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Jean des Esseintes is the last of his line - an ancient aristocratic family reduced, over generations, to a single exhausted heir. He has tried Paris. He has tried society, women, debauchery, and conversation. He has found them all intolerable. Now he is withdrawing. Into a house in Fontenay-aux-Roses, fitted out according to principles of absolute aesthetic refinement. Orange walls. A dining room designed to resemble a ship's cabin. A conservatory filled with flowers chosen because they look artificial. A tortoise with a jewel-encrusted shell. A collection of Gustave Moreau's visionary paintings. An elaborate apparatus for constructing harmonies of perfume. A library of late Latin poetry and the works of Baudelaire, Poe, and Mallarmé. In this hermetically sealed retreat, des Esseintes will build a world without compromise - a world of pure artifice, superior in every respect to the one he has abandoned. Nature is crude. Society is stupid. Only art, sensation, and the absolute refinement of taste offer any reason to continue. Published in 1884 and immediately recognized as the defining document of the Decadent movement, À Rebours is the novel that Oscar Wilde gave to Dorian Gray, that scandalized two continents, and that announced the end of one literary era and the beginning of another. It is a portrait of a mind at the extreme limit of aesthetic sensibility - magnificent, exhausting, and impossible to forget. By Joris-Karl Huysmans. The bible of Decadence.

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