"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." Against the Grain contains many themes that became associated with the Symbolist aesthetic. In doing so, it broke from Naturalism and became the ultimate example of "decadent" literature.