Drifting a Vau-L'eau (Dedalus European Classics)
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6 Huysmans’ novel of 1879, Les Soeurs Vatard caused a certain outrage in the press of the time because it likened the smell of working women’s dirty underwear to a mix of rotten charcuterie and the acrid stink of cat’s piss.
7 Léon Chaperon (1840-1884) was a critic who wrote for L’Événement and who was given to outbursts of moral outrage in his criticism. He denounced Maupassant’s collection of short stories, La Maison Tellier, for example, calling it “filth” and “a repugnant book”. In 1880 he criticised Les Soirées de Médan, the Naturalist collection of stories that included Huysmans’ Sac au dos, describing the Naturalists as “overwrought with vanity” and the book’s preface as “simply vulgar”. Pierre Véron (1831-1900), a Parisian journalist and later editor of the satirical magazine Charivari. Véron had himself featured in an issue of Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui in 1879. Véron had also been among those who had attacked Les Soirées de Médan, fulminating against “all the baroque preciosities and pretentious neologisms of M Huysmans.”
8 Huysmans’ novel of 1881, En ménage, which dealt with the conjugal trials of André Jayant and his attempt to find a suitable living arrangement, featured a cat called Barre de Rouille (‘Streak of rust’). Huysmans was a longtime cat owner, and cats feature in many of his novels.
9 Huysmans’ semi-autobiographical story about serving in the army during the Franco-Prussian war was published in Soirées du Médan in 1879, as Sac au dos. Although not an ostensibly political story it was generally anti-war in tone.
10 Huysmans first book was a collection of prose poems called Le Drageoir à épices, published in 1874 at his own expense.
11 Zola’s novel of 1876 on the social dangers of alcohol caused a certain outrage on publication, being seen by some as too coarse in its presentation of the working classes as drunkards. Zola’s response was that he was portraying life as it was.
12 The Dutch genre painter Jan Steen (c.1626-1679) was frequently mentioned by Huysmans as an exemplar of down-to-earth realism.
13 The leading characters of En ménage, À vau-l’eau, and À rebours respectively.
14 The writer and critic Émile Hennequin (1859-1888) had recently written a profile of Huysmans for the Revue Indépendante, on 4 July 1884.
15 In Huysmans’ 1881 novel, En ménage the lead character André Jayant suffers from what is termed in the original une crise juponnière (‘a petticoat crisis’), in other words an overpowering sense of desire for female company. The term combines the psychology of desire and lust with a medicalised vocabulary.
16 The first edition of Croquis parisiens appeared in 1880, and included illustrations by Jean-François Raffaëlli (see note below) and Jean-Louis Forain (1852-1931), a painter who early in his career was associated with the Impressionists. A revised and expanded edition, minus the illustrations, was published in 1886.
17 Aloysius Bertrand (1807-1841) a French poet considered a forerunner of Symbolism who was known mostly for his prose poems; Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), poet, essayist and translator, his prose poetry was a huge influence on subsequent poets such as Rimbaud, Verlaine and Mallarmé.
18 François Villon (1431-c.1463) a French poet renowned for his colourful life. He was imprisoned for a short period in 1461. Huysmans had written about him in his first collection of prose poems, Le Drageoir aux épices (1874); Eustache Deschamps (c.1340-c.1410), a French poet who wrote innumerable ballads.
19 During the late 1870s and early 1880s Huysmans published almost as much art criticism as he did fiction. L’Art moderne of 1883 was the first collection of his art criticism to be published in book form, though he was forced by his publisher to tone down or cut out some of his criticisms about certain painters, which were deemed to be too offensive.
20 Jean-François Raffaëlli (1850-1924), a French painter. He was invited to exhibit with the Impressionists by Degas, though his work belonged more in the Realist school. Huysmans championed his work, and used some of his engravings as illustrations for Croquis parisiens (1880).
21 Huysmans was an early supporter and friend of the painter Odilon Redon (1840-1916), who would become a leading figure in the Symbolist movement of the late 1880s and early 1890s. Although Redon remained grateful for his support, he slightly resented Huysmans’ claim to have discovered him and disagreed with the interpretations of his work that he later put forward.
22 The quote from the controversial Catholic writer Léon Bloy (1846-1917) comes from his review of À rebours in 1884. At the time Bloy and Huysmans were still close friends, though they would ultimately fall out.
23 Huysmans’ choice of pseudonym would have had resonance only to his close associates, being the name of his long-standing mistress, Anna Meunier. Tragically, Meunier suffered from a degenerative disease and was committed to a sanatorium near Paris in 1893, where she died two years later in 1895.
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Publishing History
First published in France in 1882
First published by Dedalus in 2017
Translation, introduction & notes copyright © Brendan King 2017
The right of Brendan King to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Typeset by Marie Lane
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