En Route

En Route is a novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans, first published in French in 1895. The book represents the turning point of Huysmans’s literary career from the Decadent aestheticism of Against the Grain of 1884 toward the Catholic religious commitment that would dominate his later work.

The novel follows Durtal, a French intellectual whose career as a writer and aesthete has left him spiritually empty and who finds himself drawn toward Catholic monastic life. The book covers Durtal’s gradual movement from urban Parisian skepticism through various stages of religious inquiry to an extended retreat at a Trappist monastery in the French countryside. The treatment of the monastic experience is detailed and reflects Huysmans’s own experience of similar retreats during the years when he was working out his own religious commitments.

En Route was the first of three Durtal novels that followed Huysmans’s religious development. La Cathédrale of 1898 and L’Oblat of 1903 continued the sequence and recorded Durtal’s deepening Catholic commitment.