There was only one living scion of this family which had once been so numerous that it had occupied all the territories of the Ile-de-France and La Brie. The Duc Jean was a slender, nervous young man of thirty, with hollow cheeks, cold, steel-blue eyes, a straight, thin nose and delicate hands.
Thus we are introduced to the character of Des Esseintes in a novel that has been banned and censored for years, but still lives on as being one of the finest examples of the decadent literature written by fin-de-siecle (late nineteenth century) writers. Oscar Wilde himself called the novel the Breviary of Decadence.