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Parisian Sketches
First published in 1880, same year as Edgar Degas' The Dancing Lesson and Edouard Manet's solo show of brasserie paintings at La Vie Moderne gallery, these Parisian Sketches share the Impressionist fascination with the contemporary life of Paris, an exuberant Paris in the era of the Op?ra Garnier and the Folies-Bergeres. Like the striking images of the early Impressionists, whom Huysmans championed when it was unfashionable, Parisian Sketches is an assault on the visual senses. Composed of a series of intense, meticulously observed literary impressions û of caf? concerts and circus performers, of streetwalkers and hot-chestnut sellers, of run-down slums and forgotten quarters in the grimy, shiny `City of Light' -- Parisian Sketches recreates the Paris with an intimacy and an immediacy that confirms Huysmans as one of the masters of 19th century French prose.
200 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1880
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About the author
Joris-Karl Huysmans
323 books702 followersCharles Marie Georges Huysmans was a French novelist who published his works as Joris-Karl Huysmans. AKA: J.-K. Huysmans.
He is most famous for the novel À rebours (Against Nature). His style is remarkable for its idiosyncratic use of the French language, wide-ranging vocabulary, wealth of detailed and sensuous description, and biting, satirical wit.
The novels are also noteworthy for their encyclopedic documentation, ranging from the catalogue of decadent Latin authors in À rebours to the discussion of the symbiology of Christian architecture in La cathédrale. Huysmans' work expresses a disgust with modern life and a deep pessimism, which led the author first to the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer then to the teachings of the Catholic Church.
He is most famous for the novel À rebours (Against Nature). His style is remarkable for its idiosyncratic use of the French language, wide-ranging vocabulary, wealth of detailed and sensuous description, and biting, satirical wit.
The novels are also noteworthy for their encyclopedic documentation, ranging from the catalogue of decadent Latin authors in À rebours to the discussion of the symbiology of Christian architecture in La cathédrale. Huysmans' work expresses a disgust with modern life and a deep pessimism, which led the author first to the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer then to the teachings of the Catholic Church.
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February 2, 2019
Portrait of Joris-Karl Huysmans, by Jean-Louis Forain
Now probably known primarily for his "decadent" novels portraying possibly the most extreme aesthete ever seen in literature, Jean des Esseintes (À rebours, 1884), and no less than a foray into Satanism engaged by his alter ego, Durtal(*) (Là-Bas, 1891), in which, ages ago, a much younger and more innocent version of myself was introduced - with horror - to Gilles de Rais, Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans (1848-1907) actually began his literary life as a Naturalist (close to Émile Zola), permeated with Schopenhauer's pessimism, and finished it as a fervent believer writing about Catholic institutions and spiritual transformations. Quite a journey.
But characteristic of nearly his entire literary trajectory are an extremely rich prose studded with rare words that send me scrambling to ever larger dictionaries, impressive erudition, close observation and, oftentimes, a sardonic wit. All are well represented in Croquis parisiens (1880, with an extended second edition in 1886; available in English translation with the title Parisian Sketches), a collection of smaller texts vividly evoking the lives of late nineteenth century lower and lower middle class people with extended set pieces portraying the Folies-Bergère and a vast dance hall in proletarian Paris, coupled with more focused portraits of street car conductors, street walkers, laundresses etc. None of this is done with a disdainful eye, nor with a wallowing in miserabilism, but with a somewhat disabused empathy, or should I say a clear-eyed empathy.
To these are added some very idiosyncratic landscapes. Like Baudelaire, Huysmans had little affinity for Nature:
La nature n’est intéressante que débile et navrée. Je ne nie point ses prestiges et ses gloires alors qu’elle fait craquer par l’ampleur de son rire, son corsage de rocs sombres et brandit au soleil sa gorge aux pointes vertes, mais j’avoue ne pas éprouver devant ses ripailles de sève, ce charme apitoyé que font naître en moi un coin désolé de grande ville, une butte écorchée, une rigole d’eau qui pleure entre deux arbres grêles.
And true to his word, his richly literary prose and his sharply observant eye turn to render the damaged and dismayed Nature on the outskirts of Paris; reading about the "pitiful charm" of "a desolate corner of a great city, a flayed monticule, a rivulet that weeps between two spindly trees" presented on the silk-covered platter of Huysmans' diction is a most curious experience.
Odilon Redon, Mephistophélés, 1877
The texts become even more idiosyncratic as one proceeds into the book; some would say even more self-indulgent. But a lover of Huysmans like myself would say more delectable, as essays like "Les Similitudes" anticipate the incredible plenitude and finesse of color, scents and sounds of À rebours and "Petit poème en prose des viandes cuites au four" returns the Huysmans amateur to the last piece in his early Naturalistic style, the novella À vau-l'eau. Not to mention the constantly shifting ironies of these little texts - ironies that turn self-ironic (or the brief paean to one of my favorite artists, Odilon Redon). For some reason, I feel driven to quote a few lines from "Petit poème en prose des viandes cuites au four":
Ce sont les fallacieux rosbifs et les illusoires gigots cuits au four des restaurants qui développent les ferments du concubinage dans l'âme ulcérée des vieux garçons. Le moment est venu où la viande tiède et rose, sentant l'eau, écoeure. (**)
Perhaps Huysmans is not for everyone, but I consider him to be one of the finest stylists of the French language in the nineteenth century.
(*) Who would be the protagonist of all of Huysmans' subsequent novels, reflecting Huysmans' own spiritual journey into Catholicism.
(**) It is the fallacious roastbeefs and the illusory joints roasted in the ovens of the restaurants that develop the fantasies of cohabitation in the appalled minds of old bachelors. The moment has come for the pink, lukewarm, damp smelling meat to turn your stomach.
One should mention that Huysmans was a lifelong bachelor.
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August 17, 2023Je suis moi-même, l'errant solitaire, au cœur de Paris, je flâne et j'observe les rues obscures, les ombres éphémères, qui dansent au gré de leur propre cadence.
Je suis le spectateur des âmes vivantes, de leurs espoirs, de leurs détresses, je capte leurs murmures, leurs chuchotements, et j'en fais des poèmes, des fresques de déesses.
Je suis celui qui cherche l'extraordinaire dans la banalité des quotidiens usés, je décompose la ville, je'n exhume les mystères et je les raconte en vers ciselés.
Je suis un alchimiste du langage, mêlant les formes, les sons, les images, je crée des tableaux, des cathédrales de mots, et je les dédié à cette ville, à ses passages..
Je suis moi-même, me perdant dans les rues, écrivant sur les murs, à la recherche de l'insondable beauté qui émane de ces lieux, de ces silences obscurs.
Je suis moi-même, mais toujours un autre...
Je suis le spectateur des âmes vivantes, de leurs espoirs, de leurs détresses, je capte leurs murmures, leurs chuchotements, et j'en fais des poèmes, des fresques de déesses.
Je suis celui qui cherche l'extraordinaire dans la banalité des quotidiens usés, je décompose la ville, je'n exhume les mystères et je les raconte en vers ciselés.
Je suis un alchimiste du langage, mêlant les formes, les sons, les images, je crée des tableaux, des cathédrales de mots, et je les dédié à cette ville, à ses passages..
Je suis moi-même, me perdant dans les rues, écrivant sur les murs, à la recherche de l'insondable beauté qui émane de ces lieux, de ces silences obscurs.
Je suis moi-même, mais toujours un autre...
February 10, 2016
Very much a naturalistic work and yet there is something else in this, something is being brewed up. Some sketches have a style that would be fully developed and featured in A Rebours, one of the most obvious ones is the sketch about Odilon Redon's art (a few of his drawings are featured).
Here's a bit of it:
"It was of a sheet of water, diseased and cloudy, but with no sky this time, a sheet of water filling a huge plain, a gigantic aqueduct supported by columns, like those on the Dhuis and the Vanne. A sepulchral silence fell from the arches; dreary daylight filtered through the frosted glass of hidden portholes; a wind as if from an ice-tunnel shivered your marrow and, in this solitude, an intense, irresistible fear nailed you, breathless, to the stone seat which ran like a quay the whole length of this lifeless water.
Then, from under these fearsome, silent arches, strange beings suddenly sprang up. A head, with no body, hovered, whirring like a top, a head pierced by an enormous Cyclopean eye, complete with a mouth like that of a skate, separated by a wide groove from a nose, the filthy nose of a bailiff, stuffed with snuff! And this white, scalded head was coming out of a kind of skillet, and was radiating its own light, illuminating the waltz of other almost amorphous heads, some like embryos hinting at skulls, some like blurred infusoria, vague flagellates, indefinite monera and bizarre protoplasms like Haeckel’s Bathybius, though less gelatinous and less unformed.
And then this formation of living matter disappeared in its turn, this vile species of head faded away, and the obsession with this motionless water finally ceased.
There was a short respite in this nightmare. Then suddenly, a sun, inky-black to the core, emerged from the shadows, bursting, like a Grand Cross medal, with unequal but regularly spaced rays of gold. At the same time flower petals fell from some unknown space, bulbs in which imperceptible pupils squinted bounced around like billiard-balls, and a coffee-maker’s sieve remained suspended in the air, beneath which undulated the bare arm of a superhuman juggler with terrifying eyes, as if shaped and enlarged by surgery, round eyes with a pupil stuck on like the boss of a cartwheel.
There was in this man who was conjuring with planets, grocer’s implements and flowers, the cruel air of a tough Gaul, the imperious countenance of a bloodthirsty bard; and the awfulness of his dilated eyes, like rings of iron, hypnotised you and made your hair stand on end.
Finally, there was a lull; the mind, carried away by these hallucinations, tried to hang on and moor itself to a bank; but the spectacle continued to unfold, recalling a similar, bygone scene that for years had been almost forgotten. In place of that flower of the marshes, another, more human flower, seen not long since at an exhibition, returned and planted itself, revealing a variant on this dismal conception.
Then the water, that terrifying water, dried up, and in its place rose a desolate steppe, a land broken up by volcanic eruptions and ravaged by swellings and crevices, a land scorified into slag. It was as if one were visiting, on an imaginary journey using a Beer and Mädler map, one of the silent amphitheatres of the moon, the Sea of Nectar, or the Sea of Humours, or the Sea of Crises, and that, in this atmospheric void, in a cold such as one had never felt before, you were wandering in the middle of a dead, noiseless desert, terrified by the immensity of the mountain peaks that rose up all around you to vertiginous heights, their craters in the form of cups, like those of Tycho, Calippus or Eratosthenes.
And on this desolate planet there emerged from the white soil the same stalk that had just sprung from the black water; as before, buds were blooming on its metallic branches and a round pale head also swayed at the top; but its sadness was more ambiguous and melted into the irony of a dreadful smile.
* * *
Suddenly the nightmare completely broke off and a frightful waking ensued, as the inflexible face of Certainty appeared, gripping me again in her hand of iron, leading me back to life, to the waking day, to the fastidious tasks that every new morning brings.
* * *
Such were the visions evoked by an album dedicated to Goya’s glory by Odilon Redon, the prince of mysterious dreams, the landscape artist of subterranean waters and of deserts convulsed by lava; by Odilon Redon the Comprachico Oculist of the human face, the subtle Lithographer of Suffering, the Necromancer of the Pencil, who, for the pleasure of a few aristocrats of art, has strayed into the democratic milieu of modern Paris."
Here's a bit of it:
"It was of a sheet of water, diseased and cloudy, but with no sky this time, a sheet of water filling a huge plain, a gigantic aqueduct supported by columns, like those on the Dhuis and the Vanne. A sepulchral silence fell from the arches; dreary daylight filtered through the frosted glass of hidden portholes; a wind as if from an ice-tunnel shivered your marrow and, in this solitude, an intense, irresistible fear nailed you, breathless, to the stone seat which ran like a quay the whole length of this lifeless water.
Then, from under these fearsome, silent arches, strange beings suddenly sprang up. A head, with no body, hovered, whirring like a top, a head pierced by an enormous Cyclopean eye, complete with a mouth like that of a skate, separated by a wide groove from a nose, the filthy nose of a bailiff, stuffed with snuff! And this white, scalded head was coming out of a kind of skillet, and was radiating its own light, illuminating the waltz of other almost amorphous heads, some like embryos hinting at skulls, some like blurred infusoria, vague flagellates, indefinite monera and bizarre protoplasms like Haeckel’s Bathybius, though less gelatinous and less unformed.
And then this formation of living matter disappeared in its turn, this vile species of head faded away, and the obsession with this motionless water finally ceased.
There was a short respite in this nightmare. Then suddenly, a sun, inky-black to the core, emerged from the shadows, bursting, like a Grand Cross medal, with unequal but regularly spaced rays of gold. At the same time flower petals fell from some unknown space, bulbs in which imperceptible pupils squinted bounced around like billiard-balls, and a coffee-maker’s sieve remained suspended in the air, beneath which undulated the bare arm of a superhuman juggler with terrifying eyes, as if shaped and enlarged by surgery, round eyes with a pupil stuck on like the boss of a cartwheel.
There was in this man who was conjuring with planets, grocer’s implements and flowers, the cruel air of a tough Gaul, the imperious countenance of a bloodthirsty bard; and the awfulness of his dilated eyes, like rings of iron, hypnotised you and made your hair stand on end.
Finally, there was a lull; the mind, carried away by these hallucinations, tried to hang on and moor itself to a bank; but the spectacle continued to unfold, recalling a similar, bygone scene that for years had been almost forgotten. In place of that flower of the marshes, another, more human flower, seen not long since at an exhibition, returned and planted itself, revealing a variant on this dismal conception.
Then the water, that terrifying water, dried up, and in its place rose a desolate steppe, a land broken up by volcanic eruptions and ravaged by swellings and crevices, a land scorified into slag. It was as if one were visiting, on an imaginary journey using a Beer and Mädler map, one of the silent amphitheatres of the moon, the Sea of Nectar, or the Sea of Humours, or the Sea of Crises, and that, in this atmospheric void, in a cold such as one had never felt before, you were wandering in the middle of a dead, noiseless desert, terrified by the immensity of the mountain peaks that rose up all around you to vertiginous heights, their craters in the form of cups, like those of Tycho, Calippus or Eratosthenes.
And on this desolate planet there emerged from the white soil the same stalk that had just sprung from the black water; as before, buds were blooming on its metallic branches and a round pale head also swayed at the top; but its sadness was more ambiguous and melted into the irony of a dreadful smile.
* * *
Suddenly the nightmare completely broke off and a frightful waking ensued, as the inflexible face of Certainty appeared, gripping me again in her hand of iron, leading me back to life, to the waking day, to the fastidious tasks that every new morning brings.
* * *
Such were the visions evoked by an album dedicated to Goya’s glory by Odilon Redon, the prince of mysterious dreams, the landscape artist of subterranean waters and of deserts convulsed by lava; by Odilon Redon the Comprachico Oculist of the human face, the subtle Lithographer of Suffering, the Necromancer of the Pencil, who, for the pleasure of a few aristocrats of art, has strayed into the democratic milieu of modern Paris."
August 8, 2019
This review was previously posted on the Side Real Press website in 2011.
I believe this book to have the same content as my edition on Fortune Press which is not translated by King. King is a superb translator so I imagine that his version is even better than my older edition. Hurrah! For even my edition is a great read.
J-K Huysmans (1848-1907) is best known for 'Against Nature' (1884) the novel that defined the Decadent movement and should be on every weird story lovers bookshelf.
Before he wrote 'Against Nature' he was a student of the 'realistic school' of Zola, De Maupassant and the like and this is a collection of evocations/prose poems which were originally published in 1874, and are in effect a bridge between the two styles. This volume includes material revised and added in 1886 and the influence of the 1884 novel.
The Fortune Press edition has a useful introduction from the translator Richard Griffiths who points out how much smell (especially womens') plays a part in these writings-and in 'Against Nature'. This is particually effective in his descriptions of the Folies-Bergere and a Grand Ball. There is also a controversial (at the time) piece called 'The Arm-Pit' which Huysmans terms "spice boxes in order to season and enhance the stew of love". Each to their own, but I prefer 'Low Tide' which is a survey of breast shape and size through the ages and lifestyles of various female types (albeit via tailors dummies).
These and many of the other twenty or so short pieces (none run to much more than 3 pages) are really quite 'decadent' in style and subject. Huysmans selects the more grotesque and bizarre aspects of his subjects to extol the virtues (or otherwise) of. Prostitutes and their pimps, a fantasy inspired by Odilon Redons paintings and the like; but the best pieces in this vein (and the book) are his meditations on landscape especially 'The Bievre'. "Yes it is true that the Bieve is nothing more than a moving dung-heap...true it emits a fetid stench of stagnation, an aroma of the charnal house; but just place a barrel organ at the foot of one of its trees, and make it gasp out its melodies that fill its belly; or let the voice of a begger-woman resound in this valley of misery, let her sing, as she sits by the water, a woeful lament learned at a sing-song, a ballad extolling the little birds and begging for love: and then tell me whether this wailing does not stir you to the depths of your soul, and whether this sobbing voice does not appear to be the desolate complaint if the poor suburbs themselves."
This slim book is a great read and best savoured slowly for maximum pleasure. Highly recommended.
I believe this book to have the same content as my edition on Fortune Press which is not translated by King. King is a superb translator so I imagine that his version is even better than my older edition. Hurrah! For even my edition is a great read.
J-K Huysmans (1848-1907) is best known for 'Against Nature' (1884) the novel that defined the Decadent movement and should be on every weird story lovers bookshelf.
Before he wrote 'Against Nature' he was a student of the 'realistic school' of Zola, De Maupassant and the like and this is a collection of evocations/prose poems which were originally published in 1874, and are in effect a bridge between the two styles. This volume includes material revised and added in 1886 and the influence of the 1884 novel.
The Fortune Press edition has a useful introduction from the translator Richard Griffiths who points out how much smell (especially womens') plays a part in these writings-and in 'Against Nature'. This is particually effective in his descriptions of the Folies-Bergere and a Grand Ball. There is also a controversial (at the time) piece called 'The Arm-Pit' which Huysmans terms "spice boxes in order to season and enhance the stew of love". Each to their own, but I prefer 'Low Tide' which is a survey of breast shape and size through the ages and lifestyles of various female types (albeit via tailors dummies).
These and many of the other twenty or so short pieces (none run to much more than 3 pages) are really quite 'decadent' in style and subject. Huysmans selects the more grotesque and bizarre aspects of his subjects to extol the virtues (or otherwise) of. Prostitutes and their pimps, a fantasy inspired by Odilon Redons paintings and the like; but the best pieces in this vein (and the book) are his meditations on landscape especially 'The Bievre'. "Yes it is true that the Bieve is nothing more than a moving dung-heap...true it emits a fetid stench of stagnation, an aroma of the charnal house; but just place a barrel organ at the foot of one of its trees, and make it gasp out its melodies that fill its belly; or let the voice of a begger-woman resound in this valley of misery, let her sing, as she sits by the water, a woeful lament learned at a sing-song, a ballad extolling the little birds and begging for love: and then tell me whether this wailing does not stir you to the depths of your soul, and whether this sobbing voice does not appear to be the desolate complaint if the poor suburbs themselves."
This slim book is a great read and best savoured slowly for maximum pleasure. Highly recommended.
November 18, 2025
Językowo - lekka przeprawa przez mękę pod kątem tłumaczeniowym (aka proza poetycka), ale BOŻE DROGI JAKIE TO BYŁO PIĘKNE. Żałuję, że jest to tekst Huysmansa aż tak bardzo nieznany i niedoceniany (za jego życia). To jakie ten człowiek miał niesamowite wyczucie piękna i to jak obrazowo potrafił przedstawić zwykłe elementy życia codziennego/natury - jak to mówią: chapeau bas 🎩
May 31, 2013
While not as good as some of Huysmans' novels, this collection of essays, articles, art critcism and prose poems still provides one with a fascinating glimpse into what life was like in Paris in the late 19th-century. Worth getting alone for the prose poem "Nightmare," a lovely piece in which Huysmans paints, with words, visions he experienced upon gazing at various prints from Odilon Redon's "Hommage a Goya" series (Huysmans refers to Redon as the "subtle Lithographer of Suffering" and "the Necromancer of the Pencil," as good a description as any).
July 27, 2011
Decadent literature and psychogeography by numbers. Prurient observations on the slums and the working classes designed to titillate to middle-class readers too nervous to become voyeurs themselves. Lights Out For The Territory by Iain Sinclair is a much better book than this, but this does illustrate some of the questionable aspects of psychogeography.
That said, Against Nature by Huysmans is one of my favourite novels, so he can certainly write.
That said, Against Nature by Huysmans is one of my favourite novels, so he can certainly write.
April 17, 2008
A classic snapshot of Paris street life circ. 1880's by one of the great writers of that period. Huysmans wrote the ultimate novel 'Against Nature' and this collection of short narratives or reporting one really can feel the excitement of life in Paris just before the big change in culture and society.
March 7, 2023
Les Folies Bergere comes back to life with gas lamps, cigar whiffs and the stench of sweat.
" The waltz stops dead. An ominous silence descends, brocken suddenly by an explosion from a champagne bottle. A shiver runs through the audience an "all right" resounds around the hall. The woman hurls herself through the air, flies beneath the light of the chandeliers, then letting go of the trapeze...."
The dancehall of the Brasserie European;
" Some of them, well turned out and decked with pretentious trinkets had preserved the former elegance of the tobacco-girls of the Gros-Caillou quarter to which they belonged; they flaunted long light button gloves, bought for fifteen sous at the dry cleaners and the two of them, squeezed into matte black Indian Cashmere dresses with Jade necklaces that rained sparkling drops around their necks, were shrewishly strutting about on the arms of two butchers from the Grenelle abattoir..."
The conversation between Madame Haumont and Madame Tampois takes on a burst of life. Parisian
Characters is simply a song of people blended with descriptive poetry and high art of a day at a cafe sipping espresso and nibbling bon-bons.
Landscapes;
"Fundamentally the beauty of a landscape consists in it's melancholy"
The Bieve is a by-gone wilderness near a river originally outside of Paris before being consumed by the city, Huysmans used to frequent.
" This suffering countryside, this threadbare stream, these ragged plains were all that were left to us and now their going to cut them to pieces. They're going to hang every last patch of earth out to dry , sell every bowl of water at public auction , filling the marshes, level the roads, tear up the dandelions and the brambles, the whole flora of rubbish dumps and wasteland"
Fantasies and Forgotten Corners.
In " Lowtide" he describes a boutique. "At first, you think of a morgue in which the torsos of decapitated cadavers are standing ; but soon the horror of these amputated corpse fades fades and more suggestive reflections come to mind , because that subsidiary charm of a woman, her bosom is here displayed, faithfully reproduced by the incomparable dressmakers who have constructed these busts."
Still Lifes describes a full color a Herring and a pub.
"A Hommage a Goya "plates by Odilon Redon, who was a friend of Huysmans, is displayed in a section of black and white.
The final story" Nightmare"
" Whichever it was, this mysterious face haunted me in vein. I tried to scrutinize it's far out gaze; in vain I tried to sound out a face that purely personal sufferings could not have furrowed in such a way; but the hieratic and dolorous image disappeared".
" The waltz stops dead. An ominous silence descends, brocken suddenly by an explosion from a champagne bottle. A shiver runs through the audience an "all right" resounds around the hall. The woman hurls herself through the air, flies beneath the light of the chandeliers, then letting go of the trapeze...."
The dancehall of the Brasserie European;
" Some of them, well turned out and decked with pretentious trinkets had preserved the former elegance of the tobacco-girls of the Gros-Caillou quarter to which they belonged; they flaunted long light button gloves, bought for fifteen sous at the dry cleaners and the two of them, squeezed into matte black Indian Cashmere dresses with Jade necklaces that rained sparkling drops around their necks, were shrewishly strutting about on the arms of two butchers from the Grenelle abattoir..."
The conversation between Madame Haumont and Madame Tampois takes on a burst of life. Parisian
Characters is simply a song of people blended with descriptive poetry and high art of a day at a cafe sipping espresso and nibbling bon-bons.
Landscapes;
"Fundamentally the beauty of a landscape consists in it's melancholy"
The Bieve is a by-gone wilderness near a river originally outside of Paris before being consumed by the city, Huysmans used to frequent.
" This suffering countryside, this threadbare stream, these ragged plains were all that were left to us and now their going to cut them to pieces. They're going to hang every last patch of earth out to dry , sell every bowl of water at public auction , filling the marshes, level the roads, tear up the dandelions and the brambles, the whole flora of rubbish dumps and wasteland"
Fantasies and Forgotten Corners.
In " Lowtide" he describes a boutique. "At first, you think of a morgue in which the torsos of decapitated cadavers are standing ; but soon the horror of these amputated corpse fades fades and more suggestive reflections come to mind , because that subsidiary charm of a woman, her bosom is here displayed, faithfully reproduced by the incomparable dressmakers who have constructed these busts."
Still Lifes describes a full color a Herring and a pub.
"A Hommage a Goya "plates by Odilon Redon, who was a friend of Huysmans, is displayed in a section of black and white.
The final story" Nightmare"
" Whichever it was, this mysterious face haunted me in vein. I tried to scrutinize it's far out gaze; in vain I tried to sound out a face that purely personal sufferings could not have furrowed in such a way; but the hieratic and dolorous image disappeared".
September 10, 2023
One can definitely see his budding writing style. Some of the pieces are really good, others boring. The barber is rly rly funny
November 6, 2023
A fine collection of naturalist stories that show the creeping macabre mood that would be at the forefront of Huysmans later work.
May 24, 2008
Perceptive glimpses of people, places, and things of late 19th-century Paris. Whether he writes of buildings or armpits, Huysmans is always keenly biting in his observations and honest to the point of being cruel. Huysmans goes well beyond where Zola stopped.
May 28, 2012
pretty much as it describes itself, concerning places, people and a few things, with some fondness for the seamier, vanishing parts of Paris, but more interest in a typically heady aestheticism of language.
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