After resigning his post in the Ministry, Huysmans retitred to Liguge, where he lived near the Benedictine monastery. When the monks were expelled, he returned to Paris. Huysmans was one of the founders of the Goncourt Academy, and in 1900 he was elected its president. Huysmans died of cancer on May 12, 1907. During the last days of his life he was afflicted with an affection of the eyes and it became necessary to sew his eyelids shut.
Art is the only clean thing on earth, except holiness.
In his work Huysmans combined exoticism, eroticism, and spirituality. He wrote in a rich, intoxicating style that paralleled his alter ego's neurotic obsession with unnatural, artifical, and bizarre sensations. Huysmans' own spiritual history reflected the successive phases of the intellectual life of the late 19th-century France.