_A Rebours_ is a book that can only be written once, and since that date Huysmans has published a short story, _Un Dilemme_ (1887), which is merely a somewhat lengthy anecdote; two novels, _En Rade_(1887) and _Là-Bas_(1891), both of which are interesting experiments, but neither of them an entire success; and a volume of art criticism, _Certains_ (1890), notable for a single splendid essay, that on Félicien Rops, the etcher of the fantastically erotic. _En Rade_ is a sort of deliberately exaggerated record--vision rather then record--of the disillusions of a country sojourn, as they affect the disordered nerves of a town _névrose._ The narrative is punctuated by nightmares, marvellously woven out of nothing, and with no psychological value--the human part of the book being a sort of picturesque pathology at best, the representation of a series of states of nerves, sharpened by the tragic ennui of the country. There is a cat which becomes interesting in its agonies; but the long boredom of the man and woman is only too faithfully shared with the reader. _Là-Bas_ is a more artistic creation, on a more solid foundation. It is a study of Satanism, a dexterous interweaving of the history of Gilles de Retz (the traditional Bluebeard) with the contemporary manifestations of the Black Art. "The execration of impotence, the hate of the mediocre--that is perhaps one of the most indulgent definitions of Diabolism," says Huysmans, somewhere in the book, and it is on this side that one finds the link of connection with the others of that series of pessimist studies in life. _Un naturalisme spiritualiste,_ he defines his own art at this point in its development; and it is in somewhat the "documentary" manner that he applies himself to the study of these strange problems, half of hysteria, half of a real mystical corruption that does actually exist in our midst. I do not know whether the monstrous tableau of the Black Mass--so marvellously, so revoltingly described in the central episode of the book--is still enacted in our days, but I do know that all but the most horrible practices of the sacrilegious magic of the Middle Ages are yet performed, from time to time, in a secrecy which is all but absolute. The character of Madame Chantelouve is an attempt, probably the first in literature, to diagnose a case of Sadism in a woman. To say that it is successful would be to assume that the thing is possible, which one hesitates to do. The book is even more disquieting, to the normal mind, than _A Rebours._ But it is not, like that, the study of an exception which has become a type. It is the study of an exception which does not profess to be anything but a disease.