Everything is fucked up, I'm dying of the pox

In 1619, a collection of poems by different authors was published in Paris under the title: Parnasse satyrique. The star poet in the group was Théophile de Viau. The poem he published went like this:

Par le sieur Theophille

Philis tout est f…tu je meurs de la verolle
Elle exerce sur moi sa dernière rigueur :
Mon V. baisse la teste et n'a point de vigueur
un ulcére puant a gasté ma parole.

J'ai sué trante jours, j'ai vomi de la colle
Jamais de si grand maux n'eurent tant de longueur
L'esprit le plus constant fut mort à ma langueur,
Et mon afficlition n'a rien qui la console.

Mes amis plus secrets ne m'osent approcher,
Moi-même cet estat je ne m'ose toucher
Philis le mal me vient de vous avoir foutue.

Mon dieu je me repans d'avoir si mal vescu :
Et si vostre couroux a ce coup ne me tuë
Je ne fais vuex désormais de ne …tre qu'en cul.

The translation goes like this:

“Philis, everything is f..ed up; I’m dying of the pox
which has me strictly bound in the last throes;
My D..k hangs its head, is on the rocks
and a stinking sore spoils my attempts at prose.

For thirty days I’ve sweated, vomited up bowls
I’ve never seen a sickness last like this!
my exhaustion would have killed firmer souls
and my affliction brings me no consoling bliss.

My most secret friends dare not approach me.
I don’t even dare to touch myself in this stew –
And all this Philis, comes from ..cking you.

My god, I repent of having lived so badly!
And if your anger doesn’t kill me with this blast
I swear that from now on, I’ll only ..ck in the ass.”

(Sorry for my distortions – wanted to see if I could find a few appropriate rhymes, though of course my rough draft scans like a hog in heat).

I’m interested in Théophile as one of the early freethinkers who are separated by a degree or two from Gassendi. He is also, famously, one of the regrets of French literature – what if the French baroque had been allowed to flower, much as the English Jacobin writers were? There is a view, first expressed I believe by the romantics, that the imposition of rules of literary bienseance emptied French poetry of what Theophile called the “natural”. And that old fight isn’t worth fighting.

More interesting is that Théophile was put on trial for this poem, and nearly had the same fate doled out to him as to the Protestant printer, Etienne Dolet - who is, or should be, to translators what the skull is to the contemplating monk – for Dolet, poor guy, trying to convey a bit of Plato in French, translated a line in the Apology Apres le mort tu ne seras plus rien de tout, instead of tu ne seras plus, and so – for that rien - was burned at the stake. That is one way to ensure literalism!

There’s an amusing gloss on the enterprising use of ellipses and acronyms in obscene poems in Joan E. DeJean’s The Reinvention of Obscenity, who claims that the startling thing about Theophile’s poem was the ‘cul’ – a vite as a V. or a foutre as a …tre was, in a sense, a bow to the common dignity, but that ass, stuck at the very end of the poem, it was practically mooning the authorities. I love these discussions that are close readings of readings – the third life’s life. They are so Nabokovian. DeJean introduces the topic like this:

“These four-letter words, primary obscenities, stand out as the principle mark of this basdy poetry’s sexual transgressiveness. With one exception, cul (ass), which was to become key in Theophile’s case, they are never written out. Instead, in an act of self censorship that initially may have helped save the volumes from official prosecution, the words were abbreviated in various ways, and different types of punctuation were inserted to stand as a visual mark representing the suppressed content. This punctuation is the typographical equivalent of the fig leaves that began appearing in Renaissance engravings to veil male and female genitalia without fully hiding the contours.

The typographical fig leaves are, however, less efficient than their visual counterparts. A leaf painted on a representation of a human body means that the viewer, even though he or she obviously knows what presumably is there behyind the cover-up, is nevertheless denied the right to see the offending sexual characteristics. In the case of a text, however, a reader – and there is no reason to imagine that seventeenth century readers were any more conscious of these textual barriers than are their counterparts today – simply replaces the missing letters without a thought, so much so that he or she is immediately unaware that anything has been left out. This is truly the zero degree of censorship. Since, however, it obviously served an important function, I will consider it for a moment more.”

And so she does. LI will return to Theophile’s trial, and then to some of his amazing prose pieces.

honeyed drops of spiritual delight

“They don’t enter into their system by the door, they enter in by the window…” Bayle, article on Epicurus

My sometimes commenter, Chuckie K., asked a very good question about my last Bayle post, which, you will recall, ended with a question about whether belief guides behavior. To which Mr. K. said: “Today I'll ask a real question. Is this, "if belief makes no difference to your behavior" this question, or is "if belief does not always completely determine significant behavior'"

Well, that’s a good, hard question, and a hatcher of other hard questions – for instance, do beliefs stand in some apologetic relation to behavior? Do we seek out beliefs to excuse our desires? In fact, defending Epicurus, Bayle opts for the idea that we could, that it is possible, to construct our beliefs according to the facts as we see them, regardless of what we would want to be the case:

“The doctrine that rejects the providence of God, and the immortality of the soul, steals an infinity of consolations from man. Plutarch proves this solidly, that after having read what he exposed, one cannot be sufficiently astonished at the power that our first impression of certain objects have on our mind. The first idea that presents itself to those who wish to exam the state of irreligion that it is about the world’s idea of a happy liberty in which one satisfies all one’s desires without any fear, without any remorse. This idea is so rooted in the soul, and so occupies its capacity, that if someone wants to tell us that the estate of a pious man is incomparably [better], in the way of temporal advantages, to that of an epicurean, we would reject it as an absurd lie. And yet this so called lie has on its side a crowd of strong reasons, as Plutarch makes us see. The good faith of this author in this part of the dispute seems to me to be considerable, in as much as he must have known how much his reasons disculpate epicureanism; for it is certain that in denying the providence of God and the immortality of the soul, one is deprived of a thousand sweetnesses and a thousand consolations; it isn’t by motives of interest, by amour proper, by attachment to volupté, that Epicurus chose the philosophical hypothesis that he taught. He would have chosen another, if he was driven by those motives. “

So one way we could come at the question of belief is to ask about the building of systems of belief. And in fact, Pierre Force’s interpretation of Bayle is not about this or that stray belief – my belief, for instance, that the red light sign will be obeyed by the slowing, oncoming car as I walk across the street in front of it – but rather these vaster temples of belief, which are about the ways the world is made. In Mr. D’s modification of Force’s assertion – “belief does not always completely determine significant behavior” – is the liberal hope here. On the one hand, belief does not so determine behavior that there is no space of tolerance possible between two opposing, absolute beliefs – and on the other hand, that it determines it enough that there is some use in having these vast beliefs.

But notice that the liberal path is fraught with peril. It can never be emphasized enough that the enlightenment leads not only to Kant, Jefferson, and my Republican grandparents, but that it also leads through Sade to Bazarov to… Patty Hearst. Or perhaps I should say that these romantic figures express, with exaggerated gestures, the nihilistic fall of the belief in belief – the belief that anything, and thus nothing, is true or valuable. This nihilism even eats at the aura of seriousness surrounding belief, taking away the shame of going from, say, Maoism to Southern Baptist Fundamentalism by way of alternative medicines and your recovered memory of a UFO abduction.

In the sense that I take nihilism, rather than discipline a la Foucault, as a privileged vantage point to see what is happening in the Enlightenment, I guess you could say that LI is just your typical canned Nietzschian. And of course I need to make the links a lot clearer here – but I do want to… to gesture to what is in the background for these small circles, in the seventeenth century, who began purposefully relating all human endeavor to volupté.

Advice for Britney

LI, making a play for information domination on the Britney issue, has been bluesing about the People story that Brit is going to be starring, again, on some forgettable tv sit com. What is up with this? I know what is up. The artiste in the mouseketeer is being callously starnapped back into the profit stream by her pa - and are we, spectators all, expected to put up with this abhorrent strangling of Britney’s desires in, so to speak, their cradle? No wonder she is bored with her life! My advice – are you listening, Ms. Spears? - is to read about Patty Hearst, or at least listen to this Stereo Total song about Patty Hearst, romantic terrorist. And remember, Tania was never an exceptional earner – you could kick that bitch around the block! You have more revolutionary potential in your little finger than she ever had. Take back your kids, boot your dad, go to Vegas and act like Frank Sinatra to your heart’s content – which means applying the maxim that has an eternal currency among the great celebrity elite (in the VIP area), to wit, to be famous is so nice/suck my dick, lick my ass.

He read Bayle

Via George Huppert’s The Style in Paris: Renaissance origins of the French Enlightenment, LI found this story about the Marquis D’argens in Jean Philibert Damiron’s Memoire sur le Marquis D’argens:

He was never lacking in adventures, and if it wasn’t in one genre, it was in another. In returning from Italy and during the trip across [the Mediterranean] , he encountered a storm, the frightened sailors took vows to all the virgins of their countries of origin; a monk said his breviary in sobbing; two Calvinists trembled while reciting the psalms of Marot; for himself, he read the Pensees diverses of Bayle, and those who saw such cold bloodedness imagined that he was a saint, to whom the tranquility of his conscience procured his repose. – He read Bayle, that was his own breviary, his preferred book, the assiduous nourishment of his soul, which opened more and more to skepticism. If to doubt is to repose, it was that repose which his author of predilection bestowed upon him. [Memoires, 13]

LI likes this story. It is a perfect cameo of the libertine sub-culture that extended into the eighteenth century, connecting the time of Voltaire with the time of Cyrano de Bergerac. Something is happening here when the libertine becomes the double of the saint, doubt becomes the double of belief, and Bayle becomes the double of the breviary. Last year, LI posted a lot about the notion of ‘volupte’ as a sort of intermediary between the humanist’s stoicism and the greatest happiness of the political arithmeticians that Burke denounced in his Reflections on the French Revolution. As Damiron confesses at the beginning of his Memoire, D’argens was not a great personality:

“The marquis d’Argens, in fact, was not a great character, and what is more, he was not an eminent thinker, and in more than one circomstance of his life, he displayed a personality that was little enough serious. He wrote much and on all things, but with no rare distinction, and of philosophy in particular, on which he often touched, he didn’t illustrate with some new light a single thing.”

He was, to use the hobbled language of the advertisers, an early adopter. He adopted a sensibility. Which brings us to a number of questions.

These questions go back to Bayle, and a point made by Pierre Force in his Self Interest Before Adam Smith. Force notes that Bayle, the encyclopedic skeptic of the 17th century (a man whose graphomania, very much of the era, has been rewarded by posterity by being read by practically no one but being preserved as a name, just as a piece of wedding cake might be preserved in a freezer for decades, not to be ceremonially eaten, but as a gesture of etiolated piety) was considered an atheist not because he advocated atheism, but because he stripped belief of the coordinate conduct it was assumed that it entailed:

For Bayle, the principle of pleasure explains the variations that may be observed in the behavior of atheists. At fist sight, someone who does not believe in the rewards and punishments of eternal life would be inclined to indulge in every kind of physical pleasure. Yet we observe that some atheists are more restrained on that count than many Christians. Whether someone indulges in drunkenness is not a matter of opinion regarding the existence of a punishment for it in the afterlife. It is simply a difference in humor and temper. Some people love to drink, others don’t:

“If you examine things in general, you suppose that, as soon as an atheist realizes that he can get drunk with impunity, he will get drunk every day. But those who know the maxim, Trahit sua quemque voluptas, and who have examined the heart of man more carefully, do not go so fast. Before judging the conduct of this atheist, they inquire about his tast. If they find that he likes ot drink, that he is very sensitive to this pleasure, that he prefers it to his reputation as a good person, they conclude that he actually will drink as much as possible. But they do not conclude that he will drink more than countless Christians, who are drunk most of the time. …”

Bayle believes that, in general, differences in behavior cannot be explained by differences in belief. The adherence to such and such system of belief is irrelevant when it comes to explaining concrete human behavior. Preferences are not a matter of opinion.”

Here we stumble upon one of the great themes of modernity, which runs through Balzac, Dostoevsky, Freud, Alcoholics Anonymous and the political industry of polling – the relationship between what we believe and how we conduct ourselves. For after all, if belief makes no difference to your behavior, why believe anything?

Mankind's impossible task: unhappiness

“Fyodorov used to say that the dead had to be resurrected,mankind should set impossible tasks for itself, and after its rebirth, mankind would exit earth as if from a waiting room, and leisurely take over the cosmos.” – From Victor Shklovsky’s Energy of Delusion

LI has not read Nikolai Fyodorov’s Common Task of Mankind, in which he envisions our collective human energies devoted to resurrecting the dead and such. However, I would not laugh too hard at the project of resurrecting dead as the impossible task that humanity has set for itself, since it is my contention that humanity has set itself an equally impossible task, with equally unthought of but horrendous consequences – the spread of happiness to all peoples at all times. To each his obsessions; mine, of course, is to find out how the norm of happiness came to be the heuristic upon which we all agree, the ultimate reference for the political.

David Leonardt’s column Wednesday took up some papers that dispute the Easterlin paradox. According to research by Richard Easterlin, over time, as societies grow richer (as, for instance, Japanese society), polls indicate that populations don’t necessarily grow happier. The shorthand for this is that more money doesn’t bring more happiness. This has a gladsome sound to the Lefty ear, for more money is connected with more monopoly capitalism, and who wants monopoly capitalism? But Easterlin’s conclusion and data base have been attacked by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers of the Brookings Institute:

“In the paper, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers argue that money indeed tends to bring happiness, even if it doesn’t guarantee it. They point out that in the 34 years since Mr. Easterlin published his paper, an explosion of public opinion surveys has allowed for a better look at the question. “The central message,” Ms. Stevenson said, “is that income does matter.”
To see what they mean, take a look at the map that accompanies this column. It’s based on Gallup polls done around the world, and it clearly shows that life satisfaction is highest in the richest countries. The residents of these countries seem to understand that they have it pretty good, whether or not they own an iPod Touch.
If anything, Ms. Stevenson and Mr. Wolfers say, absolute income seems to matter more than relative income. In the United States, about 90 percent of people in households making at least $250,000 a year called themselves “very happy” in a recent Gallup Poll. In households with income below $30,000, only 42 percent of people gave that answer. But the international polling data suggests that the under-$30,000 crowd might not be happier if they lived in a poorer country.”

At this point, the traditional move is to criticize the quality of the happiness of those very happy rich people. For instance, take this householder who wrote in to a Q and A at the Washington Post today about threats to his income:

“Arlington, Va.: Who is in this working class? I make $150,000 a year and my wife makes $100,000 a year. I work 50 hours a week and my wife works 45 hours a week. We have investments we have made, but we do not live off these investments. We are both first in our families to be college-educated and have worked hard to get where we are at 32 and 31. Why are we not considered working-class?
In addition, Obama and Clinton want to increase the Social Security, income and investment taxes. Where in the Constitution does it say that people like my wife and I have to support people who did not plan wisely (housing bailout, retirement and health care). I don't mind paying my fair share, but my family is not living off inheritance, and has worked hard to get where we are. Why are we not being viewed as working-class for having some self-made success? Will this class warfare work? It blew up on the Democrats in '00 and '04.”

I imagine one could say, we have to discourage that man and his wife from putting in 95 hours a week at 32 and 31 to make their 250 thou per year. One could say that this is a recipe for unhappiness. But I don’t think so. I think this is a recipe for a disastrous, total happiness. I think that that much money combined with that much work might well make happiness the cancer that eats up all other emotions, leaving the man and his wife liable only to the panic that someone might take away some of their pile. I think that year after year, the drunkenness of happiness will so fill their souls that the addiction will be too great to ever break.

Mankind’s common task, which, say, Malthus, in 1800 would have every right to look at as a crazy and impossible dream, is now a social reality. Within our society of artifice and technology, the structures of happiness rise, triumphant, on every hand. And the people that are born and bred into this structure even have many virtues. They are more peaceful. They are prey to fits of anger, but generally sober in their habits. They have lost any sense of public spirit, but, within the narrow confines of their private sphere, they are generous when they can be.

So what is there to bitch about? Well, I dream of a new impossible common task, in which finally emotion is separated from the moral norm – in which the range of emotions that the human beast can produce find a more ample and unashamed representation in the material relations that bind together our society. In which, in other words, ennui, melancholy, anger, dread, and the vast block of nameless, mixed moods that surround reflection are not viewed as opening acts for the happiness we all strive for – since we do not all strive for happiness. Since that striving makes little sense. Since it is founded on a very imprecise sense of what happiness is (a judgment about life? a passing mood?). Finally, I do not think there is any evidence whatsoever that we naturally strive for happiness except in certain circumstances, just as we strive for this or that feeling. It is one among many, not a thing to justify a social order or a life.

To talk about the dead is a waste of time.
I can’t think of a better subject

Infinite Thought's Democracy in America: the short course

IT is back from America, and has taken advantage of opportunities undreamt of by Tocqueville (a monkey traveling companion, a digital camera) to write her own condensed version of "Democracy in America". She seems very impressed by our vast institutions of higher learning over here - and who wouldn't be? U.T., for instance, here in Austin is its own little city. Of course, this has less to do with the Texas belief in facilitatin' the Socratic method in appropriate architectural settings, and more to do with making money in real estate and construction - ah, the fortunes you can make in higher education. But I'm not gonna bitch too much - as an accidental byproduct of building a nice, expensive library building, you often get a library! You've got to stick something in there.

the ethics of garbage flies

Yesterday I scribbled down a post about the news that Bush aided, abetted and ordered torture. At the end of it my heart dribbled out of me. Though I believe that my posts are full of sound and fury and signify quite a lot, thank you very much, there is good reason to ask whether writing in every register, from the satiric to the analytical, about the scurrilous people who rule us is doing any good. From the aesthetic point of view – which is my point of view – what counts is the intangible quality of the insult, not whether it breaks your bones. However, the aesthetic point of view does merge, at some point, with the magical point of view. A curse might be beautiful poetry, but it should still be a curse. Richard III should go to hell with the ghosts’ voices ringing in his ears, even if, in the end, Richard III is a puppet imp.

Such are the intangibles. Yesterday, I got hold of a copy of Steven Coll’s Family History of the Bin Ladens, and I’ve been enjoying the evidence pouring out of every page of the interlocking Saudi and American oligarchies, which explains a whole hell of a lot about our current politics. Perhaps instead of wailing about Bush, I should devote a little space to the intentional gap in our sense of America’s historical engagement in the Middle East. It is into this vacuum that nature – in the form of such Gandarene swine as Paul Berman – has rushed with a vengeance, creating the comic figure of the Islamofascist and the “terrorist” against which we are carrying out our global war.

And I will… but as LI is boundless in space and time, we decided that, after all, ranting about our torturing president would serve at least a cathartic purpose. So here’s the post:

…
Although here and there you can find appropriate responses to the news, reported by ABC, that the President not only knew about torture but, after his Vice President attended meetings designed to hammer out a torture agenda for prisoners captured by the Americans or sold to them or whatever, approved it knowingly and with malice aforethought, on the whole, the nation has been unmoved by this latest revelation about our national Garbage Fly.

I’m with the nation. We aren’t moved. The moral faculty, insofar as it extends into and identifies with this place where I am a citizen has been so desensitized that it is no longer even a phantom limb. Our National Fly has, at least, ground the residue of patriotic illusion out of me. In fact, the vision of the Fly and his country club desperadoes pretending to be serious S.S. officers is more comic than tragic, more evidence that crime, in D.C., no longer requires the dark brilliance of Richard Nixon, but can be entrusted to a bumbling cadre of Farside nosepickers, who will spill the beans to a complacent and enabling press confident that that same press will not print the beans on the front page and put the whole affair into the amnesia hole, while selecting the donuts for their favorite next superfly, John McCain.

Admittedly, the story that ABC news broke was easy to guess. Torture would be one of the Fly’s responses to 9/11, an event that we still have not fully measured, vis a vis the Fly’s reaction to it. When the planes rammed into the WTC and the Pentagon, we know now that Bush had to remember the warnings he had received and coldly dismissed a mere month before. Knowing, as we do now, what he knew then, his actions fall into a familiar pattern. For here, once again, the Fly was face to face with the fact that he sucks as a man, by every criterion of manhood instilled in him by his education and breeding. His projects are always utter failures; his responses to them, while they are ongoing, are always utterly wrong; and his susceptibility to great bouts of panic are witnessed by all the people around him, who, he will later remember, know this key fact about him. It is a fact that he retrospectively tries to hide with swagger and the bizarre assortment of things that come out of his mouth – the “bring it ons”, the “mission accomplisheds”. The Fly’s long history of failure and panic have made him vulnerable to the emotional blackmail of those he thinks of as tough. There’s something alarming and pitiful about the Fly, going around day after day, calculating toughness – but such is the life of this beast, written in every trace he leaves behind him. And, to be fair, while he gulled the population post 9/11, it was a population longing to be gulled, longing for fairy tales, longing for easy credit, longing for a sloppy, third world fuck atop its wretched piles of junk and mcmansions.

So yes, the Fly’s a war criminal, and yes, he’ll go unpunished, and even remain the object of veneration to the cult that twitches with love for him. I actually know some members of the cult. Some of them I like, bracketing their politics. On the other hand, on days when the Fly’s nature is rubbed in my face, I want to go out and bite their necks and suck them dry of blood. Which is how LI has come to sympathize with the Comte de Lautreamont:

Debout sur le rocher, pendant que l’ouragan fouettait mes cheveux et mon manteau, j’épiais dans l’extase cette force de la tempête, s’acharnant sur un navire, sous un ciel sans étoiles. Je suivis, dans une attitude triomphante, toutes les péripéties de ce drame, depuis l’instant où le vaisseau jeta ses ancres, jusqu’au moment où il s’engloutit, habit fatal qui entraîna, dans les boyaux de la mer, ceux qui s’en étaient revêtus comme d’un manteau. Mais, l’instant s’approchait, où j’allais, moi-même, me mêler comme acteur à ces scènes de la nature bouleversée. Quand la place où le vaisseau avait soutenu le combat montra clairement que celui-ci avait été passer le reste de ses jours au rez-de-chaussée de la mer, alors, ceux qui avaient été emportés avec les flots reparurent en partie à la surface. Ils se prirent à bras-le-corps, deux par deux, trois par trois; c’était le moyen de ne pas sauver leur vie; car, leurs mouvements devenaient embarrassés, et ils coulaient bas comme des cruches percées... Quelle est l'armée de monstres marins qui fend les flots avec vitesse? Ils sont six; leurs nageoires sont vigoureuses, et s’ouvrent un passage, à travers les vagues soulevées. De tous ces êtres humains, qui remuent les quatre membres dans ce continent peu ferme, les requins ne font bientôt plus qu’une omelette sans oeufs, et se la partagent, selon la loi du plus fort. Le sang se mêle aux eaux, et les eaux se mêlent au sang. Leurs yeux féroces éclairent la scène du carnage... Mais, quel est encore ce tumulte des eaux, là-bas, à l’horizon. On dirait une trombe qui s’approche. Quels coups de rame! J’aperçois ce que c’est. Une énorme femelle de requin vient prendre part au pâté de foie de canard, et manger du bouilli froid. Elle est furieuse, car, elle arrive affamée. Une lutte s’engage entre elle et les requins, pour se disputer les quelques membres palpitants qui flottent par-ci, par là, sans rien dire, sur la surface de crème rouge. À droite, à gauche, elle lance des coups de dents qui engendrent des blessures mortelles. Mais, trois requins vivants l’entourent encore, et elle est obligée de tournée en tous sens, pour déjouer leurs manoeuvres. Avec une émotion croissante, inconnue jusqu’alors, le spectateur, placé sur le rivage, suit cette bataille navale d’un nouveau genre. Il a les yeux fixés sur cette courageuse femelle de requin, aux dents si fortes. Il n’hésite plus, il épaule son fusil, et, avec son adresse habituelle, il loge sa deuxième balle dans l’ouïe d’un des requins, au moment où il se montrait au-dessus d’une vague. Restent deux requins qui n’en témoignent qu’un acharnement plus grand. Du haut du rocher, l’homme à la salive saumâtre, se jette à la mer, et nage vers le tapis agréablement coloré, en tenant à la main ce couteau d’acier qui ne l’abandonne jamais. Désormais, chaque requin a affaire à un ennemi. Il s’avance vers son adversaire fatigué, et, prenant son temps, lui enfonce dans le ventre sa lame aiguë. La citadelle mobile se débarrasse facilement du dernier adversaire... Se trouvent en présence le nageur et la femelle du requin, sauvée par lui. Il se regardèrent entre les yeux pendant quelques minutes; et chacun s’étonna de trouver tant de férocité dans les regards de l’autre. Ils tournent en rond en nageant, ne se perdent pas de vue, et se disent à part soi: “Je me suis trompé jusqu’ici; en voilà un qui est plus méchant.” Alors, d’un commun accord, entre deux eaux, ils glissèrent l’un vers l’autre, avec une admiration mutuelle, la femelle de requin écartant l’eau de ses nageoires, Maldoror battant l’onde avec ses bras; et retinrent leur souffle, dans une vénération profonde, chacun désireux de contempler, pour la première fois, son portrait vivant. Arrivés à trois mètres de distance, sans faire aucun effort, ils tombèrent brusquement l’un contre l’autre, comme deux aimants, et s’embrassèrent avec dignité et reconnaissance, dans une étreinte aussi tendre que celle d’un frère ou d’une soeur. Les désirs charnels suivirent de près cette démonstration d’amitié. Deux cuisses nerveuses se collèrent étroitement à la peau visqueuse du monstre, comme deux sangsues; et, les bras et les nageoires entrelacés autour du corps de l’objet aimé qu’ils entouraient avec amour, tandis que leurs gorges et leurs poitrines ne faisaient bientôt plus qu’une masse glauque aux exhalaisons de goémon; au milieu de la tempête qui continuait de sévir; à la lueur des éclairs; ayant pour lit d’hyménée la vague écumeuse, emportés par un courant sous-marin comme dans un berceau, et roulant, sur eux-mêmes, vers les profondeurs inconnues de l’abîme, ils se réunirent dans un accouplement long, chaste et hideux!... Enfin, je venais de trouver quelqu’un qui me ressemblât!... Désormais, je n’étais plus seul dans la vie! Elle avait les mêmes idées que moi!... J’étais en face de mon premier amour!