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Everything base contains a touch of the marvelous, which arouses me. A scent of danger always surrounds these ladies: eyes whose circles have been permanently etched and whose weariness is deified by makeup, hands whose devilish expertise their every movement demonstrates, an intoxicating air of facility, their agonizing persiflage, lewd voices, specific trivia which narrate the hazards of a lifetime, signs betraying its suspected calamities; everything about them counsels fear of love’s ignominious perils; yet, with equal persuasion, everything about them shows me the abyss and makes me dizzy. I am bound, presently, to forgive them for consuming me. I am like the cloth merchant in The Thousand and One Nights who married a palace beauty; she thrashed him with a rod because he neglected to wash his hands before caressing her, and then she severed his thumbs with a razor; but he couldn’t fault her on such slight grounds and swore to wash his hands thereafter six-score times with alkali, saltwort ashes, and soap; then he bought a house and lived there for a year with his bride.

- 29, "The Passage de L'Opera," Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon