red acacia; plump, curled, depraved little girls of sixteen; women who
are the prey of hysterical attacks; hunters of heritages offering
their sons and daughters to debauched testators. All pass across the
pages. They debate in the streets, rub elbows in the baths, beat each
other unmercifully as in a pantomime.

And all this recounted in a style of strange freshness and precise
color, drawing from all dialects, borrowing expressions from all the
languages that were drifting into Rome, extending all the limits,
removing all the handicaps of the so-called Great Age. He made each
person speak his own idiom: the uneducated freedmen, the vulgar Latin
argot of the streets; the strangers, their barbarous patois, the
corrupt speech of the African, Syrian and Greek; imbecile pedants,
like the Agamemnon of the book, a rhetoric of artificial words. These
people are depicted with swift strokes, wallowing around tables,
exchanging stupid, drunken speech, uttering senile maxims and inept
proverbs.

This realistic novel, this slice of Roman life, without any
preoccupation, whatever one may say of it, with reform and satire,
without the need of any studied end, or of morality; this story
without intrigue or action, portraying the adventures of evil persons,
analyzing with a calm finesse the joys and sorrows of these lovers and
couples, depicting life in a splendidly wrought language without
surrendering himself to any commentary, without approving or cursing
the acts and thoughts of his characters, the vices of a decrepit
civilization, of an empire that cracks, struck Des Esseintes. In the
keenness of the observation, in the firmness of the method, he found
singular comparisons, curious analogies with the few modern French
novels he could endure.