If man elevates his loves to the highest spheres of the ideal; if he can be called the most sublime lover on the terrestrial planet, he can boast of having had from nature the largest cup at the banquet of voluptuousness; he can also boast of being able, alone among the living creatures, to die of pleasure and to end his life with lasciviousness. Certainly, a tremendous thing is the embrace of a man and a woman who love each other! So tremendous that, before this hurricane of the senses, the painter lets the brush fall from his hand, the physiologist loses the thread of analysis, and the philosopher is bewildered by the ferocious grandeur and the brutish sublimity of that act, in which every human force seems to be offered as a holocaust to animal fecundation. The avowed or secret aim of every love, the dream of every virgin and rage of every lust, the torment and delight of every man, voluptuousness is the greatest pleasure of the senses; but it is also the deepest abyss into which vulgar loves fall at every step, and where the great ones too are submerged. Voluptuousness! Tremendous word that recalls the most ardent scene of life and the greatest chaos, which concentrates wherever an organism is born or destroyed; formless chaos, from which flashes radiate and where elements quiver and earthquakes rumble and thunder; chaos in which good and evil are so near as to mingle, confuse and melt together; chaos in which angel and brute join in close embrace, and human individuality vanishes for a moment to give way to a fantastic monster, half man and half woman, half god and half demon; chaos from which a man is born, just as from another chaos arose the cry that generated light. I open the book of human deeds and read: "In Sardinia the San Luri belle killed with her exuberance of carnality the young King Martin II. of Sicily, of the House of Aragon, him who gave the last blow to the independence of Sardinia, subjecting to his dynasty that part of the island which was still free. In 1409 he had gained a splendid victory over Brancaleone Doria and the Viscount of Narbonne, when he himself was defeated in turn by the belle of San Luri, who, modern Judith, killed the Aragonese king with the fury of her kisses." ("La Marmora, Itinerario in Sardegna," etc., p. 270.)