Saw this on the socials this evening. This is by one Auguste Leroux (apparently no relation to Gaston) and apparently it’s from a 1920 edition of J.K. Huysmans’ A rebours, which is a fairly peculiar book and this is one of its more grotesque moments… A rebours was one of the key texts of the later 1800s’ Decadence and Symbolist movements (and probably the “poisonous French novel” in The Picture of Dorian Gray), it’s about a somewhat etiolated aristocrat who withdraws from society into a world of his own aesthetic satisfaction; nothing much really happens as such, it’s Des Esseintes having sensory and literary experiences of various kinds, including one point where he does notably leave his house (cos reading Dickens inspires him to go to London, but he decides that eating at an English restaurant in Paris was near enough and the real thing would only disappoint him).
But there’s one particular episode that this picture shows, i.e. the one with the bejewelled tortoise. Astonishingly, this actually seems to have been based on an actual thing; the book’s Wiki entry notes that one of the models for Des Esseintes was the real aristocrat Robert de Montesquiou, who once invited the poet Stephan Mallarmé to his house, with the latter reporting that one of the many sights he saw there was “the remains of an unfortunate tortoise whose shell had been coated with gold paint”. Huysmans obviously jacked that up by having Des Esseintes cover his tortoise’s shell in gemstones, which makes the shell weigh so much the poor bloody animal dies as a result. It’s a really kind of obnoxious moment that’s lingered in my memory more than most of the details in that book (I can’t remember how long it’s been since I read it, but it’s probably not since at least the early oughts, possibly even the late 90s), hence how I managed to recognise it immediately even before I read the caption identifying it. I probably should re-read it at some point.
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