United States or Bermuda ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It feeds upon the passion it inflames, and fattens on the holiest sentiments, turned by its touch to filth and rottenness. It loves the haunts of vice, and is at home in the company of harlots and debauchees." George T. Lemon says: "No Church in Christendom commends or even excuses the dance. All unite to condemn it."
"One would say that he was a Doge of Venice on his way to his bridal with the sea." "Say, Jehan! here are the canons of Sainte-Genevieve!" "To the deuce with the whole set of canons!" "Abbe Claude Choart! Doctor Claude Choart! Are you in search of Marie la Giffarde?" "She is in the Rue de Glatigny." "She is making the bed of the king of the debauchees.
Besides, debauchees, whether they stop short at vice or roll down the descent into crime, have no foresight of the future. Present sensation is too strong for them; its image abolishes all other images, and absorbs all the vital forces of the temperament and the soul.
What a strange and fiendish idea it was, the young, handsome noble who had ruined himself and his family in the society of the splendid debauchees, gathering them all together, men and women who had known only love and pleasure, for a glorious and awful riot of luxury, and then, when they were all dancing in the great ballroom, locking the doors and burning the whole castle about them, the while he sat in the great keep listening to their screams of agonized fear, watching the fire sweep from wing to wing until the whole mighty mass was one enormous and awful pyre, and then, clothing himself in his great-great-grandfather's armor, hanging himself in the midst of the ruins of what had been a proud and noble castle.
And those who uphold the Platonic view are not always debauchees but sometimes men and women who, however incomprehensibly, still sincerely believe that they and not we who oppose them are the true idealists. This is why it is worth while to state our reasons for our profound disagreement, and to do so as intelligently and fairly as possible.
It was a strange and melancholy contrast to see these debauchees, disturbed in the very depth of their midnight revel, on their arrival at such a scene as this.
To the debauchees, the poisoners, the atheists, who had worn the tiara during the generation which preceded the Reformation, had succeeded Popes who, in religious fervor and severe sanctity of manners, might bear a comparison with Cyprian or Ambrose.
There resulted widespread sexual violence and seduction, hesitating at nothing, often insanely daring, in which everywhere the devil was supposed to help; everyone's head was turned in this way; the uncontrolled lust of debauchees found vent in secret bacchanalian associations and orgies, wherein many, with or without masquerade, played the part of Satan; shameful deeds were perpetrated by excited women and by procuresses and prostitutes ready for any kind of immoral abomination; add to these sexual orgies the most widely diffused web of a completely developed theory of witchcraft, and the systematic strengthening of the widely prevalent belief in the devil all these things, woven in a labyrinthine connection, made it possible for thousands upon thousands to be murdered by a disordered justice and to be sacrificed to delusion."
Where is she now? Ask Gibbon, the historian, in his prose poem, the "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." Ask her gigantic ruins straggling their sadness through the ages, the screech owl at windows out of which world-wide conquerors looked. Ask the day of judgment when her crowned debauchees, Commodus and Pertinax, and Caligula and Diocletian, shall answer for their infamy?
Amongst them were merchants from whom Thais had often bought perfumes and stuffs, and they looked on anxiously with long, yellow faces, unable to comprehend what was going on. Some young debauchees, who, returning from a supper, passed by there, preceded by their slaves, stopped, their heads crowned with flowers, their tunics floating, and uttered loud cries.
Word Of The Day