Resumo de Against the Grain - Joris-Karl Huysmans

The Des Esseintes were an old family. In the Château de Lourps, the portraits of the ancestors were those of rugged troopers and stern cavalrymen. The family, however, had followed a familiar pattern; through two hundred years of intermarriage and indulgence, the men had become increasingly effeminate. Now the only remaining Des Esseintes was Jean, a man of thirty. By a kind of atavism, Jean’s looks resembled his first grandsire. The resemblance, however, was in looks only. Jean’s childhood had been unhappy. His father, living in Paris most of the time, visited Jean briefly at school once in a while when he wished to give moral counsel. Occasionally, he went to see his wife at the château. Jean was always present at those hushed interviews in which his mother took little interest. Jean’s mother had a strange dread of light. Passing her days in her shaded boudoir, she avoided contact with the world. At the Jesuit school, Jean became a precocious student of Latin and acquired a fair knowledge of theology. At the same time, he was a stubborn, withdrawn child who refused all discipline. The patient fathers let him follow his own bent, for there was little else they could do. Both his parents died while he was young; at his majority, he came into complete control of his inheritance. In his contacts with the world, Jean went through two phases. At first, he lived a wild, dissolute life. For a time, he was content with ordinary mistresses. His first love was Miss Urania, an American acrobat. She was strong and healthy; Jean yearned for her as an anemic young girl might long for a Hercules. Nevertheless, Miss Urania was quite feminine, even prudish in her embraces. Their liaison prematurely hastened his impotence. Another mistress was a brunette ventriloquist. One day, he purchased a tiny black sphinx and a chimera of polychrome clay. Bringing them into the bedchamber, he prevailed on her to imitate Gustave Flaubert’s famous dialogue between the Sphinx and the Chimera. His mistress, however, was sulky at having to perform offstage. After that phase, Jean began to be disgusted with people. He saw that men reared in parochial schools, as he was, were timid and boring. Men who had been educated in the public schools were more courageous but even more boring. In a frantic effort to find companionship, he wildly sought out the most carnal pastimes and the most perverted pleasures. Jean had never been strong, and from childhood he had been afflicted with scrofula.

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