Là-Bas
Translated by Keene Wallace
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This novel offers a masterful exploration of the fin de siècle fascination with evil, blending historical scholarship with a gripping, decadent narrative that questions the very nature of art, faith, and desire.
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Book Summary
A disenchanted writer, Durtal, researches the medieval serial killer Gilles de Rais while navigating a sordid affair with a mysterious woman, Madame Chantelouve. The novel contrasts naturalist materialism with spiritual yearning, culminating in a harrowing Black Mass that exposes the depths of modern Satanism and cultural decay.
Durtal, a novelist disillusioned with naturalism, retreats from literary society to study Gilles de Rais, a 15th-century nobleman and serial killer. His research immerses him in medieval spirituality and Satanism, which he discusses with his friends: the physician Des Hermies, the pious bell-ringer Carhaix, and the astrologer Gévingey. Simultaneously, Durtal begins a correspondence with an anonymous woman who reveals herself as Madame Chantelouve, a married woman with a hidden past. Their affair proves emotionally hollow, and Durtal grows increasingly obsessed with the renegade priest Canon Docre, whom Madame Chantelouve knows. She arranges for Durtal to attend a Black Mass officiated by Docre, a sacrilegious ceremony that repulses him and leads him to break off their relationship. The novel ends with Durtal returning to his work on Gilles de Rais, having witnessed the living embodiment of the evil he had only studied historically, and finding a measure of solace in the simple faith of Carhaix.
Reading guide
Go deeper in Là-Bas
Character guides, themes, chapter companions — plus Character Web, narrative arc, and theme heatmap teasers that unlock fully beside the text in BetterReads.
Narrative arc
Story tension across the book.
- Setup
- Breaking point
- Aftermath
- Closing
Durtal
Durtal lives alone with his notes on Gilles de Rais, having traded naturalist fiction for the fifteenth century and its monsters. His senses, dormant for years, reignite over a correspondent he has never met — and a visit to an old prostitute leaves him more haunted, not less. His research into a child-killer and his hunger for an unknown woman pull him in the same direction: toward the forbidden, and toward a faith he cannot quite name.
Gilles de Rais
Gilles de Rais is the subject Durtal cannot put down: a baron so powerful that peasants flee at his approach and his liege lord shields him for the sake of his lands. Only the Church, in the person of the Bishop of Nantes, finally moves against him — after Gilles commits sacrilege at Saint-Étienne by seizing a tonsured clerk in the middle of mass. He is the novel's true center of gravity: the monster Durtal studies, and the abyss Durtal keeps circling.
Carhaix
Carhaix and his wife bow under the paternal despotism of the priests, and Durtal, watching them, cannot decide whether their simplicity is sanctity or servility. He climbs the tower to sit with them, drawn to their unsmirched souls even as his own skepticism picks at the fat, jovial abbé below. Their cramped, curtained room above the square is the one place in the novel where belief is not argued but simply lived.
Des Hermies
Des Hermies is the friend who tells Durtal the truth: that he execrates the age while the other realists worship it, and that Gilles de Rais was the escape hatch his exhausted talent needed. He moves through cafés and consulting rooms with the same dry precision, collecting the era's superstitions and maladies without ever quite catching the disease himself. He is Durtal's sounding board — and the novel's clearest-eyed witness to what is happening to him.
Mme Chantelouve
Durtal spends a whole day tidying his apartment and buying exotic liqueurs for her first visit, only to find himself exhausted before she arrives. She is married to a sugary, calculating hagiographer who almost certainly knows about her goings-on and says nothing. She draws Durtal toward a world of séances, satanism, and appetite that his research into Gilles de Rais had only prepared him to recognize, not to resist.
Canon Docre
Docre appears in the Chantelouve household as a smooth, rotund man of affairs, pink cotton in his ears, capable of doing one a bad turn behind his pious smile. He speaks of saints and their filth with the same detached fluency he brings to everything else, and Durtal senses in him a cool unscrupulousness that the drawing-room setting only half conceals. He is the door through which the novel's occult underworld begins to open, and he knows exactly what he is doing.
Naturalism vs. Spirituality
The book contrasts the materialistic, earthbound focus of naturalist literature with a yearning for the supernatural, the mystical, and the spiritual, as seen in the characters' debates about art and their fascination with Satanism and medieval religiosity.
Satanism and Evil
Evil is explored through the historical figure of Gilles de Rais and contemporary Satanic practices, examining the psychology of cruelty, demonic pacts, and the idea that evil can be a deliberate, spiritual choice rather than mere madness.
Art and the Artist
The novel critiques the literary world, the commercialization of art, and the isolation of the artist, with Durtal rejecting modern literary circles and seeking a more profound, stylistically rich, and spiritually engaged form of expression.
Decadence and Fin de Siècle
The book embodies the decadent movement, portraying a sense of cultural exhaustion, disgust with modernity, and a fascination with the morbid, the perverse, and the historical past as an escape from the vulgarity of contemporary life.