Undoubtedly, there remained to him no roadstead, no landing place. What would become of him in that Paris where he had neither family nor friends? No tie any longer bound him to that faubourg Saint-Germain quivering with age, which was flaking away into a dust of desuetude, lying in the new society like an empty and decrepit shell! And what points of contact could there be between him and that bourgeois class which had little by little raised itself up, profiting from every disaster to grow rich, stirring up every catastrophe to lend respectability to its outrages and its thefts?
After the aristocracy of birth, it was the turn of the aristocracy of money: it was the caliphate of the shops, the despotism of rue du Sentier, the tyranny of a commerce of mean and venal ideas, of vain and cunning instincts. More wicked, more vile than the now-stripped nobility and the fallen clergy, the bourgeoisie had borrowed from them their frivolous ostentation, their perishable boastfulness, degrading these by its want of breeding, and, stealing their faults, had converted them into hypocritical vices; and, domineering and sly, servile and cowardly, it machine-gunned without pity its necessary and eternal victim, the common people, whom it had itself unmuzzled and set in ambush to spring at the throat of the old castes!
Now, it was an accomplished fact. Once its usefulness was exhausted, the plebs, as a measure of hygiene, had been bled dry: the bourgeois, reassured, sat enthroned and jovial, with the force of his money and the contagion of his folly. The result of his advent had been the annulment of all intelligence, the negation of all rectitude, the death of all art, and indeed the debased artists had knelt down, brimming with ardor, and devoured with kisses the fetid feet of the great panders and the petty satraps whose alms kept them alive!
There was, in painting, a deluge of nerveless nonsense; in literature, an intemperance of slovenly style and base ideas, since the scheming profiteer had need of a show of honesty, virtue was required for the freebooter who sought a good position for his son and refused to pay the dowry for his daughter; chaste love for the Voltairean who charged the clergy with rapes, and went off hypocritically, bestially, devoid of the true depravity of art, into certain murky rooms, to sniff the greasy water in the washbasins and the tepid dust of grubby petticoats!
It was the great penal colony of America transported to our continent; it was, in short, the immense, the profound, the incommensurable villainy of the financiers and the parvenus, which radiated, like an abject sun, upon the idolatrous city that, belly to the ground, ejaculated impure canticles before the impious tabernacle of the banks! “Collapse then, society! die then, old world!” cried des Esseintes, indignant at the ignominy of the spectacle he had conjured up; that cry broke the nightmare that oppressed him.
“Ah! he said, and to think that all this is but a dream! that I am about to re-enter the vile and servile bedlam of the century!” To calm himself he called to his aid the consoling maxims of Schopenhauer; he repeated to himself the sorrowful axiom of Pascal: “The soul sees nothing that does not afflict it, when it meditates,” but the words resounded, in his spirit, like sounds without sense; his tedium broke them apart, took from them all meaning, all sedative virtue, all their gentle and efficacious vigor.
He realized, at last, that all the reasons of pessimism were powerless to bring him relief, that only the impossible faith in a future life would have been reassuring.
A fit of rage swept away, like a hurricane, his proofs of resignation, his attempts at indifference. He could no longer hide it from himself: there was nothing, nothing more, everything had been razed to the ground; the bourgeois were gorging themselves as at Clamart, a paper napkin on their knees, beneath the grandiose ruins of the Church that had become a place of assignations, a heap of rubble, befouled by unspeakable buffooneries and scandalous witticisms. And who knows whether, to show once and for all that He exists, the terrible God of Genesis and the pale Unnailed One of Golgotha were not about to revive extinguished cataclysms, to rekindle the rains of fire that once consumed the damned peoples and the dead cities? Or would the mire go on trickling and covering with its ichor this old world where nothing is sown but iniquity and nothing is reaped but shame?
The door opened abruptly; at the far end, framed by the doorposts, appeared men wearing the tricorn on their heads, their cheeks shaven and a tuft of beard beneath the lip; they were handling crates and hauling furniture, then the door closed again behind the servant who was carrying bundles of books.
Des Esseintes fell, exhausted, into a chair. “In two days I shall be in Paris; courage – he murmured – it is all truly over; like a tidal wave, the waves of human mediocrity rise up to the sky and would engulf the refuge whose floodgates I myself, in spite of myself, am opening. Ah! I lack the courage, and my heart breaks! Lord, have pity on the Christian who doubts, on the unbeliever who would like to believe, on the galley-slave of life who embarks alone, in the night, beneath a firmament no longer lit by the beacons of the ancient hope.”

(Translation by Giorgio Pangaro)

Note
These are only a few lines, the last of À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans (Paris 1848-1907). Naturally the title of the chosen passage is not from the author’s hand. In the novel, held on its appearance (1884) to be the bible of Decadentism, through the figure of des Esseintes, Huysmans sketches and sums up, as Marc Fumaroli writes, “the torpors, the languors, the venomous and perverse neuroses of the century that is drawing to a close”. His contemporary Barbey d’Aurevilly had a keen nose, and after reading À rebours he predicted for its author a drastic either/or: to shoot himself or to convert! In fact Huysmans’s conversion to Catholicism was not long in coming, and the last part of his life he devoted to composing devotional works. We have translated it because it seems to us that, if one wishes, and without excessive effort, one may catch interesting analogies with another end of century and, if one wishes further, with this beginning of a millennium.