It fashioned beings the law of whose existence was hideously simple: it permitted them to suffer, and commanded them to amuse.
III.
The manufacture of monsters was practised on a large scale, and comprised various branches.
The Sultan required them, so did the Pope; the one to guard his women, the other to say his prayers.

These were of a peculiar kind, incapable of reproduction.

Scarcely human beings, they were useful to voluptuousness and to religion.

The seraglio and the Sistine Chapel utilized the same species of monsters; fierce in the former case, mild in the latter.
They knew how to produce things in those days which are not produced now; they had talents which we lack, and it is not without reason that some good folk cry out that the decline has come.

We no longer know how to sculpture living human flesh; this is consequent on the loss of the art of torture.