Lust appears in many forms in The Name of the Rose and can be seen as the driving force behind many of the novel’s events. Sexual lust between the monks runs throughout the narrative, just below the surface of abbey life. Berengar’s lust for Adelmo leads him to betray the secret of the lost volume of Aristotle, Adelmo’s guilt over giving into lust (Berengar’s and his own) leads him to commit suicide, and Malachi’s lust for Berengar leads him to murder Severinus in a fit of jealousy. Ubertino discourses at length on the difference between sexual lust and holy love, although his own behavior toward Adso could be interpreted as indicative of suppressed sexual lust. Adso himself mentions that as an old man, he still feels the presence of the “noonday demon” when he sees a handsome novice. In contrast to these instances of lust between men, which are described as sinful and unnatural, Adso’s youthful lust for the girl from the village is regarded as an understandable folly, one that receives forgiveness from William and Ubertino. His feelings for the girl are, the novice reasons, wrong not in themselves but because he has taken a monk’s vow of chastity. Many of the monks have a lust for knowledge and books, particularly of the forbidden variety. This intellectual lust leads Venantius, Berengar, and Malachi to their deaths as they read the secret manuscript and is at least part of why Adelmo agrees to sleep with Berengar. Benno is perhaps the ultimate symbol of this type of lust, which William characterizes as intellectual pride: the young scholar desires unbridled access to the library so much that he steals the manuscript from the infirmary so that he may return it to Malachi in exchange for being appointed assistant librarian, after which he refuses to aid William any longer in the investigation. At the end of the novel, Benno rushes into the burning library, the repository and symbol of the assembled knowledge of Christendom, and meets his fate in a blaze of passion. Then there is the darker kind of lust William tells Adso he encountered as an inquisitor: lust for pain and death. Inquisition and torture, William explains, bring out this type of lust in their frenzied victims, who, like Remigio, often end up falsely confessing to all manner of crimes. Inquisitors like Bernard Gui, William says, are driven by a lust for power, while the Pope is driven by a lust for wealth.