This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. Paris, 1891. The novelist Durtal is writing a biography of Gilles de Rais — Marshal of France, companion of Joan of Arc, and one of the most prolific child-murderers in the history of the medieval world. It is difficult material, and Durtal finds it difficult to work: contemporary Paris, with its smug materialism, its comfortable mediocrity, and its contempt for anything beyond the immediately visible, offers him nothing he needs.
Then he learns that Satanism is not merely a chapter of medieval history. It is alive, organized, and active in the drawing rooms and back streets of the Third Republic. And through his contacts in the city's occult underworld, and through a woman who is not quite what she seems, he is going to see it for himself.
Là-Bas — Down There — is Huysmans's most famous novel after À Rebours, and it is unlike anything else in French literature: a work that weaves the documented crimes of a fifteenth-century Satanist with a firsthand investigation of living occultism in modern Paris, and arrives at a Black Mass described with a precision and an intensity that scandalized two continents. Serialized in 1891 over the furious objections of readers and moralists alike, banned from French railway kiosks, suppressed in America for indecency, and recognized by every serious reader since as a masterwork of the Decadent movement.
It is also the first appearance of Durtal — the writer who will go on, across three more novels, to find his way from this darkness toward something entirely different.
By Joris-Karl Huysmans. The most controversial French novel of 1891.
