The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

THE EQUINOX the thirst of destruction, and its final aim is suicide. The murderer Eligabide, on his own confession, not only felt the savage need of killing his relations and friends, but he even wished, had it been possible—he said it in so many words at his trial—to burst the globe like a cooked chestnut, Lacenaire, who spent his days in plotting murders, in order to have the means of passing his nights in ignoble orgies or in the excite- ment of gambling, boasted aloud that he had lived. Hecalled that living, and he sang a hymn to the guillotine, which he called his beautiful betrothed, and the world was full of imbe- ciles who admired the wretch! Alfred de Musset, before extinguishing himself in drunkenness, wasted one of the finest talents of his century in songs of cold irony and of universal disgust. The unhappy man had been bewitched by the breath of a profoundly perverse woman, who, after having killed him, crouched like a ghoul upon his body and tore his winding sheet. We asked one day, of a young writer of this school, what his literature proved. It proves, he replied frankly and simply, that one must despair and die. What apostleship, and what a doctrine! But these are the necessary and regular conclusions of the spirit of perversity; to aspire ceaselessly to suicide, to calumniate life and nature, to invoke death every day without being able to die. This is eternal Hell, it is the punishment of Satan, that mythological incarna- tion of the spirit of perversity; the true translation into French of the Greek word Diadolos, or devil, is fe pervers— the perverse. Here is a mystery which debauchees do not suspect. It is this: one cannot enjoy even the material pleasures of life but by virtue of the moral sense. Pleasure is the music of the 264