Against the Grain

The last of a syphilitic aristocratic line retires to a house outside Paris to arrange a life entirely of his own taste: hothouse flowers that look artificial, a tortoise gilded and jewelled until it dies of it, a funeral dinner served in black. Huysmans wrote it while working thirty-two years as a civil servant; Wilde made it the poisonous yellow book of Dorian Gray, and it gave the decadence its handbook. Fifty-six plates, among them visions by Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon, supply the dreamlike, morbid imagery Huysmans's decadent hero collects.