Comte de Lautréamont ( Isidore-Lucien Ducasse, 4 April 1846 - 24 November 1870).“The true Satanist a
Comte de Lautréamont ( Isidore-Lucien Ducasse, 4 April 1846 - 24 November 1870).“The true Satanist among the decadents was Isidore Ducasse (1846-1870), who wrote under the name Lautréamont. Lautréamont agreed with Baudelaire that we must face evils in its most intense and shocking forms, but he went on to make the transition from facing evil to embracing it. Impressed by Sade, Lautréamont regarded creative cruelty as a mark of genius and honesty, and he used the attack on hypocrisy as an excuse to explore the most loathsome recesses of his own soul. Maldoror, the personna of his ugly master piece The Chants of Maldoror, is a combination of Sade, Satan and Ducasse himself. Maldoror contemplates or commits an endless series of perverted outrages. It is unclear whether Lautréamont was mad; he clearly did not practice everything his character did; yet it is insane to hope that one can summon up such dark forces and not become their slave. Maldoror sees a child sitting on a park bench and immediately imagines a hog gnawing away her genitals and burrowing through her body. He dreams of torturing young boys and drinking their blood and tears. When he kisses a baby, he fantasizes about slashing its cheeks with a razor. Vampirism, necrophilia, blasphemy, bestiality, incest, bondage, pederasty, mutilation, murder, and cannibalism obsess him. « Maldoror was born evil. He admited the truth that he was cruel ». Reacting against the bland assumption of the Enlightenment and the Romantics that human nature is essentially good, Lautréamont plunged to the opposite extreme.” Jeffrey Burton Russell. -- source link