Excerpt from Against Nature (A Rebours) by Huysmans, J-K, translated by Baldick, R, 1987, Penguin Books

This dining-room resembled a ship’s cabin, with its ceiling of arched beams, its bulkheads and floorboards of pitch-pine, and the little window-opening let into the wainscoting like a porthole. 

Like those Japanese boxes that fit one inside the other, this room had been inserted into a larger one, which was the real dining-room planned by the architect. 

This latter room was provided with two windows. One of these was now invisible, being hidden behind the bulkhead; but this partition could be lowered by releasing a spring, so that when fresh air was admitted it not only circulated around the pitch-pine cabin but entered it. The other was visible enough, as it was directly opposite the porthole cut into the wainscoting, but it had been rendered useless by a large aquarium occupying the entire space between the porthole and this real window in the real house-wall. Thus what daylight penetrated into the cabin had first to pass through the outer window, the panes of which had been replaced by a sheet of plate-glass, then through the water and finally through the fixed bull’s-eye in the porthole. 

On autumn evenings, when the samovar stood steaming on the table and the sun had almost set, the water in the aquarium, which had been dull and turbid all morning, would turn red like glowing embers and shed a fiery, glimmering light upon the pale walls. 

Sometimes of an afternoon, when Des Esseintes happened to be already up and about, he would set in action the system of pipes and conduits which emptied the aquarium and refilled it with fresh water, and then pour in a few drops of coloured essences, thus producing at will the various tints, green or grey, opaline or silvery, which real rivers take on according to the colour of the sky, the greater or less brilliance of the sun’s rays, the more or less imminent threat of rain – in a word, according to the season and the weather. 

He could then imagine himself between-decks in a brig, and gazed inquisitively at some ingenious mechanical fishes driven by clockwork, which moved backwards and forwards behind the port-hole window and got entangled in artificial seaweed. At other times, while he was inhaling the smell of tar which had been introduced into the room before he entered it, he would examine a series of colour-prints on the walls, such as you see in packet-boat offices and Lloyd’s agencies, representing steamers bound for Valparaiso and the River Plate, alongside framed notices giving the itineraries of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Line and the Lopez and Valéry Companies, as well as the freight charges and ports of call of the transatlantic mail-boats.