an excerpt from:
Maldoror & the Complete Works
by Comte de Lautréamont

from FIRST CANTO

May it please heaven that the reader, emboldened, and become momentarily as fierce as what he reads, find without loss of bearings a wild and abrupt way across the desolate swamps of these sombre, poison-filled pages. For unless he bring to his reading a rigorous logic and mental application at least tough enough to balance his distrust, the deadly issues of this book will lap up his soul as water does sugar. It would not be good for everyone to read the pages which follow; only the few may relish this bitter fruit without danger. So, timid soul, before further penetration of such uncharted steppes, retrace your steps, do not advance. Hear my words well: retrace your steps, do not advance, resemble the eyes of a son who respectfully looks away when faced with an august maternal gaze; or, rather, a horizon chevron of chilly cranes which in winter with much meditation fly powerfully through the silence, full sail, toward a specific spot on the skyline, whence springs a strange strong wind — sudden herald of the storm. The oldest crane, forming by herself the spearhead’s tip, sees this, and shakes her head like a rational person, causing her beak to click, uneasy (as I would be in her place), while her old neck, denuded of feathers and contemporaneous with three generations of cranes, cranes in peevish waves which give warning of the everapproaching tempest. Calmly, after surveying all sides several times with her experienced eyes, cautiously, the leader (for it’s she who has the privilege of displaying her tail-plumage to her less intelligent companions), with the vigilant cry of a doleful sentry, to repel the common enemy, deftly swerves the apex of the geometric figure (perhaps a triangle, but impossible to see the third side traced in space by these curious birds of passage), now port, now starboard, like a clever captain; and manoeuvring with wings apparently no larger than a sparrow’s, she takes then, being no booby, another — safer and more philosophic — course.

Perhaps, reader, you would have me invoke hatred at the opening of this work! How do you know you won’t sniff it up, paddling in innumerable pleasures, as much of it as you wish, with your wide, thin, haughty nostrils, your belly uppermost like a shark in the dark fine air, as if you understood the importance of this action no less than the importance of your legitimate appetite, slow and majestic, for the ruby flux? I assure you that the latter will delight those twin hideous holes in your unspeakable snout, O monster, if first you set yourself to inhale three thousand times the accursed awareness of The Eternal! Your nostrils, vastly dilated with sublime content, with static ecstasy, will ask nothing better of space — now become embalmed as if in perfumes and incense — for they shall be sated with a perfect happiness, like angels living in the magnificence and peace of the pleasant heavens.

I shall set down in a few lines how upright Maldoror was during his early years, when he lived happy. There: done. He later perceived he was born wicked: strange mischance! For a great many years he concealed his character as best he could; but in the end, because this effort was not natural to him, each day the blood would rush to his head until, unable any longer to bear such a life, he hurled himself resolutely into a career of evil… sweet atmosphere! Who could guess whenever he hugged a rosycheeked young child, that he was longing to hack off those cheeks with a razor and would have done so often had not the idea of Justice and her long cortege of punishments restrained him on every occasion. No liar, he confessed the truth, admitting he was cruel. Mankind, did you hear? He dares repeat it with this quivering quill! A force, then, stronger than the will.... Curse it! Would a stone want to elude the law of gravity? Impossible. Impossible for evil to form alliance with good. As I was saying above.