The Parisian author Durtal is hard at work on his biography of the French knight and notorious child-murderer Gilles de Rais, but the question of how a confidant of Joan of Arc became such a figure of depravity is difficult to answer. Turning to his friend and confidant Des Hermies, he gradually discovers that the Satanism of de Rais’ time is not only still active in the Paris of the 1890s, but that there are practitioners in his social circle.
Huysmans–already famous from the success of Against the Grain–wrote Là-Bas (alternatively translated as Down There) at a time when he was struggling with his journey back to Catholicism, and the character of Durtal is a fairly unsubtle autobiographical portrait. Each character represents an allegorical faction in the religious debates of the time, and their conversations and interactions with Durtal help him navigate his own spiritual truth. The novel’s descriptions of both Satanic ceremonies and de Rais’ sexual violence against children shocked fin de siècle France; if a modern reader with a taste for horror is inured to the first, the second retains its nauseating power.
This Standard Ebooks edition is Keene Wallace’s 1924 translation from Huysmans’ original French, plus a restored scene of a sexual nature that had been excised from some other editions.
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