuse for his opinions, a peg for his dreams, he was modelled upon a real person: Count Robert de Montesquiou. Anatole France, in his essay on Robert de Montesquiou,2 denies that he was ever the 'Parisian Heliogabalus' described by Huysmans. 'If one could penetrate', he says 'the secret of his discreet and hidden life consecrated to a charming but prolonged and heavy labour, one would find nothing of the legendary and mythical Montesquiou, except a delicate lover of beautiful things, surrounding himself with those forms of art which responded best to his dreams, living in the chosen sumptuosities of Empire furniture and Japanese decoration. He was, first and foremost, a poet'.

France agrees, however, that he was credited with having rubies and emeralds set in the carapace of a tortoise and that people attributed to him a marvellous refinement, an un heard of search for the exquisite, 'the delicious malady of the rare and the precious'. That was his legend and it was, after all, the legend that set Huysmans dreaming. We can be almost certain that Huysmans, dans son coin, never met the real Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac at all. But per haps France protests too much, for if Montesquiou, in his

1 Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony. Translated from the Italian by Angus Davidson, London, 1933, p. 308.

2 Reprinted in La Vie Litteraire, ye Serie, Paris (1949) but originally published in Le Temps, 13th Nov. 1892.
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youth, was not the model for des Esseintes, he is generally sup posed to have been, in his age, the model for Proust's Charlus, and Proust, unlike Huysmans, did move in the world of the cultivated haute noblesse, and presumably knew his man.

Montesquiou was certainly not quite the blameless aesthete that France, rather surprisingly, tries to make out. Mario Praz, basing himself on the Goncourt Journals, calls him 'an amateur of gems and of handsome gymnasts of the ephebe type'. In 1890 he spent a month in London, partly in order to be painted by Whistler, and, in a recent life of Whistler,' we learn of the elaborate precautions he took to conceal his identity, precautions which remind one of the 'blaze of secrecy' in which the late Montagu Norman used to set out on his financial missions to the United States. After sitting sixteen times for Whistler, Montesquiou was almost dropping with fatigue and revived himself with what he called yin de coca, i.e. cocaine.

The same author records that he (Montesquiou) 'lived at the top of his father's house on the Quai d'Orsay, and it was a weird experience to go from the austere rooms of the old Comte into the oriental atmosphere of his son's apartments where the walls of the sitting room were of different shades of red, where another room was entirely grey, and where the main feature of the bedroom was a black bulbous-eyed dragon which on inspection resolved itself into a bed. "It was all queer, disturbing, baroque," decided one visitor. Portraits of himself in different attitudes and outlandish costumes filled the walls and strange scents filled the air. He was known among his acquaintances as "Chief of Fragrant Odours"; at one time he was frequently seen in society carrying a gilt tortoise; and it was generally believed that he was a connoisseur in various forms of vice.'2

1 The Man Whistler, by Hesketh Pearson, London, 1952, P. 152.

2 Pearson, op. cit., p. 15.
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Sir William Rothenstein, who probably met Montesquiou while he was sitting for Whistler, also mentions that he 'had a tortoise whose shell was inlaid with jewels; the tortoise's s retort on this outrage was direct and emphatic—it died. I met him one day on his way to hear Weber's music, when he told me that one should always listen to Weber in mauve.1

Such stories must long have been current in Paris, and we can be certain that some of them at least reached Huysmans' ears, and that he used them—especially the jewelled tortoise—in order to build up the character of des Esseintes. But this of course was only the starting point and we can still consider A Rebours as its author's personal confession; not of what he did but of what he would like to have done if he had had the means, even what he would like to have been if fortune had made him, instead of the son of a poor Dutch immigrant, the descendant of a long line of French seigneurs.

Des Esseintes was an aristocrat, the last scion of a family that had once possessed nearly the whole territory of the Ile de-France and the Brie: 'a young man anaemic and nervous, with hollow cheeks, steel blue eyes, a thin yet aquiline nose, and dry tapering hands . . . he had a pointed beard of an extraordinarily pale blonde and an ambiguous expression, at once weary and subtle.'

He was thirty years old (that is, almost exactly the age of Huysmans). His parents had both died when he was about eighteen. He had been educated by the Jesuits, and under their care had become a good latinist. But he could not be persuaded to pursue any regular course of study. He detested science and modern languages but showed, from an early age, a curious interest in theology.

When he attained his majority he found himself in possession of a considerable fortune; but the amusements of society soon palled upon him, partly by reason of his excessive

1 W. Rothenstein, Men and Memories, London, 1931. Vol. 1, P. 15.
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sensibility and partly (one cannot help thinking) because Huysmans felt himself quite incapable of describing anything so foreign to his own experience.

He began to dream of 'a refined Thebaid, a comfortable solitude, a warm and static Ark where he could take refuge from the incessant deluge of human folly'. He therefore sold his ancestral chateau, and all his other possessions, in ex change for an annual income, keeping back just enough to purchase and furnish a small house where he could be quiet and alone. After some search he found one to his liking at Fontenay, not far from Paris, and set about installing him self according to his particular taste.

The furnishing of the house at Fontenay occupies a considerable portion of A Rebours. For des Esseintes was not a man who was easily satisfied. Before leaving the world he had made himself conspicuous by his extravagances, his baroque sense of the mise-en-scene. On one occasion in order to celebrate 'the most futile of misadventures' (presumably the end of a love-affair) he had organised a 'mourning banquet'. Perhaps the description of it is worth transcribing as an example of the strange fancies that flickered in the brain of the little clerk at the Ministry of the Interior.

In a dining room hung entirely with black and opening on a garden which had been transformed by putting down paths of coal dust, changing the basin of the fountain into black basalt and filling it with ink, the dinner had been served on a black table-cloth, decorated with baskets of violets and scabious, and lit by candles which burned with a green light. . . . While a hidden orchestra played funeral airs, the guests had been served by naked negresses, with slippers and stockings of silver tissue, sewn with pearls like tears. The plates were black-bordered and the food also had been black:

caviar, black puddings and truffles. Even the drinks were as black as possible, a list of dark wines—and stout!
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All this was childish enough as Huysmans—and des Esseintes—now realised. He had put such follies behind him and proposed to decorate his apartment not to astonish others but merely to please himself. But it was to be, nonetheless, pare d'une facon rare.

Having had the house at Fontenay practically rebuilt he was much exercised over the choice of colours for the rooms. The chief requirement was that the colours should look best by artificial light, for des Esseintes did not propose to keep normal hours, and some of the rooms were built to exclude the daylight altogether. He decided that orange was his favourite colour, as being most in harmony with 'the sensual nature of a true artist', for his were no 'bourgeois eyes, in sensible to the pomp and victory of strong, vibrating tones', nor yet the eyes of 'solides males', who would naturally prefer red and yellow. The woodwork was painted deep indigo. The greater part of the walls was covered with bookshelves of ebony, the floor with blue fox skins, and the furniture included high-backed arm-chairs and an old church lectern supporting a massive folio. The window spaces were filled with bulls-eyes of glass the main function of which was to filter the harshness of the light, and also to prevent any view of the outside world.

On the chimney piece, which was draped with a sumptuous piece of stuff cut from a Florentine dalmatic, stood, between two monstrances, a kind of triptych in the Byzantine style, its three compartments containing three sheets of 'authentic vellum' on which were written in letters like those of a missal and with illuminated initials, three pieces by Baudelaire: the two sonnets entitled respectively, La A fort des Amants and L'Ennemi and (in the middle) the poem in prose entitled 'Anywhere out of the world'.

All this is very revealing. It is nearly always possible to deduce a man's taste and character from the decoration and
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arrangement of his room; how much more so when the room is an imaginary room, decorated regardless of expense, and even without consideration for convenience and practicality. In the dream apartment of des Esseintes is the whole of Huysmans: his love of the extraordinary and the factitious,' his naivety, his passion for ecclesiastical properties and the hint of blasphemy in the use of them, his devotion to Baudelaire. The man who could devise such a scheme of decoration was plainly a much more complicated being than any mere disciple of Zola had any right to be.

Having decorated the salon des Esseintes next turned his attention to the dining room. This was to be arranged like the cabin of a ship, and it was to be inserted (the word is Huysmans' own) in a larger room, the real dining room built by the architect. And between the real window and the porthole of the inner room was a large aquarium, through which the light of the outside day was filtered. Not content with this, des Esseintes, on the rare occasions when he was awake in the afternoon (for his usual practice was only to get up when the sun was setting) would change the water in the aquarium by means of a system of pipes, and tint it with coloured essences, thus being able to enjoy 'the green or salmon-pink, the opalescent or silvery tones of a real river reflecting the changing sky.

The reader should not imagine that the injection of coloured essences in the water of the aquarium was bad for the fish. The fish (perhaps it is hardly necessary to say) were not real fish but mechanical contrivances moving by clockwork among artificial marine plants. When he entered this room, which had been perfumed with tar, he was able to imagine himself at sea; and a slightly comic touch is added by the provision of advertisements of voyages hung on the walls, together with framed time-tables of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company and other shipping lines. This nautical nostalgia seems all the


THE APPARITION
From the painting by Gustave Moreau in the Louvre

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more remarkable when we reflect that Huysmans was never on shipboard in his life. But perhaps when he remarks that, after all, the pleasures of travel are almost entirely imaginary, and reside in the anticipation and remembrance of a voyage rather than in its actual experience, he is uncomfortably near the truth! It is when he declares that no real moonlight can equal stage moonlight, that no real flower is better than an artificial flower, and that no woman can compete in 'plastic beauty' with a locomotive of the Chemin de Fer du Nord, that the normal man begins to rub his eyes.

Chapter three gives an account of the literary tastes of Huysmans' strange hero. One whole section of his library was devoted to works in Latin and it goes without saying that they were all in what the professors of the Sorbonne would call 'Latin of the decadence'. According to des Esseintes these were the only authors worthy of notice. Not for him the writings of Virgil, who was not only a pedant of the deepest dye, but one of the most sinister raseurs that Antiquity had produced. His admiration for Ovid was extremely moderate and he detested Horace and all his works. As for Cicero, Caesar, Livy, Suetonius, Tacitus, he rejected them all. The only 'classical' author with whom he had the least sympathy was Petronius.

Things began to improve, in his opinion, in the second century A.D. with Apuleius. Then follows a list of authors which to the classical scholar are mere names, and of which the ordinary cultivated man has never heard; and it is interesting to note that although Huysmans, speaking for des Esseintes, makes several disobliging remarks about Christianity, he is plainly already fascinated by those authors of the Dark Ages who 'spiced the corpse of latinity with the aromatics of the Church'. He even professes a liking for the acrostic verses of St. Boniface.  It is in the following chapter that, as if afraid of having
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exhausted the patience of the reader, Huysmans introduces the famous jewelled tortoise. The first idea had been, he tells us, merely to gild its shell, but the effect was too glaring, so he chose a Japanese design (the passion for japonaiserie, owing to the influence of the Goncourts, being then in full blast) and had it reproduced in jewels set in the carapace. There is a long discussion of the jewels used, and when the work is at last completed des Esseintes feels 'perfectly happy'. The sight of the tortoise, thus bedizened, even gives him an appetite which he satisfies with a cup of tea—no ordinary tea, of course, but a subtle blend of three rare varieties, brought all the way from China by caravan.

Des Esseintes, however, did not confine himself entirely to tea. When in need of stronger stimulus he repaired to the dining room where, in one of the panels, there was concealed a cupboard housing a miniature bar. Small sandalwood barrels with silver stopcocks contained a large assortment of liqueurs, and by an ingenious arrangement of push-buttons these could be blended drop by drop. He called this apparatus, with a typical touch of Huysmans' humour, his mouth organ.

In a celebrated passage, suggested no doubt by Zola's famous 'symphony in cheese' in Le Ventre de Paris1 he elaborates this idea of the relationship between taste and sound. 'The taste of each liqueur corresponded, according to him, to the sound of an instrument. Dry curacao, for ex ample, to the note, at once sharp and smooth, of the clarinet; kummel to the sonorous yet nasal oboe; creme-de menthe and anisette to the flute, at the same time sweet and pepper-sharp, soft and yet wailing; while to complete the orchestra, kirsch is like a trumpet, gin and whisky assault the palate like the strident sounds of pistons and trombones,

1 See the present author's 'Symphony in Cheese, or Zola goes to market', in Wine and Food, No. 37, l943, p. 17.
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marc resembles a tuba, while the thunder claps of drums and cymbals are represented in the mouth by the raki of Chios...

He imagined also that it might even be possible to play string quartets on the palate, with the violin represented by old brandy, the viola by the more robust rum, the violoncello by vespetro, and the bass-violin by fine old bitters. If one wished to add a fifth instrument and make the performance a quintet, one could figure a gustatory harp by adding 'the vibrant savour, the silver note, detached and fragile of cumin sec'.

Once the principle was admitted, he had found it possible to transfer to the inside of his jaw (the phrase is Huysmans' own) whole passages of music, following the composer step by step, expressing his thought, and echoing every nuance of his effects by means of the contrast and learned blending of liqueurs. He even composed melodies himself, executing pastorals with the benign cassis which produces, in the throat, the pearly notes of nightingales, or the tender creme-de cacao which hums syrupy old-fashioned airs. Huysmans concludes, amusingly enough, that 'this evening des Esseintes felt no inclination for music and contented himself with a glass of real Irish whiskey!'

From these exquisite refinements of the pleasures of tasting, he passes to the visual arts, and it is interesting to note that he rejects, by implication, almost the entire oeuvre of those modern painters for whom, following Zola, he had fought so many battles in his printed art criticism. What he desires, he says quite frankly, for the joy of his eyes and the delectation of his mind, is something quite different: works suggesting the world of the unknown, giving rise to new speculations, attacking the nervous system by means of 'learned hysterias, complicated nightmares, nonchalant and yet atrocious visions'. What he wants, in a word, are the pictures of Gustave Moreau.
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Huysmans has been called the 'discoverer' of Gustave Moreau, but Moreau was far from being an unknown painter at the date of the publication of A Rebours. In the Salon of 1876 he had exhibited two paintings: Salome (now in the Mantes Collection) and L'Apparition which was after wards purchased for the Luxembourg. The first was an oil- painting and the second a watercolour, and it is interesting that Huysmans was so much excited by them that he includes them both by name in the imaginary collection of des Esseintes. In other words, he would have purchased them himself if he had had the money, for what des Esseintes does represents his own wish fulfilment.

Huysmans evokes the figure of Salome in one of the most famous of his purple patches. 'With a face withdrawn, solemn, almost august, she began the lascivious dance which was to awaken the exhausted senses of the aged Herod; her breasts quivered and, at the touch of her whirling necklaces of jewels, the nipples rose; diamonds, attached to the damp ness of her flesh, scintillated; her bracelets, her girdles, her rings gave out sparks on her triumphal robe sewn with pearls, patterned with silver, spangled with gold, the cuirass of jewels, of which each scale was a stone, seemed to be on fire, little snakes of flame swarming over the pale flesh, over the tea-rose skin, like splendid insects, with dazzling shards, marbled with carmine, shot with pale yellow, diapered with steel-blue, striped with peacock green.'

Mario Praz has shown' that even the details of Moreau 's picture were inspired by Flaubert's evocations of oriental luxe and luxure in his Tentation de Saint Antoine, so that Huysmans in his descriptions is following Flaubert at one remove. And he concludes: 'There is in these despairing and learned works a singular enchantment, an incantation profoundly moving like that of certain poems of Baudelaire.'

1 Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, p. 292.
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Baudelaire indeed has much to say in the matter. It might even be contended that Flaubert, and Moreau and Huysmans are, in their different works, merely expanding and elabo rating the famous line:

La tres-chere etait nue, et, connaissant mon coeur, Elle n'avait garde' que ses bijoux sonores...

But the attitude is common to the whole Decadent Movement and Salome is a favourite, almost an obsessional, figure, reaching its final expression (and the culminating touch of making Salome in love with, or in lust for, John the Baptist) in Wilde's famous play.

Mallarme also made a formal treatment of the theme. It is true that his Herodiade was not published until 1898, but it had long circulated in manuscript among the poet's friends, and it was certainly known to Huysmans, for he pictures his des Esseintes reading a fragment of it while gazing at Moreau's watercolour. It 'subjugates him like a sortilege, at certain hours'. But it would perhaps be better to finish with the paintings on the walls of des Esseintes before we turn our attention to his literary enthusiasms.

In addition, therefore, to the two paintings by Moreau, he hung, in ebony frames, a series of prints by Jan Luyken, 'an old Dutch engraver, almost unknown in France'. The choice may seem surprising, for Luyken was an ardent, indeed a fanatical Calvinist, who lived a life of great austerity and went about preaching the Gospel. He was, however, an engraver of some ability and what fascinated des Esseintes was his choice of subjects. His 'Religious Persecutions' display every variety of torture that the mad ingenuity of mankind has ever invented. There was more than a hint of sadism in the Salome pictures; here it was more openly expressed, albeit with a very different conscious intention. The worthy Calvinist would no doubt have been extremely scandalised
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if he could have foreseen how his crude Protestant propaganda would appeal to ultra-refined decadents some three centuries later, decadents who, whatever else they might have been, were certainly not Protestants.

Huysmans indeed, in the Preface which he wrote for A Rebours, after his conversion, calls sadism the 'bastard of Catholicism'. It 'presupposes a religion to be violated. It consists above all in a sacreligious practice, in a moral rebellion, in a spiritual debauch, in an aberration which is completely ideal, entirely Christian. . . . The power of sadism, the attraction which it offers, resides entirely in the prohibited pleasure of transferring to Satan the homage and the prayers which are due to God; it resides therefore in the non observance of the Catholic precepts, or even in observing them in reverse (the key word a rebours), by committing, in order the more to spurn Christ, the sins He has expressly cursed: the pollution of the cult and the carnal orgy.'

This is surely to claim too much. Sadism and sacrilege are not necessarily the same thing, although they are closely allied; but the passage is interesting as showing that the germ of La-bas was already present in A Rebours.

In addition to the engravings of Luyken, des Esseintes exhibited on his walls the lithograph by Bresdin called La Comedie de la Mort. Rodolphe Bresdin is not a name that is very well-known today,' but there was a certain vogue for his work, at the time of the publication of A Rebours, in the circles with which Huysmans was in contact. He was an extraordinary character who was employed for a time as a railway-man and road-mender. When he was in Paris he lived in a dilapidated shack in the suburbs 'surrounded by a collection of incongruous objects amongst which cats lay

1 But see an excellent article on his work: 'Rodoiphe Bresdin called Chien-Caillou,' by Claude Roger-Marx, Print Collectors' Quarterly, XIV, 1927, p. 251.
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feeding their young and spiders spun their webs'. He had considerable skill as an etcher, 'pulled his proofs by means of a shoe brush and some blacking and sold them for a few francs to second-hand dealers who passed them off as Rembrandts.' He taught etching to Odilon Redon, one of whose early etchings is signed 'pupil of Bresdin'. Huysmans may even have met him through Redon, or through Catulle Mendes, for whose Revue Fantaisiste, Bresdin made a series of etchings. Later he produced lithographs of which La Comedie de la Mort is the most ambitious.

It is easy to see why it appealed to des Esseintes with its fantastic foliage, its lowering clouds, its gesticulating skeletons. In detail it is fantastically minute, but there was no question of drawing from the model. 'The artist,' said Bresdin, 'should not even glance at Nature. He has every thing within himself.' This might have stood as a motto for des Esseintes; it shows how completely Huysmans had broken with Zolaism and the doctrine of the Impressionists, when he could prefer to Manet and his followers the works of men like Bresdin and Odilon Redon.

For des Esseintes hung Odilon Redon too, in the vestibule leading to his bedroom, and Redon, who was a considerable artist, paid no attention to the outside world at all but drew his strange forms, his evocative images, his monstrous flowers terminating in human faces, entirely from the world of dream. He takes his place today as a precursor of the Surrealists.

In the bedroom itself was a drawing by Theotocopuli, 'a Christ of singular hue, exaggerated design and ferocious colour. It was a sinister picture, in tones of wax-yellow and cadaverous green.' Huysmans' reference to it is half-apologetic, but it is interesting to see him anticipating, if he did not foresee, the now universal passion for El Greco. What he was seeking, of course, in all these pictures was an excitation
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of his sensibility, one might almost say a sharpening of his neurosis.

It is impossible to follow des Esseintes in all his researches. There is a chapter on flowers, there is a discussion of the effects of perfumes. He is tempted to start on a journey to England, but after a single visit to an English tavern in the Rue de Rivoli, decides not to risk losing by actually visiting the country, the 'imperishable sensations' procured by a meal of ox-tail soup, haddock, beefsteak, Stilton, and rhubarb tart. Then, as if exhausted by this unwonted effort, he returns to his books.

It is his choice of these, perhaps, which throws most light on Huysmans at the moment when he was writing A Rebours. Pride of place, it is perhaps unnecessary to say, is given to Baudelaire. He has had his works specially printed 'in a large format like that of missals'. There follows a veritable paean of praise for this writer for whom 'his admiration was boundless'. Beside him the older French classics seemed pretentious and empty. Rabelais and Moliere did not amuse him; he cared little for Voltaire, Rousseau or Diderot. He was touched, however, by the melancholy ballades of Villon, and had quite a liking for Christian orators like Bourdalone and Bossuet. He respected Pascal for the austerity of his pessimism.

Of contemporary authors he admired Barbey d'Aurevilly, finding particular pleasure in Les Diaboliques. He praises Barbey for his violent oscillations between mysticism and sadism, and declares that this book alone among the works of 'contemporary apostolic literature (the phrase is Huysmans' own), is the perfect witness of that state of mind, at once devout and impious, towards which his memories of Catholicism, stimulated by his neurosis, had often driven des Esseintes'.1

1 A Rebours, p.2l3.
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He had an almost equal admiration for the writings of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, and he embarks on a long discussion of his short stories which recall, on the one hand, the 'mystifications' of Edgar Allan Poe and, on the other, the cold and ferocious irony of Swift. In this there was much to chime with Huysmans' own predilection, but perhaps he did not realise completely at the time what it was in Villiers which attracted him so much.

Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, says Anatole France,' 'was of that family of literary neo-Catholics whose common father was Chateaubriand, and which has produced Barbey d'Aurevilly, Baudelaire, and more recently M. Josephin Peladan. These men savoured above all in religion the charms of sin, the grandeur of sacrilege; and their sensuality caressed dogmas which added to voluptuousness la supreme volupte de se perdre.' He might have added to his list, says Praz,2 the names of Huysmans, Verlaine, Barres and Henri de Montherlant.

As may well be imagined, A Rebours was a literary sensa tion of the first magnitude. Nothing quite like it had ever appeared before, and the public hardly knew what to make of it. Huysmans wrote to Zola: 'I have trodden on everybody's corns. The Catholics are exasperated: the others accuse me of being a clerical in disguise, the Romantics are offended by the attacks on Hugo, on Gautier, on Leconte de Lisle; the Naturalistes by the book's hatred of the moderns.'

Zola himself was not very pleased. He saw that his young disciple was no longer of his company; he had gone off in another direction altogether. The story of the reproachful telegram: 'Naturalisme pas mort, lettre suit' is probably apocryphal, but it almost certainly illustrates Zola's state of mind.3 The well-known critic Sarcey, during a lecture in

1. 'La Vie Litteraire, IIIe serie, p.121.             2 Op. cit,p. 301.

3. The telegram was actually sent by Paul Alexis, Zola's disciple. See Pierre Mille, Le Roman Francais. Paris, 1930.
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the Salle des Capucines, complained that he was unable to understand the book at all. Brunetiere, writing in the influential Revue des Deux Mondes, compared A Rebours to a vaudeville.

With considerable acumen Jules Lemaitre wrote of Huysmans,1 soon after the publication of A Rebours: 'Penetrate to his inmost heart and you will find, first, a Fleming, much concerned with detail and with a lively feeling for the grotesque; then the most disgusted and bored and contemptuous of pessimists, an artist, in fact, who is very incomplete, but very determined, very conscious, and refined to the point of malady, the detraque representative of the extreme tendencies of a literature nearing its end.'

The most penetrating criticism came from the pen of no less a person than Barbey d'Aurevilly himself, reviewing A Rebours in Le Constitutionel.2 He began by ridiculing the toys that des Esseintes had played with: the battery of flavours, the paper flowers, the jewelled tortoise, and he continued: 'Des Esseintes is no longer a being organised in the same way as Obermann, Rene, Adolphe, those heroes of novels who are human, passionate, guilty. He is a piece of mechanism out of order. Nothing more . . . In writing the autobiography of his hero (Huysmans) makes the particular confession of a depraved and solitary personality, but at the same time he charts the symptoms of a society putrefied by materialism . . . Certainly, in order that a decadent of such power should be produced and that a book like that of M. Huysmans should germinate in a human head it was necessary that we should have become what in fact we are—a race which has reached its final hour.'

Barbey,. of course, did not blame Huysmans for reflecting what he believed to be the universal decadence, or at least

1. Les Contemporains, ire serie, 1886, pp. 312—317.

2. 18th July, 1884. Reprinted in Le Roman Contemporain, Paris, 1902.
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the finis Latinorum. Huysmans was, he believed, a great writer, and a Catholic writer, even if he was unaware of the fact. And he quotes the closing passage of A Rebours:

'Ah! courage fails me; I feel sick. Lord, have pity on the Christian who doubts, on the sceptic who would believe, on the prisoner of life who sets out alone, into the night, under a sky no longer lighted by the consoling lamps of the ancient hope.'

'Is this not', wrote Barbey, 'humble enough and sub missive enough? It is more so even than the prayer of Baudelaire:
            "Ah! Seigneur! donnez-moi laforce et le courage
            De contem pier mon cwur et mon corps sans degout!"

Baudelaire, the satanic Baudelaire, who died a Christian, must have been one of M. Huysmans' admirations. One feels his presence, behind the most beautiful of the pages that M. Huysmans has written. Well, one day, I defied all Baudelaire's originality to recommence Les Fleurs du Mal, and to take one step further in the direction of blasphemy. Today, I am quite capable of offering the same challenge to the author of A Rebours. After Les Fleurs du Mal, I said to Baudelaire, "nothing logically remains for you but to choose between the muzzle of a revolver or the foot of the Cross"; but will the author of A Rebours make this choice?'