Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings

by Marquis de Sade

  MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE—I heartily approve the arrangement; I too gain thereby; and my scholar will benefit from two excellent lessons instead of one.

  DOLMANCÉ, seizing Augustin—Come, my stalwart swain, I’ll restore thee to life. . . . Eh, look how the brute responds! Kiss me, dear friend. . . . You are still all wetted over with fuck, and ’tis fuck I ask of thee. Ah, by God, I simply must pump his ass while frigging him! . . .

  LE CHEVALIER—Approach, sister; to comply with Dolmancé’s strictures and with yours, I am going to stretch out on this bed; you will lie in my arms, and expose your gorgeous buttocks to him, and very wide indeed you shall spread them. . . . Yes, just so: we’re ready to begin.

  DOLMANCÉ—No, not quite; wait for me; I must first of all enter your sister’s ass, since Augustin whispers me to do it; next, I’ll marry you: remember, let’s not fall short of any of our principles and remember also that a student is observing us, and we owe her precise demonstrations. Eugénie, come frig me while I determine this low fellow’s enormous engine; lend a hand with my own erection, pollute my prick, very lightly, roll it upon your buttocks. . . . (She does so.)

  EUGÉNIE—Is this as it ought to be?

  DOLMANCÉ—There is always too much of the timorous in your movements; far more tightly squeeze the prick you frig, Eugénie; if masturbation is agreeable at all it is because the member is more severely compressed then than in fucking, it is therefore necessary that the co-operating hand become, for the engine over which it works, an infinitely straiter passage than exists anywhere else in the body. . . . Better! Yes, that’s better! Spread your behind yet a little more so that with each stroke the end of my prick can glide ahead to touch your asshole. . . . yes, very good, very good indeed! While waiting, Chevalier, frig your sister; we will be at your disposal in a minute. . . . Ah, excellent! there’s my man stiffening! Now ready yourself, Madame; open that sublime ass to my impure ardor; Eugénie, guide the dart, it must be your hand that conducts it to the vent, your hand must make it penetrate; immediately it is in, get a grip on good Augustin here, and fill my entrails up with him; those are an apprentice’s chores and thence there is much instruction to be had; that, my dear, is why I put you to this trouble.

  MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE—Are my buttocks where you wish them, Dolmancé? Ah, my angel, if you but knew how much I desire you, how long I have been waiting to be buggered by a sodomite!

  DOLMANCÉ—Thy will shall be done, Madame; but suffer me to halt an instant at my idol’s feet; I would praise it before entering into the depths of the sanctuary. . . . What a divine ass is this! . . . let me kiss it! let me lick it, lick it a thousand times over and a thousand more! . . . Here, that’s the prick you yearn for! . . . Dost feel it, bitch? Tell me, say, dost feel it penetrate? . . .

  MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE—Oh, drive it to darkness in my bowels! . . . Oh sweet lechery, what is your empire!

  DOLMANCÉ—’Tis an ass such as never in my days have I fucked; worthy of Ganymede himself! To it, Eugénie, be immediately attendant upon my buggering by Augustin.

  EUGÉNIE—I bring him to you; there. (To Augustin:) Wake, sweet angel, do you spy the hole you’ve to pierce?

  AUGUSTIN—Aye, I see it. Mother of God! there’s a big one I say! I’ll go in easier than into you, Miss. Kiss me a little so it will enter nice.

  EUGÉNIE, embracing him—Oh, as much as you like, you are so fresh! . . . But push, do you hear! The head’s out of sight—’twas quick, and I dare say the rest will follow close behind. . . .

  DOLMANCÉ—Thrust, thrust, my good fellow . . . tear me, if so it must be. . . . Dost see my ass? Is it not ready? Doth it not beckon? Well, drive . . . ah, by Christ! what a bludgeon! never have I received one of such amplitude . . . Eugénie, how many inches remain outside?

  EUGÉNIE—Scarcely two.

  DOLMANCÉ—Then I have eleven in my ass! . . . What ecstasy! He cleaves me in twain, I can no more! Chevalier! Are you ready?

  LE CHEVALIER—Feel, and give me your opinion.

  DOLMANCÉ—Come hither, my children, let me wed thee . . . let me do all I may to expedite this heavenly incest. (He introduces the Chevalier’s prick into his sister’s cunt.)

  MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE—Why, my dears, there I am fucked from either side! By Jesus! What a divine pleasure! No, there’s none like it in all the world. Ah, fuck! how I pity the woman who has not tasted it! Rattle me, Dolmancé, smite away . . . let the violence of your movements impale me upon my brother’s blade and you, Eugénie, do you contemplate me; come, regard me in vice; come, learn, from my example, to savor it, to be transported, to taste it with delectation. . . . Behold, my love, behold all that I simultaneously do: scandal, seduction, bad example, incest, adultery, sodomy! Oh, Satan! one and unique god of my soul, inspire thou in me something yet more, present further perversions to my smoking heart, and then shalt thou see how I shall plunge myself into them all!

  DOLMANCÉ—Ah voluptuous creature, how you do stir up my fuck, how your sentiments and the uncommon temperature of your ass do excite it to discharge! ’Twill all have me coming in an instant. . . . Eugénie, fire my fucker’s courage, belabor his flanks, pry apart his buttocks; you are now somewhat skilled in the art of reviving the desires in him who vacillates . . . your approach alone gives energy to the prick that fucks me. . . . I feel it, the strokes are more powerful . . . oh, thou bitch, I must yield to you what I should never have wanted but to owe to my own ass-end . . . wait for me! wait, dost hear? Oh, my friends, let us not discharge but in unison: ’tis life’s single pleasure! . . .

  MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE—Fuck! fuck! come when you wish . . . for I can withstand it no longer! Oh double name of God befucked! Sacred bugger-God! I come! . . . Inundate me, my friends, soak, drench, drown your whore! spray floods of your scum-fuck to the very seat of this blazing soul! it exists for naught but to be slaked, quenched by your tides! Aië! aië! aië! . . . fuck! . . . fuck! . . . what incredible excess of voluptuousness! . . . I am slain! . . . Eugénie, let me kiss thee, let me eat thee! let me consume, batten upon thy fuck as I loose my own! . . . (Augustin, Dolmancé and the Chevalier act in chorus; the fear of appearing monotonous prevents us from recording expressions which, upon such occasions, are all very apt to resemble one another.)

  DOLMANCÉ—And there is one of the fairest fucks I have ever had. (Showing Augustin to the others.) This bugger glutted me with sperm! but, Madame, I consider I passed as much on to you.

  MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE—Ah, speak not to me of it; I am sunk in it.

  EUGÉNIE—I cannot say as much, not I! no! (Casting herself playfully into her friend’s arms.) You say you have committed abundant sins, my dearest, but as for me, blessed God! not a one. Oh, if I have got to eat my soup cold this way, I’ll have indigestion.

  MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE, bursting into laughter—How droll the creature is!

  DOLMANCÉ—But how charming! Come here, little one, I’d whip thee a bit. (He strikes her ass.) Kiss me, your turn is soon to come.

  MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE—From now on we must occupy ourselves exclusively with her; consider her, brother, she’s the prey; examine that charming maidenhead; ’twill soon belong to thee.

  EUGÉNIE—Oh, no! not by the fore-end! ’twould hurt me overmuch; from behind as much as you please, as Dolmancé dealt with me a short while ago.

  MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE—Naive and delicious girl! She demands of you precisely what one has so much difficulty obtaining from others.

  EUGÉNIE—Oh, ’tis not without a little remorse; for you have not entirely reassured me upon the criminal enormity I have always heard ascribed to this, especially when it is done between man and man, as has just occurred with Dolmancé and Augustin; tell me, Monsieur, tell me how your philosophy explains this species of misdemeanor. ’Tis frightful, is it not?

  DOLMANCÉ—Start from one fundamental point, Eugénie: in libertinage, nothing is frightful, because everything libertinage suggests is also a natural inspiration; the most extraordinary, the most bizarre acts,
those which most arrantly seem to conflict with every law, every human institution (as for Heaven, I have nothing to say), well, Eugénie, even those are not frightful, and there is not one amongst them all that cannot be demonstrated within the boundaries of Nature; it is certain that the one you allude to, lovely Eugénie, is the very same relative to which one finds such a strange fable in the tasteless fictions of the Holy Writ, that tedious compilation of an untutored Jew during a Babylonian captivity; but the anecdote is false, wants all likelihood, all verisimilitude, when it is affirmed that in retribution for these depravities, those cities, those towns rather, perished by fire; having their site upon the craters of ancient volcanoes, Sodom, Gomorrah too, perished like the Italian cities Vesuvius’ lavas submerged; and that’s all there is to the miracle, yet, all the same, ’twas from this most simple event they departed in order barbarously to invent the torture of fire to be used against those unfortunate humans who, in one area of Europe, delivered themselves over to this natural fancy.

  EUGÉNIE—Oh, ’tis natural?

  DOLMANCÉ—Yes, natural, so I affirm it to be; Nature has not got two voices, you know, one of them condemning all day what the other commands, and it is very certain that it is nowhere but from her organ that those men who are infatuated with this mania receive the impressions that drive them to it. They who wish to denigrate the taste or proscribe its practice declare it is harmful to population; how dull-witted they are, these imbeciles who think of nothing but the multiplication of their kind, and who detect nothing but the crime in anything that conduces to a different end. Is it really so firmly established that Nature has so great a need for this overcrowding as they would like to have us believe? is it very certain that one is guilty of an outrage whenever one abstains from this stupid propagation? To convince ourselves, let us for an instant scrutinize both her operations and her laws. Were it that Nature did naught but create, and never destroy, I might be able to believe, with those tedious sophists, that the sublimest of all actions would be incessantly to labor at production, and following that, I should grant, with them, that the refusal to reproduce would be, would perforce have to be, a crime; however, does not the most fleeting glance at natural operations reveal that destructions are just as necessary to her plan as are creations? that the one and the other of these functions are interconnected and enmeshed so intimately that for either to operate without the other would be impossible? that nothing would be born, nothing would be regenerated without destructions? Destruction, hence, like creation, is one of Nature’s mandates.

  This principle acknowledged, how may I offend Nature by refusing to create? the which, supposing there to be some evil in it, would appear infinitely less evil, no question about it, than the act of destruction, which latter is numbered among her laws, as I have but a moment ago proven. If on the one hand I admit the penchant Nature has given me to fabricate these losses and ruins, I must examine, on the other hand, to see whether they are not necessary to her and whether I do not conform with her will when I destroy; thus considered, where then, I ask you, is the crime? But, the fools and the populators continue to object—and they are naught but one—this procreative sperm cannot have been placed in your loins for any purpose other than reproduction: to misuse it is an offense. I have just proven the contrary, since this misuse would not even be equivalent to destruction, and since destruction, far more serious than misuse, would not itself be criminal. Secondly, it is false that Nature intends this spermatic liquid to be employed only and entirely for reproduction; were this true, she would not permit its spillage under any circumstance save those appropriate to that end. But experience shows that the contrary may happen, since we lose it both when and where we wish. Secondly, she would forbid the occurrence of those losses save in coitus, losses which, however, do take place, both when we dream and when we summon remembrances; were Nature miserly about this so precious sap, ’twould never but be into the vessel of reproduction she would tolerate its flow; assuredly, she would not wish this voluptuousness, wherewith at such moments she crowns us, to be felt by us when we divert our tribute; for it would not be reasonable to suppose she could consent to give us pleasures at the very moment we heaped insults upon her. Let us go further; were women not born save to produce—which most surely would be the case were this production so dear to Nature—, would it happen that, throughout the whole length of a woman’s life, there are no more than seven years, all the arithmetic performed, during which she is in a state capable of conceiving and giving birth? What! Nature avidly seeks propagation, does she; and everything which does not tend to this end offends her, does it! and out of a hundred years of life the sex destined to produce cannot do so during more than seven years! Nature wishes for propagation only, and the semen she accords man to serve in these reproducings is lost, wasted, misused wherever and as often as it pleases man! He takes the same pleasures in this loss as in useful employment of his seed, and never the least inconvenience! . . .

  Let us cease, good friends, let us cease to believe in such absurdities: they cause good sense to shudder. Ah! far from outraging Nature, on the contrary—and let us be well persuaded of it—, the sodomite and Lesbian serve her by stubbornly abstaining from a conjunction whose resultant progeniture can be nothing but irksome to her. Let us make no mistake about it, this propagation was never one of her laws, nothing she ever demanded of us, but at the very most something she tolerated; I have told you so. Why! what difference would it make to her were the race of men entirely to be extinguished upon earth, annihilated! she laughs at our pride when we persuade ourselves all would be over and done with were this misfortune to occur! Why, she would simply fail to notice it. Do you fancy races have not already become extinct? Buffon counts several of them perished, and Nature, struck dumb by a so precious loss, doesn’t so much as murmur! The entire species might be wiped out and the air would not be the less pure for it, nor the Star less brilliant, nor the universe’s march less exact. What idiocy it is to think that our kind is so useful to the world that he who might not labor to propagate it or he who might disturb this propagation would necessarily become a criminal! Let’s bring this blindness to a stop and may the example of more reasonable peoples serve to persuade us of our errors. There is not one corner of the earth where the alleged crime of sodomy has not had shrines and votaries. The Greeks, who made of it, so to speak, a virtue, raised a statue unto Venus Callipygea; Rome sent to Athens for law, and returned with this divine taste.

  And under the emperors, behold the progress it made! Sheltered by the Roman eagle, it spread from one end of the earth to the other; with the Empire’s collapse, it took refuge near the diadem, it followed the arts in Italy, it is handed down to those of us who govern ourselves aright. We discover a hemisphere, we find sodomy in it. Cook casts anchor in a new world: sodomy reigns there. Had our balloons reached the moon, it would have been discovered there as well. Delicious preference, child of Nature and of pleasure, thou must be everywhere men are to be found, and wherever thou shalt be known, there shall they erect altars to thee! O my friends, can there be an extravagance to equal that of imagining that a man must be a monster deserving to lose his life because he has preferred enjoyment of the asshole to that of the cunt, because a young man with whom he finds two pleasures, those of being at once lover and mistress, has appeared to him preferable to a young girl, who promises him but half as much! He shall be a villain, a monster, for having wished to play the role of a sex not his own! Indeed! Why then has Nature created him susceptible of this pleasure?

  Let us inspect his conformation; you will observe radical differences between it and that of other men who have not been blessed with this predilection for the behind; his buttocks will be fairer, plumper; never a hair will shade the altar of pleasure, whose interior, lined with a more delicate, more sensual, more sensitive membrane, will be found positively of the same variety as the interior of a woman’s vagina; this man’s character, once again unlike that of others, will be softer, mor
e pliant, subtler; in him you will find almost all the vices and all the virtues native to women; you will recognize even their weaknesses there; all will have feminine manias and sometimes feminine habits and traits. Would it then be possible that Nature, having thuswise assimilated them into women, could be irritated by what they have of women’s tastes? Is it not evident that this is a category of men different from the other, a class Nature has created in order to diminish or minimize propagation, whose overgreat extent would infallibly be prejudicial to her? . . . Ah, dear Eugénie, did you but know how delicate is one’s enjoyment when a heavy prick fills the behind, when, driven to the balls, it flutters there, palpitating; and then, withdrawn to the foreskin, it hesitates, and returns, plunges in again, up to the hair! No, no, in the wide world there is no pleasure to rival this one: ’tis the delight of philosophers, that of heroes, it would be that of the gods were not the parts used in his heavenly conjugation the only gods we on earth should reverence!7

  EUGÉNIE, very much moved—Oh, my friends, let me be buggered! . . . Here, my buttocks stand ready. . . . I present them to you! . . . Fuck me, for I discharge! . . . (Upon pronouncing these words, she falls into the arms of Madame de Saint-Ange, who clasps her, embraces her, and offers the young lady’s elevated flanks to Dolmancé.)

  MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE—Divine teacher, will you resist the proposal? Will you not be tempted by this sublime ass? See how it doth yawn, how it winks at thee!

  DOLMANCÉ—I ask your forgiveness, beautiful Eugénie: it shall not be I, if indeed you wish it, who shall undertake to extinguish the fires I have lit. Dear child, in my eyes you possess the large fault of being a woman. I was so considerate as to forget much in order to harvest your virginity; deign to think well of me for going no further: the Chevalier is going to take the task in hand. His sister, equipped with this artificial prick, will bestow the most redoubtable buffets upon her brother’s ass, all the while presenting her noble behind to Augustin, who shall bugger her and whom I’ll fuck meantime; for, I make no attempt to conceal it, this fine lad’s ass has been signaling to me for an hour, and I wish absolutely to repay him for what he has done to me.