FINISHED PIECE : thegodofpegana.deviantart.com THE SONGS OF MALDOROR, the only novel of French writer Le Comte de Lautréamont (aka Isidore Ducasse, 1846-1870) went down in history as one of the single most intriguing and important texts of French Literature. It shaped whole artistic movements, notably the Surrealist movement and single handedly immortalized its author. Here is the complete quote that inspired this drawing : "I am filthy. I am riddled with lice. Hogs, when they look at me, vomit. My skin is encrusted with the scabs and scales of leprosy, and covered with yellowish pus. I know neither the water of rivers nor the dew of clouds. An enormous, mushroom with umbelliferous stalks is growing on my nape, as on a dunghill. Sitting on a shapeless piece of furniture, I have not moved my limbs now for four centuries. My feet have taken root in the ground; up to my belly, they form a sort of tenacious vegetation, full of filthy parasites; this vegetation no longer has any! thing in common with other plants, nor is it flesh. And yet my heart beats. How could it beat, if the rottenness and miasmata of my corpse (I dare not say body), did not nourish it abundantly? A family of toads has taken up residence in my left armpit and, when one of them moves, it tickles. Mind one of them does not escape and come and scratch the inside of your ear with its mouth; for it would then be able to enter your brain. In my right armpit there is a chameleon which is perpetually chasing them
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