The tension in family fictions between consanguinity and illegitimacy, adumbrated in the previous chapters, is amplified in certain novels which question in extreme form the status of individuality amidst the sociopolitical mælstrom of modernity. The intersubjective network on which the density of Naturalist plots often rely (and which is finally parodied to death by Gide's ‘sotie’, Les Caves du Vatican (1914)) ultimately threatens the coherence of the family plot, as we shall see in chapter 6 in the cases of Hennique's Un accident de Monsieur Hébert and Zola's Paris. Both infer by the evocation of radical politics the dangers of narcissism in the self-concerned family romance in both its adulterous and incestuous forms. What both novels reflect is the political irresponsibility of a narrative form (and of a lifestyle) whose focus on private desires ignores the demands of public life, or fails to register the political dimension of private life. The decadence of modernity is pathologized by these Naturalist novelists as a form of social blindness, an unwillingness to engage with the political. Nowhere is this quest for privacy voiced more audaciously than in A Rebours (1884) by Joris-Karl Huysmans. His suspicion of the commercial metropolitan centres of modernity and their very public culture of spectacle, presided over by the likes of Octave Mouret, is addressed elsewhere in a warning about the social effects of the grands magasins: