I saw sensuality as sacred, indeed the only sacredness, I saw woman and her beauty as divine since her calling is the most important task of existence: the propagation of the species. I saw woman as the personification of nature, as Isis, and man as her priest, her slave; and I pictured her treating him as cruelly as Nature, who, when she no longer needs something that has served her, tosses it away, while her abuses, indeed her killing it, are its lascivious bliss.

My husband's personality was filled with serenity and sunlight. Not even the incurable illness which fell upon him soon after our marriage could long cloud his brow. On the very night of his death he took me in his arms, and during the many months when he lay dying in his wheel chair, he often said jokingly to me: 'Well, have you already picked out a lover?' I blushed with shame. 'Don't deceive me,' he added on one occasion, 'that would seem ugly to me, but pick out an attractive lover, or preferably several. You are a splendid woman, but still half a child, and you need toys.

People who want to live like Olympian gods must have slaves whom they throw into their fishponds and gladiators who fight during their masters sumptuous banquets-and the pleasure-seekers never care if some blood splatters on them.

Once I no longer exist as I am, out of what consideration then should I forgo anything? Should I belong to a man I don't love simply because I used to love him? No, I forgo nothing, I love any man who appeals to me and I make any man who loves me happy. Is that ugly? No, it is at least far more beautiful than my cruelly delighting in the tortures incited by my charms and my virtuously turning my back on the poor man who pines away for me. I am young, rich, and beautiful, and just as I am, I live cheerfully for pleasure and enjoyment.

The person who doesn't know how to subjugate will all too quickly feel the other's foot on the nape of his neck.

You are cold, while you yourself fan flames.

You have corrupted my imagination and inflamed my blood.