Why this book
This 1884 novel scandalized Paris on publication, denounced from pulpits as poison for impressionable young minds, yet it quietly became the secret bible of the entire Decadent movement — inspiring Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, and proving that a strange book almost without plot could still reshape the course of literature for a century.
The Story
Des Esseintes was born the very last of a noble line worn dangerously thin by generations of intermarriage among cousins, therefore he arrived into the world sickly, nervous, and strange, pale and hollow-eyed from birth, the family's old vitality already spent before he could put it to any real use.
His parents died while he was still a young boy, so distant Jesuit priests raised him instead in silent, candlelit halls — cold, exacting, brilliant men, therefore he grew into a solitary, deeply erudite young man, already quietly contemptuous of the ordinary, noisy people crowding the world just outside his window.
As a young man he chased society, women, and fashionable pleasure eagerly among his peers and cousins in Paris, but found every bit of it hollow, stupid, and exhausting beyond words, therefore he was left impotent, disgusted, and desperate to want something else entirely from the life stretched ahead of him.
Therefore Des Esseintes resolved to vanish from that whole tiresome world completely: he sold off the crumbling family château at last, secured a modest private income to live on quietly, and bought a small isolated house at Fontenay-aux-Roses, just outside Paris, far from every prying, judging eye.
There he decorated obsessively for months, sealing every window against real daylight and every door against real outside air, therefore building an entirely artificial refuge for himself — a private, jewel-toned world meant to shut out nature and the modern city for good, forever if he could manage it.
He filled the shuttered house with rare post-classical Latin authors, a single jewel-encrusted gilded turtle meant as living decoration, and Gustave Moreau's haunting Salomé paintings glowing on the walls, therefore assembling a private museum of pure obsession, curated entirely for an audience of exactly one man: himself alone.
But the gilded turtle, crushed helplessly under the sheer, glittering weight of its own jeweled shell, died quietly within weeks of arriving, therefore giving Des Esseintes an early, unmistakable sign that his artificial paradise could not even sustain one small living creature, let alone a man.
Increasingly, Des Esseintes wanted only one thing: total control over sensation itself, choosing exactly what beauty, scent, and taste reached him, therefore rejecting anything real, ordinary, or accidental that the natural world might otherwise offer him instead of his own careful design.
Alone now with only his memories for company, he recalled once trying to corrupt a poor, impressionable youth named Auguste Langlois at a brothel, hoping to twist him toward crime and ruin, but the boy's name never once appeared in the Police News, and Des Esseintes only regretted missing the scandal.
He remembered too his past lovers: Miss Urania, an American acrobat whose imagined masculine strength had disappointed him by proving ordinarily feminine after all, and a ventriloquist mistress who once voiced his private fantasies for him, before finally judging his desires too complicated and leaving him for good.
Therefore these old, half-buried memories curdled slowly into a genuine religious crisis, his childhood Catholic schooling resurfacing uninvited as guilt he could not shake off, while his already fragile nerves worsened week by week, his sleep thinning into fevered, anxious, sweat-soaked nights spent alone in the dark.
Seeking any relief at all, he ordered exotic hothouse flowers shaped unsettlingly like diseased flesh and open wounds, but most of them withered and died within days of arriving, therefore he read their slow decay as a private mirror of his own hidden, hereditary family sickness.
He then composed elaborate, carefully layered perfumes to chase away a foul smell that only he could hallucinate in empty rooms, but the painstaking, obsessive effort only drained him further still, therefore deepening the very exhaustion he had been so desperately trying to escape all along.
Restless again, and freshly inspired by reading Dickens's novels late at night, he resolved to finally travel to England himself, therefore buying guidebooks and railway timetables in advance, and rehearsing the whole imagined journey at English-style Paris taverns dressed up carefully to feel like distant London.
But sudden lethargy, and a private fear that real England would only disappoint him, just as an earlier trip to Holland once quietly had, sent him straight back home again instead, therefore his packed trunks stayed shut and unopened, and the whole planned journey was abandoned before it ever truly began.
Therefore he turned back instead to his own library, rereading old Catholic authors for comfort and favoring Barbey d'Aurévilly above all the rest, but found most of the remaining shelf trivial and dull, while the heavy summer heat quietly worsened his creeping, persistent anaemia day by day.
Hoping to strengthen his failing, wasted body, he acquired a strange new "digester" apparatus meant for artificial feeding, but it over-stimulated his stomach violently within days, therefore bringing on severe abdominal pain, vivid waking hallucinations, and a rising, dangerous fever that simply would not break.
Therefore a doctor was summoned urgently from nearby Fontenay in the night, who examined him carefully by candlelight and found unmistakable signs of true nervous collapse, not simple stomach illness — his entire fragile system was quietly breaking down beneath the surface of things.
The doctor now understood plainly what Des Esseintes wanted and feared: he craved his sealed, artificial world completely, yet his own body was quietly rebelling against the very isolation he had built to protect himself from the ordinary world outside.
The doctor prescribed a peptone enema instead of any solid food at all, which Des Esseintes embraced almost joyfully as the ultimate artificial meal fit for his tastes, therefore over several slow weeks he partially recovered his strength, his color, and his appetite for life itself.
But as he recovered his strength, he drifted straight back to redecorating and his same old obsessive habits within days, therefore the doctor read this quiet relapse not as good news at all, but as a genuine warning sign of real danger still ahead.
Therefore the doctor delivered a blunt, final ultimatum: change his entire way of life immediately and completely, or face madness or consumption before long, and Paris's finest medical specialists, called in for a second opinion, agreed with him completely and without exception.
Therefore Des Esseintes leased a small, plain flat back in central Paris and gave the painful order at last: pack up Fontenay completely and for good, therefore his hard-won sanctuary would be dismantled piece by piece around him, whether he felt ready for it or not.
In his very last days there, he learned from careful Church sources that sacramental bread, wine, oil, and incense were routinely adulterated across French parishes everywhere, therefore even the mass itself, the one ritual he still secretly longed for, stood quietly, permanently compromised.
Therefore, he reasoned bitterly to himself, transubstantiation became flatly impossible under such widespread fraud, every mass rendered hollow and void from the start, and the faith he had privately hoped to reach again slipped even further out of his desperate reach.
He raged privately at a rising bourgeois society that had replaced the old aristocracy he descended from and once represented, but found no real comfort in Schopenhauer or Pascal either, only a desperate, impossible hope for something waiting after death.
Therefore, as the old servant couple carried his books and packing cases toward the door one by one, Des Esseintes watched his entire artificial paradise dismantled around him piece by piece, and prayed one last, uncertain prayer: a doubting man, still fain to believe.
What it means
Against Nature says the self cannot be perfected by simply walling out the world — taste, beauty, and solitude, pushed far enough past their natural limit, curdle quietly into the very sickness and despair they were originally built to escape from in the first place.
🎧 Read-along audio is being prepared — text-only for now.
