CONQUEST AND VOLUPTUOUSNESS

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,[Pg 90] 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.)

    "The Empress Theodora was the source of such exquisite delight that it was said that painting and poetry were incapable of delineating the matchless excellence of her form. The satirical historian has not blushed to describe the naked scenes which Theodora was not ashamed to exhibit in the theatre. After the mention of a narrow girdle, which she wore, as none could appear stark naked in the theatre, Procopius adds: ?ναπεπτωκυ?α [Greek: anapept?kuia]. After exhausting the arts of sensual pleasure, she most ungratefully murmured against the parsimony of nature, wishing a fourth altar, on which she might pour libations to the god of love. After having been possessed by everybody, she seduced Justinian, who made her his wife and called her a gift of the Deity." (Gibbon, "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.")

    "The old age of David was warmed by the young Shunammite, and Hermippus lived to be one hundred and five years old, sustained by the spirit of many young women." (Bible.)

These few examples will be sufficient to delineate in a general way the frontiers within which human voluptuousness struggles, an insatiable author of so much good and so[Pg 91] much evil. And yet, in the eyes of science it is nothing but "the most powerful of chemical affinities comprehended by the most perfect of living brains." Prepared in the slow laboratory of a man and a woman, the gemmul? of life intensely seek each other and are reciprocally attracted; and when love gathers them by millions and millions, they kiss and join and, quivering, restore one of the most prodigious equilibriums of nature and generate a man.

If it is true that at every second a leaf detaches itself and falls from the human tree, it is most true that in the same unit of time ten existences at least are fused in order to relight the torch of life; and if all the gigantic forces which are condensed in those aggregations could be summed up, they would certainly be sufficient to send the world through infinite space without the aid of the laws of Newton. In the hut of the savage and in the gilded halls of the prince, on the soft cushions of new-mown hay and on the glaciers of the Sorata; on the swift train and on two camels crossing the desert, within the damp walls of the prison and in the deep mines where the rays of the sun never penetrate, in the forest and on the sands of the sea-shore, wherever a man and a woman find themselves near and can desire each other, voluptuousness wreat............