RETURN TO THE PORTAL OF HELL

There is in hell a deep fjord called Saguenay, made of stone and the colour of iron,
as well as the circle of rocks that surrounds it. Just in the middle of this damned space,
a very broad and deep well opens, of which I will tell how it is ordered.
It is in this place that we were when we descent from the croup of Geryon;
the poet moved towards the left and I followed him.
The bay where we were bears its name very well, which lets escapes
some Ha! Ha! of pain, from the souls who reach it at last.

On my right, I saw a new object of pity, new tortures and the new tortured ones of which the first grave was filled.
At the deep bottom, lay the naked adulators; from the middle to us, they march out in Indian file
adjusting their steps on that of the one in front. Here and there I saw horned demons armed with long whips
that cruelly struck them from behind.
Oh! how they made them raise their heels at the first blows, so that they did not await for any other blows!

While walking, my glance was attracted by one of them, and I said at once:
"You there, it is not the first time I see you."
So, I stopped to stare at him; and my soft guide stopped with me, this fustigated
believed he could hide by lowering his head; but that hardly succeeds, because I told him:
"You who direct your eyes on the ground, if your features do not mislead me, you are one of these flatterers
who pursue the celebrities; but what takes you out to such bitter torments?"

He answered me:
"I say it with bad feeling; but your clear language constrained me, that makes me remembering her,
whom I had sanctified. When she died under the Alma bridge, my tears and my flowers covered her tomb;
moreover I am not the only one to mourn here, on the contrary, this place is filled of others
that there is not so many prayers to have now the habit to say:
"Ave, Diana, gratia plena:
Dominus tecum:
Benedicta tu in mulieribus,
Et benedictus fructus ventris tui."
If you know the place in Hell where is my Princess, do not hesitate to tell me."

"Go, walk, flatterrer! There is not here, as on earth, any Madonna, neither any Julie,
nor any Celine, neither Lady Dy, nor celebrities, or princesses to be sold."

I joined my guide; and, in a few steps, we arrived where a bridge in the rock crossed over the other bank.
We climb up there without sorrow, and turning to the right, on its escarpment, we quit these eternal circles.
When we arrived at the point where it overhangs the emptiness to give passage to the fustigated, my guide says to me:
"Stop and do so, that, strikes you the aspect of these other deprived,
of which you did not yet saw the face, because hysteria obliterates their personality." "

From the old bridge we looked and heard the hysterical cries of the young girls who twisted and hoarsed herselves in pain;
they projected their bust out, whereas sadists devils with their naked chest and leather trousers stuck to their flesh,
grabbed them, pushed them back violently and burned their cardrum with their instruments of torture,
so that they could, with ease, subjugate them and deflowered them.

The good Master says to me:
"Look at the one who detached himself from the platform and who, by its costume, is the Golden calf and,
in spite of his shouts, he seems not suffering. What magic he operates beside these young girls not yet pubescent,
because he pushes them in fright only by swinging, he makes them hysterical just by shouting and he can rape them
without having to penetrate them.
He comes from the Island Britannicus, where he learned the art of satanic rites and enchanter languages
bond to mislead the young girls and to push the young males to suicide. He abandons them with their distress
after having subjugated their soul, and it is this fault that condemns him to such a torment;
it is this way Meduse is avenged. With him are going away the celebrities who usurp their power;
and it is enough for you to know that of the first valley and of those she slaughters in her enclosure."

Already, we were at the point where the narrow path of the bridge crosses with the second dam
and rests over it to form a new arch. From there, we heard people who lament in the second grave,
and blow from their muzzle and strike themselves with the palms of their hands.
The walls were covered with a mildewed crust, coming from exhalations from below which are pasted there
and which wound the eyes as much as the nose. The bottom is so obscure that one cannot see from nowhere,
unless going up on the curve of the arch, where this shelf is overhanging the most.

We reached that point; and from there I saw, in the grave below, people plunged in excrement
that appeared drawn from human latrines. And while I scanned the bottom with my eyes,
I saw one of them whose head was spoiled with shit that one could not know if he was an actor,
a singer, a preacher, a sportsman or a citizen without importance.

He sermonized me as follows:
"Why are you so greader to recognize me, more than the other of these disgusting people?"

I answered him:
"Because, if I remember it well, it was you Normand, the star of the seminary who steel all our girl-friends
and who, blindly, they pursued because you were the so-called most handsome and that
you shamefully dropped them after having taken everything from her.
This is why I spy you more than the others, these others for whom I do not have any sentiment
of jealousy, but rather nourish, for those who adulates them and maintain them like so
in their sufficiency, a soft and persistent mistaken."

And he answered me:
"In this hollow I was plunged by flatteries from which I never had
my ear satiated, forgetting that one could also love."

After which, my guide says to me:
"Make sure you glances a littlemore ahead, so that your eyes perceive well
the face of this dirty and dishevelled maid, who scratches herself
with her filthy nails, and sometimes squats herself, and sometimes is drawn up upright.
It is Eponine, this courtesan who, whereas her lover asked her:
"Do you Have any love for me as much as I have any for you?"
she answered:
"I am never in love with whom believes he fornicates with me in this very moment,
but with those who will come tomorrow and with whom I will fornicate for a sole and single time,
because there is not in me an other love than the vicious pleasure of fornication." " "