Lust
Literature

From Ovid to the works of les poètes maudits, characters have always been faced with scenes of lechery, and for time out of mind lust has been a common motif in world literature. Many writers, such as Georges Bataille, Casanova and Prosper Mérimée, have written works wherein scenes take place at bordellos and other unseemly locales.

Baudelaire, author of Les fleurs du mal, had once remarked, in regard to the artist, that:

The more a man cultivates the arts, the less randy he becomes... Only the brute is good at coupling, and copulation is the lyricism of the masses. To copulate is to enter into another—and the artist never emerges from himself.

The most notable work to touch upon the sin of lust, (and also upon the other Seven Deadly Sins), is Dante's Divine Comedy. Dante's criterion for lust was an "excessive love of others", insofar as an excessive love for man would render one's love of God secondary. In the first canticle of the Divine Comedy—the Inferno—the lustful are punished by being continuously swept around in a whirlwind, symbolizing their ungovernable passions. The damned who are guilty of lust, like the two famous lovers, Paolo and Francesca, receive in Hell exactly what they desired most in their mortal lives, only to find that their passions will give them no rest for all eternity. In Purgatorio, of the selfsame work, the penitents choose to walk through flames in order to purge themselves of their lustful inclinations.
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