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.
J.-K. 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.
If you enjoy dark, atmospheric tales that blur the lines between historical investigation and occult horror, this masterpiece of French decadent literature will captivate you completely. Huysmans weaves a mesmerizing exploration of evil that spans centuries, combining scholarly fascination with genuine supernatural dread. Perfect for readers who crave intellectually sophisticated horror and aren't afraid to venture into literature's darkest corners.
The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)
