# Là-Bas — Character guide

> Key figures in Là-Bas by J.-K. Huysmans.

- [Durtal](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/l_bas_se/characters/durtal.md): 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 visi
- [Gilles de Rais](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/l_bas_se/characters/gilles_de_rais.md): 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 Nante
- [Carhaix](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/l_bas_se/characters/carhaix.md): 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 unsmi
- [Des Hermies](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/l_bas_se/characters/des_hermies.md): 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 co
- [Mme Chantelouve](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/l_bas_se/characters/chantelouve.md): 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
- [Canon Docre](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/l_bas_se/characters/canon_docre.md): 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 f
- [Dr. Johannès](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/l_bas_se/characters/dr_johannes.md): Dr. Johannès moves between the consulting room and the séance, a man of medicine who takes seriously what his colleagues would dismiss as superstition. He is the one Durtal can confess to about the anonymous letters and 
- [Gévingey](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/l_bas_se/characters/gevingey.md): An astrologer and associate of Des Hermies.
- [Hyacinthe Chantelouve](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/l_bas_se/characters/hyacinthe_chantelouve.md): Hyacinthe Chantelouve first arrives as handwriting and obsession, then as flesh: a woman Durtal prepares for with cedar essences and exotic liqueurs, tidying his apartment like a bridegroom. She is married, elusive, and 
- [Jean de Malestroit](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/l_bas_se/characters/jean_de_malestroit.md): A historical bishop involved in the trial of Gilles de Rais.
- [Père Rateau](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/l_bas_se/characters/pere_rateau.md): A priest and friend of Carhaix.
- [Charles VII](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/l_bas_se/characters/charles_vii.md): King of France during the time of Gilles de Rais.
- [Francesco Prelati](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/l_bas_se/characters/francesco_prelati.md): An Italian alchemist and accomplice of Gilles de Rais.

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