Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans was a French novelist and art critic who published his works as Joris-Karl Huysmans. He is most famous for the novel À rebours. He supported himself by way of a 30-year career in the French civil service.

À rebours is an 1884 novel by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans. The narrative centers on a single character: Jean des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive, ailing aesthete. The last scion of an aristocratic family, Des Esseintes loathes nineteenth-century bourgeois society and tries to retreat into an ideal artistic world of his own creation. The narrative is almost entirely a catalogue of the neurotic Des Esseintes's aesthetic tastes, musings on literature, painting, and religion, and hyperaesthesic sensory experiences.