προγραφές

'However, those girls working in bars were as stupid, as self-seeking, as base, and as self-indulgent as the women who worked in brothels. Like the prostitutes, they drank without being thirsty, laughed without being amused, went into raptures over the caresses of a common labourer maligned one another, and scrapped with one another without the slightest provocation; in spite of that, the youth of Paris had never yet observed that, as regards beauty of form, skill of technique, and desirable attire, bermaids were clearly inferior to the women cooped up in the luxurious salons of brothels. "My God,' thought Des Esseintes, 'what fools these fellows are who hang round bars! Quite part from their idiotic illusions, they even manage to forget the risks associated with damaged or dubious merchandise, to no longer take into account the money spent on a lot of drinks the landlady charges for in advance, or the time wasted in waiting for goods whose delivery is deferred so as to enhance their value, or the endless shilly-shallying used to prompt and to promote the sport of tipping!"
This inane sentimentalism, combined with a fierce practicality, epitomized the dominant thinking of the century; those same individuals who would have blinded their neighbour for the sake of ten sous lost all their rationality, all their shrewdness when confronted by those shifty tavern girls who harassed them without mercy and extorted money from them without remission. Business enterprises laboured and families swindled one another in the name of commerce, so that their money could be fliched by their sons; they in their turn let themselves be cheated by these women who, in the final analysis, were robbed of everything by their fancy men.
Throughout the whole o Paris, from east to west, from north to south, there existed an uninterrupted sequence of frauds, a pile-up of organized thefts each of which occasioned the next; and all this because, instead of customers being satisfied on the spot, they were persuaded to exercise their patience, they were kept waiting. Essentially, the sum total of human wisdom consisted in dragging things out, in saying "no" then, eventually, "yes"; for the most effective way of controlling the younger generation was by constantly putting them off!'

Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature: A New Translation by Margaret Mauldon, publisher: Oxford University Press