Juliette

by Marquis de Sade

  “In that case,” said Delcour, “you consider that every passion can be increased or nourished by lust?”

  “Lust is to the passions what the nervous fluid is to life: it sustains them all, it supplies strength to them all, and the proof thereof is that a man who, as they say, hasn’t any balls will never have any passions.”

  “And so you suppose that ambition, cruelty, greed, vindictiveness as motivations lead to the same thing as lust?”

  “Yes, I am convinced that all these passions cause erections, and that a lively and properly organized mind will be as readily inflamed by any of them as by lust. Mark you, I am speaking now from personal experience. The effect of concentrating upon mental images characterized by ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge has been that of a thorough frigging, and each of these ideas has more than once made me discharge myself dry. I have not entertained the thought of a single crime, whatever the passion inspiring it, without feeling the subtle heat of lust circulate in my veins: falsehood, impiety, calumny, rascality, hardheartedness, even gluttony have wrought those effects in me; and, in a word, there is not one form or mode of viciousness which has failed to ignite my lust; or, if you prefer, the torch of lust has at one time or another made all the vices in me blaze up with its sacred fire, to them all communicating that voluptuous sensation which, it appears, is never kindled otherwise in us curiously organized persons. There. That is my opinion.”

  “And it is mine also, Madame,” Delcour rejoined, “I’ll not attempt to conceal it any longer.”

  “I rejoice at your frankness, my dear, it helps me to know you. And from what I know of you already, I venture to say, and would be greatly surprised if I was in error here, that you require to enter into a libertine furor when you perform your official murders, which enables you to reap far more voluptuous satisfaction from your functions than is granted your colleagues who carry them out mechanically.”

  “Madame, I must own that you have fairly found me out.”

  “Scoundrel,” I said, smiling and taking hold of this young man’s tool, which I began to exercise so as to restore some of its energy, “oh, deep-dyed libertine that you are, why not go on to say that your prick hardens for the sake of the enjoyment to be had from my existence today, and tomorrow depriving me of it would make you discharge?”

  The young man was visibly embarrassed at this last question; I gazed at him for a moment, then came to his rescue. “There, there, my friend; I have absolutely no quarrel with your principles, I must forgive you their results: instead of disputing about those results, let’s profit from them.” At this point I grew very hot indeed. “Come now, look alive, we must try some extraordinary tricks.”

  “What would you have me do?”

  “Beat me, outrage me, lash me; isn’t that what you do with women every day; aren’t those the foul violences which, electrifying you, make you capable of the rest? Well? Answer.”

  “’Tis true.”

  “Of course. Well, you’ve a job to perform tomorrow, start preparing for it today. There is my body. It is at your disposal.”

  And Delcour, following my instructions, having started in with a dozen slaps and kicks in the behind, took up a bundle of withes and slashed away at my ass for fifteen minutes or so, while one of my women cunt-sucked me.

  “Delcour,” I cried. “Oh, divine destroyer of the human race! you whom I adore and from whom I expect unheard-of joys, lay on, lay on, I say, whip your slut harder, faster, imprint the marks of your savagery upon her, for she yearns to wear them. I discharge at the idea of my blood wetting your fingers; shed it liberally, my love.…”

  It flowed…. Oh, my friends, I was in ecstasies; words cannot express the wild emotion that was cindering me; without a brain like mine there is no conceiving such a thing, unless one has brains like yours it is not to be comprehended. Unlimited were the quantities of fuck I loosed into the mouth of my fricatrice; never in my life had I been in the throes of such disorder, such torment, such rapture.

  “Delcour, Delcour,” I went on, “there is one last homage you must render me, husband your resources for the purpose. This ass you’ve just hacked to ribbons beckons you, invites you to soothe, to console it. At Cythera Venus had more than one temple, you know; come ope the most arcane, come bugger me, Delcour, make haste … for we must leave no delight untasted, no horror uncommitted.”

  “Great God!” said Delcour, in transports. “I didn’t dare propose it to you; but behold how your desires inflame mine.”

  And indeed my fucker exhibited a prick harder, longer than any I’d clapped eyes on hitherto.

  “Beloved libertine,” said I, “are you then fond of ass?”

  “Ah, Madame, is there anything that affords comparable pleasure?”

  “’Tis all too plain, my dear,” said I, “when you accustom yourself to defying one of the laws of Nature, you do not take authentic pleasure anymore except in transgressing them all, one after the other.”

  And Delcour, master of the altar I abandoned to him entirely, covered it, though ’twas drenched in blood, with the tenderest caresses. His tongue thrilled in the hole, my temperature soared. The slut operating upon me frontwardly set my cunt afire. Fuck gushed out of me afresh, I was dry, I could bear no more; but I was not by any means easy; I suddenly lost all interest in Delcour, then all patience with him. Great had been my desire for the man, great was my abhorrence for him now. And there’s the effect of irregular desires: the greater the height they arouse us to, the greater the emptiness we feel afterward. From this cretins derive proof of God’s existence; whereas for my part I find here only the most certain proofs in support of a materialistic attitude: the more you cheapen your existence, the less I’ll be inclined to believe it is the handiwork of a deity. Delcour sent off to his bedchamber, I retired for the night with my Lesbian hireling.

  Saint-Fond put in his appearance the next day around noon; he dismissed his servants and his coach, and came directly into the salon to greet me; we embraced. Uncertain what his reaction would be to the little prank I had played with Delcour, but anxious lest he hear the story from someone else, I told him everything.

  “Juliette,” he said when I had concluded, “had I not assured you long ago that I would take the most indulgent view of your aberrations, L would scold you now. We can ignore the fuckery, ’tis natural to fuck; your one mistake was in your choice of a partner. Are you so sure you can rely upon Delcour’s discretion? I am glad, however, that you have made his acquaintance; for two years he was my bardash when he was fourteen and fifteen: he is from Nantes where his father was hangman, a fact which stimulated my interest in the boy: I took his maidenhead, and when I was weary toying with his ass, I turned him over to the Paris executioner, whose aide he remained up until the time his father died; he inherited his post at Nantes. The lad is not without intelligence, he is excessively libertine; and as I just hinted, he isn’t the sort who merits overmuch trust. But let me tell you something about the captives we are going to put to death.

  “Of all the men in France, Monsieur de Cloris has probably contributed most to my advancement; the year I was preferred to the Ministry, he, though very young at the time, was sleeping with the Duchesse de G*** whose power at court was immense, and owing primarily to the maneuvering and intrigues of the two of them, I obtained from the King the position I still hold. As of that moment I contracted an insuperable loathing for Cloris; I would go to any lengths to avoid encountering him, I dreaded the sight of him, I hated him; so long as his protectress was alive I postponed taking action; but she has just passed away, or, perhaps, I have just put her out of the way; this brought Cloris to the top of my black list; he married my cousin-german.”

  “What, my Lord! This woman is your cousin?”

  “She is, Juliette, and the fact has contributed not a little to her doom. I had designs upon that woman; she always resisted my desires. Little by little they shifted to her daughter; here I met with yet more stubborn resistance; with the result
that my rage, and my extreme desire to see the whole family gone to blazes, reached the decisive pitch. To promote its undoing I resorted to every known kind of cunning, baseness, lie, and calumny; and I have finally so aroused the Queen’s antipathies to the father and daughter, by giving her to understand that Cloris once sold his child to the King, that at our last interview Her Majesty, much wrought up, commanded me to arrange their deaths. She adamantly insists upon having their heads by tomorrow; my recompense has been fixed at three million apiece: I shall obey the Queen’s orders and very joyfully, you may be sure, and very pleasurable will be the episodes wherewith I plan to accompany my revenge.”

  “My Lord, ’tis this a dreadful complication of crimes, it puts my brain into an indescribable whirl.”

  “It affects mine likewise, my angel, and I arrive here with the most execrable intentions. I’ve not discharged for a week; no one is more adept than I in the art of whetting the passions through abstinence; and having a good time the while. Over the past seven days I’ve probably been fucked two hundred shots, and had intimately to do with somewhere between a hundred and seven score individuals of both sexes, but during this interval not a drop of fuck have I yielded. From thus playing coy with Nature I have achieved a pent-up state that bodes very ill for the persons upon whom the storm is due to break…. Have you given orders that we be left alone and that nobody, saving only those who are necessary to the scene, be under any circumstances admitted to the house?”

  “Yes, my Lord. And I have added that anybody who ventures to intrude shall be hanged on the spot: a squadron of troopers is lying at Sceaux to lend me assistance in case of need; never has stage been more impeccably set for a crime. We shall, the two of us, be able to relish the pleasure of committing it under ideal conditions and in absolute security.”

  “Ah, you see into what state whatever you say puts me.”

  “In truth, I believe you are discharging.”

  “And you?”

  Whereupon, in search of proof positive of a crisis which I was indeed undergoing, the rake lifts my skirt above my navel and ferrets briefly about in my cunt; then he examines his fingers, and finds them slimed with damning evidence of my lewd agitation.

  “You know,” the Minister confesses, “I adore discovering such symptoms in you, for they roundly attest the similarity of our ways of thinking. But hold, I must bib at the tap I’ve set to flowing.”

  And gluing his mouth to my cunt, the villain drank thereat a good quarter of an hour; then rolled me over. “Ah,” said he, “there’s what I like to kiss most of all—the peerless hole. Eh, rascal, it’s been traveled recently, has it not? You’ve been bum-fucked of late, ’tis very plain to be seen.” All the while he went on cooing and kissing about my vent and the area environing; now he has his breeches off, shows me his own ass, and I fall to licking it.

  “You manage that wonderfully well, you little minx,” says he, “I do declare, I think you love my ass. Here’s my prick, it’s starting to stand, suck it a bit; and suggest a few extravagances if you can: the hour of Venus should be rung in by the bells of Folly.”

  “The weather is warm,” I said, “I recommend that you adopt savage attire, leaving your arms, thighs, and prick bare; your headdress ought to resemble a dragon or serpent in the Patagonian manner, you’ll smear red grease paint all over your face, we’ll fit you with moustaches, you’ll wear a baldric, girding on all the instruments required for the tortures you plan to inflict upon your victims: this costume will terrify them for a certainty, and it is terror one should inspire when one wishes to wallow in crime.”

  “You are right, Juliette, you are quite right. I’ll ask you to rig me out in that way.”

  “Apparel and gear are imperative; tell me if in the courts of law our precious buffoons, the judges, don’t resemble heroes out of comedy or charlatans.”

  “My sole objection to the magistracy nowadays is that it is composed of men sorely lacking in sanguinary temper, and if these are such unruly times, we may lay it up to that. Rest assured, Juliette: better not even to try your hand at governing men unless you are willing to immerse it in their blood.”

  Dinner was announced, we repaired to table and pursued our conversation in the same tone.

  “Yes by all means,” the Minister proceeded, “the laws must be made more severe; the only happily governed countries are those where the Inquisition reigns. They alone are really under their sovereigns’ control; the purpose of sacerdotal chains, and the need for them, is to reinforce political ones: the might of the scepter depends on that of the censer, it is hugely in the interest of both authorities, lay and clerical, to stay each other mutually, and only by breaking that common front will the people ever achieve their liberation. Nothing so effectively cows a nation as religious fears; nothing better than that it dread hell’s eternal fires if it revolts against its overlord; and that’s why the crowned heads of Europe are always in such admirable intelligence with Rome. We other great ones of this world do indeed despise and defy the fabulous thunderbolts of a contemptible Vatican, but we are well advised to keep our slaves in terror of them; once again ’tis there the sole means to keep them under the yoke. Steeped in Machiavelli, I would want the disparity between the king and the mob to be no less considerable than that between a heavenly body and a cockroach; a mere gesture on the part of the monarch, and his throne would become an island in a very sea of blood; beheld as a god on earth, his subjects would only dare crawl into his presence on their hands and knees. Who is fool enough even to compare the physical constitution, yes, the mere physical constitution of a king with that of a commoner? I’m willing to believe that Nature gave them the same needs—the lion and the earthworm have the same needs also; but does this create a resemblance between them? Oh, Juliette, do not forget that if kings are beginning to lose their credit in Europe, it’s the vulgarity they’ve become attainted with that has been their downfall; had they remained aloof and invisible like the sovereigns of Asia, the whole world would yet tremble at the sound of their names. Contempt is bred of familiarity, and familiarity from what is daily within public view; the Romans must surely have stood in greater awe of Tiberius off on Capri than of a Titus wandering around the city consoling the poor.”

  “But this despotism,” I said to Saint-Fond, “you favor it because you are so powerful; do you suppose however that it is equally pleasing to the weak?”

  “It pleases everybody, Juliette,” Saint-Fond replied; “mankind tends universally in that direction. To be despotic is the primary desire inspired in us by a Nature whose law could not be more unlike the ludicrous one usually ascribed to her, the substance of which is not to do unto others that which unto ourselves we would not have done … from fear of reprisals, they should have added, for very certain it is that only weaklings, dreading tit for tat, could have contrived this homily; and they must have been desperate as well as insolent rogues to dare to fob it off as a natural law. I affirm that the fundamental, profoundest, and keenest penchant in man is incontestably to enchain his fellow creatures and to tyrannize them with all his might. The suckling babe that bites his nurse’s nipple, the infant constantly smashing his rattle, reveal to us that a bent for destruction, cruelty, and oppression is the first which Nature graves in our hearts, and that we surrender to it more or less violently according to the amount of sensibility we are endowed with from the outset. I therefore hold it self-evident, that all the pleasures which ornament the life of a man, all the delights he is able to savor, all that makes for the extreme delectation of his passions, are essentially located in his despotic usage of his brethren. The sequestration, in voluptuous Asia, of the objects accessory to pleasure-taking demonstrates to us, does it not, that lust gains with oppression and tyranny, and that the passions are more strongly fired by whatever is obtained through force than by anything granted voluntarily. When it is logically established that the degree of violence characterizing the action committed is the one factor for measuring the amount of happi
ness of the active person—and this because where the violence is greater the shock upon the nervous system will be sharper—as soon, I say, as that is proven, the greatest possible dose of happiness will necessarily consist in the greatest of the effects of despotism and tyranny; whence it will emerge that the harshest, the most ferocious, the most traitorous and the wickedest man will be the happiest man; and that stands to reason. For as Noirceuil has often told you, happiness lies neither in vice nor in virtue; but in the manner we appreciate the one and the other, and the choice we make pursuant to our individual organization. It isn’t in the meal set before me my appetite lies, my need is nowhere but in me, and two people may be very differently affected by the same fare: it makes his mouth water who is hungry, excites repugnance in him who has just eaten his fill: however, as ’tis certain there must be some difference between the vibrations received, and that vice must procure much more intense ones in the individual with the vicious bent than virtue can give to the person whose organs are structured for its reception; that, although Vespasian had a good soul and Nero an evil, despite the fact both were sensitive, there was a great difference in the temper of those souls as regards the species of sensibility constituting them: for Nero’s was without doubt endowed with a faculty of sensation far superior to Vespasian’s; ’tis certain, I say, that of the two, Nero was the happier man by far; why? because that which affects more intensely will always produce the happier effect in man; and because a vigorous person, owing to his very vigor so structured as to be a better recipient of vicious than of virtuous impressions, will sooner discover felicity than a mild and peaceable individual, whose feeble complexion will deny him all possibilities other than the abject, hangdog, woebegone practice of the formulas of humdrum good behavior; and what the devil would the merit be in virtue if vice weren’t preferable to it? Thus, I tell you, Vespasian and Nero were as happy as they were able to be, but Nero must have been much more so, because his pleasures were incomparably livelier and keener; while Vespasian, in giving an aim to some beggar (simply because as he himself said, the poor have got to live), was stirred in an infinitely less intense manner than Nero, a lyre in his hand, watching Rome burn from atop the tower of Antonia. ‘Ah,’ somebody will say, ‘but deification was the reward of the one, disparagement and hate that of the other.’ As you wish; however, it is not the effect their souls had upon others I am interested in; I am simply evaluating the inward sensation which the different penchants native to each must have made each experience, and discriminating between the vibrations each was capable of feeling. Thus I am able to affirm that the happiest man on earth will inevitably be he who is addicted to the most infamous, the most revolting, the most criminal habits, and who exercises them the most frequently—who, every day, doubles their force, triples their scope.”