Les Diaboliques Quotes

“For in Paris, whenever God puts a pretty woman there (the streets), the Devil, in reply, immediately puts a fool to keep her.”
― Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques

“Extreme civilization robs crime of its frightful poetry, and prevents the writer from restoring it. That would be too dreadful, say those good souls who want everything to be prettified, even the horrible. In the name of philanthropy, imbecile criminologists reduce the punishment, and inept moralists the crime, and what is more they reduce the crime only in order to reduce the punishment. Yet the crimes of extreme civilization are undoubtedly more atrocious than those of extreme barbarism, by virtue of their refinement, of the corruption they imply and of their superior degree of intellectualism. ("A Woman's Vengeance")”
― Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques

“They had...finished their lives before their death – which is not always the end of life and often comes long before the end.”
― Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques

“Men are all the same. Novelty amongst themselves displeases and upsets them – but if the novelty is wearing a skirt, they go crazy for it.

(Les hommes sont tous les mêmes. L'étrangeté leur déplaît, d'homme à homme, et les blesse ; mais si l'étrangeté porte des jupes, ils en raffolent.)”
― Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques

“Yet, whether to the glory or to the shame of human nature, in what we call pleasure (with an excess of scorn, perhaps) there are abysses as deep as those of love.”
― Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques

“Beauty is single. Only ugliness is multiple, and even then its multiplicity is soon exhausted.”
― Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques

“Fools – in other words most people – imagine that it would be a wonderful achievement to be able to recover our youth; but those who know life are aware how little it would profit us. ("A Woman's Vengeance")”
― Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques

“He was terrified by the sublime horror of it, for intensity of feeling, carried to this degree, is sublime. ("A Woman's Vengeance")”
― Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques

“My good fellow,” said Mesnil, stopping, “ever since the creation of the world there have been men like me specially intended to astonish men...men like you.”
― Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques

“They were like the Neapolitan girl who said that her sorbet was good but that it would have been better if it had been a sin to eat it.”
― Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques - édition enrichie

“He had a reputation in society as a man with a lively wit, whose gaiety was pleasant and formidable – which all gaiety must be in a society which would despise you if, while amusing it, you did not make it tremble a little. ("A Woman's Vengeance")”
― Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques

“And, in fact, if these crimes appeal less to the senses, they appeal more to the mind; and the mind, in the last analysis, is the profoundest part of us. For the novelist, therefore, there is a new type of tragedy to be derived from these crimes, more intellectual than physical in character, which do not really seem to be crimes to the superficial judgement of old materialistic societies because they do not involve bloodshed, and murder is committed only in the sphere of feelings and manners.”
― Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques

“Now, Mesnilgrand saw himself come to full maturity without the great military career that he had hoped for, his sword rusting in its scabbard, his feelings swelling up into the bitterest kind of rage. [...] An ingenious moralist, preoccupid by how illogical our destinies appear to be, once explained it by hypothesizing that men are like portrairs: the ones who have only their head and shoulders depicted seem larger than they could really have been in life, while others practically disappear, shrunken and reduced to looking like dwarves by the absurd size of their portrait's frame. [...] Back then, people thought he would either kill himself or go mad. He did not kill himself, and his mind stayed whole. He did not go mad. But then, that was because he was mad already, said the jokers—for there are always jokers. But although he did not kill himself—and, given his nature, his comrades chose not to ask him why he did not—he was not the kind of man to let his heart be eaten by a vulture without at least trying to break the vulture's beak.”
― Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques

“For – as everyone knows – in libertinism bad taste is a potent force. ("A Woman's Vengeance")”
― Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques

“If writers only dared to dare, a Suetonius or a Tacitus of the Novel could exist, for the Novel is essentially the history of manners, turned into a story and a play, as is History itself often enough. And there is no other difference than this: that the one, the Novel, cloaks its manners under the disguise of invented characters, while the other, History, provides names and addresses. Only, the Novel probes much deeper than history. It has an ideal, and History has none; it is limited by reality. The Novel also holds the stage much longer. ("A Woman's Vengeance")”
― Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques

“It had to have been the first time something hideous has ever taken place! A father and a mother hurling the heart of their dead child into each other's faces!”
― Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques

“There were no tender young girls present, the type Byron detested, like fruits that look ripe but upon tasting are sour and unready—none of those early spring growths; instead, all the women there were splendid...”
― Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques

“So theirs was not the atheism of the eighteenth century, though that was where it originated. Eighteenth-century atheism had pretensions to truth, and to thought. It was rational, sophistical, declamatory, and above all, insolent. But its insolence was nothing compared to that of these veterans of the Empire, these apostate regicides. We who have come along after these men, we too have our own brand of atheism--absolute, focused, erudite, cool, hate-filled, implacable!--and hating everything related to religion with the hatred of the termite for the beam he is gnawing. But neither our modern nor eighteenth-century atheism can give any of the ferocity of the atheism of these men earlier in the century, who were bred like dogs by their Voltairean fathers, and once having reached manhood, having had their arms plunged up to the shoulders in all the horrors, all the double corruptions of politics and of war. After two or three hours of howling blasphemies from those drinking and eating, the dining room of old Monsieur de Mesnilgrand had quite a different atmosphere and quite a different look from that sorry little room in a restaurant where some of our grand literary mandarins recently held a little anti-God orgy at five francs a head.”
― Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques

“So this had been going on for three months?' asked Tressignies--not daring to specify what *this* referred to; his vagueness was in fact more horrible than precison would have been.

'Yes,' she said. 'Three months.' Then she added, 'But what's three months? It takes time to cook and cook some more this dish of vengeance I'm preparing for him, to pay back for that heart of Esteban's that he wouldn't let me eat ...”
― Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques - édition enrichie

“[Mesnilgrand] had the gift of sarcasm. But that was not the only gift that almighty God had given him. While character was the dominant force in his constitution, wit occupied the second place and was a real strength for him to use against others. There is no doubt that if the Chevalier de Mesnilgrand had been a fortunate man, he would have been a great wit; but as an unfortunate, he had the opinions of a desperate man, and when he was in high spirits, which was rare, there was something desperate about him; and nothing will shatter the kaleidoscope of wit more readily, preventing it from twisting and casting ever new splendors, than a fixed, steady unhappiness.”
― Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques - édition enrichie