Les Soeurs Vatard, described by its author as a ""lewd but exact"" slice of life, was J.-K. Huysmans' second novel. Huysmans abandoned poetry and turned to the novel at a time when the works of Emile Zola were intensely controversial; Les Soeurs Vatard is dedicated to Zola by ""his fervent admirer and devoted friend.""In it, Huysmans vividly depicts the scene that for his generation of French writers stood for the contemporary world: the brutal, teeming life of the industrial quarters of Paris in the 1870s. Huysmans' Vatard sisters are ""De?sire?e, an urchin of fifteen, a brunette with large,