COVER TO COVER

THE VELVET INHERITANCE: ON À REBOURS 

ALAIN DES ESSEINTES

June 16, 2025

Alain des Esseintes, great-great-grandson of Jean des Esseintes, reflects on a legacy of ornamental retreat, fragile resistance, and inherited exhaustion. Through memory, melancholy, and barely functional taste, he considers what survival looks like after “À rebours”—and whether it can ever be reversed.

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I suppose every family has its burden. Some inherit madness, others fortune, others scandal. I inherited velvet.

Not literal velvet, though there was a chaise longue once—dark plum, cat-clawed, exiled to storage after my mother’s nervous breakdown. No, I mean something subtler. An atmosphere. A manner of sitting too long in the same chair. A preference for filtered light. A disinterest—bordering on revulsion—for spontaneity. In short, I inherited taste. Or, more precisely, the performance of taste as a defense against life.

It all traced back, inevitably, to Jean des Esseintes—my great-great-grandfather, known in family lore not as a man, but as a mood. He’d long since passed by the time I was born, of course, but he remained very much alive in the house: in the way we weren’t allowed overhead lighting, in the way holidays were canceled due to “aural contamination,” in the way my father once left a dinner party because the wine label used a sans-serif font. Jean’s book—À rebours, still in its original binding, cracked and foxed—lived in a glass cabinet like a saint’s shinbone. No one read it. It was consulted.

I read it, of course. I was sixteen. It was summer. I’d just come back from my first trip abroad—a regrettable experience involving a sailboat, a Canadian girl, and a sunburn that made me feel something close to spiritual. My father, seeing the signs of vitality, grew alarmed. He handed me the book in silence, as one might pass a relic during a plague. I read it in two sittings. I still haven’t entirely recovered.

What struck me most, reading it then—and still, rereading it now—is not how much my ancestor hated the world, but how much he feared being touched by it. Not physically (though he was famously fastidious) but metaphysically. He wanted a world that could be contemplated, not inhabited. Things he could arrange, archive, polish, rename. He suffered, in the most beautiful language possible, from a kind of terror of reality.

They call me Jean – Édouard Manet, Portrait of Stéphan Mallarmé, 1876. Oil on canvas, 27 x 36 cm

This, I’ve come to believe, is the true family trait. Not melancholy, not decadence, not even snobbery, but the belief that style can save us from experience.

I’ve seen it mutate across generations. My grandfather refused to listen to live music—said it was “too wet.” My uncle collected dining chairs but never hosted a meal. My cousin gave up speaking for two years, claiming conversation had been degraded by television. And me? I once broke off a relationship because she used the word “vibe” unironically.

We don’t handle the world well. That’s what I’m trying to say. We’ve spent generations fashioning ourselves into corners, living in ever more rarefied interiors—real and psychological. Our afflictions don’t show up on scans. They manifest in upholstery.

After I finished reading À rebours that summer, I began to notice the shape of my own inheritance more clearly. The book was, to the outside world, a novel. But in our family, it functioned more like a manual. Joris-Karl Huysmans claimed it was fiction, of course. But we’ve always read it as autobiography lightly disguised—a collaboration between Jean’s silence and someone else’s pen. It chronicled, in painstaking detail, Jean’s retreat from society and the elaborate interior world he built to replace it. He had left Paris in disgust—at democracy, industry, literature, people in general—and moved into a house in Fontenay-aux-Roses, where he tried to live a life of pure aestheticism.

He soundproofed the windows. He read only obscure Latin authors like Petronius and Apuleius. He arranged his perfumes the way a composer arranges chords, combining base notes like a chemist or a desperate god. He once hosted a dinner party where the guests were replaced by exotic flowers, each one representing a different type of degenerate personality.

And the tortoise. Always the tortoise.

It had seemed, to him, a natural flourish to have a live tortoise encrusted with jewels—an aesthetic punctuation mark to set off the opulence of his Persian carpet. But the poor creature died from the weight of the decoration. This story was often told at family gatherings, though no one laughed. It was cited as one might refer to an ancestor who died in a war.

I was always Jean – Giovanni Baldoni, Portrait of Robert de Montesquiou, 1897. Oil on canvas, 116 x 83 cm

The details are outlandish, yes. But beneath them is something far more familiar: a man trying to design his way out of despair. Jean didn’t want life to surprise him. He wanted it stylized, contained, reversible—like a piece of furniture or a rare edition.

The great family secret, of course, is that it didn’t work. The novel ends not with triumph, but with collapse. His health gives out. His fantasies rot from within. And so, after all the refinements—after the aniseed wines, the religious reveries, the florid eroticisms and baroque asceticism—he returns to Paris. Back to the vulgar world. Back to the doctor. “It must be lived,” he says. Life, that is. His last line. A surrender.

But not a conversion.

We don’t speak of that sentence much in the family.

Last spring, I took the train south to Fontenay-aux-Roses. I told myself it was research. I was writing something. But of course I wasn’t. I brought no notebook. I didn’t even bring a pen.

The house—what was left of it—stood at the end of a quiet residential street, half-swallowed by a retirement complex and a boulangerie with an awning in cheerful green. It had been subdivided long ago. The original stained-glass windows were gone. A row of terra-cotta planters lining the front path were filled with hydrangeas—too bright for that soil. No trace of the black walls, the Turkish smoking room, the library of poisoned poets. The last caretaker, a man in his seventies with skin like linen, told me the bath had once been lined in zinc. He seemed unsure why I cared.

Even then, I was Jean – F. de Korff, The Dandy a Salon in Paris, 19th-Century Portrait of a Young Man, 1848. Oil on canvas, 55 x 51 cm

I didn’t go inside. I stood at the fence and stared for a while. It was quiet. A kind of moral quiet—the stillness of someone who has made all the wrong choices and accepts them.

On the train back, I tried to recall the names of the perfumes Jean kept by his bed. One was civet-based, I remembered. Another he’d invented himself, distilled from dried lilies and misplaced hope. He had once called that scent the most philosophical of the senses. I don’t know what that means. But I believe it.

I tried, for a while, to escape it all. Not like him—no jewel-encrusted reptiles. I just tried normalcy. I took a job in marketing for an artisanal vinegar start-up. I moved in with someone who had never read Proust. We watched television. We went to brunch. For a few weeks, I thought I might make it.

But then I found myself reorganizing our spice rack by emotional tone. I threw out the cumin because it “felt anxious.” I stopped answering calls. I told my partner that I didn’t believe in narrative anymore. She told me to move out.

Des Esseintes tried to save himself with Latin. I tried green juice and psychoanalysis. It comes to the same thing.

People speak now of burnout, of information fatigue, of content nausea. But we, in my family, had it early. We were born tired. Des Esseintes wasn’t trying to enjoy life. He was trying to outwit entropy—to turn decline into something ornamental.

In this light, I am still Jean – Unknown artist, The Dandy, 1889. Watercolor on paper, 22 x 19 cm

We’ve carried that strategy forward, generation after generation. Taste as defense. Style as sedative. In our blood, exhaustion is an aesthetic category. But I’ve begun to wonder, in recent years, if all this refinement isn’t just another form of cowardice. A way of never risking love, or failure, or joy. Jean believed that life had to be endured. I wonder if he ever asked what had to be endured about it. And if he would have found the answer unbearable.

It’s fashionable now to say we are living at the end of something—of culture, of narrative, of politics, of the planet. That everything is too late, too complex, too mediated. Our responses vary: irony, silence, performance, collapse. But under all of it lies the same murmur that haunted Jean in his little house at Fontenay: the suspicion that meaning has already left the building, and that we are the staff assigned to maintain its furnishings.

He responded with style. With control. He tried to frame life like a painting—flat, enclosed, without contingency. And for a time, it worked.

But style, however exquisite, is not shelter. It is not a substitute for contact, nor for grief. It cannot hold the weight of love, or time, or history. That’s what he discovered. That’s what I am discovering, in slower motion, through subtler rituals—through the passive voice in emails, the deleted invitations, the precisely folded napkin placed where a conversation might have been.

The deeper sickness isn’t decadence. It’s the belief that we can perfect ourselves out of vulnerability.

You know me: Jean – Emile Deroy, Portrait of Baudelaire, 1844. Oil on canvas, 81 x 66 cm

That’s what Jean bequeathed to us—not his orchids, or his library, or his hatred of daylight, but a method for surviving the unbearable condition of being permeable. Of being touched. Of not being able to choose every element of a day. He gave us an escape plan. But not an afterlife.

And so I write this now, not as apology, and certainly not as elegy, but as a kind of cracked testimony. I come from a line of exquisite fugitives. I’ve worn their robes. I’ve mimicked their refusals. But I’m beginning to wonder if survival—real survival—isn’t the opposite of taste. If it doesn’t mean letting life in without rearranging it. If the future belongs not to those who refine, but to those who endure, and endure messily.

Last week I opened the windows. Just half an inch. It was raining. The light that came in was unflattering—blue-gray, indecisive. Somewhere outside, a child was crying. A car alarm hiccuped. The air smelled like copper and damp plaster.

I sat there and let it happen.

No filtered calm. No soft lighting. No precise arrangement of mood and material. Just the sound of a life I hadn’t controlled rushing in, molecule by molecule.

Jean would have hated it. But for the first time in years, I felt something I could not classify.

Not pleasure. Not clarity. Not peace. Just exposure.

And maybe that’s the future—if there is one. Not escape. Not refinement. Not even meaning. Just the decision, however shaky, to remain permeable. To let the world come in, even if it has nothing beautiful to offer. Especially then.

To live, not à rebours, but simply à nu.

Alain des Esseintes is a writer and occasional translator with a background in neglected disciplines. He speaks several dead languages poorly and lives somewhere between ironic detachment and the faint longing for sincerity.

Cover image: I am Jean – Frantisek Kupka, The Yellow Scale, 1907. Oil on canvas, 79 x 74 cm