As mentioned in a prior post, I’d given myself an assignment to read J.-K. Huysmans’ novels in the order in which they were written. My objective was to track his progression from a Naturalist writer in Emile Zola’s orbit to the author who wrote À rebours , the novel some refer to as “the Decadent bible”. I skipped Huysmans’ first effort, Le drageoir aux épices (1874) and started with his first two novels: Marthe: The Story of a Whore (1876) and The Vatard Sisters (1879). After that was "Sac au dos", his contribution to Evenings at Médan , an 1880 anthology of French Naturalism comprised of stories by six different authors. As a mini-survey of French Naturalism, I gave myself a sub-assignment to read all six stories in Evenings at Médan . Unfortunately, there’s no English version of the anthology. I was able to read the stories by Zola (“The Attack on the Mill”) and Guy de Maupassant (“Boule de Suif”) via English language anthologies of each authors’ short stories. Howev...