Reflections on l’affaire Epstein/Maxwell

Writes Rick Rozoff:

This is from French writer Romain Rolland’s 1904 play The Montespan, based partially on the 17th-century Affair of the Poisons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affair_of_the_Poisons )

The final paragraph cuts to the core of the issue, I find. I think it’s the very essence of what’s at play:

MME. de Montespan: Do I refuse him anything of myself? My soul is his; but he must not ask me to debase myself to these foul practices!

La Voisin:

What do they amount to? A few gestures. Not a word. Shut your eyes and give over your body.

MME. de Montespan [Eyes fixed] Nude, lying on the altar, head and limbs hanging down – the eyes and hands of a vicious priest upon me, the Lord’s cross and the sacred chalice on my sacrilegious body, the chalice, red with the blood of an innocent child! . . . No, no! Be gone!

La Voisin What is that, compared with what you want? Isn’t the power that only demands the blood of an innocent child, obtained at a very low cost?

MME. de Montespan

I feel sick. I will not, I cannot humiliate my self.

La Voisin

[Bitterly] You, who think you have run the gamut of voluptuous sensations, – you are ignorant of the most powerful one of all, that of degrading oneself. The human herd is parked between two narrow limits: that of good and that of evil. It is forbidden to go either higher or lower. Only a small number dare cross the barriers; and the glory is greater in crossing that of evil because it is more forbidden. To break one’s chains, to wrest oneself out of the iron collar of human morality, to slap one’s conscience in the face, to vilify oneself. It is a bitter joy for those who are great and dominate the world. It is nothing to scorn others: one must also scorn oneself. What a delightful sensation to trample under foot the works of God, to soil His image, to drag oneself down, down still further! Then one becomes like the Other, the One who laughs amid sorrow and is puffed up in abjection, the Master who holds in his hands all the power of the world, not in order to use it, but to destroy it!

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