Summary
Summary of The Damned
Who it’s for
For readers who love dark, atmospheric fiction, the Paris of the 1890s, and novels of ideas about faith and doubt.
What this book is
The Damned is a French novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans, first published in 1891 under the title Là-bas, which means Down There. Huysmans had made his name as a follower of Émile Zola and the naturalist school. Here he turns away from it. He wrote a book about a Paris where money, flesh and boredom rule, and where some people still hunt for something beyond them.
The hero is Durtal, a writer who is tired of plain realism and plain lives. He is working on a life of Gilles de Rais, the fifteenth century nobleman who fought beside Joan of Arc and was later put on trial for murdering children. As Durtal studies the past, he finds that the old evils have not gone away. Satanism is alive in the modern city, and he is drawn toward it.
This summary gives you the story in the order it unfolds, then the ideas that run beneath it and the way Huysmans builds his strange mix of novel, history and confession. Let us begin where Durtal begins, with a writer who has run out of belief in his own age.
In this summary
- 1A novelist walks away from realismFree
- 2Gilles de Rais, saint's comrade and monster
- 3Friends of the old faith in a bell tower
- 4A mysterious woman writes to Durtal
- 5Paris hides a living cult of Satan
- 6Desire draws Durtal toward the forbidden
- 7What the novel says about boredom and belief
- 8A novel built from research and talk
- 9What to watch as the story tightens
Key point 1 of 9
A novelist walks away from realism
The book opens in a Paris salon talk between Durtal and his friend Des Hermies. Durtal is a novelist who has spent years in the school of Zola. That school aims to record life as a scientist records facts, with every crude detail in place. Durtal now finds it shallow. It shows bodies and appetites, he says, but it never touches the soul.
Des Hermies is a doctor with a taste for odd books and old theories. He listens, argues and teases. Together they talk about what a new kind of novel might look like. Durtal wants to keep the sharp eye for detail that naturalism trained in him. He also wants a way to write about the mysteries that science leaves out.
Huysmans uses this opening to state his own break with his old masters. Durtal calls for what he names spiritual naturalism. That means a book as precise as a clinical report, but one that follows the unseen as well as the seen. The novel you are holding is meant to be that book.
The talk also sets the mood. Durtal is bored with the present, with its quick pleasures and its trade in everything. He looks to the Middle Ages as a time when people believed in saints and demons with equal force. That longing is not simple nostalgia. It is a hunger to live inside a world where good and evil actually matter.
So the first turn of the story is a choice of subject. Durtal will leave the modern novel of daily manners and write about a medieval monster. That choice will pull him much deeper than he expects, and it leads straight to Gilles de Rais.
For the listener, this part works as a door. You learn how Durtal thinks, what he fears and what he wants. You also learn that the story will wander between talk, study and scene. Keep that in mind, because the book moves by ideas as much as by events.
That’s 1 of 9 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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