The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings

by Marquis de Sade

  THE 25TH. That morning, the Duc takes Colombe to be his wife and hereafter she performs all a wife’s functions.

  129. A great connoisseur of the ass and a man mightily fond thereof, he embuggers the mistress while the lover looks on, then the lover while his mistress watches, then he nails the lover over the mistress’ body and leaves them to expire, mouth to mouth.

  Such will be the end of Céladon and Sophie, who are in love, and Messieurs interrupt the storyteller to oblige Céladon himself to spread a little hot sealing wax on his dear Sophie’s thighs; while obeying instructions, he collapses: while lying unconscious, he is embuggered by the Bishop.

  130. He who was wont to amuse himself by throwing a girl into water and pulling her out, has as his second passion that of casting seven or eight whores into a pond and watching them thrash about, for they are poor swimmers. He tenders them an iron pike, but it is heated red hot; still they cling to it, but he thrusts them away, and that they the more certainly perish, he has amputated one limb from each of them before throwing them in.

  131. His earlier caprice was to cause vomiting; his improvement thereof is, by using a secret means, to spread the plague throughout an entire province: he has brought about the death of a truly incredible number of people. He also poisons wells and streams.

  132. Fond of employing the whip, he has three pregnant women locked in an iron cage, and with them he imprisons their three children; a fire is lit beneath the cage, its occupants caper and dance more and more in earnest as the floor heats; the women take the children in their arms, and finally fall and die in this manner.

  (That one belongs somewhere further above; move it to its proper place.)

  133. ’Twas he who pricked with an awl; more of a man today, he seals a pregnant woman in a chest whose interior is studded with sharp nails; he then has the chest rolled and dragged through the garden.

  These tales of pregnant women being chastised have proven as woeful to Constance’s ears as they have delighted Curval’s; she sees only too well what the future holds in store for her. As her fatal hour is drawing nigh, Messieurs are of the opinion her vexations may be inaugurated: her thighs are burned in six places, molten wax is allowed to trickle upon her navel, and her breasts are teased with pins.

  Giton appears, a burning needle is run through his little member, his little balls are stabbed, four of his teeth are extracted.

  Then comes Zelmire, whose death is not far off; deep into her cunt runs a red-hot poker, six wounds are inflicted upon her breasts, a dozen upon her thighs, needles are driven far into her navel, each friend bestows twenty strong blows upon her face. They forcibly remove four of her teeth, her eye is pricked, she is whipped, she is embuggered. While in the act of sodomizing her, Curval, her husband, gives her intelligence of her death, scheduled for the morrow; she declares she is not sorry to learn the tidings, for ’twill put a period to her sorrows.

  Rosette steps forward; four teeth are jerked from her mouth, each of her shoulders is branded, her thighs and calves are gashed and hacked; she is then embuggered while several hands worry her breasts.

  And now Thérèse advances; out comes an eye, a hundred blows of the bull’s pizzle rain down upon her scrawny back.

  THE 26TH. 134. A bugger takes his stand at the foot of a tower; the earth about him is studded with sharpened steel rods pointing upward; his associates pitch several children of both sexes from the top of the tower. He has previously embuggered them, and now enjoys seeing them impaled a second time. ’Tis, he considers, very thrilling to be splashed by their blood.

  135. The same personage she cited on the 11th and 13th of February, whose tastes ran to instigating combustions, also delights in binding six pregnant women to bundles of inflammable materials; these he sets afire, and if his victims undertake to save themselves, he awaits them, pitchfork in hand, skewers them and hurls them back into the blaze. However, when half-roasted, the floor gives way and they spill into a large vat of boiling oil, wherein they finally perish.

  136. He is the nobleman Duclos spoke of, who has no fondness for the poor and who bought Lucile, her mother, and her sister, and whom Desgranges has also cited (verify this); another of his passions is to assemble a family of beggars over a mine and to watch those luckless creatures blown to bits.

  137. A notorious sodomist, in order to combine that crime with those of incest, murder, rape, sacrilege, and adultery, first inserts a Host in his ass, then has himself embuggered by his own son, rapes his married daughter, and kills his niece.

  138. Greatly partisan to asses, he strangles a mother while embuggering her; when she is dead, he turns her over and cunt-fucks her corpse. While discharging, he kills her daughter with a knife, slashing her breasts, then he buggers the girl even though she is dead; then apparently convinced there is still some life in his victims, and fancying they are yet capable of suffering, he hurls the cadavers into a fire and discharges as he watches them burn. Duclos spoke of this wealthy individual on the 29th of November: ’twas he who liked to see the girl lying on the pallet covered with black satin; he is also the same man who figured in Martaine’s first tale of the 11th of January.

  The evening’s program begins with Narcisse. One of his hands is lopped off.

  Giton loses a hand too.

  The interior of Michette’s cunt is burned, the same treatment is given Rosette’s, and then both girls are burned upon the body and breasts. But Curval, who has lost control of himself, violates the society’s charter and cleaves an entire breast from Rosette’s chest, all the while embuggering Michette.

  Thérèse makes a further appearance; she receives two hundred blows of the bull’s pizzle and loses her other eye.

  Curval goes in search of the Duc that night when all is still and, accompanied by Desgranges and Duclos, those two champions take Zelmire down to the cellars where the most refined tortures are put to use upon her: they are all much more painful, more severe than the others employed upon Augustine, and the two men are still hard at work by the time breakfast arrives the following morning. That enchanting girl dies at the age of fifteen years and two months. ’Twas she who could boast the most beautiful ass in the harem of little girls. And thus deprived of a wife, the Président weds Hébé the next day.

  THE 27TH. The seventeenth and last week’s festival is postponed until the morrow, in order that the holiday may coincide with the end of the narrations; Desgranges recounts the following passions:

  139. A man Martaine described on the 12th of January, the one who set off fireworks in the woman’s ass, has, for his second, this other passion: he ties two pregnant women together so that they form a ball and fires them from a large mortar.

  140. He was a scratcher and scab picker; he now places two pregnant women in a room and obliges them to fight with knives (he observes them from a safe position); they are naked, he threatens them with a gun he keeps trained upon them, and promises to shoot them dead if they begin to dally and falter. If they kill each other, why, that is precisely what he wishes, if not, sword in hand, he rushes into the arena and, after killing one, he disembowels the other and burns her entrails with aqua fortis, or with pieces of red-hot metal.

  141. A man who once liked to flog pregnant women’s bellies has reformed: he presently binds a pregnant girl to a wheel and beneath it, fixed in a chair and unable to move, sits the girl’s mother, her head flung back, her mouth open and ready to receive all the ordures and rubbish which flow out of the corpse, and the infant, too, if the girl gives birth to it.

  142. Martaine’s of the 16th of January, whose joy was to prick asses, attaches a girl to a machine studded with sharp iron points; he fucks her as she lies upon that bed, with every blow of his loins he drives her upon the nails, then he turns her over and fucks her ass-wise, that she may also be punctured on the other side. When he has finished that phase of the operation, he lays a second plank above her, and it is likewise provided with nails; the planks are brought together by means of bolts, thus die
s the patient, crushed and stabbed in a multitude of places. The pressing is carried out gradually, she is given ample opportunity to savor her pain.

  143. A fustigator stretches a pregnant woman out upon a table; he nails her thereto, first driving a fiery nail into each eye, one into her mouth, another into either breast, then he burns her clitoris and nipples with a taper, and slowly saws her knees halfway through, breaks her legs, and ends by hammering a red-hot spike, of enormous size, into her navel: it undoes both mother and child. He likes to have her ready to give birth.

  Messieurs whip Julie and Duclos that evening, but from amusement, since they are both amongst the inhabitants of Silling who shall transfer their residence to Paris: nevertheless, Julie’s thighs are burned in two places, and she is depilated.

  Sentenced to die the next day but unaware of her impending fate, Constance appears; her nipples are scorched, molten wax is allowed to trickle down over her belly, she yields four teeth, Messieurs prick the white of her eyes with needles.

  Narcisse, also due to be immolated on the 28th of February, enters upon the stage; he loses an eye and four teeth.

  Giton, Michette, and Rosette, destined to accompany Constance to the grave, each surrenders an eye and four teeth, Rosette her two nipples to the knife and six chunks of flesh, some of them carved from her arms, some from her thighs; all her fingers are neatly severed, and hot irons are introduced into her cunt and bum. Both Curval and the Duc discharge twice.

  Up steps Louison; she weathers a storm of one hundred blows of the bull’s pizzle; Messieurs pluck out one of her eyes and, most cynically, bid her swallow it. Down it goes.

  THE 28TH. 144. A bugger: has two girls brought to him, they are fast friends, he ties them mouth to mouth, and by their side sits an excellent meal; but they cannot get to it, and he watches them bite and eat each other when hunger begins to exert its influence upon them.

  145. A man who as a boy was wont to flog pregnant women, now shuts six of this sort into a round cage formed by large iron hoops: they are all facing one another. Little by little, the hoops contract, little by little they are brought together, slowly they are flattened, gradually all six are crushed, their fruit crushed too. But prior to this he has cut a buttock and a breast from each and fashioned six collars therefrom: each woman wears one as you might a fur tippet.

  146. Another pregnant-woman beater binds two of these objects each to the end of a long tilting pole; a clever machine, into which the other ends of the poles are inserted, bumps and bangs the women against each other. These repeated collisions are their mutual undoing, and he discharges. He makes every effort to procure himself a mother and daughter, or two sisters.

  147. That Comte of whom Duclos spoke at length, and to whom Desgranges alluded once before on the 26th, he who purchased Lucile, Lucile’s mother, and Lucile’s little sister, of whom Martaine also spoke in her fourth tale on the 1st of January, this Comte, I say, has another passion still: ’tis to suspend three women over three holes. The first woman hangs by her tongue, beneath her is a very deep well; the second hangs from her breasts, underneath her lies a charcoal brazier; the scalp of the third has been loosened, she hangs by her hair over a pit studded with pointed iron rods. When the weight of their bodies causes these women to fall free—when the scalp is torn from the head of the third, when the breasts of the second tear loose from her torso, when the tongue of the first is torn from her mouth—they only escape one difficulty in order to encounter a new one. Whenever possible, he suspends three pregnant women, or three women from the same family; such was his unkind use of Lucile, her sister, and her mother.

  148. The last passion.

  (But why the last? Where are the other two? They were all there in the original outline.)

  Desgranges recounts the last passion:

  The nobleman who indulges in this final passion we shall designate as the infernal caprice or, more simply, as the hell passion, has been cited four times: by Duclos in the last story she told on the 29th of November; by Champville, when referring to a personage who depucelates nine-year-olds only; by Martaine, as he who depucelates three-year-olds in the bum; by Desgranges who mentioned him in an earlier connection (establish that connection more precisely). He is a man of some forty years, enormous in stature and furnished with the member of a stallion: his prick is very near to nine inches in circumference and a foot in overall length; he is exceedingly wealthy, a very powerful lord, very harsh, very cruel, his heart is of stone. He has a house on the outskirts of Paris which he uses for no purpose other than the gratification of this passion.

  The surroundings wherein he savors his delight is a spacious room, simply decked, but padded everywhere, the floor covered with mattresses; upon entering the room one sees a single long casement window, the room has no other opening save for the door; that window looks down upon an underground cellar, twenty feet below the salon where he busies himself, and looking out, one sees the mattresses which break the fall of the girls he flings down into the cellar, a description whereof we shall give shortly. He requires fifteen girls for this party; their ages must be between fifteen and seventeen, neither more, nor less; he employs six procuresses in Paris, as well as twelve in the provinces, and they are to spare no efforts, no expense to find him everything of the most charming that may possibly be found of that age, and as it is collected, the material is sent to a country convent over which he has absolute control, and there, in that nursery, the girls ripen, and from it he selects the fifteen objects for his debauch, which is regularly executed every fortnight.

  That evening before the ceremony begins, he personally examines the said material, the least defect in which warrants its rejection; he insists that his creatures be perfect models of beauty. Escorted by a procuress, they arrive at the house and are lodged in a room adjacent to the pleasure-salon. They are first exhibited to him in this adjoining chamber, all fifteen are naked. He touches, feels, fondles, experiments with them, he scrutinizes them, sucks their mouths, and one after the other has them all shit into his mouth. But he does not swallow.

  This initial operation performed with dreadful seriousness, he brands each upon the shoulder, imprinting a number in her flesh; it is to indicate the order in which he will receive them. That done, he goes alone into the salon, where he remains for a brief space: no one knows what he does in this moment of solitude. Then he knocks. Girl Number 1 is cast into his lair. And she is properly cast into it: the procuress flings her toward him, he catches her in his arms, she is naked. He shuts the door, takes up switches and begins to flail her ass; after that he sodomizes her with his gigantic prick. Never does he need any help. He does not discharge. His prick retires, still rock-hard; he seizes the switches again and returns to lashing the girl’s back, the front and back of her thighs, then he lays her down again and deflowers her cunt; next, he goes back to beating her, now upon the breasts, both of which he seizes and grinds and kneads with all his strength, and he is a strong man. And now he picks up an awl and six times stabs her body, driving his point once into each bruised breast.

  After all that has been done, he opens the casement window, places the girl in the middle of the room, standing erect, at attention, facing the window; he stands behind her and, when all is ready, gives her a kick in the ass of such startling violence that she flies across the room, crashes against the windowsill, topples over it, and vanishes into the cellar. But before launching her, he slips a ribbon around her neck, thereby to signify which torture, according to his best belief, will be most suitable for that particular patient, which torture will prove most voluptuous to inflict upon her, and his acuity and judgment in these matters, his tact and discrimination are truly wonderful.

  And thus the girls pass one by one through his hands, the identical ceremony awaits them all, and thus he makes away with thirty maidenheads in a given day, and performs those heroic feats unscathed: not a drop of fuck does he lose. The subterranean apartment into which the girls tumble is furnished with fifteen
different assortments of frightful torture machines, and an executioner, wearing the mask and emblems of a demon, wearing also the colors of his specialty, presides over each apparatus. The ribbon placed about the girl’s neck corresponds in color with the torture to which she has been condemned, and directly she falls into the pit, the appropriate executioner steps forward, having recognized his victim, and drags her to the machine of which he has charge, but the tortures do not begin until the fifteenth has entered the gallery and been claimed by her demon. As soon as the entire complement has descended, our man, by now in a furious state after having depucelated thirty orifices without discharging, our man, I say, makes his entrance into the infernal repair; he is practically naked, his prick is glued against his belly. Everything is ready, all the tortures are in motion, and they proceed simultaneously, amidst much noise.

  The first torture engine is a wheel upon which the girl is strapped and which, rotating uninterruptedly, bears against an outer circle studded with razors which everywhere scratch and tear and slice the unfortunate victim, but as the blades do not bite deep, only superficially, she turns for at least two hours before dying.

  The second: the girl lies two inches above a red-hot iron plate which slowly melts her.

  Third: she is attached by the waist to a piece of burning iron, and all her limbs are twisted and frightfully dislocated.

  Fourth: the four limbs attached each to a spring which slowly moves away, gradually stretching her arms and legs until they are detached and the trunk falls into a brazier.

  Fifth: a red-hot cast-iron bell is placed over her head, but the bonnet is several sizes too large, the iron does not touch her, but her brain slowly melts, her head is slowly grilled.

  Sixth: she is chained inside an iron tub of boiling oil.