L’Homme-Sirène

de Luis d'Herdy

This novel describes the gradual destruction of the marriage between Jeanne and Georges d'Athis by a young dandy, Édouard d'Ore, strongly inspired by Jean Des Esseintes, from the novel À rebours. The androgyny claimed by the dandies that d'Herdy chooses as main characters corresponds with the sisterhood of the female figures introduced through the theme of collaboration. His contemporaries saw in these novels true studies of “legal medicine” rather than literary works that sought to provoke and subvert bourgeois morality from a decadent perspective.