“Nonetheless,” I broke in peremptorily, “it cannot be done without some assistance.”
“It can’t, my dear?”
“It cannot, Monsieur.”
“Eh then, if that is the case, pray go and see if one of the women is still about. If they’re all there, bring the youngest back with you: her ass got me quite palpably erect, and of them all ’tis she I fancy the most.”
However, I had not budged. “Sir,” I pointed out, “I am not familiar with your house; and I am, furthermore, little disposed to move for, do you see, the state I am in….”
“The state? Ah, yes, the state. I’ll ring then—”
“I beg you under no circumstances to ring. You surely cannot expect me to appear before your servants thus?”
“But my woman is out there, she’ll come.”
“Not at all. She is escorting the girls home.”
“Damn my eyes!” he cried. “I cannot bear these delays.”
And Mondor dashed from the room, vanishing into the apartment we’d just come from; and thus the idiot left me alone amidst his treasures. No need to think twice: in Noirceuil’s house I had had the very best reasons for restraining myself, here in Mondor’s I could give vent to this immense longing I had to commit a theft: I seize the opportunity, the instant my man’s back is turned I pounce upon the package, my hair is done up in a large chignon, that is where I cache my prize. No sooner had I stowed it away out of sight than Mondor called me. The girls had not left; would I please come into the apartment? For he preferred to have this final scene enacted in the same surroundings where the earlier ones had taken place. We were given instructions and work began: the youngest of the girls sucked the patient’s member, he filled her mouth with sperm while simultaneously into his I deposited the victual whereof he was so uncommonly fond. All went well, nothing was remarked, I readjusted myself, two carriages were waiting for us, and, hugely contented, Mondor bade us farewell after having distributed generous largesse to us.
When I had returned to the house of Noirceuil and shut myself up in privacy, I said to myself, even before I set to opening the package, “Great God, can Heaven itself have viewed my theft with favor?”
Wrapped up in that parcel were sixty thousand francs in notes of credit payable to the bearer, already signed and requiring no further endorsement.
It was then, as I was about to put these spoils away, I noticed that by some extraordinary coincidence while I’d been off stealing, somebody had been robbing me: my secretary had been forced open, missing were five or six louis I’d kept in a drawer. Advised of the fact, Noirceuil assured me that only one Gode could have been responsible for it. This Gode was an extremely pretty girl of twenty whom Noirceuil had attached to my service since my entry into his household, whom he quite often had make a third in our pleasures, and whom, in the spirit of jollity such as the libertine intelligence conceives it, he had got one of his homosexual juveniles to impregnate. She was now in her sixth month.
“Gode! Do you really believe it could have been she?”
“I am certain of it, Juliette. Had you noticed her nervous manner? How uneasily she withstood our interrogating glances?”
Therewith, heedless of all save my perfidious selfishness, completely forgetting my resolution never to work injury upon those who were my kinsmen in villainy, with tears in my eyes I besought Noirceuil to have the culprit arrested.
“I am perfectly willing to do as you suggest,” Noirceuil replied with a chilly lack of expression which I should have interpreted accurately had my preoccupied mind permitted me to remark it; “however, you’re not to be deprived of any pleasure her punishment might afford you. She’s gravid, that will retard justice and while they fiddle-faddle the scoundrel may very well wriggle out of her plight. She’s young and attractive, you know.”
“Ah, Christ!” I cried, “I am in despair.”
“I dare say you must be, my beloved,” Noirceuil pursued quietly, “for you ambition to see her hanged; but it will be a good three months before they get her to the scaffold. Supposing now, Juliette, that you are ever able to enjoy the spectacle which, I fully appreciate, would have a very incisive effect upon a sensibility as highly organized as yours, I must remind you that such pleasures are over and done with in fifteen or twenty minutes. I recommend that we somewhat prolong the wretch’s sufferings; what say we make them extend over the rest of her life? It’s a simple matter. I’ll have her confined to a dungeon in Bicêtre; how old is she? Twenty? She could rot half a century in prison.”
“Ah, my friend, a splendid plan!”
“I only ask that you let me postpone putting it into operation until tomorrow; which would give me time to clothe this scheme with all the details and adjuncts needed to enhance its charm.”
I embrace Noirceuil; he has his carriage sent for and two hours later returns with the writ necessary to our enterprise.
“She’s ours,” says the traitor; “we may now amuse ourselves. Let’s play our parts convincingly.” Later, after we have dined and gone to his dressing room, he summons the poor girl. “Gode, my dear Gode,” says he, “you know what my feelings for you are, the time is approaching when I shall want to demonstrate them: I am going to unite you to that young man who left in your womb the tokens of a noble affection for you; two thousand crowns a year, that shall guarantee the future of your ménage.”
“Oh, Sire, you are too kind—”
“No, my child, I really am not, please, expressions of thanks embarrass me. You owe me none, of that you may be absolutely sure; this that you take for kindness is pure self-indulgence, the pleasure is all my own. From now on you have nothing to fear, everything has been settled owing to the steps I have lately taken; whereas you may not live in regal style, you shall never lack for a crust of bread.”
Failing entirely to perceive the underlying significance of these words, Gode sprinkled tears of joy upon the hands of her fancied benefactor.
“Eh then, Gode,” said my lover, “I ask for your cooperation this one last time; though I am not much taken by pregnant women, let me embugger you while kissing Juliette’s buttocks.”
We assumed our stances; never had I seen Noirceuil so aroused.
“A criminal thought excites most wondrously, does it not?” I whispered to him.
“Incomparably,” he replied; “but whose would the crime be, and what would become of that thought, if she had truly robbed you?”
“You are quite right, my dear.”
“Take comfort, Juliette, take comfort, if crime there be, Gode is not its author. No, this wretch is as innocent of theft as are you; ’twas I stole your money, you see.”
And as he spoke he had his prick hilt-driven into her ass, and he was kissing my mouth and paddling my buttocks. I confess that this triumph of wickedness fetched a discharge from me in a trice; grasping my lover’s hand, pressing it to my clitoris, by the fuck that beslimed his fingers I bade him judge of his infamy’s powerful effect upon my heart; he came the next moment, two or three furious jerks and a string of horrible blasphemies heralded his delirium…. But he had scarcely withdrawn his prick from Gode’s ass when, knocking softly at the door, a valet announced that the police constable Was asking Noirceuil’s leave to carry out the mission he had been charged to execute.
“Very good, have the officer wait a moment,” said Noirceuil, “I’ll hand the culprit over to him, tell him so.” The valet disappeared; Noirceuil turned complacently toward Gode. “Make haste there,” said he, “dress yourself. Your husband has come himself to fetch you away to the little country house which I have arranged for you to inhabit the remainder of your days.”
Gode, trembling with anticipation, puts on her clothes, Noirceuil thrusts her out of the room. Heavens! what must her terror be as she catches sight of the black-clad man and his retinue, as they put manacles on her as though she were a criminal, as, above all else, she hears (and this, it would seem, made the deepest impression upon her) all the domestics, a
cquainted with the fact, cry out:
“Aye, ’tis she, sergeant, don’t let her get away, she’s a very bad one, beyond all doubt she broke into her Ladyship’s secretary and in doing so she brought suspicion to hang over all the rest of us—”
“I, break into Mademoiselle’s secretary!” Gode protested, her knees about to buckle. “I! God be my witness, but I am incapable of any such thing.”
The constable paused, looked inquiringly at Noirceuil.
“Eh,” said the latter, “do-you shirk your duty, Sir? Justice will be done, you understand, you are employed for that.”
The wretch was dragged off and flung into one of the most cheerless of the unhealthy Bicêtre dungeons, where upon her arrival she had a miscarriage which came within an ace of putting an end to her life. But she did not succumb. No, there is breath in her yet; which, by the simplest computation, means that for many a long year she has been lamenting her errors, and they can be said to consist in having stirred up powerful desires in Noirceuil, who goes at least once every six months to savor her tears and to issue recommendations to her wardens that, if possible, they tighten the irons that bind her.
“Tell me now,” said Noirceuil, as soon as Gode had been led away, and as he returned to me double the sum removed from my secretary, “isn’t that a hundred times better than if she had been confided to an uncertain and perhaps merciful justice? We’d not have been able to exert any control over her destiny, whereas,” he smiled, “this way it is in our hands forever.”
“Oh, Noirceuil, thou art an evil man … and what joys thou hast fashioned for thyself!”
“Yes,” my lover acknowledged, “I knew the constable was waiting at the threshold, and believe me, I discharged deliciously into the ass of the prey I was about to surrender to him.”
“A very evil man you are, a very wicked man … but why is it that I too could not help but taste the wildest pleasures in the infamy you committed?”
“Precisely because it is one,” Noirceuil answered; “there is no imaginable infamy that does not give pleasure. Crime is the soul of lubricity; there is no real lubricity without crime: there are, thus, passions which are the massacre of humaneness and … of humanity.”
“If that be so, they must obviously have no connection with Nature, those tiresome humane sentiments upon which moralists constantly expatiate. Or could it be that there are moments when an inconsistent Nature countermands with one voice what she enjoins with another?”
“Ah, Juliette, become better acquainted with her, this profoundly wise, this sweetly bountiful Nature, never would she have us aid others save our motive for doing so be profit or fear:
“Fear, because we dread lest the woes our weakness leads us to relieve in others befall us in our turn.
“And profit—we succor others in the hope that we will gain thereby, or in order to flatter our lustful pride.
“But as soon as a more imperious passion than charity makes itself heard, all the other passions fall mute, egoism then reclaims its sacred rights, our lips curl scornfully at the torments others have to endure; what sympathies can these torments awake in us? They are never any of our concern except in as much as we may ourselves have to undergo them; well, if pity is bred of fear, it is then a weakness whence with all possible dispatch we ought to protect, to purge ourselves.”
“This calls for a fuller development,” I remarked to Noirceuil. “You have demonstrated the inexistence of virtue, will you kindly explain to me what crime is; for if on the one hand you annihilate what I am advised to respect and on the other you belittle what I ought to fear, you shall surely put my soul in the state I desire it to be in so as henceforth to dread the undertaking of nothing.”
“Will you then sit down, Juliette, and make yourself comfortable,” Noirceuil suggested, “for this requires a serious dissertation, and if what I shall have to say is to be intelligible to you, you must lend me your whole attention.
“Crime: the term is applied to any formal violation, whether fortuitous or premeditated, of what in the human community goes under the name of law; whence we have but one more arbitrary and meaningless word: for laws are relative, depending upon customs, upon considerations varying according to time and place; they are utterly different every few hundred miles, and so it is that were I to take ship or board the mail-coach I could, for having performed one and the same deed, find myself condemned to death on Sunday morning in Paris and a public hero on Saturday of the same week in some land on the frontiers of Asia or on the coasts of Africa. Faced with this towering absurdity, philosophy has returned to the following fundamental propositions. I enumerate:
“1) That in themselves all acts are indifferent; that they are neither good nor bad intrinsically, and if man now and then so qualifies them, the sole criteria by which he performs his judgment are the laws he has elaborated for himself or the form of government under which he chances to live; but from the standpoint of Nature, and barring all else from consideration, all our acts are as one, none better, none worse than the rest.
“2) That if from somewhere within us there arises a murmur of protestation against the acts of wickedness we concert, this voice is nothing whatever but the effect of our prejudices and education, and that if we had been born and reared in some other climate, it would address us in a very different language.
“3) That if in changing country we were still to be subject to these inspirations, that would in no wise demonstrate their goodness but merely that one’s earliest impressions are only with some effort effaced.
“4) That, lastly, remorse, or the sentiment of guilt, is the same thing, that is to say, purely and simply the effect of the earliest impressions one receives, which habit alone can neutralize and which one ought to labor determinedly to destroy.
“And indeed, to find out whether something be truly criminous or not, one must first find out what harm it can do to Nature; for one can rationally describe as a crime only that which might conflict with her laws. Nature being constant, this crime must hence be uniform: the deed must prove to be of some sort or other that all the races and nations of the earth hold it in equal and tremendous horror, and the loathing it inspires must be as universal in man as his desire to satisfy his elementary needs; well, of this species of deed there is not one that exists; that which unto us has the most atrocious and execrable aspect has been a cornerstone to ethics elsewhere.
“Crime, thus, is not in any sense real, there is thus, veritably, no crime, no thinkable way or means for outraging a Nature in ceaseless flux and action … eternally so superior to us as, from where aloft she superintends the general order, to be infinitely above worrying about us or what we do. There is no act, however awful, however atrocious, however infamous you like or can imagine it, which we cannot perform every time we sense the urge, why! which we have the right not to commit, since Nature puts the idea in our heads; for our usages, our religions, our manners and customs may easily and indeed must perforce deceive us, whilst we shall certainly never be misled by the voice of Nature: it is upon a mixture combining strictly equal parts of what we term crime and virtue that her operations and laws are based: destruction is the soil and light that renews her and where she thrives; it is upon crime she subsists; it is, in a word, through death she lives. A totally virtuous universe could not endure for a minute; the learned hand of Nature brings order to birth out of chaos, and wanting chaos, Nature must fail to attain anything: such is the profound equilibrium which holdeth the stars aright in their courses, which suspendeth them in these huge oceans of void, which maketh them to move periodically and by rule. She must have evil, ’tis from this stuff she creates good; upon crime her existence is seated, and all would be undone were the world to be inhabited by doers of good alone. Now, Juliette, I inquire of you: once evil is indispensable to Nature’s major designs, once she is helpless to function, once she is impotent without it, how can the individual who does evil help but be useful to Nature? and what doubt remains but that the wicked
man is he whom Nature has deliberately so framed in order to achieve her ends? Why do we decline to acknowledge that she has done with men what she has done with beasts? are not all classes, like all species, in perpetual strife, do they not mutually batten one upon the other, does not one or the other weaken, wilt, perish away, depending upon the state or shape which Nature’s laws must give to the natural order? Who can deny that Nero’s gesture, when he poisoned Agrippina, was one of the effects of those selfsame laws, as rigidly everlasting as that other law whereby the wolf devours the lamb? who doubts that the prescriptions of a Marius or a Sulla are anything other than the plague or the famine Nature sometimes unleashes over the length and breadth of a continent? She does not, I know, assign to mankind as a whole the perpetration of a given crime, but each man is allotted a certain talent and a certain propensity for a certain crime, thus does she ensure a certain harmony: from the sum of all these misdeeds, from the entirety of all these lawful or unlawful destructions, she extracts the chaos, the decline, the decrepitude she must have to recast order, to renew growth, to restore vigor. Why did she give us poisons if she was not anxious to have men employ them? why ever did she cause Tiberius to be born, or Heliogabalus, or Andronicus, or Herod, or Wenceslas, or all the other great villains or heroes (they are synonymous) who have been the scourges of the earth—why, if the devastations wrought by these bloody men did not answer her requirements and promote her ends? Why does she send, concurrently with these scoundrels and to act in concert with them, plagues, wars, blights, and dearths, if it were not essential that Nature destroy, and if crime and destruction were not inseparable from her laws? If then it be essential that she destroy, why does he who feels himself born to destroy resist his penchants, neglect his duties? Might one not say that if there were an evil thing in this world, if there could be, it would be visibly that which one commits in resisting the destiny Nature has prepared for each of us? In order that crime, which neither does nor can offend anyone or anything but our fellows, irritate Nature, one would have to pretend that she takes a greater interest in some persons than in others, and that, though we be all equally formed by her hand, we are not however all equally her children. But if we are all alike, save for our greater or lesser strength; if Nature goes to no more trouble shaping an emperor than a chimney sweep, the different activities of high conquest and menial service are simply the necessary accidents that derive directly from the initial impulsion, and both conquering and the cleaning of flues have got to be done, for we have been expressly formed and intended to do them. When next we see that Nature has physically distinguished individual persons, that she has made some strong, others weak, what could be more patently evident than that, in so making them, she expects the strong to commit the crimes she needs to have committed, just as it is of the essence of the wolf that he devour the lamb, just as the essence of the mouse is to be devoured by the cat?
Juliette Page 21