The lowly, downtrodden Paris civil servant Jean Folantin seeks respite from the boredom and isolation of his life in the small joys of food and the occasional embraces of a prostitute. But whatever he does, wherever he turns in his quest for some pleasure, his dissatisfaction only increases, until he is forced to realize that he has to abandon all hope and just "go with the flow".

This 1882 novella, a key work in Huysmans' literary development - prefiguring in its protagonist the figure of Jean des Esseintes, the hero of rebours, written two years later - is accompanied here by another masterly study of human despair, 'M. Bougran's Retirement'.