Who is Maldoror? The text tells us that he was born evil; that he never cuts his fingernails so that he can pierce the breast of a child more easily therewith to drink its blood; that his breath exhales poison; that his forehead is furrowed green; that his face is like the face of some hideous deep-sea fish; that he lives alone in a cave, shunned by and shunning humanity; that he prowls the city at night wrapped in black; that he hasn’t slept for thirty years; that he was born deaf but that he developed the ability to hear; that he likes to have sex with prepubescent boys; that he is permanently tumescent; that he changes his clothes twice a week so as to save mankind from dying of their stench; that he is a shape-changer wanted by an army of spies and agents throughout Europe; that he loves the cold purity of mathematics; that he has assisted at the revolutions of the globe and been a silent witness to cataclysms and disasters; that he only has one eye in the centre of his forehead; and finally, in the last canto, there is the suggestion that Maldoror is Lucifer himself, the devil with a myriad names, this particular one conjured up by Lautreamont himself, and compounded of (echoes of) the French words for sickness or evil (), gold (), andhorror (). We let these words, then, as defined by(first edition published 1863-72, coterminous with the publication of) stand as symbols of various aspects of the text, and our responses to it.