*siècle masquerading, lying, trickery, atheism, and vice, make up an abomination in the form of Venus that is a painting of many society beauties of the day,—soulless beauties whose bodies are as deliberately sold in the marriage mart as the clothes and jewels with which their damning forms are adorned.
And then in "The Sorrows of Satan" there is the unattractive personality of Geoffrey Tempest, a man with five millions of money, one of whose first declarations on the attainment of wealth is that he will give to none and lend to none, and who pursues a life of vanity, selfishness, and self-aggrandizement, until at last he repels the evil genius of the story, Prince Lucio Rimânez—the devil.
In the opening chapter of "The Sorrows of Satan" we are introduced to Mr. Geoffrey Tempest, at the moment a writer and a man of brains, but starving and sick at heart through a hopeless struggle against poverty, and railing against fate and the good luck of a "worthless lounger with his pockets full of gold by mere chance and heritage." He is in the lowest depths of despair, having just had a book of somewhat lofty thoughts rejected with the advice that, to make a book "go," it is desirable, from the publisher's point of view,
