Abstract: In his “profane cloister”, Des Esseintes dreams of suspending time to gain victory over reality: À rebours describes an experiment in decadentism. Unfortunately, far from finding the key to eternity, the protagonist finds himself “fatally” bogged down in an enterprise of subversion. The novel shifts between failure and hope depending on the vertiginous power of attraction of the words chosen, tried, abandoned, or declined in all their forms by the novelist in his manuscript all the way to the final version.
