worship and carnal orgy.

In its elements, this phenomenon to which the Marquis de Sade has
bequeathed his name is as old as the Church. It had reared its head in
the eighteenth century, recalling, to go back no farther, by a simple
phenomenon of atavism the impious practices of the Sabbath, the
witches' revels of the Middle Ages.

By having consulted the _Malleus maleficorum_, that terrible code of
Jacob Sprenger which permits the Church wholesale burnings of
necromancers and sorcerers, Des Esseintes recognized in the witches'
Sabbath, all the obscene practices and all the blasphemies of sadism.
In addition to the unclean scenes beloved by Malin, the nights
successively and lawfully consecrated to excessive sensual orgies and
devoted to the bestialities of passion, he once more discovered the
parody of the processions, the insults and eternal threats levelled at
God and the devotion bestowed upon His rival, while amid cursing of
the wine and the bread, the black mass was being celebrated on the
back of a woman on all fours, whose stained bare thighs served as the
altar from which the congregation received the communion from a black
goblet stamped with an image of a goat.

This profusion of impure mockeries and foul shames were marked in the
career of the Marquis de Sade, who garnished his terrible pleasures
with outrageous sacrileges.

He cried out to the sky, invoked Lucifer, shouted his contempt of God,
calling Him rogue and imbecile, spat upon the communion, endeavored to
contaminate with vile ordures a Divinity who he prayed might damn him,
the while he declared, to defy Him the more, that He did not exist.

Barbey d'Aurevilly approached this psychic state. If he did not
presume as far as De Sade in uttering atrocious curses against the
Saviour; if, more prudent or more timid, he claimed ever to honor the
Church, he none the less addressed his suit to the Devil as was done
in medieval times and he, too, in order to brave God, fell into
demoniac nymphomania, inventing sensual monstrosities, even borrowing
from bedroom philosophy a certain episode which he seasoned with new
condiments when he wrote the story _le Diner d'un athee_.

This extravagant book pleased Des Esseintes. He had caused to be
printed, in violet ink and in a frame of cardinal purple, on a genuine
parchment which the judges of the Rota had blessed, a copy of the
_Diaboliques_, with characters whose quaint quavers and flourishes in
turned up