HUYSMANS, JORIS KARL (1848-1907), French novel ist, was born in Paris on Feb. 5, 1848. He belonged to a family of artists of Dutch extraction ; he entered the ministry of the interior, and was pensioned after thirty years' service. He thus led a thoroughly bourgeois existence in striking enough contrast to the character of his novels. His earliest venture in literature, Le Drageoir a epices (1874), contained stories and short prose poems showing the influence of Baudelaire. Marthe (1876), the life of a courtesan, was published in Brussels, and Huysmans con tributed a story, "Sac au dos," to Les Soirees de Medan, the collection of stories of the Franco-German war published by Zola. He then wrote a series of novels of everyday life, including Les Sćurs Vatard (1879), En Ménage (1881), and A vau-l'eau (1882), in which he outdid Zola in minute and uncompromising realism. Of these the most important is En Ménage, which de scribes the complete disillusion of two friends, Adrien and Cyprien, the one by means of marriage, the other by a vulgar liaison: "The book," says Lalou, "oases with misanthropy, with hatred of a society incurably common, ugly and stupid." But there is more in Huysmans's work than the presentment in real istic detail of the more disagreeable side of life. He was, in fact, influenced more directly by Flaubert and the brothers de Gon court than by Zola.
In L' Art moderne (1883) Huysmans gave a careful study of impressionism and in Certains (1889) a series of studies of con temporary artists. He went on to glorify art at the expense of nature, and the real importance of his work is to be found in his later works, in which the excesses of the aesthetic revolt find a serious and quite humourless exponent. A Rebours (1884), the history of the morbid tastes of a decadent aristocrat, des Esseintes, provides a caricature of literary and artistic symbolism which nev ertheless contained much of the real beliefs of the aesthetes. In Ld-Bas Huysmans's most characteristic hero, Durtal, makes his appearance. Durtal is occupied in writing the life of Gilles de Rais ; the insight he gains into Satanism is supplemented by modern Parisian students of the black art ; but already there are signs of a leaning to religion in the sympathetic figures of the religious bell-ringer of Saint Sulpice and his wife. En Route (1895) relates the conversion of Durtal to mysticism and cathol icism in his retreat to La Trappe.
In La Cathedrale (1898), Huysmans gives a symbolist inter pretation of the architecture of the cathedral of Chartres which is a magnificent evocation of the spirit of the place. The life of Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam (19o1), an exposition of the value of suffering, gives further proof of his conversion; and L'Oblat (1903) describes Durtal's retreat to the Val des Saints, where he is attached as an oblate to a Benedictine monastery. Huysmans was nominated by Edmond de Goncourt as a member of the Academie des Goncourt. He died as a devout Catholic, after a long illness of cancer in the palate on May 13, 1907. Before his death he destroyed his unpublished mss. His last book was Les Foules de Lourdes (1906).
See Arthur Symons, Studies in two Literatures (1897) and The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) ; Jean Lionnet in L'Evolu tyon des idffes (1903) ; Eugene Gilbert in France et Belgique (i 9o5) ; J. Sargeret in Les Grands convertis (1906).