263. When I had reached this point in my reflexion, word was sent to me by the Lord through an angel who said, 'Now you shall see and receive visual proof of what hellish love is like.' Then the ground suddenly opened on the left, and I saw a devil coming up from hell. On his head he had a square hat pulled down over his forehead to his eyes, a face covered in spots like those of a raging fever, glowering eyes, and a chest swollen up in the shape of a lozenge. He belched smoke from his mouth like a furnace, his loins were plainly on fire, and in place of feet he had bony ankles devoid of flesh. His body gave off a heat that smelt rotten and filthy.
[2] I was terrified by this apparition and called out, 'Don't come closer. Tell me where you are from.' 'I am from the underworld,' he replied in a hoarse voice, 'and I belong with two hundred others to a community which is the most exalted of all. All of us there are emperors of emperors, kings of kings, dukes of dukes, princes of princes. There is no one there who is merely an emperor, king, duke or prince. There we sit on thrones of thrones, from where we despatch our commands through all the world, and beyond.' 'Don't you see,' I said to him, 'that your imagined pre-eminence has driven you mad?' 'How can you say such a thing,' he replied, 'when this is exactly what we seem to ourselves to be, and we are acknowledged by our companions as such?'
On hearing this I was unwilling to go on telling him he was mad, because his madness was the result of his delusion. I was allowed to know that when that devil lived in the world he had been nothing but the steward of a household. He had been so haughty in spirit that he despised the whole human race compared with himself and indulged in the fancy that he was of higher rank than the king or even the emperor. This pride made him deny the existence of God and treat all holy things of the church as of no value to him, but merely something for the unintelligent populace.
[3] At length I asked him, 'How long are the two hundred of you there going to go on boasting to one another?' 'For ever,' he said. 'But those of us who torture others for denying our pre-eminence sink down below. For we are allowed to boast, but not to harm anyone.' 'Do you know,' I went on to ask, 'what awaits those who sink down below?' He said that they sink into a sort of prison, where they are called lower than the low, the lowliest of all, and there they work. Then I told the devil to take care, that he too did not sink down.
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