Christa Giles

Adonis, and across the veined sardonyx sped
Artemis with her hounds. 442
167
The jewels’ raison d’être is their beauty and therefore
inheres in their form. It is interesting, then, that Des
Esseintes refers to Moreau’s paintings as being exquisitely
˝bejewelled,˝ and that Huysmans finds Moreau’s literary
equivalent to be La Tentation de Saint-Antoine as written by
the Goncourts:
S’il était possible de s’imaginer l’admirable et
definitive Tentation de Gustave Flaubert,
écrite par les auteurs de Manette Salomon,
peut-être aurait-on l’exacte similitude de l’art
si délicieusement raffiné de M. Moreau. 443
For Moreau speaks of ˝la beauté d’inertie,˝ and it is this
beauty which Huysmans and Wilde sought with their
catalogues and the elaborately wrought syntax of their
sentences, their revelling in the unusual word or epithet.
Indeed, A rebours might be said to be a long catalogue or
series of decorative units elaborating on the central theme,
of art and artifice.
Huysmans at all times stressed the primacy of style
and disagreed strongly with those who held the opposing
view: