"Sade, Marquis De - The 120 Days Of Sodom 1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Marquis de Sade)

there, and even during the winter they had fruits of every season; in a
word, one may be certain that the table of the world's greatest monarch was
not dressed with as much luxury nor served with equal magnificence.
But now let us retrace our steps and do our best to portray one by one
each of our four heroes - to describe each not in terms of the beautiful,
not in a manner that would seduce or captivate the reader, but simply with
the brush strokes of Nature which, despite all her disorder, is often
sublime, indeed even when she is at her most depraved. For - and why not
say so in passing - if crime lacks the kind of delicacy one finds in
virtue, is not the former always more sublime, does it not unfailingly have
a character of grandeur and sublimity which surpasses, and will always make
it preferable to, the monotonous and lackluster charms of virtue? Will you
protest the greater usefulness of this or of that, is it for us to scan
Nature's laws, ours to determine whether, vice being just as necessary to
Nature as is virtue, she perhaps does not implant in us, in equal quantity,
the penchant for one or the other, depending upon her respective needs? But
let us proceed.
The Duc de Blangis, at eighteen the master of an already colossal
fortune which his later speculations much increased, experienced all the
difficulties which descend like a cloud of locusts upon a rich and
influental young man who need not deny himself anything; it almost always
happens in such cases that the extent of one's vices, and one stints
oneself that much less the more one has the means to procure oneself
everything. Had the Duc received a few elementary qualities from Nature,
they might possibly have counter-balanced the dangers which beset him in
his position, but this curious mother, who sometimes seems to collaborate
with chance in order that the latter may favor every vice she gives to
those certain beings of whom she expects attentions very different from
those virtue supposes, and this because she has just as much need of the
one as of the other, Nature, I say, in destining Blangis for immense
wealth, had meticulously endowed him with every impulse, every inspiration
required for its abuse. Together with a tenebrous and very evil mind, she
had accorded him a heart of flint and an utterly criminal soul, and these
were accompanied by the disorders in tastes and irregularity of whim whence
were born the dreadful libertinage to which the Duc was in no common
measure addicted. Born treacherous, harsh, imperious, barbaric, selfish as
lavish in the pursuit of pleasure as miserly when it were a question of
useful spending, a liar, a gourmand, a drunk, a dastard, a sodomite, fond
of incest, given to murdering, to arson, to theft, no, not a single virtue
compensated that host of vices. Why, what am I saying! not only did he
never so much as dream of a single virtue, he beheld them all with horror,
and he was frequently heard to say that to be truly happy in this world a
man ought not merely fling himself into every vice, but should never permit
himself one virtue, and that it was not simply a matter of always doing
evil, but also and above all of never doing good.
"Oh, there are plenty of people," the Duc used to observe, "who never
misbehave save when passion spurs them to ill; later, the fire gone out of
them, their now calm spirit peacefully returns to the path of virtue and,
thus passing their life going from strife to error and from error to
remorse, they end their days in such a way there is no telling just what