The priest is immense, because he makes one believe in a host of astounding matters. That the Church wants to do all and to be all, is a law of the human mind. Mankind worships authority. Priests are the servants and sectaries of the imagination. The throne and the altar, revolutionary maxim. Religious intoxication of great cities. Pantheism. I, that is all; all, that is I. Vortex. III I think I have already written in my notes that love is very like torture or a surgical operation. But that idea can be developed in the bitterest way. Even though two lovers are deeply smitten and filled with reciprocal desire, one of the two will always be more calm, or less enraptured than the other. He or she is the surgeon, or the hangman; the other is the patient, the victim. Do you hear those sighs, preludes of a tragedy of shame, those groanings, those cries, those throat-rattlings? Who has not breathed them, who has not irresistibly summoned them forth? And what worse do you find in the torments applied by painstaking torturers? Those faraway eyes of the somnambulist, those limbs the muscles of which twitch and grow taut as under the action of a galvanic battery; drunkenness, delirium, opium, in their most infuriate consequences, surely yield no such frightful, no such curious examples. And the human countenance, which Ovid thought fashioned to reflect the stars, behold! it speaks only of insane ferocity, or is spread in a species of death. For, certainly, I believe it would be sacrilege to apply the word "ecstasy" to that sort of decomposition. Frightful play, in which one of the players must lose control of himself! Once, in my presence, it was asked in what lay the greatest pleasure of love. Some one answered naturally: in receiving, and another: in giving one's self. The former said: pleasure of pride; and the latter: delight of humility! All these blackguards spoke like the Imitation of Christ.--Finally, an impudent Utopian came forward to affirm that the greatest pleasure of love is to create citizens for the fatherland. As for me, I said: The one and the supreme bliss of love rests in the certainty of doing _evil_. Both man and woman know, from birth, that in evil lies all bliss. V When a man takes to his bed, almost all his friends have a secret desire to see him die; some, to establish the fact that his health is inferior to theirs; others, in the disinterested hope of studying an agony. The arabesque is the most spiritual of designs.. VI The man of letters rouses the capitals and conveys a taste for intellectual gymnastics. We love women in proportion as they are strangers to us. To love intelligent women is a pleasure of the pederast. Thus bestiality excludes pederasty. The spirit of buffoonery need not exclude charity; but that's rare. Enthusiasm applied to other things than abstractions is a sign of weakness and disease. The thin is more naked, more indecent, than the fat. VII