Instead, what's memorable about La Bas is its view of Satanism as one logical repsonse to modernism-- Huysmans affected to hate his then-modern world, of Edison lightbulbs and the execrable Eiffel Tower, and sought a refuge from it in an affected medievalism. Yet he couldn't be comfortable in the Church, at least not right away (eventually he did become a Catholic oblate, a kind of lay monk), and so the type of Satanism practiced by the notorious medieval sadist Gilles de Rais became one refuge... or at least a reverse-chic fashion to affect for one season and shock the old folks. (Huysmans would have hated California in the late 60's, but it dug him-- and it's a wonder the Gothic movement hasn't picked up on this book.) It's the philosophical discussion of this surprisingly contemporary position that provides the real interest of the book today.