I suppose all men of letters are like myself in this, that they never reread their works once they have appeared. Nothing in fact is more disenchanting, more painful than examine one’s phrases again a...

To judge by such family portraits as were preserved in the Château de Lourps, the race of the Floressas des Esseintes had been composed in olden days of stalwart veterans of the wars, grim knights wit...

More than two months slipped by before the time came when Des Esseintes found it feasible to immerse himself definitely in the peace and silence of his house at Fontenay; purchases of all kinds still ...

After the sale of his household goods, Des Esseintes kept on the two old servants who had looked after his invalid mother and between them had filled the double office of general factotum and hall-por...

One division of the shelves fixed against the walls of his blue and orange working-room was occupied exclusively by Latin works⁠—those works which minds broken in to conventionality by listening year ...

A carriage stopped late one afternoon before the house at Fontenay. As Des Esseintes never received a visitor; as even the postman did not venture within these deserted precincts, never having either ...

Simultaneously with his craving to escape a hateful world of degrading restrictions and pruderies, the longing never again to see pictures representing the human form toiling in Paris between four wal...

Buried in a vast hooded armchair, his feet resting on the silver-gilt balls of the firedogs, his slippers roasting before the burning logs that shot out bright, crackling flames as if lashed by the fu...

After this evening when, without any apparent cause, he had dwelt upon the melancholy memory of Auguste Langlois, Des Esseintes lived his whole life over again. He was now incapable of understanding o...

He had always been madly fond of flowers, but this passion which, during his residence at Jutigny, had at the first embraced all flowers without distinction of species or genus, had in the end grown m...

These nightmares recurred again and again, till he was afraid to go to sleep. He would lie stretched on his bed, sometimes the victim of obstinate fits of insomnia and feverish restlessness, at others...

In the course of that singular malady which plays such havoc with races of exhausted vitality, sudden intervals of calm succeed the crises. Without being able to explain the reason, Des Esseintes awok...

The terrified domestics hurried off in search of the Fontenay doctor, who did not understand one word of Des Esseintes’ condition. He muttered sundry medical terms, felt the invalid’s pulse and examin...

During the days that followed his return home Des Esseintes occupied himself in reviewing the books of his library, drawing from the thought that he might have been parted from them for a long period ...

The weather went from bad to worse. That year the seasons seemed to have changed places; after a long succession of rainstorms and fogs, blazing skies, like sheets of white-hot metal, now hung over th...

Two or three days had jogged by more or less satisfactorily, thanks to various devices for cheating the stomach’s reluctance, when one morning the highly spiced sauces which masked the smell of fat an...

After blazing up like a fire of straw, his enthusiasm for the “digester” was extinguished with a like rapidity. Soothed for the time being, his dyspepsia began again; presently, this over-stimulating ...

Des Esseintes shut himself up in his bedroom and turned a deaf ear to the knocking of the men’s hammers who were nailing up the packing-cases the servants had got ready; each stroke seemed to beat on ...

“Weird Women, translated from the French of Barbey d’Aurévilly. With thirteen engravings. Privately Printed, London.” ↩ Night was falling, a dubious night of Autumn; it was the hour when fair ones han...