Juliette

by Marquis de Sade

  At this we all laughed merrily; arrangements were completed during the interview, no detail was neglected. One of the hags gets down on all fours, we prop the text on her rump, the story of the passion of Mary’s bastard is located; I read out the chapter and verse aloud. The young man is already in bedraggled condition when he returns; Clairwil, Saint-Fond, and the unoccupied hag take charge of him; he is affixed to the cross, and upon it he suffers precisely what that impudent little bore out of Galilee endured at the hands of those wise Romans of old: his side is gashed, he is crowned with thorns, he is given a vinegar-soaked sponge to suck. At length, remarking that Delnos is in no hurry to die, we institute improvements upon the classical ordeal: the patient is lifted off the cross, turned over, nailed on again, and every kind of horror is perpetrated upon his behind; we prick his buttocks, we sear them, and tear them into shreds; by the time he finally expires, Delnos has gone mad. Clairwil and Saint-Fond, whom I have been frigging one on either hand, discharge copiously; and therewith ended infamies at which we had been twelve hours occupied. They were succeeded by the pleasures of the table.

  Clairwil was deeply curious to learn Saint-Fond’s secret; she plied him with wine, she caressed and praised him till he was quite giddy; then she put the question: “What is it you do with your victims just prior to killing them?”

  “I announce their death to them.”

  “That’s not all you do. There’s more, we’re convinced of it.”

  “No, that’s all.”

  “There’s more. We know there is.”

  “Perhaps. But it’s merely one of my failings. Why force me to reveal it?”

  “Ought you to keep secrets from us?” I asked my lover.

  “In truth, it’s no secret,” said he.

  “You hide it from us, however. Pray tell us what it is.”

  “What purpose would that serve?”

  “It would satisfy our curiosity, and we are the two best friends you have in the world.”

  “You are cruel women,” said he, and he sighed. “Don’t you realize that I cannot make this confession without acknowledging a dreadful weakness in me, a veritably unavowable paltriness?”

  “You can afford to divulge it to us.”

  We redoubled our pleas and flatteries, our caresses and seductions conquered, the Minister waved us to our chairs and addressed us in this wise:

  “Fierce and long has been my struggle against the shameful yoke of religion, my friends; and I must confess to you today that I am yet its captive insofar as I still have hopes of a life after this. If it is true, I say to myself, that there are punishments and rewards in the next world, the victims of my wickedness will triumph, they will know bliss. This idea hurls me into deepest despond, owing to my extreme barbarity this idea is a very torture to me. Whenever I immolate an object, whether to my ambition or to my lubricity, my desire is to make its sufferings last beyond the unending immensity of ages; such has been my desire, and had been for a long time when I broached it to a famous libertine whom I was greatly attached to in days bygone, and whose tastes were the same as mine. He was a man of vast knowledge, his attainments in alchemy and astrology were especially noteworthy; he assured me that I was very correct indeed in my suspicion that there are punishments and rewards to come; and that, in order to bar the victim from celestial joys, it is necessary to have him sign a pact, writ in his heart’s blood, whereby he contracts his soul to the devil; next to insert this paper in his asshole and to tamp it home with one’s prick; and while doing so to cause him to suffer the greatest pain in one’s power to inflict. Observe these measures, my friend assured me, and no individual you destroy will enter into heaven. His agonies, in kind identical to those you make him endure while burying the pact, shall be everlasting; and yours will be the unspeakable delight of prolonging them beyond the limits of eternity, if eternity there be.”

  “And so that is what you do to your victims?”

  “Softly, Clairwil, berate me not. You wanted nothing so much as to learn the truth. It is a weakness you wheedled me into disclosing. I am not proud of it.”

  “No, nor should you be. Why, Saint-Fond, I am amazed! I thought you were a philosopher. You have a mind, do you not? Then how can you for a single instant accept the absurd claptrap about the immortality of the soul? For, is it not so, this disgusting religious fantasy must first be accepted before you begin to believe in the rewards and punishments of an afterlife?

  “As for your intention, I applaud it, it is delicious,” Clairwil continued, “it accords with my own attitudes: to want to prolong forever the sufferings of the person you send to his doom—that is a desire which does you credit. But to base It all upon nonsense, upon extravagances—no, Saint-Fond, that will not do, that is quite unpardonable.”

  “Clairwil, do you not understand that my divine hope must fade away unless founded upon such an opinion as I entertain?”

  “I do very well understand, my good man, that if you have to edify your divine hopes upon fables, it would be better to give them up; for the day may come when the harm belief in fables has done you will prove to outweigh the pleasures you have received therefrom. Come, come, Saint-Fond: be content with the evil you can work in this world and abandon your foolish schemes for perpetuating it forever.”

  “Saint-Fond, there is no afterlife,” said I at this point, recollecting the philosophical tenets which had been very early inculcated in me; “the sole authority vouching for that illusion is the imagination of those men who, dreaming it up and clinging to it, merely expressed their desire to find later on a more durable and purer happiness than what is our portion on earth. Ah, is it not a pitiful absurdity, first of all to invent for oneself a God, then to believe that this God holds torments without end in store for the majority of humankind! Thus it is, after rendering mortals miserable in this world, religion shows them a weird deity, the fruit of their credulousness or their knavish cunning, a deity, I say, who’s very apt to render them more miserable still in the world to come. I know how they quibble: this God’s justice is horrible, but this God is merciful also; but a mercifulness which leaves room for appalling cruelty is far from infinite; neither is it reliable; after having been infinitely good, he becomes infinitely wicked; and is this what you call an immutable God? A God overflowing vindictiveness and fury, is this the sort of entity to whom you ascribe one jot of clemency or kindliness? To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell. Would it not have been more conforming to honesty, to goodness, to common sense and decency, to have created stones and plants and gone no farther, instead of creating men whose behavior would bring unending calamity down on their heads? A God so perfidious, so evil as to create a single man and then to leave him exposed to the peril of damning himself, such a God can be regarded as no specimen of excellence; if perfection be his, then it is a monster of unreason, injustice, malice, and foul atrocity. Nay, very far from composing a perfect God, theology’s adepts formed the most loathsome chimera; and when to this abominable God they ascribed the invention of eternal penalties, they but added the final touch to an artifact that was hateful from the start. The cruelty that makes for our pleasure has at least its purposes and hence its justification; this latter is accessible to the reason, we understand it; but what motive has God for torturing the victims of his wrath? Has he rivals? Is he threatened? No, those he packs off to hellfire were able neither to contest his power nor trouble his felicity. Let me add that the tortures of the life after this would be of no use to the living who cannot witness them; they would be of no use to the damned, since there are no new leaves turned over in hell; whence it follows that in the exercise of his eternal vengeance, God’s sole aim is to enjoy himself, and having exploited his creatures’ frailties, to make the most of their helplessness; and your infamous God, acting more cruelly than any mortal, and without any motive a man might have, in so doing shows himself infinitely a traitor, infinite
ly a cheat, and infinitely a villain.”

  “I think we may go farther,” said Clairwil. “If that is agreeable to you, I shall attempt a more detailed analysis of this pernicious and gloomy hell dogma; I am confident that by the time I am done, our friend shall have abandoned every bit of his faith in this pathetic, onerous superstition. Will you lend me your ears?”

  “Certainly,” said we.

  And then it was as follows that the subtle and erudite Clairwil addressed herself to this solemn question.

  “There are certain dogmas which one is sometimes obliged not to accept but to posit hypothetically for the purpose of combating others. My aim you know, and you will allow that it is worthy: to obliterate the idiotic dogma of hell out of your apprehension; I trust you will not take it amiss if, with this end in view, and for the time being, I reinstate the deistic chimera. Bound to employ it as point of departure in this important dissertation, I am forced temporarily to ascribe substance to the myth; this is regrettable but I am sure you will excuse it, and excuse it all the more readily knowing, as you do, that as regards belief in this abominable phantom, I am above suspicion.

  “In itself, the dogma of hell is, I own, so devoid of probability, all the arguments customarily advanced in its support are so weak, so transparent, in such manifest contradiction with reason, that one almost blushes at having to counter them. Never mind; let us ruthlessly deprive the Christians even of the hope of fettering us anew at the feet of their atrocious confession, and let us very plainly show them that the dogma they count upon most heavily to affright us vanishes, like all their other ghosts and goblins, at the mere approach of philosophy’s rational light.

  “The primary arguments in the case they make out for their baneful fairy tale are these:

  “1) That sin being infinite by virtue of the fact sin is offensive to God, the sinner merits infinite punishment; that the Almighty having decreed the laws, it behooves his mightiness to punish those who transgress them.

  “2) The universality of this doctrine, and the manner in which we find it enunciated in Scriptures.

  “3) The high need for such a dogma, lacking which there would be no restraining sinners and the incredulous.

  “The whole edifice sits on those foundations; now let us demolish them.

  “Taking them in the above order, we begin with the first: it, I have no doubt but that you will concur, is exploded by the glaring disproportion between the human provocation and the divine reprisal. We observe that according to this doctrine the pettiest fault is to be punished as severely as the gravest; now, presuming our God just, for so he is accounted, how can we admit such iniquity? Who created man, anyhow? Who gave him the passions and the penchants which the torments of hell are to punish him for having? Who else but your God? And thus, half-witted Christians, you are disposed to imagine this preposterous God endowing man with impulses one minute and being compelled the next to chasten man for having acted upon them? But was it that God did not know what he was doing? Is it a blind incompetent fool you worship? Did he not know that man, endowed by him with the power to misbehave, would outrage him inevitably? If God knew, then why did he not otherwise endow man? And if he did not know, then why does he punish defective man when he, the Maker, is alone to blame?

  “I think it is only too obvious that under the conditions alleged to be necessary to salvation, we are far more likely to be damned than saved. So tell me then, is this your God’s so loudly vaunted justice, to have placed his puny, miserable masterpiece in such an abominable position? and this being the system, how dare your doctors assert that eternal happiness and eternal unhappiness are presented to man to choose between, and that his destiny depends on his option alone? If it comes out that the fate of the greater share of mankind is to be eternally unhappy, an all-knowing God must have known this from the outset; why then did the monster create us? Was he forced to? Then he is not free. Did he knowingly, deliberately, cause things so to be? Then he is a fiend. No, God was under no obligation to create man, certainly not, and if he did so simply to expose man to such a fate, the propagation of our species therewith becomes the foulest of all crimes, and nothing would be more desirable than the total extinction of humankind.

  “If however you esteem this dogma necessary to the greatness of God, I must ask you why this God, so great and so good, failed to give man the capacities he would need in order to avoid the torture awaiting perhaps nine out of ten human beings. Is it not, to say the least, cruel on God’s part to allow man opportunities and an appetite for dooming himself eternally? And however are you to exonerate your God from a charge either of ignorance or of wickedness, the one as criminal as the other?

  “If all men are equal in the eyes of the Divinity who made them, why are they not all in agreement as to the particular crimes which are to cost man this everlasting suffering? Why does the Hottentot damn you for something which if you are a Chinaman sees you into paradise, and how is it, pray tell, that the latter will promise you a place in heaven for what lands the Christian in hell? Endless would be the task of listing the various opinions of pagans, Jews, Mohammedans, Christians, concerning the means to employ to escape eternal woe and to attain felicity; endless the task, and yet more cheerless, of describing the puerile and ridiculous formulas and devices invented to these ends.

  “But we shall proceed to examine the second of the foundations they have endeavored to construct for this grotesque doctrine: its peculiar enunciation as shown in the Writ, and its universal character.

  “We ought to preface our remarks with a reminder to ourselves: let us beware of taking the universality of any belief for a title in its favor. There is not one idiocy, not one form of madness, that has not enjoyed a general currency and mode; not one that has wanted for adherents any more than for exponents; so long as there are men on earth there will be fools, and so long as there are fools there will be gods, cults, a heaven, a hell, etc. But Scripture contains it all in black and white, you tell me. We shall for a moment suppose that the texts so called have some authenticity, and that they truly merit some respect. (I think I have already pointed out that to attain a position from which one can blast certain absurdities one may have to play lip service to certain others.)

  “Very well. My reply, to begin with, is that there are strong grounds for doubting whether Scripture mentions this doctrine at all. Supposing nevertheless that it does, what Scripture says can be addressed to none but those who are familiar with these writings and acknowledge them as infallible; those who have no acquaintance of them, or who refuse to believe them, cannot be convinced by their authority; however, is it not maintained that they who have no acquaintance of this Scripture, or they who do not believe it, are subject to eternal punishment, just as are those others who are acquainted with Scripture or who believe it? What say you, is not this dreadful injustice?

  “Perhaps you’ll say that some races or nations to whom your nonsensical sacred literature was completely unknown had no lack of belief in a future life made up of eternal suffering. This may be true of some peoples; many others, however, had no knowledge of these dogmas. But precisely how were such opinions able to make their way into the heads of a people unacquainted with the Bible? I trust nobody will tell me that we are here dealing with innate ideas; for in that case we would find these opinions in all men everywhere. Nor do I fancy anybody will maintain that they naturally stem from the human reason; for surely his reason is not apt to advise man that he will suffer infinite punishment for finite wrongs; nor is revelation the answer, since the people in our example know nothing of that. To what then must we ascribe the existence of this dogma among this particular people? Either to the people’s fancy or to the plotting of its priests; these being the sources of the superstition, how can you allow it any substance?

  “Were you to conjecture that, there where we find no Scripture, belief in eternal punishment has been handed down by tradition, I should have to ask where they got it from, who spread the word originally;
and if you are unable to prove that they received it through divine revelation, you shall have to agree with me that this tremendous opinion must have arisen out of some disease of the imagination or some piece of roguery.

  “Supposing now that Scripture, allegedly holy, informs men of punishments in a future life, and supposing that this announcement is in no sense a false alarm, might one not wonder how the authors of Scripture could know that such punishments did in actual fact exist? The unfailing reply is, of course, that they were inspired; splendid. But those who have not been favored by this special illumination have therefore had to take the word of others for it; pray tell me, if you please, what confidence should one have in persons who concerning a fact of such importance declare to you, ‘I believe it is true because so-and-so told me he dreamt it.’ And lo! there it stands before you: that’s what haunts and preoccupies, and what frightens and debilitates half the human race; that’s what prevents one man out of two from hearkening to Nature’s sweetest promptings! Is it possible to be more mistaken, to tumble more needlessly into error? But your inspired ones did not get in touch with everybody; the vast majority of mankind knows nothing about their reveries. It is, is it not, to the vital interest not only of the men who wrote the Bible and their adherents but of all men to be apprised of this dogma? Then why is it that some, nay, many, whole multitudes, have been left in the dark? This matter of eternal punishments being the concern of all, thorough and definitive information thereupon would have been of advantage to all; why then did God not impart this sublime knowledge directly and immediately to everyone, without the help and participation of individuals who may be suspected of fraud or insanity? To have positively done the very contrary, is this, I ask you, the behavior of a being whom you would have me believe infinitely wise and good? Does not such conduct rather show all the attributes of stupidity and wickedness? Whenever laws are made in a State, does not every government bring them to the attention of the public and employ every possible means to make generally known what penalties will be incurred by violation of them? Provided you are rational, how can you punish a man for breaking a law he has never even heard of? And what now, in the face of all these truths, must our conclusion be? This: that the institution of a hell has never been anything but the result of the malicious lucubrations of some men, and the unqualifiable folly of a great many others.12