The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings

by Marquis de Sade

  I fell to the task and simultaneously executed my three chores with such skill and grace that the little anchovy soon vomited all its fury into my mouth; I swallowed heartily, my Adonis likewise made short shrift of the piss that poured out of my crack and, while he drank, he inhaled the fragrance that a continual stream of farts bore to his nostrils.

  “Forsooth, Mademoiselle,” murmured Durcet, “you could surely have dispensed with disclosures that portray all my youthful childishness.”

  “Ha!” said the Duc with a merry laugh, “well indeed! You who scarcely dare look at a cunt today, do you mean to say you used to have ’em piss in the old days?”

  “’Tis true,” said Durcet, “I blush to admit it, for what could be more dreadful than to have such turpitudes upon one’s conscience? Oh, I presently feel the heavy weight of remorse, my friend. . . . O delicious asses!” he exclaimed, in his enthusiasm kissing Sophie’s which he had drawn close for a minute’s fondling, “O divine asses! how I reproach myself for the incense I deprived you of! O delicious fundaments, I promise you an expiatory sacrifice, I swear upon your altars never again while I live to stray from the paths of rectitude.”

  And that splendid behind having heated him somewhat, the libertine placed the novice in what was doubtless an exceedingly indecent posture but one in which he was able, as has been seen above, to give his little anchovy to be sucked while sucking the tidiest, freshest, most voluptuous of asses. But Durcet, become now too blasé, too surfeited with that pleasure, only very rarely found it invigorating; one could suck all one wished, he could do the same till his lips cracked, ’twas always the same: he would withdraw in the same collapsed state and, cursing and swearing at the girl, would regularly postpone until some happier moment the pleasures Nature denied him then.

  Not everyone was so unfortunate; the Duc, who had passed into his closet with Zélamir, Bum-Cleaver, and Thérèse, emitted shouts and bellows which attested to his happiness, and Colombe, hawking and spitting in great earnestness, left precious little doubt about the temple at which he had done his worshiping. As for the Bishop, reclining upon his couch in the most natural manner, Adelaide’s buttocks pinching his nose and his prick in her mouth, he was in seventh heaven, for he was having a wealth of farts out of the young woman; Curval, in an extremely upright state, plugged Hébé’s little mouth with his outsized stopper, and yielded up his fuck as he resorted to other stunts.

  Mealtime arrived. The Duc wished to advance the thesis that if happiness consisted in the entire satisfaction of all the senses, it were difficult to be happier than were they.

  “The remark is not a libertine’s,” said Durcet. “How can you be happy if you are able constantly to satisfy yourself? It is not in desire’s consummation happiness consists, but in the desire itself, in hurdling the obstacles placed before what one wishes. Well, what is the perspective here? One needs but wish and one has. I swear to you,” he continued, “that since my arrival here my fuck has not once flowed because of the objects I find about me in this castle. Every time, I have discharged over what is not here, what is absent from this place, and so it is,” the financier declared, “that, according to my belief, there is one essential thing lacking to our happiness. It is the pleasure of comparison, a pleasure which can only be born of the sight of wretched persons, and here one sees none at all. It is from the sight of him who does not in the least enjoy what I enjoy, and who suffers, that comes the charm of being able to say to oneself: ’I am therefore happier than he.’ Wherever men may be found equal, and where these differences do not exist, happiness shall never exist either: it is the story of the man who only knows full well what health is worth after he has been ill.”

  “In that case,” said the Bishop, “you would maintain as a real source of pleasure the act of going and contemplating the tears of persons stricken by misery?”

  “Most assuredly,” Durcet replied. “In all the world there is perhaps no voluptuousness that more flatters the senses than the one you cite.”

  “What? You would not succor the lowly and wretched?” exclaimed the Bishop who took the most genuine delight in engaging Durcet to expatiate upon a question whose examination was so much to the taste of them all and upon which, they knew, the financier was able to deliver some very sound opinions.

  “What is it you term succor?” Durcet responded. “For the voluptuousness I sense and which is the result of this sweet comparison of their condition with mine, would cease to exist were I to succor them: by extricating them from a state of wretchedness, I should cause them to taste an instant’s happiness, thus destroying the distinction between them and myself, thus destroying all the pleasure afforded by comparison.”

  “Well then, following that,” reasoned the Duc, “one should in one way or another, so as the better to establish that distinction indispensable to happiness, one should, I say, rather aggravate their plight.”

  “There is no doubting it,” said Durcet, “and that explains the infamies of which I have been accused all my life. Those who are in perfect ignorance of my motives,” the banker continued, “call me harsh, ferocious, barbaric, but, laughing at these divers denominations, I go merrily on; I cause, I dare say, what fools describe as atrocities, but thereby I have created pleasure-giving distinctions and have made many a delectable comparison.”

  “Come now,” said the Duc, “confess, my dear fellow: admit that upon more than a score of occasions you have engineered the ruin of some poor folk, simply by that means to serve the perverse tastes you have just acknowledged.”

  “More than a score?” said Durcet. “More than ten score, my friend, and, without the slightest exaggeration, I could enumerate above four hundred families reduced to beggardom, a state in which they’d not now be languishing had it not been for me.”

  “And,” said Curval, “I fancy you have profited from their ruin?”

  “Why yes, that has very frequently been the case, but I must also confess that often enough I have acted not to gain, but purely to undo, at the behest of that certain wickedness which almost always awakens the organs of lubricity in me; my prick positively jumps when I do evil, in evil I discover precisely what is needed to stimulate in me all of pleasure’s sensations, and I perform evil for that reason, for it alone, without any ulterior motive.”

  “Upon my soul,” declared the Président, “I own I fancy nothing better than that taste. When I was in Parliament I must have voted at least a hundred times to have some poor devil hanged; they were all innocent, you know, and I would never indulge in that little injustice without experiencing, deep within me, a most voluptuous titillation: no more was needed to inflame my balls, nothing used to heat them more certainly. You can imagine what I felt when I did worse.”

  “It is certain,” said the Duc, whose brain was beginning to warm as he fingered Zéphyr, “that crime has sufficient charm of itself to ignite all the senses, without one having to resort to any other expedient; no one understands better than I that enormities and malpractices, even those at the most extreme remove from libertine misbehavior, are quite as capable of inciting an erection as those which lie directly within the sphere of libertinage. The man who is addressing you at this very instant has owed spasms to stealing, murdering, committing arson, and he is perfectly sure that it is not the object of libertine intentions which fires us, but the idea of evil, and that consequently it is thanks only to evil and only in the name of evil one stiffens, not thanks to the object, and were this object to be divested of the power to cause us to do evil, our prick would droop, ’twould interest us no more.”

  “What could be more certain than that?” the Bishop demanded. “And thence is born another certitude: the greatest pleasure is derived from the most infamous source. The doctrine which must perpetually govern our conduct is this: the more pleasure you seek in the depths of crime, the more frightful the crime must be; as for myself, Messieurs,” added the Bishop, “if I may be permitted to speak personally, I affirm that I have reached the p
oint of no longer being susceptible of this sensation you have been discussing, of no longer experiencing it, I say, as a result of lesser or minor crimes, and if the one I perpetrate does not combine as much of the atrocious, of the base, of the vicious, of the deceitful, of the treacherous as may be possibly imagined, the sensation is not merely faint, there is no sensation at all.”

  “Very well,” said Durcet, “is it possible to commit crimes such as these our minds yearn after, crimes like those you mention? For my part, I must declare that my imagination has always outdistanced my faculties; I lack the means to do what I would do, I have conceived of a thousand times more and better than I have done, and I have ever had complaint against Nature who, while giving me the desire to outrage her, has always deprived me of the means.”

  “There are,” said Curval, “but two or three crimes to perform in this world, and they, once done, there’s no more to be said; all the rest is inferior, you cease any longer to feel. Ah, how many times, by God, have I not longed to be able to assail the sun, snatch it out of the universe, make a general darkness, or use that star to burn the world! oh, that would be a crime, oh yes, and not a little misdemeanor such as are all the ones we perform who are limited in a whole year’s time to metamorphosing a dozen creatures into lumps of clay.”

  Whereupon, their minds having waxed gay and hot, as two or three young girls had already had cause to remark, and their pricks beginning to rise, they left the table and went in search of pretty mouths, thereinto to pour the floods of that liquor whose too insistent throbbings promoted the utterance of so many horrors. That evening they confined themselves to mouth pleasures, but invented a hundred manners of varying them, and when they had run, all four of them, each a magnificent race, in a few hours of repose they sought to find the strength necessary to starting out afresh.

  THE NINTH DAY

  That morning Duclos expressed her opinion, saying she held it prudent either to offer the little girls new patients to replace the fuckers then being employed in the masturbation exercises, or to terminate their lessons, for she believed their education sufficiently advanced. Duclos very astutely pointed out that by continued use of the young men known by their title of fucker, there might result that species of intrigue Messieurs wished especially to prevent; moreover, she added, for such exercises these young men were worth nothing at all; since they were prone to discharge immediately they were touched, their skittishness or incontinence ought certainly be better exploited, Messieurs’ asses had only to lose if the program remained unchanged. It was therefore decided that the lessons would cease; they had generally succeeded, there were already amongst the little girls a few who frigged masterfully: Augustine, Sophie, and Colombe could easily have been matched, what for skill and nimbleness of wrist, against the capital’s most famous friggers. Of them all, Zelmire was least adept: not that she lacked agility or that considerable science was not conspicious in all her motions, no, but it was her tender and melancholic character which stood in her way, she seemed unable to forget her sorrows, she was sad and pensive at all times. At that morning’s breakfast inspection tour, her duenna affirmed she had the previous evening caught the child in a prayerful attitude, flagrantly on her knees before retiring; Zelmire was summoned, questioned, she was asked the subject of her prayers; she at first refused to answer, then, threats having been employed, she fell to weeping and admitted she had besought God to deliver her from the perils wherewith she was beset, and had above all prayed that help would come before her virginity were lost. The Duc thereupon declared she deserved to die, and made her read the articles which dealt specifically with this subject.

  “Very well,” she sighed, “kill me, at least the God I invoke shall have pity upon me, kill me before you dishonor me, and that soul I have devoted to Him will at least fly in purity to His breast. I shall be delivered of the torment of seeing and hearing so many horrors every day.”

  A reply wherein reigned such a quantity of virtue, of candid innocence, and of gracious amenity caused our libertines prodigiously to stiffen. There were voices that called out for her instantaneous depucelation, but the Duc, reminding his cohorts of the inviolable contract they had subscribed to, was content to propose—and his suggestion was unanimously approved—that she be condemned to be punished very violently the following Saturday and that, in the meantime, she kneel and for fifteen minutes take into her mouth and suck each friend’s prick, and that she be given by way of warning the assurance that, were she to repeat her error, it would decidedly cost her her life, for she would be judged and punished to the fullest extent of the law. The poor little thing crawled up to accomplish the first part of her penance, but the Duc, whom the ceremony had aroused, and who after having pronounced sentence had prodigiously fondled her ass, like the villain he was, shot all his boiling seed into that pretty little mouth, in so doing threatening to strangle her if she spat out a drop, and the poor little wretch swallowed it all, not without furious repugnances. The three others were similarly sucked one after the other, but yielded nothing, and after the usual visit to the boys’ quarters and the excursion to the chapel, which that morning produced little because almost everyone had been refused permission to join the party, the meal was served, and then Messieurs entered the salon for coffee.

  It was served by Fanny, Sophie, Hyacinthe, and Zélamir; Curval fancied he might thigh-fuck Hyacinthe, and obliged Sophie to post herself in such a way as to be able to suck that length of his prick which protruded beyond Hyacinthe’s tightly squeezed legs. The scene was pleasant and inspiriting, he frigged the little chap he held hugged to his belly, and Hyacinthe discharged upon Sophie’s face; the Duc, who owing to the dimensions of his prick was the only other one who could imitate this performance, likewise arranged himself with Zélamir and Fanny, but the lad had not yet reached the discharging age, and thus the nobleman had to do without the very agreeable episode Curval considered so enjoyable. After they had finished, Durcet and the Bishop took charge of the four children and had themselves sucked, but no one discharged, and after a brief nap, the company moved into the auditorium where, everyone having assumed his place, Duclos went on with her disclosures.

  Before any other audience, said that amiable girl, I might shrink at broaching the subject of the narratives wherewith this entire week we shall be occupied, but however crapulous that subject, I am too well acquainted with your tastes, Messieurs, to be in any wise apprehensive. No, I believe you’ll not be displeased; quite the contrary, I am convinced you will find my anecdotes agreeable. I ought however to advise you that you are about to hear of abominable, filthy goings on; but whose ears could be better made to appreciate them? your hearts love and desire them, hence I enter into the matter without further delay or ambages.

  At Madame Fournier’s we had a trusty old client who was known as the Chevalier, I don’t know why, or whence the title came; his custom was to pay us a visit every evening, and the little rite that we regularly performed with him was equally simple and bizarre: he would unbutton his breeches, and we were required to form a queue and one by one drop a turd into them. Once we had all done our duty, he would button up again and go off in great haste, taking that freight with him. While he was being supplied he would frig himself for an instant or two, but he was never seen to discharge, and no one knew where he went or what he did with his breechload of shit.

  “Oh, by Jesus!” muttered Curval, who never heard anything he had not a desire to do on the spot, “I’ll have someone shit in my breeches, and I’ll keep the treasure the whole evening.”

  And ordering Louison to come render him that service, the old libertine provided the assembly with a full-blown dramatization of the whimsy whereof account had just been delivered.

  “Well, go on,” he said phlegmatically, nodding to Duclos and settling down on his couch again, “there’s nothing to it, and I expect it will only be the lovely Aline, my charming companion for the afternoon, who’ll find something inconvenient about it. As for myself,
a pound of shit in the vicinity suits me perfectly.”

  And Duclos resumed her story.

  Forewarned, said she, of all that was destined to take place at the home of the libertine to whom I was being sent, I dressed myself as a boy, and as I was only twenty, with pretty hair and a pretty face, that costume very well became me. Before leaving, I took care to do in my breeches what Monsieur le Président has just had done for him in his. My man was awaiting me in bed, I approach him, he kisses me very lewdly two or three times, he tells me I’m the prettiest little boy he’s ever set eyes upon, and while praising me he undertakes to unbutton my breeches. I put up a faint resistance with the single purpose of inflaming his desires all the more, he entreats me, urges me, he has his way, but how am I to describe to you the ecstasy that possesses him when he perceives the package I have brought along, and the colorful mess it has made of my two buttocks.

  “Why, what’s this?” cries he. “You’ve shit in your breeches, have you? But, my little rascal, ’tis very nasty, you know. How could you have done such a thing?”

  And quick as a shot, holding me with my back turned to him and my breeches pulled down, he sets to frigging and rattling himself, presses against me, and spurts his fuck upon my beshitted behind, the while driving his tongue into my mouth.

  “Do you mean to say,” exclaimed the Duc, “he refrained from touching anything? Didn’t he handle it?”

  “No, your Lordship,” Duclos made him answer, “I recount all that transpired, I conceal no detail; but have a little patience, Sire, and we will gradually reach more entertaining circumstances.”

  “Come,” said one of my companions, “let’s go watch a truly humorous fellow. He doesn’t need a girl, he amuses himself all alone.”