The Sorrows of Satanor, the Strange Experience of One Geoffrey Tempest, Millionaire: A Romance
1899
The Sorrows of Satanor, the Strange Experience of One Geoffrey Tempest, Millionaire: A Romance
1899
In 1895 London, starving writer Geoffrey Tempest inherits five million pounds and catches the attention of Prince Lucio Rimanez, a dangerously charming aristocrat who may or may not be the Devil himself. What follows is a Faustian bargain dressed in Victorian finery: the newly rich Geoffrey must navigate a society where everything is for sale, from political favors to sexual favors, and prove that one honest man can resist the corruption all around him. Marie Corelli's scandalous bestseller sold over 100,000 copies in weeks, sparked moral outrage across Britain, and earned praise from Oscar Wilde even as critics dismissed it as prose melodrama. The novel works as both supernatural thriller and sharp satire of fin de siècle Britain, where the aristocracy is bankrupt in more ways than one, the church has lost its faith, and the New Woman threatens everything Victorian respectability holds dear. It's a wild, sprawling, sometimes ridiculous read that knows exactly what it is: a pulp masterpiece about whether money can buy your soul, and what happens when the Devil makes you rich.
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“But a man gifted with original thoughts and the power of expressing them, appears to be regarded by everyone in authority as much worse than the worst criminal, and all the ‘jacks-in-office’ unite to kick him to death if they can.””
— Marie Corelli
“takes its colours from the mind, my dear friend;””
— Marie Corelli
“The finest actor is he who play the comedy of life perfectly, as i aspire to do. To walk well, talk well, weep well, laugh well and die well, it is all pure acting, because in every man there is the dumb dreadful immortal spirit who is real- who cannot act, who-is and who steadily maintains an infinite though speechless protest against the body's lies””
— Marie Corelli
“Be sure that if you are unhappily celebrated for either beauty, wit, intellect, or all three together, half society wishes you dead already, and the other half tries to make you as wretched as possible while you are alive.””
— Marie Corelli
“no fame is actually worth much now-a-days,”
— Marie Corelli
“I am going to make you what you may perhaps consider rather a singular proposition. It is this, that if you don’t like me, say so at once, and we will part now, before we have time to know anything more of each other, and I will endeavour not to cross your path again unless you seek me out. But if on the contrary, you do like me,”
— Marie Corelli
“Wealth acts merely as a kind of mirror to show you human nature at its worst.””
— Marie Corelli
“Beauty combined with wantonness frequently ends in the drawn twitch, fixed eye and helpless limbs of life-in-death. It is Nature’s revenge on the outraged body,”
— Marie Corelli
“I confess I like a woman to have a certain amount of temper. I can not endure your preternaturally amiable female, who can find nothing in the length or breath of the globe to move to any other expression than a fatuous smile. I love to see the danger flash in bright eyes, the delicate quiver in of pride in the lines of a lovely mouth, and the warm flush of indignation on fair cheeks. It all suggests spirit, and untamed will; and rouse in a man the love of mastery that is born in his nature, urging him to conquer and subdue that which seems unconquerable.””
— Marie Corelli
