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

roles they have enacted on earth. Such persons," he would continue, "must
surely be miserable: forever drifting, continually undecided, their entire
life is spent detesting in the morning what they did the evening before.
Certain to repent of the pleasures they taste, they take their delight in
quaking, in such sort they become at once virtuous in crime and criminal in
virtue. However,"our hero would add, "my more solid character is a stranger
to these contradictions; I do my choosing without hesitation, and as I am
always sure to find pleasure in the choice I make, never does regret arise
to dull its charm. Firm in my principles because those I formed are sound
and were formed very early, I always act in accordance with them; they have
made me understand the emptiness and nullity of virtue; I hate virtue, and
never will I be seen resorting to it. They have persuaded me that through
vice alone is man capable of experiencing this moral and physical vibration
which is the source of the most delicious voluptuousness; so I give myself
over to vice. I was still very young when I learned to hold religion's
fantasies in contempt, being perfectly convinced that the existence of a
creator is a revolting absurdity in which not even children continue to
believe. I have no need to thwart my inclinations in order to flatter some
god; these instincts were given me by Nature, and it would be to irritate
her were I to resist them; if she gave me bad ones, that is because they
were necessary to her designs. I am in her hands but a machine which she
runs as she likes, and not one of my crimes does not serve her: the more
she urges me to commit them, the more of them she needs; I should be a fool
to disobey her. Thus, nothing but the law stands in my way, but I defy the
law, my gold and my prestige keep me well beyond reach of those vulgar
instruments of repression which should be employed only upon the common
sort." If one were to raise the objection that, nevertheless, all men
possess ideas of the just and the unjust which can only be the product of
Nature, since these notions are found in every people and even amongst the
uncivilized, the Duc would reply affirmatively, saying that yes, those
ideas have never been anything if not relative, that the stronger has
always considered exceedingly just what the weaker regarded as flagrantly
unjust, and that it takes no more than the mere reversal of their positions
for each to be able to change his way of thinking too; whence the Duc would
conclude that nothing is really just but what makes for pleasure, and what
is unjust is the cause of pain; that in taking a hundred louis from a man's
pocket, he was doing something very just for himself, although the victim
of the robbery might have to regard the action with another eye; that all
these notions therefore being very arbitrary, a fool he who would allow
himself to become their thrall. It was by means of arguments in this kind
the Duc used to justify his trans-gressions, and as he was a man of
greatest possible wit, his arguments had a decisive ring. And so, modeling
his conduct upon his philosophy, the Duc had, from his most tender youth,
abandoned himself unrestrainedly to the most shameful extravagances, and to
the most extraordinary ones. His father, having died young and, as I
indicated, left him in control of a huge fortune, had however stipulated in
his will that the young man's mother should, while she lived, be allowed to
enjoy a large share of this legacy. Such a condition was not in displeasing
Blangis: poison appearing to be the only way to avoid having to subscribe
to this article, the knave straightway decided to make use of it. But this