No More Learning

Last night two superb Satans and a She-devil not less extraordinary
ascended the mysterious stairway by which Hell gains access to the
frailty of sleeping man, and communes with him in secret. These three
postured gloriously before me, as though they had been upon a stage--and
a sulphurous splendour emanated from these beings who so disengaged
themselves from the opaque heart of the night. They bore with them so
proud a presence, and so full of mastery, that at first I took them for
three of the true Gods.

The first Satan, by his face, was a creature of doubtful sex. The
softness of an ancient Bacchus shone in the lines of his body. His
beautiful langourous eyes, of a tenebrous and indefinite colour, were
like violets still laden with the heavy tears of the storm; his
slightly-parted lips were like heated censers, from whence exhaled the
sweet savour of many perfumes; and each time he breathed, exotic
insects drew, as they fluttered, strength from the ardours of his
breath.

Twined about his tunic of purple stuff, in the manner of a cincture, was
an iridescent Serpent with lifted head and eyes like embers turned
sleepily towards him. Phials full of sinister fluids, alternating with
shining knives and instruments of surgery, hung from this living girdle.
He held in his right hand a flagon containing a luminous red fluid, and
inscribed with a legend in these singular words:

"DRINK OF THIS MY BLOOD: A PERFECT RESTORATIVE";

and in his left hand held a violin that without doubt served to sing his
pleasures and pains, and to spread abroad the contagion of his folly
upon the nights of the Sabbath.

From rings upon his delicate ankles trailed a broken chain of gold, and
when the burden of this caused him to bend his eyes towards the earth,
he would contemplate with vanity the nails of his feet, as brilliant and
polished as well-wrought jewels.

He looked at me with eyes inconsolably heartbroken and giving forth an
insidious intoxication, and cried in a chanting voice: "If thou wilt, if
thou wilt, I will make thee an overlord of souls; thou shalt be master
of living matter more perfectly than the sculptor is master of his clay;
thou shalt taste the pleasure, reborn without end, of obliterating
thyself in the self of another, and of luring other souls to lose
themselves in thine. "

But I replied to him: "I thank thee. I only gain from this venture,
then, beings of no more worth than my poor self? Though remembrance
brings me shame indeed, I would forget nothing; and even before I
recognised thee, thou ancient monster, thy mysterious cutlery, thy
equivocal phials, and the chain that imprisons thy feet, were symbols
showing clearly enough the inconvenience of thy friendship. Keep thy
gifts.
"

The second Satan had neither the air at once tragical and smiling, the
lovely insinuating ways, nor the delicate and scented beauty of the
first. A gigantic man, with a coarse, eyeless face, his heavy paunch
overhung his hips and was gilded and pictured, like a tattooing, with a
crowd of little moving figures which represented the unnumbered forms of
universal misery. There were little sinew-shrunken men who hung
themselves willingly from nails; there were meagre gnomes, deformed and
under-sized, whose beseeching eyes begged an alms even more eloquently
than their trembling hands; there were old mothers who nursed clinging
abortions at their pendent breasts. And many others, even more
surprising.

This heavy Satan beat with his fist upon his immense belly, from whence
came a loud and resounding metallic clangour, which died away in a
sighing made by many human voices. And he smiled unrestrainedly, showing
his broken teeth--the imbecile smile of a man who has dined too freely.
Then the creature said to me:

"I can give thee that which gets all, which is worth all, which takes
the place of all. " And he tapped his monstrous paunch, whence came a
sonorous echo as the commentary to his obscene speech. I turned away
with disgust and replied: "I need no man's misery to bring me happiness;
nor will I have the sad wealth of all the misfortunes pictured upon thy
skin as upon a tapestry. "

As for the She-devil, I should lie if I denied that at first I found in
her a certain strange charm, which to define I can but compare to the
charm of certain beautiful women past their first youth, who yet seem to
age no more, whose beauty keeps something of the penetrating magic of
ruins. She had an air at once imperious and sordid, and her eyes, though
heavy, held a certain power of fascination. I was struck most by her
voice, wherein I found the remembrance of the most delicious contralti,
as well as a little of the hoarseness of a throat continually laved with
brandy.

"Wouldst thou know my power? " said the charming and paradoxical voice of
the false goddess. "Then listen. " And she put to her mouth a gigantic
trumpet, enribboned, like a mirliton, with the titles of all the
newspapers in the world; and through this trumpet she cried my name so
that it rolled through space with the sound of a hundred thousand
thunders, and came re-echoing back to me from the farthest planet.