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"Literary Sadism “Imagine, I am seeing blood,” Valéry writes to Gide in May of 1891. Valéry was responding to the violence at Fourmies in northern France where gendarmes shot and killed ten workers at a mass strike at a textile mill. Those soldiers who fired on the crowd, I envied them and oh to fire on all the World! I detest the masses, and even more, the Others!…I am exhausting an art form in a quick spasm, and am so panic-stricken that I am haunted by a panorama of slaughter, and blinded by ravaged lights. I almost wish for a monstrous war in which to flee amid the shock of a crazed and red Europe….I don’t know what blood is speaking in me, or what wolf of olden times yawns in my boredom, but I feel it there….Does this barbarian surprise you?…Ah! how much night there is! To grasp it! To brood it…and to laugh at holding it captive—a Star! It is difficult. Well then! Blood!"
