The manifesto of European decadence of the late 19th century and its first prose masterpiece. A novel admired by Oscar Wilde, Gabriele d'Annunzio and Paul Valery.

The story of the fragile and refined Duke des Essentes, who is painfully opposed to the full-blooded philistinism of bourgeois society and, in a kind of revenge, turned his whole life into an artificial aesthetic paradise filled with flights of imagination and exquisite pleasures of both sensual and aesthetic order. Huysmans immerses the reader in the intellectual world of the hero, in his discussions about aromas and colors, about painting and literature - into a world created according to all the canons of aestheticism, where the beauty of the flesh is perishable, and only art is eternal.