At the center of this legendary Decadent novel is Durtal, a writer obsessed with the life of one of the blackest figures in history, Gilles de Rais—child murderer, sadist, necrophile and practitioner of all the black arts.

The book's detailed descriptions of the worst of humanity can make it a difficult read, but Huysmans quest for mysticism stands as a perfect metaphor for the symbolist movement, where art and life itself rejects the baseness of materialism, nature, and science and reaches for the immaterial world of angels, magic and black masses, of strange demonic hierarchy and forgotten saints.

La-Bàs is a magnificent fin de siècle novel that captures the uncertainty of the times and the essence of the symbolist and decadent movement.

This is a hardback edition published by University Books in 1958, no dust jacket.

The book is clean and tight with unmarked pages. Please look at the photos for details.