Sublime

The woman Huysmans looked for all his life he had already described when he was twenty-seven or -eight, in Marthe, his first novel, published in Brussels in 1876. He wanted a good little cook who could also turn herself into a whore, and he wanted this on a fixed schedule.

Little girls, she argued, were worth nothing more than the medals they could win, so they were starved, abused, and used to keep their bodies and skills perfect—like “pretty boxes.”

Marcelin Albert