Blood of the Poor

Blood of the Poor (originally Le Sang du pauvre), by Catholic writer Leon Bloy, is perhaps the hardest to read of Leon Bloy’s writings, as it goes straight to the heart of the matter of what is wrong in the world. It is hard to read, emotively, because it gives the honest reader no room for cover, no space for shelter, no shadow of a tree to hide behind. With avarice as its subject, it is a dark poem in prose, a sermon in the style of Savonarola, with the biting satire of a Jonathan Swift.

The Blood and the Flesh of the Poor are the only aliments that can nourish, the substance of the rich being a poison and a putrefaction. It is therefore a necessity of hygiene that the poor be devoured by the rich who find that very good, and who ask for it again. Rich children are fortified by the juice of the poors’ flesh, and the rich man’s cuisine is endowed with concentrate of the poor.

You believe yourselves to be innocent because you have not slit somebody’s throat, as yet, I want to believe; because you have not forced open somebody’s door nor scaled his wall in order to despoil him of his possessions; because finally you have not transgressed human laws too visibly. You are so gross, so carnal, for you do not conceive of a crime that cannot be seen. But I say to you, my very dear brother, that you are a plant, and that that assassin is your flower.

It is true that there are refuges: drunkenness, prostitution of the body, suicide, or madness. Why would the dance not continue?