Read "Là-Bas" by Joris-Karl Huysmans online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
"He doesn't lead a humdrum life, that canon! " said Des Hermies, when Durtal had related to him the details of the Black Mass. "It's a veritable seraglio of hystero-epileptics and erotomaniacs that he has formed for himself. But his vices lack warmth. Certainly, in the matter of contumelious blasphemies, of sacrilegious atrocities, and sensual excitation, this priest may seem to have exceeded the limits, to be almost unique. But the bloody and investuous side of the old sabbats is wanting. Docre is, we must admit, greatly inferior to Gilles de Rais. His works are incomplete, insipid; weak, if I may say so."
"I like that. You know it isn't easy to procure children whom one may disembowel with impunity. The parents would raise a row and the police would interfere."