Huysmans as a seismograph of modernity: Agnès Michaux

Between biography and fiction

Agnès Michaux, Huysmans vivant (Le Cherche Midi, 2024). [quote as HUV]
Agnès Michaux, La Fabrication des chiens, 1889 (Joëlle Losfeld, 2019). [quote as FDC]

Agnès Michaux has dedicated two books to Joris-Karl Huysmans, each illuminating and commenting on the other: a biography and a novel. While HUV (704 pages) is labeled a biography, it also employs literary techniques—rhythmic prose, scene reconstruction, and lyrical condensation. FDC is the first volume of a novel trilogy, set in Paris during the World's Fair, and features Huysmans as a character wandering through the book.

Wolfgang Asholt dedicates the final chapter of his book to Huysmans. French literature of the 19th century (JB Metzler, 2006, pp. 321–324) under the programmatic title “Joris-Karl Huysmans or the Literary Field of the Third Republic”—a title that already names the interpretive principle: Huysmans not as an individual genius, but as an indicator of the structures of the literary field of his time. Asholt describes the development of his work as a three-phase movement—naturalistic, decadent-symbolist, Catholic—held together by a single “literary project” that decisively alters the conception of the novel: the massive use of documents and the absence of actual events increasingly replace external plot. Return He considers it the "Bible of Decadence" and a "thunderclap" without which the crisis of Naturalism would hardly have found its contemporary echo – but at the same time as a dead end from which only Proust, Musil, and Joyce led the way out. Asholt, following Smeets, reads the conversion as a dialectical relationship: "Décadence et catholicisme sont donc intimement liés" – decadence is a precursor, not the opposite of faith, and Huysmans, in the 1903 preface, retrospectively constructs a teleology that forms the work into a unified whole. Michaux confirms this thesis of unity, but shifts its foundation: Where Asholt foregrounds the literary field and the sociology of publishing—Huysmans' remarkable change of publisher from Charpentier to Stock as a strategy of autonomy—and thus understands Huysmans primarily as an actor within an institutional field of forces, Michaux argues biographically and somatically: The unity of the work is not based on a constructed narrative of conversion, but on the continuity of a body-based method of perception that changes its material but retains its nature. Asholt's framework is field-theoretical, Michaux's is phenomenological—both support the thesis of continuity, but from opposite directions.

HUV is divided into three parts, which Michaux titles theologically – “Le fils”, “Le père”, and “Le Saint-Esprit” – without thereby telling a salvation history: The first part reconstructs his origins, childhood, and early writing years up to his Naturalist phase; the second traces his work from 1877 to 1895 in annual chapters whose titles are album titles from post-punk, goth, and industrial music; the third, considerably shorter part deals with his entry into the monastery and his death. “Le Saint-Esprit,” however, is not a final chord of redemption, but rather a fading away – the image of a man who has written himself out and whose spirit now lives on in his texts, not in heaven. The theological framework is therefore less a homage to Huysmans' conversion than a compositional paradox: Michaux borrows the language of faith to structure a profoundly secular biography, thereby revealing that Huysmans himself never proceeded any differently.

The main thesis is twofold: Huysmans is not an exceptional case, but rather a symptom and seismograph of his century—his disgust, misogyny, and hatred of progress are epochally structured, not privately pathological—and his work is not a succession of isolated phases, but a single, continuous process of deepening, in which the same sensory method successively captures the Parisian street, the satanic, and the liturgy. Stylistically, Michaux operates in the mode of literary biography: she reconstructs scenes from letters and texts—the balcony in December 1876, the Pension Hortus, the visit to Verlaine—accumulating epithets and perceptual details in long sentences that quote Huysmans's own prose structure without imitating it, and deliberately keeping the apparatus of references in the background. The result is a book that reads like a novel and informs like a monograph.

Agnès Michaux's trilogy "La Fabrication des chiens" (The Making of Dogs) is conceived as a fictional feuilleton and, against the backdrop of the Parisian Belle Époque, unfolds a dense interweaving of cultural, criminal, and social history in its decade-long installments (Vol. 1: 1889, Vol. 2: 1899, Vol. 3: 1909). In the first volume (1889), which is the focus of this review, the novel follows the young provincial Louis Daumale, an aspiring journalist who works for the Figaro Daumale enters the metropolis at the very moment of its technological and symbolic zenith with the World's Fair. Within this dazzling scene, imbued with optimism about progress, Michaux establishes an unsettling counter-narrative early on: the craze for newly bred lapdogs, which leads Daumale to research the dubious "Dr. Mangelle." This figure (whose name resembles that of the concentration camp doctor Mengele) functions as a cipher for an unbridled faith in science, intertwining animal breeding, discourses on degeneration, and proto-eugenic ideas. By drawing parallels to decadent aesthetic currents—such as those associated with Joris-Karl Huysmans—the novel simultaneously gains a literary-historical depth by revealing the aestheticization of the artificial and pathological as a defining characteristic of the era.

The programmatic title functions as a multifaceted metaphor: the "fabrication" of dogs not only refers to the historically documented practice of breeding as a fashionable status symbol, but also marks an epistemic shift in which life itself becomes malleable material. In the first volume, Michaux lays bare the ideological and affective dispositions that underpin this development—the fascination with control, classification, and improvement—thus already hinting at the catastrophic consequences that emerge more explicitly in subsequent volumes. In essence, a poetics of anticipation is revealed here: what is tested on animals acts as a portent of social and political radicalization. The novel thus reads not only as a historical reconstruction, but also as a precise diagnosis of those thought patterns that pave the way for the transition to a violent modernity.

Anyone who reads both texts, biography and novel, discovers that despite their different status, they share a common interest in understanding: They want to understand what it means to live in a time that sees itself as progress and in doing so loses sight of what is essential – and what a writer can do in such a time who does not want to lose sight of what is essential.

The critical reception of the biography confirms that Michaux's gamble paid off. Anne Crignon wrote (Note(May 2026), HUV is “un petit chef-d'œuvre de biographie” – a word that Crignon explicitly identifies as “pesé,” meaning carefully chosen, not used indiscriminately. The book was awarded the Prix Goncourt de la Biographie Edmonde Charles-Roux in 2026. Crignon describes how Michaux approached her dual project from a place of intimacy and knowledge: “douze mois de passion,” Michaux said in an interview – twelve months of intensive work during which she had no time to tire of the “difficultueux,” the difficult man. What at first glance sounds like a short period of time is the result of years of familiarity: Michaux had already explored Huysmans as a character in FDC, thus becoming acquainted with the material through the patience of fiction before embarking on the biographical synthesis.

Reading both books together is worthwhile not only because of their shared subject matter. It is worthwhile because HUV shows how Michaux approached her material, and because FDC shows what could emerge from this encounter in literary terms, even before the biography was written.

Cultural diagnosis and epochal signature: Huysmans between bureaucratic existence and the art of perception

Michaux opens her biography with a chapter on the biographer's craft, which itself can be read as a literary text. She describes the writing of a life as a "pietà," a "requiem," an "apocalypse"—revelation and end in one. This terminology is programmatic: Michaux is not interested in the positivist listing of facts, but in what shines between the facts. Biography, she argues, is always also the biographer's self-exposure, a "post-mortem voyeurism" that one might feel ashamed of, but which cannot be avoided if one truly wants to understand. The biographer manages betrayal, she says: the betrayal of privacy through death, the biographer's own betrayal of the dead person's silence.

The structuring principle of the biography is theologically fractured, as I mentioned at the beginning: three parts, designated "Le fils," "Le père," and "Le Saint-Esprit." But while the Trinity represents salvation history, Michaux describes a secular trajectory—from origin through maturity to the spirit left behind by the work. The chapter headings within the second part are album titles, spanning from 1877 to 1895: "Never Mind the Bollocks," "Pornography," "The Downward Spiral," "Heaven or Las Vegas." The pop-cultural coding suggests that Huysmans was punk avant la lettre, a saboteur of bourgeois expectations, a misanthrope with radical energy. The Sex Pistols, The Cure, Cocteau Twins—the bands behind the titles share an aesthetic worldview with Huysmans: darkness is not a mood, but a method of cognition.

The hero and his milieu

The biography begins in December 1876. Michaux stages Huysmans returning home from the omnibus, climbing five flights of stairs, stepping onto the balcony, and rolling a cigarette. The opening image is delicately chosen: no heroic pose, no literary arrival scene. A civil servant coming home from work. A man weighed down by everyday life. This opening sets the tone: Michaux wants to show that Huysmans' greatness did not arise despite his mediocrity, but from it.

What follows is a detailed reconstruction of the conditions under which a writer's life was formed. Michaux traces the search for a publisher for his debut novel. Marthe to Brussels, the humiliation at Hetzel's, who had read the manuscript of Spiced drageoir She asserted that Huysmans confused palette and content. She describes the circle of Wednesday patrons in the Rue de Sèvres – Céard, Ludo, Hennique, du Seigneur – and the collective enthusiasm for Zola, who at that time L'Assommoir published. It shows how a Parisian civil servant with writing ambitions became a naturalist who then betrayed naturalism; how the Mécréant became a convert; how Huysmans remained true to himself at every step, while he seemed to change.

The biography is not a chronological history with footnotes. It is a portrait that works with color, not line. Crignon captures this precisely in her review: HUV is "a time machine"—you are with Huysmans on the bus, climb the 125 steps to his apartment with him, sit with him on the small balcony in the smoke of his cigarette, while Pantoum purrs. This impression of immediate presence is not accidental. Michaux, the daughter of a teacher of the Third Republic type, ¹ learned to live in the 19th century at an early age – at ten years old ContemplationsSmall slips of paper filled with Hugo quotes tucked into her pocket. The century is as familiar to her as her own neighborhood; she writes about Huysmans' Rue de Sèvres as if she knew every cobblestone. Michaux has a gift for creating atmospheres—the musty stairwell, the smell of printer's ink in Brussels, the coldness of the ministerial corridors. She makes palpable how Huysmans' style arose from concrete confrontation with the world: the echolalia of the street, the smells of poverty, the "gent féline" of his Bibelots. Huysmans was, as Michaux shows, above all a master of perception—a person for whom the wrong sentence was physically painful and for whom the beauty of a precise era offered solace.

Excerpt 1: The opening scene – the balcony in December 1876

The biography opens with a scene that has no documentary basis in the strict sense, but is reconstructed from knowledge of Huysmans' daily life, his letters, his writings, and his residence. Michaux transports himself to a December evening in 1876: The civil servant arrives from the ministry, climbs the 125 steps, steps onto the balcony, and lights a cigarette. The scene ends with a laconic sentence, which Anne Crignon quotes in her Note-Review cited as a model for Michaux' atmospheric mastery.

This short excerpt exemplifies Michaux's technique. The first sentence sets the tone for the book: "Huysmans fume sans faire le malin"—he smokes without pride, without affectation. The "without affectation" is a biographical hypothesis. Michaux's Huysmans is a man who suffers without making a stance out of it. The following sentences condense this into a leitmotif: physical misery ("digestions difficiles," "amertumes," "névralgie") and emotional depth ("malheureux dans les grandes profondeurs") are not contradictions for Michaux, but rather correspondences. The body suffers because the soul suffers; the soul condenses its suffering into style. The rhythm of the last three sentences—short main clauses that accumulate like breaths—formally quotes Huysmans's own prose style, which stacks perceptions until an image emerges. The "Confort" at the end of the excerpt is not an ironic word. This is what Huysmans demands of the world: not happiness, but the minimum of warmth that allows him to write.

Excerpt 2: The Hortus Pension – the trauma of childhood

Embedded within the reconstruction of Huysmans' childhood and school years, Michaux describes the Pension Hortus on Rue du Bac, where the young Georges, as a half-orphan, lived under the conditions of a classic 19th-century boarding school existence. This passage is one of the darkest in the biography and demonstrates Michaux's ability to combine historical circumstances with psychological insight.

The passage is biographically significant because Michaux here builds a causal link: between the boarding school child who is cold and the writer who establishes a "tour" in his five-room apartment on the Rue de Sèvres that allows no one in. Huysmans' legendary domesticity—his passion for biblical texts, his cats, his sofa, his pipes—appears in Michaux's work not as an aesthetic choice, but as a therapy for early deprivation. The enumerative principle (the weekly menu register, the chain of infinitives at the end: "manger correctement, avoir chaud, être au calme") is formally Huysmans' own method: to overwhelm reality through accumulating naming. Thus, when she writes about him, Michaux writes in the mode of her subject. And by reducing Huysmans' concept of happiness to its most basic elements – “libre de fumer, libre de lire” – the last sentence of the excerpt makes it clear that this writer was not a luxury aesthete, but a person who could never take basic needs for granted.

Excerpt 3: The Portrait of the Century – Huysmans as a Symptom

At the end of the first major section, Michaux condenses her characterization of Huysmans into a cultural-diagnostic thesis: he is not an exceptional case, but a paradigm. This passage links the individual with the epochal and is one of the most theoretically ambitious moments in the biography.

This excerpt vividly illustrates Michaux's cultural-analytical ambition. The enumeration that fills the first sentence—seven noun phrases—formally reproduces the inventory that Daumale pins to the editorial wall in the novel, thus condensing what connects the two books: the cartography of an era. What Michaux formulates here is not an accusation against Huysmans, but a vindication through contextualization: he was misogynistic, fascinated by occult currents, and hostile to progress—like his century. This does not absolve him of guilt, but it makes him understandable and representative. The final formulation—"The century of infidelity and innovatory"—is one of the most powerful in the biography. It describes the 19th century as an age that did not remain true to its own promises, and thus implicitly vindicates the misanthrope: those who distrusted progress perhaps saw reality more clearly than those who followed it with jubilation.

Strengths and limitations of biography

Michaux treats her subject not as a genius in need of explanation, but as a human being who has lived. Huysmans appears in her work as a "forced by life," a prisoner of life who writes to make his cell bearable. This perspective saves the biography from hagiography. Crignon observes—with the incisiveness of a good literary critic—that Michaux herself is considered a "solaire," a sunny animator of the Canal+ years, and that her fascination with this "atrabilaire," this black-billed hypochondriac, who is more misanthropic than Houellebecq, reveals a "bon syndrome d'amour antagoniste": the love of the opposite as the most productive form of appropriation. Indeed, Michaux conceals neither Huysmans' misogyny nor his occasional intellectual arrogance. It shows how his image of women – torn between desire and contempt, between the earthly woman and the unattainable saint – was symptomatic of his century, without excusing him.

Particularly powerful are the passages in which Michaux illuminates the literary horizon: her veneration for Baudelaire, her complicated friendship with Zola, her late rapprochement with the Church. She shows how Return (1884) did not arise from nothing, but as a consequence of an intellectual path that Huysmans had been pursuing since Marthe What he embarked upon was a path away from naturalism as a method and towards mysticism as an escape route. For Michaux, the transformation of the decadent into the Oblate is not a conversion story, but the logical extension of a search for the absolute that was always inherent in writing itself.

Michaux's handling of sources is also valuable. She quotes letters, newspaper articles, and diary entries, but withholds the references. The biography is scholarly without becoming academic prose. Footnotes are scarce—instead, there is a bibliography at the end and the implicit assurance that nothing is invented unless explicitly identified as a reconstruction.

Not all decisions are equally convincing. The pop culture chapters occasionally feel contrived—not because the analogy is wrong, but because it doesn't always grow organically from the text. A chapter on Huysmans entitled "The Downward Spiral" is a powerful image, but Michaux doesn't consistently develop it. Here, the connection between epigraph and content remains looser than the idea promises.

Furthermore, one can criticize the biography for portraying the spiritual Huysmans – the writer of the Cathedral, On the way – less extensively treated than the naturalistic and decadent aspects. The third part, “Le Saint-Esprit,” is considerably shorter than the first two. This is a legitimate decision, which Michaux can justify through her interest in the early, more secular Huysmans; but readers who want to understand the converted Huysmans will feel somewhat underserved.

Finally, a methodological question: Michaux's empathetic tone—she clearly loves her subject—doesn't always prevent her from interpreting things a little too smoothly. Huysmans's inner turmoil, his notorious "n'y pas être" (the chalkboard with "On n'y est pas" on his own front door), his inability to form lasting bonds—these are named, but not explored in their full, painful depth. Michaux seems to love the darkness, but she stops short of it.

This does not change the fact that HUV is one of the more beautiful biographies of writers in recent French literature – a book that reads like a novel and informs like a non-fiction book, that is equal to its subject and has literary aspirations itself.

Paris 1889: Progress, Decline and the Fabrication of Man

The Belle Époque as a world at a tipping point

FDC was published in 2019, five years before the biography. Michaux had already read Huysmans by that time and appreciated him – she mentions it in the biography itself: a copy acquired by chance. Là-bas in a South French antiquarian bookshop, which initiated the slow process of rapprochement—but the novel, as the first volume of a trilogy, is not a precursor to a biography. It is a prelude to the year 1889, the year of the Exposition Universelle, the opening of the Eiffel Tower, and at the same time the year in which Huysmans began work on Là-bas starts.

The first-person narrator is named Louis Daumale, nineteen years old, a volunteer at the FigaroHe is a young upstart from the provinces, eager to conquer the capital. He is an observer, a journalist in the making, a young man who sees fin-de-siècle Paris with fresh eyes—and whom Michaux allows to meet Huysmans. This encounter lies structurally at the heart of the novel and is one of its most beautiful chapters.

Michaux reconstructs 1889 as a moment in which everything seems simultaneously possible and everything simultaneously reveals its price. The exhibition celebrates progress, science, imperial France, the Eiffel Tower. Daumale wanders through balls, newsrooms, cafés, and brothels. He meets a courtesan, Suzanne, who teaches him that the system they both manage—he as an up-and-coming journalist, she as a "grande horizontale"—is essentially identical: consuming and being consumed. He reports on the Javanese dancers at the exhibition and grapples with the unease of the exoticizing display. He interviews a physiologist named Dr. Mangelle, who fantasizes about "human selection"—and whose language already foreshadows the eugenic catastrophe of the next century.

This novel is rich in subtext. Michaux writes about 1889, but she writes about all fin-de-siècle moments, all eras in which a society is polished to a high sheen while, beneath the surface, fractures are growing. The obsessions, the recurring themes in the FigaroThe things the editorial staff pins to the bulletin board – “la question sociale, le péril juif, la dégénérescence de la race, la désagrégation de la famille” etc. – don't sound like history today. They also sound like a list of the present.

The cipher that gives the novel its title embodies this dual temporality: the factory farming of dogs, the breeding of "improved" breeds. Dr. Mangelle asserts that what works for dogs must also be possible for humans. The dogs in the novel are not merely decorative elements of fin-de-siècle decor—courtesans with lapdogs, ladies with levrettes—but a structuring motif: in the dogs is condensed what the era does to life as a whole. They are molded, refined, optimized, until only a socially acceptable decorative element remains of their original nature. This, the novel implies, applies to all beings in this society.

Huysmans as a fictional character

The encounter between Daumale and Huysmans – reserved for a late, lengthy scene after Daumale has observed the writer several times in the Café de Flore without daring to speak to him – is the literary heart of the novel.

Michaux describes the writer with the precision of a woman who has studied her subject for years. Huysmans, as she describes him, is: “thin, framed by a short, blond-silver beard, with deep-set eyes and a bird-of-prey nose. A grey fly hung on his incredibly white shirt like a dead pigeon.” ² The image of the dead pigeon on the shirtfront is decidedly unflattering, but it shows Huysmans as a person who carries life within him, who visibly bears the weight of sadness, and who is therefore more honest than all the polished visitors to the exhibition.

The conversation between the two is unexpectedly lighthearted. Huysmans laughs a lot. He mocks Péladan, the freeloaders of Naturalism, and his minister, who Return He called it “À l'envers”. He tells of Là-bas, the novel he is just beginning to write. He shows Daumale a Forain painting in the bedroom – a prostitute in a lupanar, a man with a cane handle, cool and untouched. He asks if Daumale is having sex, and advises him to avoid legitimate love affairs. He burns an exorcism paste on the stovetop.

This Huysmans character is neither a homage nor a parody. It is the result of a close reading. Michaux has translated the biographical Huysmans—his laughter, his language, his hatred of Pedzouilles and Muffeons, his cat cult, his simultaneity of cynicism and spirituality—into a fictional character who lives because he doesn't have to explain everything.

The perspective is particularly clever. Daumale, the nineteen-year-old optimist who believes in progress and considers Paris a glamorous place, encounters Huysmans as the antithesis of his own hopes. Huysmans tells him: "I am a strange dog who only sniffs out what smells bad." ³ And Daumale replies that Huysmans is a "ferocious and highly volatile man," adding that he is sometimes unfair. Huysmans: "wild and a hothead of the first order." ⁴. In this brief exchange, the novel's theme is condensed: injustice as the price of sincerity, bitterness as a form of honesty.

At the end of the scene, Daumale accompanies Huysmans on a walk to the Pont-Neuf, then to the Pont Royal, and back to the neighborhood. Huysmans, who is grumbling in his apartment, laughs outside. He is amused by dogs in the river, by porters, by the ordinary bustle of the city. This is perhaps the most beautiful nuance that Michaux gives the writer: beneath the misanthropy is a person who enjoys life when he doesn't have to suffer through it.

Suzanne, Soyeuse and the Order of Bodies

Besides the encounter with Huysmans, the novel features a second narrative thread: the love story between Daumale and the courtesan Suzanne. This story, too, is intertwined with the Huysmans theme. Suzanne is a character who... Marthe and is reminiscent of Des Esseintes' impossibility of connection, although Michaux never makes the analogy explicit.

Suzanne and Daumale both come from nothing, both want Paris, both know that their rise is based on a system they manage and that manages them. Their small dog, Soyeuse—black fur, short snout, round eyes—is not coincidentally described as if nature had miscalculated him: an animal that doesn't quite fit the original design. In him, the novel's theme of optimization becomes tangible: he is the product of "fabrication"—built for a purpose that has little to do with life anymore.

The love story doesn't end in catastrophe, but in estrangement—a quiet, unsentimental estrangement that both characters know before it's even spoken. When Daumale takes the walk with Huysmans at the end of the novel and notices how, despite all his bitterness, the writer takes pleasure in what he sees, he begins to detach himself from Suzanne's world. Not because he no longer desires her, but because Huysmans has shown him another possibility: the possibility of living in this sick century without serving it.

1899: Huysmans l'inchangé

Huysmans is also present in the second volume (1899) – but differently than in the first, for there (1889) Huysmans was an intellectual force of gravity: Daumale observed him, hesitated for a long time before speaking to him, and then received a kind of initiation in the Rue-de-Sèvres apartment. The encounter changed his language and perception. Huysmans appeared there as the system of thought with which Daumale first learned to articulate his unease with the promise of progress at the fin de siècle.

In the second volume (1899), Huysmans has become a figure of friendly quotation. He appears several times—as a memory, as a correspondent, as the subject of a visit to Ligugé. The crucial visit occupies several chapters and forms the structural center of the Huysmans narrative: Daumale travels to Poitou, meets the writer as an oblate—that is, as a layman who has bound himself to the Benedictine monastery of Ligugé through a personal vow, without being a monk, and lives in his own apartment right next to the monastery—and discovers that Huysmans has not changed. The same four-fingered hand, the same Cheshire-style mouth, the same muffeton-like fire. His famous catalogue of weariness – “It makes me sick to write / Religion makes me sick / Art makes me sick / Women make me sick / Nature makes me sick / Paris makes me sick” – is literally the same Huysmans from 1889, only ten years older and in La Cambrousse. Daumale explicitly comments on this: “My friend Huysmans was old, but he hadn’t changed.” This is Marc Smeets’ Huysmans l'inchangé (Rodopi, 2003) as a scene in a novel.

Whether the second volume marks a departure from the tendencies shaped by Joris-Karl Huysmans can only be answered with nuance: both yes and no. Yes, because in 1899 Louis Daumale embodied a significantly altered form of existence—no longer as a journalist of analytical words, but as a photographer of the evident surface; cosmopolitan, socially integrated, and physically anchored in a now "lived" Paris that was no longer merely a showcase of progress. This shift is pointedly demonstrated in his reaction to Huysmans' tiradic "m'emmerde": Daumale responds with laughter and mild contradiction, thus with an attitude that allows for intimacy without succumbing to a total negation like that of decadence. And yet no, because Huysmans is not dismissed as an outdated authority, but remains present as a necessary mirror: The melancholic farewell scene underscores continuity rather than rupture, and even the monastic retreat to Ligugé confirms less a conversion than a constant in character. The real development, therefore, lies not in a new worldview, but in a changed attitude toward it: Daumale has learned to endure the darkness of Huysmans's gaze without allowing himself to be determined by it—a maturation that consists in coexistence, not in overcoming.

In the third volume (1909), Joris-Karl Huysmans is no longer an active part of the plot; he died in May 1907. While Agnès Michaux had him prominently featured alongside figures like Proust or Debussy in the second volume (1899), wandering through literary Paris, the final volume of the trilogy focuses on the historical luminaries who shaped the year 1909 and the impending transition to modernity: Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo Picasso, Erik Satie, and Marcel Proust.

Excerpt 1: The List of Obsessions – An Inventory of a Century

The novel opens with a soirée at Baron de M.'s in November 1889. Nineteen-year-old Daumale observes the gathering and recalls an editorial exercise he had completed: he had pinned a list of the collective fears and obsessions of his time to the bulletin board of the FigaroThe editorial staff was asked to tick the boxes for the people they themselves employed. The passage appears casual, but it is the key structuring text for the rest of the novel.

This passage is the novel's programmatic catalogue. The inventory form as a diagnosis of the era is Michaux's conscious response to Huysmans's own technique of accumulation. And Daumal's youthful reply – "True youth demanded that none of this be ticked." ⁵ This is simultaneously his promise to himself and the first indication that he will not keep it. For by the end of the novel, he will have marked several of the boxes. What Michaux stages here is the mechanism by which an era shapes its children, even those who believe they can resist it.

Excerpt 2: Daumale recognizes himself in the essence

On the Champs-Élysées, after an unpleasant encounter with the physiologist Mangelle and a chance rendezvous with Suzanne, Daumale finds himself alone in the gray November light. The scene marks a turning point: the moment when the optimistic young man from the provinces realizes that he is on his way to becoming a city dweller, yet simultaneously finding the freedoms of the city eluding him.

Huysmans, hitherto a marginal figure, suddenly appears as an inner teacher: Daumale reads through his work. Return and recognizes himself. The phrase "Tout petit, sans noblesse, mais pourtant!" is precisely chosen—it doesn't deny that the comparison is presumptuous, but insists on it nonetheless. This is the kind of honesty that Michaux appreciates in Huysmans' characters and which she inscribes here in her narrator. The subsequent metaphor—"le toutou divertissant d'un monde qui ne m'aimerait jamais"—takes up the novel's title and turns it on its head self-critically: not the bred dog of industrial optimization, but the domestic dog of social convenience, who is no better off. Huysmans' Return In this scene, it functions as a mirror – and the shock of seeing one's own image in it is, according to Michaux's concept, the actual reading exercise that the book demands of its readers.

Excerpt 3: Huysmans in front of the towers of Saint-Sulpice

Towards the end of the novel, Daumale accompanies Huysmans on a visit to Verlaine, who lives in a room where books mingle with misery. On the way home, Huysmans pauses in front of the church of Saint-Sulpice. The scene connects the social (Verlaine's destitute situation) and the literary (Là-bas (is mentioned) and the metaphysical in a brief exchange.

Saint-Sulpice is not just any place in Michaux's entire Huysmans complex. The church stands where Huysmans's childhood began, on the Rue Saint-Sulpice, and it is repeatedly described in the biography as a monument to his inner topography—the towers he saw as a child, the square to which he looked back as he lay dying. That Michaux allows Daumale and Huysmans to find rest precisely here, after the harrowing visit with Verlaine, is a compositional decision of considerable weight. Huysmans's outburst—"ecrasé de l'art," "dégueultif," "emmerdatoire"—is the raw language of the biography, placed in the mouth of the novel's protagonist. And his answer to the devil's question—the image of the "vasistas," the small skylights to the invisible world—reveals: The soul is not open, but it has loopholes. This is not mysticism; it is, rather, mechanics. And it is also a precise description of what Huysmans is referring to in Là-bas It begins: not to fling open the door to the invisible, but to gently push it open to see what awaits behind it.

The principle of truthfulness

What Michaux identifies in both texts as the true strength of Huysmans can be summed up in a single word, which she uses repeatedly: "unjust, sometimes only, but with complete sincerity." For Michaux, Huysmans is above all a writer of sincerity, of a ruthless claim to truth that knows no safe spaces – neither for society nor for himself.

Michaux describes this quality in his biography as a result of his background and his position. As a civil servant who writes, he has no economic incentive to flatter the public. As a misanthrope without social ambitions, he can say what he thinks. As Baudelaire's heir, he has the privilege of seeking out the "flowers of evil" in his own era without offering solace.

In FDC, this attitude is reflected in Daumal's reading of Return commented. Daumale writes: “Return It's not stylish, it's like the ugly guy who wrote it. Horribly funny. So funny that it makes you think. ⁶ This is a sharp characterization of the book, which is mentioned shortly before in the novel itself. Return It is not a handbook of decadence, although it has been read as such. It is a book about the impossibility of continuing to live at all, one that never pities its protagonist but observes him like an entomologist an insect on a pin.

Decadence as a diagnosis, not a pose

In his biography, Michaux dismantles the simplistic equation of Huysmans and Decadence. The Decadence movement, to which Return While it significantly contributed to this, for many of its recipients it was a way of life, a costume. For Huysmans himself, Michaux shows, it was a diagnosis: an assessment of what happens to a certain type of person in a certain civilization.

Des Esseintes is not an idealized image, but a diagnosis. A man who has heightened all irritability to the point of unbearability, who can only live in an artificial world because the real one overwhelms him—this is not an ideal, but rather a chronicle of illness. The irony of the book, which Daumale points out in Michaus's novel, lies in the fact that Des Esseintes plans a trip to London, a trip he knows perfectly well will not take place—and that he is proven right. The consequence of his withdrawal lies in the prohibition of action. This, in essence, is decadence: not the pleasure of decay, but the realization that every way out is closed, and the refusal to pretend otherwise.

In FDC, Daumale realizes towards the end of the novel that he himself is in danger of becoming "un des Esseintes": "Un des Esseintes ne poussait-il pas en moi ? Tout petit, sans noblesse, mais pourtant !" He is frightened by this and simultaneously understands it as a sign of maturation. That he has the language of Return Finding an explanation for his own discomfort means that he is finally being honest with himself.

1889 and the long fin de siècle

Both books take the year 1889 as their center of gravity. For Michaux, the Exposition universelle is not an isolated case; it constitutes a paradigm: a society that celebrates its progress while refusing to see the cracks beneath the gleam. Dr. Mangelle's eugenics plans, the murderous comments about Javanese dancers, the systematic concealment of poverty behind the magnificent buildings—Michaux connects all of this with Huysmans' own assessment of his century.

In the biography, Michaux quotes Huysmans' diagnostic language: "panmuflisme," "muffetons," "pedzouilles"—his terms for the majority of mediocrities who mistake falsehood for truth. This language is crude and comical, yet analytically precise: Huysmans describes a society that atrophies aesthetic sense because it serves no economic function and considers anyone who insists on beauty an eccentric. Crignon points out in her review that Michaux carefully contextualizes such terms: "pantruchard" (Parisian), "panmuflisme" (widespread crudeness), "copurchic" (elegance, popularized by the feuilleton press in 1885)—they appear in the text like visits from another era, making the reader a contemporary of Huysmans, who first has the vocabulary explained to them and then uses it themselves. This is biographical technique on par with good historical fiction.

Michaux shares this diagnosis. Her choice to set a novel in 1889 and intertwine it with a biography extending to 1907 is also a statement about the continuity of this issue. The fin de siècle does not end in 1900. It does not even end in 1914. It is a state of aggregation of modernity.

Writing as exorcism

The most striking intersection between the novel and the biography is the motif of the exorcism paste. In FDC, Huysmans burns a piece of paste made of frankincense, camphor, myrrh, cloves, and St. John's wort in Daumal's presence. Someone has sent it to him because "Là-bas" would attract evil spirits. Huysmans performs the ritual with a mixture of seriousness and irony. The smell fills the cramped workspace.

This scene doesn't reappear directly in the biography – but the image of writing as exorcism runs throughout the entire work. Michaux describes how Huysmans wrote each of his books against something: against mediocrity, against lies, against the Church, against himself. Writing as a purification ritual, as an attempt to drive evil or falsehood from the world and from one's own mind – this is one of the connecting threads between the two texts.

That Huysmans actually entered a monastery at the end of his life fits into this logic. He had pushed his writing so far that it led him to the limits of what could be said; beyond this limit lies only prayer or silence. The biography portrays this path as an inner necessity, not as a capitulation.

Conclusion

Stylistic similarity: Michaux and Huysmans write

It would be incomplete to conclude this essay without making observations on language. In both books, Michaux has developed a style that respects Huysmans without imitating him.

HUV writes in long, charged sentences that occasionally recall the master's orgies of nominalization. Michaux loves enumeration, the accumulation of epithets, the hammering of individual images into an overall atmosphere. At the same time, her style is more feminine, in the sense of being more relational. Huysmans writes about things, about smells, about cityscapes, with a gaze that dissects everything and embraces nothing. Michaux encompasses her subject without sentimentalizing it.

In FDC, Daumale increasingly adopts elements of Huysmans's mode of perception. Early in the novel, he describes women as objects of critique and desire—and of self-critique regarding this gaze. Later, after meeting Huysmans, his syntax changes: the sentences become longer, the observations more precise, the ironies more bitter. It is as if the encounter with the writer has also transformed the narrator's prose.

This is a form of literary homage that goes beyond mere reference: Michaux lets her narrator take on Huysmans' eyes – thus showing that a writer you actually read changes your own perception.

A changed perspective on Huysmans?

1. The author as body – against textual immanence

The literary reception of Huysmans was long characterized by a fundamental paradox: his texts were read as radically autofictional self-expressions—Huysmans himself encouraged this approach, stating that no one had immersed themselves more deeply in his books than he had—yet he was treated methodologically as an immanent entity, as if the biographical circumstances of this self-inscription were irrelevant. While the first critical complete edition, published by Classiques Garnier since 2017 and edited by Jean-Marie Seillan (Université Côte d'Azur) and Pierre Glaudes (Sorbonne), has considerably broadened the philological basis—each volume contains comprehensive critical apparatuses on the genesis, sources, and intertexts—the fundamental question of what biographical knowledge means for the reading of the text has not been methodologically resolved by textual scholarship.

Michaux intervenes here with the instrument of embodied life. The Huysmans she reconstructs is first and foremost a body: with an upset stomach, shivering, addicted to nicotine, dependent on the warmth of a cat. This has consequences for the reading of the texts: Des Esseintes' self-imposed isolation is not an aesthetic choice, but the survival strategy of a hypersensitive individual. Des Esseintes' room, Durtal's monastic cell, Folantin's kitchen – stations of the same bodily history that Michaux distills from letters, biographies, and texts. The topography of Huysmans's texts is not to be read merely as a symbolic spatial structure, but as a somatic necessity that has been objectified in literature.

Robert Baldick's 1955 biography—still the definitive work in the English-speaking world, updated by Brendan King in 2006—had hinted at this path, but in the mode of a positivist life story, not in terms of its poetological implications. Michaux picks up where he left off and goes further.

2. Habitus without class – the aesthetics of civil servants

Scholars have generally situated Huysmans within the sphere of aristocratic decadence: as Baudelaire's literary heir, as a progenitor of aestheticism, as a precursor of Wilde. Michaux significantly shifts this framework by insisting on a social context that has thus far received little attention in the analysis of his work: Huysmans is a civil servant. Not a rentier, not a bohemian, not an aristocrat—a desk jockey in the middle ranks of the civil service who commuted daily by bus for thirty years and wrote in the evenings.

The luxury inventory of the Decadence – the tortoise with gemstone inlay, the library of Latin perversities – is not, in Michaux's work, an expression of a lived worldview, but of its compensatory negation. Return is not a program, but an ideal. The civil servant as decadent: this is a socio-historical category that Michaux offers to research and which has hardly been developed yet – curiously enough, also by Seillan (Huysmans: politics and religion(Classiques Garnier, 2010) not, although this work convincingly refutes the apolitical myth and shows how Huysmans, as a disillusioned republican, arrived at a counter-revolutionary Catholicism and providentialist conspiracy thinking via anarchist sympathies. Seillan's perspective is ideological critique, Michaux's social poetics – both complement each other without being identical.

3. The departure from naturalism – not a break, but a radicalization

Research has examined the history of Huysmans' work – from Marthe (1876) about Return (1884) and Là-bas (1891) to On the way (1895) and Cathedral (1898) – long interpreted as a sequence of ruptures: Naturalism, Decadence, Occultism, Conversion. This periodization scheme is essentially found in Baldick and has since been adopted without resistance. Marc Smeets has in Huysman's change: histoire d'une conversion (Rodopi, 2003) argues systematically against this: Conversion changes the person, but not the writer; the work remains – as the title suggests – unchanged and true to itself. Smeets uses the host motif, which is by Return Sainte Lydwine It remains constant. The religious element is present in his early work, while the naturalistic element is never abandoned in his later work. Aude Jeannerod has demonstrated the same continuity for art criticism: those who project Huysmans' aesthetic development onto his spiritual biography miss the contradictions in his concrete judgments about art, which follow a sensory-pre-theoretical principle, not a religious teleology.

Michaux follows this line of continuity, but radicalizes it with a strong thesis: Not only does the method remain the same – in Là-bas The naturalistic documentation method is applied to the Satanic, in Cathedral on the liturgy – but the monastery is the final consolidation of the “tour”, the retreat that Huysmans had been constructing throughout his life. On the way and Cathedral These are not endpoints of a salvation history, but rather stations in a sensory exploration that has found its richest source material to date in the monastic sphere. Huysmans also described monastic life – and then left it again.

The older category of “naturalisme spiritualiste”, which Pierre Cogny introduced into research and which a more recent dissertation (Paris IV, 2014) has developed further philosophically – with the argument that Huysmans distinguishes between a naturalistically given reality and a “réel” of regenerative intensity, with Schopenhauer’s pessimism remaining the constant philosophical foundation – finds a biographical grounding in Michaux.

4. Misogyny as a structural problem

Michaux is the first biographer who neither defends Huysmans' misogyny nor dismisses it as a product of its time, but analyzes it as a structural, literarily productive problem. The comparative literature scholar Mireille Dottin-Orsini has in This woman is dissent fatale (Grasset, 1993) provided the context: Huysmans's portrayals of women are part of an epochal discourse in which naturalist ideology, the science of hysteria, and symbolist image production interact. Éléonore Reverzy has shown for the critical edition of Huysmans's complete works that, despite his declared misogyny, Huysmans creates female characters who defy easy categorization.

Michaux adds a biographical dimension to this: the misogyny runs deeper than the era. It is rooted in his early attachment to his mother, in the painful love affair with the Bobino actress, in his inability to accept women as reality. The transition from prostitute to saint is not a moral purification, but rather the continuation of the same inability under different guises. The Virgin Mary as the last female figure he can write without devaluing her: a dialectic that can hardly be reconstructed without considering his biography.

5. Read Huysmans after Michaux

What specific changes in one's view of Huysmans' texts after reading Michaux?

Return It loses its status as a manifesto and gains that of a soliloquy. Placing it within the Baudelaire-Gautier-Flaubert tradition is not incorrect, but incomplete. The book is also the utopia of a man who takes the bus every morning and spends eight hours working on files – and this explains the strange credibility of his digressions, which is not based on any lived aristocracy, but on the intensity of his imagination as a form of compensation.

Là-bas It regains the methodological unity that earlier research could poorly explain in the hybridity of treatise and novel: naturalistic documentation of the invisible, a consequence, not a departure.

And Huysmans' language—the neologisms, the archaisms, the "muffetons" and "pedzouilles" and "copurchics," which Seillan and the complete edition philologically situate within their historical contexts—no longer appears, according to Michaux, as an aesthetic whim, but as a program of linguistic-political resistance. Every rare word is an act against "panmuflism." Every neologism is a claim to sovereignty over a medium that everyday life threatened to dispossess daily.

This is the Huysmans that Michaux has unearthed: not a dandy, not a mystic, not a convert—a writer who made life bearable through the medium of writing, from the echolalia of the Parisian street to the silence of the monastery. Academic research has explored the individual aspects of this image—philology, political ideology, art criticism, the gender question. Michaux has brought all of this together and made it visible in two books that, while not replacing research, provide it with a vividly sharpened overall picture, without which individual studies would be rendered meaningless.

This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.

Notes

1. “J'ai la chance d'être la fille d'un instituteur,” Crignon quotes in The Obs Michaux in an interview, and adds the context “Un instituteur façon IIIe République”.>>>
2. "Maigre, encadré d'une courte barbe blonde et argentée, aux yeux enfoncés et au nez d'oiseau de proie. Sur sa chemise incroyablement blanche, a lavallière grise tombait comme un pigeon mort.">>>
3. “Je suis un drôle de chien qui ne flaire que le nauséabond.”>>>
4. “Injuste, parfois seulement, mais en toute sincérité.”>>>
5. “La vraie jeunesse exigeait de n'en cocher aucune”>>>
6. "Return n'est pas chic, it's like the affair bonhomme qui l'a écrit. Cruellement drôle. Drôle à faire réfléchir.”>>>