The last scion of an aristocratic family, Des Esseintes loathes nineteenth-century bourgeois society and tries to retreat into an ideal artistic world of his own creation.

The narrative is almost entirely a catalogue of the neurotic Des Esseintes's aesthetic tastes, musings on literature, painting, and religion, and hyperaesthetic sensory experiences.

[2] In his preface for the 1903 publication of the novel, Huysmans wrote that he had the idea to portray a man "soaring upwards into dream, seeking refuge in illusions of extravagant fantasy, living alone, far from his century, among memories of more congenial times, of less base surroundings ... each chapter became the sublimate of a specialism, the refinement of a different art; it became condensed into an essence of jewellery, perfumes, religious and secular literature, of profane music and plain-chant.

As he wrote in his preface to the 1903 reissue of À rebours:It was the heyday of Naturalism, but this school, which should have rendered the inestimable service of giving us real characters in precisely described settings, had ended up harping on the same old themes and was treading water.

It scarcely admitted—in theory at least—any exceptions to the rule; thus it limited itself to depicting common existence, and struggled, under the pretext of being true to life, to create characters who would be as close as possible to the average run of mankind.Huysmans decided to keep certain features of the Naturalist style, such as its use of minutely documented realistic detail, but apply them instead to a portrait of an exceptional individual: the protagonist Jean des Esseintes.

In a letter of November 1882, Huysmans told Émile Zola, the leader of the Naturalist school of fiction, that he was changing his style of writing and had embarked on a "wild and gloomy fantasy".

It was late at night when the poet was shown over the house, and the only illumination came from a few scattered candelabra; yet in the flickering light Mallarmé observed that the door-bell was in fact a sacring-bell, that one room was furnished as a monastery cell and another as the cabin of a yacht, and that the third contained a Louis Quinze pulpit, three or four cathedral stalls and a strip of altar railing.

He was shown, too, a sled picturesquely placed on a snow-white bearskin, a library of rare books in suitably-coloured bindings and the remains of an unfortunate tortoise whose shell had been coated with gold paint.

I do not doubt therefore that it was in the most admiring, sympathetic and sincere good faith that he retailed to Huysmans what he had seen during the few moments he spent in Ali Baba's cave.

'[5] The epigraph is a quotation from Jan van Ruysbroeck ('Ruysbroeck the Admirable'), the fourteenth-century Flemish mystic:I must rejoice beyond the bounds of time ... though the world may shudder at my joy, and in its coarseness know not what I mean.

In this sense, À rebours recalls Gustave Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet (posthumously published in 1881), in which two Parisian copy-clerks decide to retire to the countryside and end up failing at various scientific and scholarly endeavors.

The protagonist fills the house with his eclectic art collection, which notably consists of reprints of the paintings of Gustave Moreau (such as Salome Dancing before Herod and L'Apparition), drawings of Odilon Redon, and engravings of Jan Luyken.

Illustrating his preference for artifice over nature (a characteristic Decadent theme), Des Esseintes chooses real flowers that apparently imitate artificial ones.

[1] Des Esseintes cares little for classic French authors like Rabelais, Molière, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, preferring the works of Bourdaloue, Bossuet, Nicole, and Pascal.

The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming ...[13] On the question of Huysmans' novel as an inspiration for The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ellmann writes:Wilde does not name the book but at his trial he conceded that it was, or almost, Huysmans's À rebours... To a correspondent he wrote that he had played a 'fantastic variation' upon À rebours and some day must write it down.

Stéphane Mallarmé responded with the tribute "Prose pour Des Esseintes", published in La Revue indépendante on January 1, 1885.

(Translated by Donald Davie)[19]The Catholic writer Léon Bloy praised the novel, describing Huysmans as "formerly a Naturalist, but now an Idealist capable of the most exalted mysticism, and as far removed from the crapulous Zola as if all the interplanetary spaces had suddenly accumulated between them.