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hypocrisy of a sin concealed. For one as tormented by self-loathing as Wilde, this candid vision of decadence was alluring. Temperamentally tempted to despair, he saw Baudelaire and Huysmans as kindred spirits. They were seeking enlightenment from their own inner darkness. He was trying to do the same.
    Far from vanquishing the religious question from their lives, the Decadents discovered that plunging themselves into the depths of sin brought them into closer contact with religion, even if the contact took the form only of conflict. Sin and despair were, after all, religious concepts. They were not physical, but metaphysical, realities. Furthermore, and crucially, despair was distinct from desolation. The former is the absence or the denial of hope, the latter the longing or the hunger for it. A desolate soul does not seek suicide; it seeks consolation. Ultimately, the hunger for hope engenders a hunger for faith. Thus, in the final chapter of A Rebours , the novel’s principal character, des Esseintes, discovers that his lustful appetites have not satisfied his inner hunger. In his hour of anguish, he realizes that “the arguments of pessimism were powerless to console him, and the only possible cure for his misery was the impossible belief in a future life”. At the very last, utterly desolate, des Esseintes breaks into a faltering prayer to the “impossible” God.
Ah! but my courage fails me, and my heart is sick within me!—Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the sceptic who would fain believe, on the galley-slave of life who puts out to sea alone, in the darkness of night, beneath a firmament no longer illumined by the beacon-fires of the ancient hope!
    In this agonizing cri de coeur we hear the embryonic convert pining for the authentic tradition, the “ancient hope”, that is only dimly discerned. Leon Bloy, in a poignant review of A Rebours written within weeks of the novel’s publication, wrote that Huysmans’ supreme achievement was to demonstrate that man’s pleasures were finite, his needs infinite. The choice that Huysmans had placed before his readers was “whether to guzzle like the beasts of the field or to look upon the face of God”. A similar conclusion was drawn in another review by the aging romantic writer Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, who highlighted the suggestive parallel between A Rebours and Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal .
Baudelaire, the satanic Baudelaire, who died a Christian, must surely be one of M. Huysmans’ favourite authors, for one can feel his presence, like a glowing fire, behind the finest pages M. Huysmans has written. Well, one day, I defied Baudelaire to begin Les Fleurs du mal again, or to go any further in his blasphemies. I might well offer the same challenge to the author of A Rebours . “After Les Fleurs du mal ,” I told Baudelaire, “it only remains for you to choose between the muzzle of a pistol and the foot of the Cross.” Baudelaire chose the foot of the Cross. But will the author of A Rebours make the same choice?
    Twelve years after these words were published, Huysmans recalled Barbey’s review: “Strange! But that man was the only one who saw things clearly in my case. . . He wrote an article which contained these last prophetic words: ‘There only remains for you to commit suicide or become a Catholic.’ ” By this time Huysmans had indeed become a Catholic, and he would spend the last years of his life in a monastery. Wilde, whose novel The Picture of Dorian Gray was greatly influenced by A Rebours and contains the same desolate cri de coeur , responded approvingly when he learned that Huysmans had entered a monastery, declaring his own desire to do the same. Like Huysmans, Wilde came to Christ and the Church via desolation, and even today, a hundred years after his death, he remains a controversial figure. Indeed, such are the moral somersaults that society has performed in the century since his death that he is now vindicated