here they were as comical and
ridiculous as a tiny zinc figure playing on a horn on a timepiece.

After these mystic divagations, the writer had experienced a period of
calm. Then a terrible relapse followed.

This belief that man is a Buridanesque donkey, a being balanced
between two forces of equal attraction which successively remain
victorious and vanquished, this conviction that human life is only an
uncertain combat waged between hell and heaven, this faith in two
opposite beings, Satan and Christ, was fatally certain to engender
such inner discords of the soul, exalted by incessant struggle,
excited at once by promises and menaces, and ending by abandoning
itself to whichever of the two forces persisted in the pursuit the
more relentlessly.

In the _Pretre marie_, Barbey d'Aurevilly sang the praises of Christ,
who had prevailed against temptations; in the _Diaboliques_, the
author succumbed to the Devil, whom he celebrated; then appeared
sadism, that bastard of Catholicism, which through the centuries
religion has relentlessly pursued with its exorcisms and stakes.

This condition, at once fascinating and ambiguous, can not arise in
the soul of an unbeliever. It does not merely consist in sinking
oneself in the excesses of the flesh, excited by outrageous
blasphemies, for in such a case it would be no more than a case of
satyriasis that had reached its climax. Before all, it consists in
sacrilegious practice, in moral rebellion, in spiritual debauchery, in
a wholly ideal aberration, and in this it is exemplarily Christian. It
also is founded upon a joy tempered by fear, a joy analogous to the
satisfaction of children who disobey their parents and play with
forbidden things, for no reason other than that they had been
forbidden to do so.

In fact, if it did not admit of sacrilege, sadism would have no reason
for existence. Besides, the sacrilege proceeding from the very
existence of a religion, can only be intentionally and pertinently
performed by a believer, for no one would take pleasure in profaning a
faith that was indifferent or unknown to him.

The power of sadism and the attraction it presents, lies entirely then
in the prohibited enjoyment of transferring to Satan the praises and
prayers due to God; it lies in the non-observance of Catholic precepts
which one really follows unwillingly, by committing in deeper scorn of
Christ, those sins which the Church has especially cursed, such as
pollution of