The transitions, the alternations that measure joy and pain,
and diversify human happiness, no longer existed for him. He had so
completely glutted his appetites that pleasure must overpass the
limits of pleasure to tickle a palate cloyed with satiety, and
suddenly grown fastidious beyond all measure, so that ordinary
pleasures became distasteful. Conscious that at will he was the master
of all the women that he could desire, knowing that his power was
irresistible, he did not care to exercise it; they were pliant to his
unexpressed wishes, to his most extravagant caprices, until he felt a
horrible thirst for love, and would have love beyond their power to
give.
The world refused him nothing save faith and prayer, the soothing and
consoling love that is not of this world. He was obeyed--it was a
horrible position.
The torrents of pain, and pleasure, and thought that shook his soul
and his bodily frame would have overwhelmed the strongest human being;
but in him there was a power of vitality proportioned to the power of
the sensations that assailed him. He felt within him a vague immensity
of longing that earth could not satisfy. He spent his days on
outspread wings, longing to traverse the luminous fields of space to
other spheres that he knew afar by intuitive perception, a clear and
hopeless knowledge.
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