convinced that if Henry David Thoreau could have read Joris-Karl Huysmans’s book, “Against Nature,” he would have been assiduously disgusted by it. Des Esseintes represented and admired everything that Thoreau tried to leave behind when he escaped to Walden Pond; and Des Esseintes was appalled by the aspects of life which Thoreau held most dear. Though Des Esseintes and Thoreau were men of the same century, they lived in entirely different worlds from one another; Des Esseintes in a world of expenditure
