Duke Jean Floressas des Esseintes, 30, chooses to leave Parisian high society to lock himself in his house in Fontenay-aux-Roses. He became the most decadent hermit in literary history, even influencing Oscar Wilde, who paid tribute to him in The Portrait of Dorian Gray.
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This voluntary lonely man fills himself with black dinners, drinks cocktails mixed with a “mouth organ”, caresses the Latin and Greek grimoires of his library, surrounds himself with morbid paintings and precious trinkets, in short, he enjoys from the most misanthropic refinement like a hypochondriac esthete, to madness: he walks in his orange and blue living room a turtle whose shell is encrusted with rubies (the poor creature eventually dies from it), he cultivates a garden of carnivorous plants , and fantasy about a ventriloquist prostitute. Des Esseintes would have hated the Covid-19 which democratized partitioning. His seclusion is the result of snobbery: he locks himself up because
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