Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans was a French novelist and art critic who published his works as Joris-Karl Huysmans. He is most famous for the novel À rebours. He supported himself by way of a 30-year career in the French civil service.
Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly was a French novelist, poet, short story writer, and literary critic. He specialised in mystery tales that explored hidden motivation and hinted at evil without being explicitly concerned with anything supernatural. He had a decisive influence on writers such as Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Henry James, Léon Bloy, Marcel Proust and Carmelo Bene.
A Black Mass is a ceremony celebrated by various Satanic groups. It has allegedly existed for centuries in different forms, and the modern form is intentionally a sacrilegious and blasphemous parody of a Catholic Mass.
JeanFouquet was a French painter and miniaturist. A master of panel painting and manuscript illumination, and the apparent inventor of the portrait miniature, he is considered one of the most important painters from the period between the late Gothic and early Renaissance. He was the first French artist to travel to Italy and experience first-hand the early Italian Renaissance.
À rebours is an 1884 novel by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans. The narrative centers on a single character: Jean des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive, ailing aesthete. 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 hyperaesthesic sensory experiences.
Léon Bloy was a French Catholic novelist, essayist, pamphleteer, and satirist, known additionally for his eventual defense of Catholicism and for his influence within French Catholic circles.
Stanislas de Guaita was a French poet based in Paris, an expert on esotericism and European mysticism, and an active member of the Rosicrucian Order. He was very celebrated and successful in his time. He had many disputes with other people who were involved with occultism and magic. Occultism and magic were part of his novels.
En rade is a novel by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans. It first appeared as a serial in the magazine Revue Indépendante between November 1886 and April 1887. It was published in book form on 26 April 1887 by Tresse et Stock. En rade followed Huysmans' most famous novel, A rebours, and was a commercial failure since neither critics nor the public could understand its mixture of brutal realism and fantasy. Later on, the Surrealists were more appreciative and André Breton included extracts from the novel in his Anthology of Black Humour.
En Route is a novel by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans and was first published in 1895. It is the second of Huysmans's books to feature the character Durtal, a thinly disguised portrait of the author himself. Durtal had already appeared in Là-bas, investigating Satanism. En Route and the two subsequent two novels, The Cathedral and The Oblate, trace his conversion to Catholicism, an experience which reflects the author's own. As Huysmans explained:
"The plot of the novel is as simple as it could be. I've taken the principal character of Là-Bas, Durtal, had him converted and sent him to a Trappist monastery. In studying his conversion, I've tried to trace the progress of a soul surprised by the gift of grace, and developing in an ecclesiastical atmosphere, to the accompaniment of mystical literature, liturgy, and plainchant, against a background of all that admirable art which the Church has created."
The Cathedral (1898) is a novel by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans. A revised English edition was published in 2011.
The Oblate is the last novel by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, first published in 1903.
Marthe, histoire d'une fille was the first novel by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, published in 1876.
Les Sœurs Vatard is a novel by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, first published in 1879. It was the author's second novel. His first, Marthe (1876), had earned the praise of Émile Zola and Huysmans had come to be associated with the older author and his Naturalist school of fiction. Les Sœurs Vatard shows the clear influence of Naturalism, being a realistic depiction of working-class life based on meticulous documentation.
En ménage is a novel by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, first published in February 1881 by Charpentier.
À vau-l'eau is a novella by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, first published by Henry Kistmaeckers in Brussels on January 26, 1882.
Georges Limbour was a French writer, poet and art critic, and a regent of the Collège de 'Pataphysique.
Berthe de Courrière was a French artists' model and demimondaine. She was the mistress, model, and heir of the sculptor and painter Auguste Clésinger.
The Fiery Angel is a novel by Russian writer Valery Bryusov. The novel is a meticulous account of sixteenth-century Germany, notably Cologne and the world of the occult. Characters such as Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and Faust appear alongside a description of a Black Mass.
Les Diaboliques is a collection of short stories written by Barbey d'Aurevilly and published in France in 1874. Each story features a woman who commits an act of violence, or revenge, or some other crime. It is considered d'Aurevilly's masterpiece.
The Tauberischofsheim Altarpiece is a late work by the German Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald, probably completed between 1523 and 1525. The earliest written references to the work come from the 18th century when the altarpiece was still in the Church of St. Martin in Tauberbischofsheim. Its original location and the identity of the patron who commissioned it are not known, but it is assumed that they both were in Tauberbischofsheim.
