street, regains his cab, and drives to the English
tavern of the Rue d'Amsterdam. He has just time for dinner, and he finds
a place beside the _insulaires_, with 'their porcelain eyes, their
crimson cheeks,' and orders a heavy English dinner, which he washes down
with ale and porter, seasoning his coffee, as he imagines we do in
England, with gin. As time passes, and the hour of the train draws near,
he begins to reflect vaguely on his project; he recalls the disillusion
of the visit he had once paid to Holland. Does not a similar disillusion
await him in London? 'Why travel, when one can travel so splendidly in a
chair? Was he not at London already, since its odours, its atmosphere,
its inhabitants, its food, its utensils, were all about him?' The train
is due, but he does not stir. 'I have felt and seen,' he says to
himself, 'what I wanted to feel and see. I have been saturated with
English life all this time; it would be madness to lose, by a clumsy
change of place, these imperishable sensations.' So he gathers together
his luggage, and goes home again, resolving never to abandon the 'docile
phantasmagoria of the brain' for the mere realities of the actual world.
But his nervous malady, one of whose symptoms had driven him forth and
brought him back so spasmodically, is on the increase. He is seized by
hallucinations, haunted by sounds: the hysteria of Schumann, the morbid
exaltation of Berlioz, communicate themselves to him in the music that
besieges his brain. Obliged at last to send for a doctor, we find him,
at the end of the book, ordered back to Paris, to the normal life, the
normal conditions, with just that chance of escape from death or
madness. So suggestively, so instructively, closes the record of a
strange, attractive folly--in itself partly a serious ideal (which
indeed is Huysmans' own), partly the caricature of that ideal. Des
Esseintes, though studied from a real man, who is known to those who
know a certain kind of society in Paris, is a type rather than a man: he
is the offspring of the Decadent art that he adores, and this book a
sort of breviary for its worshippers. It has a place of its own in the
literature of the day, for it sums up, not only a talent, but a
spiritual epoch.

_A Rebours_ is a book that can only be written once, and since that date
Huysmans has published a short story, _Un Dilemme_ (1887), which is
merely a somewhat lengthy anecdote; two novels, _En Rade_ (1887) and
_La-Bas_ (1