The last of a syphilitic aristocratic line retires to a house outside Paris to arrange a life entirely of his own taste: hothouse flowers that look artificial, a tortoise gilded and jewelled until it dies of it, a funeral dinner served in black. Huysmans wrote it while working thirty-two years as a civil servant; it was read aloud at Wilde's trial as the poisonous French novel, and gave the decadence its handbook.