"For fifteen years I have diligently studied earthly life. True, I saw neither the earth nor the people, but in your books I drank fragrant wine, sang songs, hunted deer and wild boar in the forests, loved women.... And beautiful women, like clouds ethereal, created by the magic of your poets' genius, visited me by night and whispered me wonderful tales, which made my head drunken. In your books I climbed the summits of Elbruz and Mont Blanc and saw from thence how the sun rose in the morning, and in the evening overflowed the sky, the ocean and the mountain ridges with a purple gold. I saw from thence how above me lightnings glimmered cleaving the clouds; I saw green forests, fields, rivers, lakes, cities; I heard syrens singing, and the playing of the pipes of Pan; I touched the wings of beautiful devils who came flying to me to speak of God.... In your books I cast myself into bottomless abysses, worked miracles, burned cities to the ground, preached new religions, conquered whole countries....

BET

desires are the chief foes of a prisoner

Never at any other time, not even after his terrible losses on the Exchange, had he felt such contempt for himself as now. Coming home, he lay down on his bed, but agitation and tears kept him long from sleep....

That I may show you in deed my contempt for that by which you live, I waive the two millions of which I once dreamed as of paradise, and which I now despise.

It was decided that the lawyer must undergo his imprisonment under the strictest observation, in a garden-wing of the banker's house.

The idea that you have the right to free yourself at any moment will poison the whole of your life in the cell. I pity you.

Will it convince people that capital punishment is worse or better than imprisonment for life. No, No! all stuff and rubbish. On my part, it was the caprice of a well-fed man; on the lawyer's, pure greed of gold."

Two millions are nothing to me

I bet you two millions you wouldn't stick in a cell even for five years.

It's a lie.

It's better to live somehow than not to live at all.

Christian State and immoral

punishment

But they braced themselves, crowded round the cage, and did not want ever to move away

Into the cage they put a young panther

because I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.

"Because I have to fast, I can't help it,"

the world who was cheating him of his reward

That made it too easy for people to make their choice

he even alleged that if he were allowed to fast as he liked, and this was at once promised him without more ado, he could astound the world by establishing a record never yet achieved

What was a consequence of the premature ending of his fast was here presented as the cause of it! To fight against this lack of understanding, against a whole world of non-understanding, was impossible.

honored by all the world, yet in spite of that troubled in spirit, and all the more troubled because no one would take his trouble seriously

why shouldn't the public endure it

he felt that there were no limits to his capacity for fasting

The longest period of fasting was fixed by his impresario at forty days, beyond that term he was not allowed to go

At the best they set him down as modest, most of them, however, thought he was out for publicity or else he was some kind of cheat who found it easy to fast because he had discovered a way of making it easy, and then had the impudence to admit the fact, more or less.

For he alone knew, what no other initiate knew, how easy it was to fast

Such suspicions, anyhow, were a necessary accompaniment to the profession of fasting. No one could possibly watch the hunger artist continuosly, day and night, and so no one could produce first-hand evidence that the fast had really been rigorous and continuous; only the artist himself could know that, he was therefore bound to be the sole completely satisfied spectator of his own fast.

an enormous breakfast was brought them, at his expense, on which they flung themselves

that he was fasting as not one of them could fast

to show them how unjust their suspicions were

reassure the masses

excitement

withdrawing deep into himself

cage

A HUNGER ARTIST