The French author of À Rebours, an 1884 novel that has been described as "the breviary of the Decadence" and which Oscar Wilde claimed at his trial had corrupted him and led him to write The Picture of Dorian Gray. Canonical reading for all aesthetes. The model for the novel's protagonist was based in large part on the actual dandy, Symbolist poet, art critic and collector Marie Joseph Robert Anatole, comte de Montesquiou-Fezensac. In turn, the character inspired Proust's invention of the Comte de Charlus.