Juliette

by Marquis de Sade

  A young thing of sixteen, very pretty, the daughter of one of my husband’s oldest friends, was the first I attacked. Caroline, intrigued by the originality of my remarks, suborned by the immorality of my systems, quickly yielded to my desires: one day when we had gone bathing together I made her discharge in my arms. But Caroline, who was only beautiful, might well once have, but could hardly hold someone who, like myself, had to be roused through the imagination; whereof the dear child possessed none at all. Brief was our idyll; I shortly found somebody else, abandoned her for a third. Yes, attractive women did not entirely lack in Angers, but how dull were their minds—never a hint of friskiness. Oh, Clairwil, how longingly I thought on you, how greatly you were missing to my happiness! Useless to deny it, he who loves vice, who since childhood cherishes it either from taste or from habit, he, I say, is invariably more apt to find felicity in the continual practice of depraved customs than will he who comes late to them after having always plodded along the desolate path of virtue.

  I tried men, met with hardly better luck; I was on my tenth when one day, while hearing Mass beside my virtuous husband, I thought I recognized in the celebrant a certain Abbé Chabert with whom I had had some agreeable connections at the Sodality of the Friends of Crime—a charming boy, you often see him here today. Never had Mass seemed so tedious; it finished at last. Monsieur de Lorsange leaves; some supplementary prayers are my excuse for remaining behind. I request a word with the priest who has just officiated; he comes: why, my God, yes, it was Chabert. We removed at once into a secluded chapel; and there the amiable Abbé, after having congratulated himself upon this stroke of good fortune and expressed his delight at seeing me again, told me that large benefices he possessed here and there in the diocese compelled him to keep under cover but that I should not be misled by his smirks and antics, bowing and scraping are enjoined to politics and cannot be avoided; that his way of thinking, views, and habits were quite what they had always been, and that he would be only too happy to give me proof thereof at the first convenient opportunity. I for my part recounted what had befallen me; having arrived in Angers but a week before, he had not known of my presence there, and reiterated his desire that we amply renew our acquaintance.

  “Abbé,” said I, “need we delay? Fuck me here and now. The church doors are shut, this altar will serve as our couch; make haste, reconcile me with pleasures over the loss of which I weep every day. Will you believe it? Ever since I came to this wretched town, not one of the persons to whom I have surrendered has so much as thought to look at my ass, I who cherish none but those attacks, and who behold all other pleasures as necessarily accessory or incidental to that one.”

  “Why, very well then, let us indulge in it,” said Chabert, turning me so that my belly was resting against the altar, raising my skirts from behind. “Ah, Juliette,” cried he after a moment spent admiring my buttocks, “your ass is still the same, Aphrodite’s own.”

  The Abbé inclines, he kisses it; ’tis most inspiring to feel, in my asshole, this tongue where a god lay of late … he soon replaces it by his prick, and lo! I am sodomized to the balls. And so these were the delights of backsliding! Ah, good my friends, my pleasure was beyond description; it is cruel to interrupt sinful habits, it is heavenly to resume them. During my enforced abstinence from this kind of pleasure I had felt the most violent need of it, this had manifested itself in the form of itchings so keen, so insistent that to soothe them I had had to resort to scratchings and scrapings with whatever instrument lay ready to hand; Chabert gave me a new lease on life. Remarking the extreme pleasure he was affording me, he prolonged it to the utmost, and the rascal, young and vigorous as he was, hung in my bum until he had spat three discharges there.

  “There’s no substitute for it, it has no equal—there’s my opinion,” said he as he withdrew. “Or do you not agree?”

  “Oh, Abbé Chabert, can you ask such a question? And of the staunchest defender of sodomy you are likely to meet in all your life! We must see each other often, my dear.”

  “We shall, Juliette, heaven be my witness, we shall. And I would that you were doubly content at having encountered me again.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have friends.”

  “And, you wag, you intend to prostitute me to them?”

  “With attributes and proclivities like yours, you are better suited to the role of a whore than the one you are enacting at present.”

  “Abbé, I am touched by what you say, it is a mark of recognition. ’Tis a sad part to play in the world, that of an honest wife; the title itself implies stupidity. Every chaste wife is mad; or else a fool who, lacking the strength to shake off her prejudices, remains buried beneath them through witlessness or because of some constitutional flaw, and is hence nothing better than a creature Nature mismade or contrived in jest. Women are built for impudicity, born for it, and those of them who remain prudes throughout and in spite of all are fit only for ridicule and scorn.”

  Chabert knew my husband and described him as a bigot; he urged me to seek some compensation for the austerities of the marital couch. Having overheard someone say that Monsieur de Lorsange was to depart the next day for one of his estates, he advised me to take advantage of his absence to come to a country dwelling of his whither he would escort me, and partake in a replica of our Parisian debauches.

  “’Tis a wicked thing you are doing,” said I, rallying the Abbé, “you are unsettling all my plans for virtue. Say now, is it right for you to flatter my passions? should you thus pave for me the way to crime? ought you lure his wife away from a husband? Ah, your conscience will answer for it; it is time you halt your wicked machinations. The harm is not yet done, I have but to consult a spiritual guide less perverted than you, he will teach me how to resist such criminal desires; he will show me that they are the product of a perverse soul, explain to me that, in submitting to them, one dooms oneself to eternal remorse, to remorse of the very bitterest as there are evil deeds for which there is no possible reparation. He will not, like you, advise me that I am at liberty to do anything, that I have nothing to fear; he will not encourage me to wild conduct by raising hopes of impunity, he will not facilitate my journey into adultery and sodomy, he will not cheer me on to betraying my husband—a gentle, God-fearing husband, wise, pious, good, who sacrifices himself for his wife…. Oh no, no, it will be the contrary of that, he will trundle out the great terrors of religion, he will brandish them to affright me; like the virtuous Lorsange, he will remind me of a dead God who died for the sake of my salvation;17 he will make me sense how guilty I am in disregarding such favors…. But I shall not attempt to conceal it from you, my dear Abbé Chabert, she who is today no less a libertine, no less a scoundrel than you knew me to be in the past would be mightily prone to take such pratings ill; and in reply to his golden words, tell him: My friend, I abominate religion, to the devil with your fuck-in-the-ass God and a fig for your advice: gibber to me no more, clumsy little oaf, virtue offends me, it’s vice I like; and it is to enjoy myself Nature put me on this earth.”

  “Ah, Juliette,” said Chabert as we parted, “wrong-headed as ever, and just as engaging. Here in this solitude and bleakness where we live, ’tis a treasure I have found in finding you.”

  I arrived punctually at the rendezvous, Chabert and I set off for his retreat; apart from ourselves, there were gathered four men and four women. Among the latter were three with whom I had held voluptuous commerce previously; while the four men were carnal strangers to me. The Abbé gave us merrily and plentifully to eat and drink, and we gorged ourselves on libertinage too. The women were pretty, the men vigorous: my ass was fucked by all the men, my cunt fingered, sucked by all the women. I discharged prodigiously. No need to describe that party to you, nor the eight or ten others which followed it during my stay at Angers. You are weary of lubricious descriptions, and henceforth I shall spare you all but those which exceptional crimes or other singularities render worthy of your hearing.r />
  Before advancing with my story I must mention a few vital details which cannot longer be omitted. Eleven months after my marriage to the Comte de Lorsange I presented him with a charming baby girl; bearing the child was a struggle for me, but shrewdness won out in the end. The measure was essential: I had to consolidate my claims to the fortune of the man who had given me his name. I could not do this without a child—but was it fathered by my virtuous husband, that’s what you are wondering, isn’t it now, prying busybodies that you are? Why then, allow me to make you the same reply Madame de Polignac made to Monsieur in answer to the same indiscreet question: “Oh my Lord, when one ventures into the midst of a thicket of rosebushes, how is one to tell by which thorn one has been pricked?” But do you suppose Lorsange bothered to inquire? He accepted everything, jibbed at nothing; the honor and the burdens of paternity devolved upon him, did my greed require anything more? This little daughter, whom my husband named Marianne, was completing her first year and I my twenty-fourth when, taking deep and long counsel with myself, I decided I had no alternative but to leave France.

  From anonymous correspondents I had received warnings that Saint-Fond, whose star was only continuing to rise at the Court and who was in apprehension of a damaging indiscretion from me, regretted not having clapped me away into a place of safety, and that he was having me sought after everywhere. Fearing lest my change of name and condition prove insufficient camouflage, I resolved to put the Alps between the Minister’s hatred and me: but there were ties binding me, they had to be dissolved; could I make my escape so long as I was under a husband’s thumb? Here was something that had to be remedied and I began to lay my plans. The great deal I had already accomplished in this domain reduced a rather unimportant crime to a mere trifle in my eyes; meditating it moistened my cunt, I hatched my plot to the tune of acute spasms of joy, and prospects of others goaded me toward its speedy execution. I had half a dozen pinches left of each poison bought from Durand: to my tender spouse I administered a strong dose of the royal variety, both out of respect for his aristocratic person, and because the time which was to elapse between the envenoming and the death of the beloved would screen me from all possible suspicion.

  Never was there a sublimer death than that of Monsieur de Lorsange; his acts and sayings were elevated, they were exemplary; his bedchamber turned into a chapel where sacraments of all sorts were celebrated continually. He exhorted me, he preached to me, he bored me; recommended to me the little daughter he thought was his; and hemmed in by three or four confessors, breathed his last. Truly, had all that dragged on another two days, I believe I would have left him to die all by himself. The respect and care allegedly due to the dying comprise another social obligation which makes no sense to me. One ought undoubtedly to take the fullest possible advantage of a living creature; but as. soon as Nature, afflicting it through maladies, advises us that she has initiated the process of reclaiming that creature, rather than risk infringing her laws we must let her operations take their course; we may hasten them, yes; but interfere with them, never. In short, the sick must be abandoned to their own devices; place a few objects inside their reach that may bring them relief, if you like, then proceed about your business. It is unnatural for a healthy individual to go and breathe, before his appointed time and in open violation of Nature’s intentions as they regard him, the contaminated air of a sickroom, and to expose himself to falling ill too, all in order to do something unlawful: nothing being more criminal in my opinion than to venture to force Nature to desist or retreat; and always acting according to my principles, I may assure you that I shall never be seen nursing the sick, nor comforting them in any way whatsoever. Nor do I wish to be told that it is my harshness of character which is responsible for this attitude of mine; it comes from nowhere but my intelligence, and my intelligence rarely deceives me where the issue is philosophical.

  My very chaste husband interred, I went gladly into mourning for him: no widow, I am told, was ever so becoming in her weeds, wherein I had myself fucked on the burial day—in Chabert’s company it happened; but even more delicious than wearing those lugubrious tires was to become the owner of four fine estates evaluated at fifty thousand livres a year in rents, plus the one hundred thousand francs in specie I found in my husband’s coffers.

  More than enough here for my Italian journey, said I, transferring the bundles of banknotes from the deceased’s moneybox into mine, and there’s the hand of fate, friendly to crime as always and crowning it once again in bestowing her blessings upon one of crime’s most devoted disciples.

  It turned out that Abbé Chabert had traveled in Italy and was able to furnish me a quantity of glowing letters of recommendation. In exchange, I left my daughter in his wardship; he promised to take the very best care of her—my concern for the child was of course motivated by material considerations rather than by any motherly affection, there being neither any place in my heart for such a sentiment, nor any justification for it in my beliefs. For lust-objects I took along only a tall, well-shaped, and pretty lackey by the name of Zephyr, to whom I had frequently played Flora, and one chambermaid, Augustine, eighteen years of age and heavenly to behold. Accompanied by these two trusty individuals, by another woman of no consequence, some baggage, and my well-filled treasury, I boarded a coach and without stopping save for the night and for meals, sped at a merry clip all the way to Turin.

  “And so here I am at last,” said I, drawing deep breaths of free air, “in this so interesting region of Europe, this Italy that has always attracted the curious, here am I in the home of Neros and of Messalinas; perhaps upon this hallowed soil they used once to tread I shall capture the spirit of those paragons of crime and debauchery, and be able to duplicate the atrocities of Agrippina’s incestuous son and the lubricities of Claudius’ adulterous wife.” The idea prevented me from sleeping that night and I spent it in the arms of a pretty young lass at the Albergo d’Inghilterra, where I had taken lodgings—a delicious creature whom I had managed to seduce an hour after alighting, and in whose fresh embraces I tasted perfectly divine pleasures.

  No city in all Italy is more regular nor duller than Turin; the courtier is tiresome there, the townsman doleful, the rabble equally hangdog and also superstitious and devout. Very slender resources for pleasure, moreover; setting forth from Angers I had struck upon a properly libertine scheme, meditated upon it en route, and at Turin I began its execution. My idea was to travel in the guise of a celebrated courtesan, to make broad display of myself everywhere, to enhance my fortune with the tribute exacted by my charms, and in the interests of my libertinage to exploit whatever of youth and vigor fell into my clutches. On the day after my arrival I had word carried to Signora Diana, the most famous furnisher in Turin, that an engaging young Frenchwoman was in town and for hire, and that I would be obliged if she would come to discuss arrangements with me; the procuress did not fail to answer the call. I outlined my plans to her, and declared that between fifteen and twenty-five they could have me for nothing where I had guarantee of sound health; that I took fifty louis between twenty-five and thirty-five; one hundred from thirty-five to sixty; and two hundred from sixty to the final point of human senescence; that as regarded fantasies, occult requirements, and the like, I satisfied them all, that I even lent myself to fustigations.

  “And the ass, my fair lady,” Signora Diana interrupted me, “and the ass? For it is in hot demand here in Italy; you will earn more money by your ass in the space of a single month than you will from four years of selling your cunt.”

  I assured Diana that I was very easy in this article, and that in consideration of a double fee no bid for the use of it would be refused. I did not have to wait long before being presented. It was the very next day that a message from Diana advised me I was expected for supper at the residence of the Duke of Chablais.

  After one of those voluptuous toilettes whence nature emerged embellished by the cunning hand of art, I betook myself to the house of this Chablais
, then forty years of age and renowned throughout the entire country for his libidinous studies in venereal pleasures. The Duke had one of his sycophants by him, together they promptly explained to me that in the games to follow I would play the dummy.

  “Get yourself out of all this array,” said the Duke, conducting me into a very elegant chamber, “art so often being a mask to defects, our policy with women, my friend’s and mine, is to lay them bare at the outset.”

  I obeyed.

  “One ought never wear a stitch when one has a body so fair,” my two assailants observed.

  “Frenchwomen are all alike,” the Duke went on to remark, “their figure and skin are delicious, we have nothing comparable here.”

  And the libertines inspected me, in their survey turning me this way and that but nevertheless concentrating their attention upon certain details and in a certain manner that soon gave me to suspect that it was not without reason Italians are charged with a predilection for the charms unappreciated by Monsieur de Lorsange.

  “Juliette,” announced the Duke, “I had better tell you that before you come to grips with us you shall make show of your talents upon some young boys, they will be admitted into the room one at a time. Station yourself upon this couch if you will; the lads we have in store for you shall, as I say, enter in single file by this door to the right and march out that other door to the left; as each arrives, you will frig him with all the skill your nationality promises, for nowhere on earth do they know how to frig pricks better than in France; just prior to discharge you will steer them first the one toward my friend’s mouth, then the next toward mine, that is where they are to deposit their fuck; after this, and once again taking turns, my friend and I shall embugger them before sending them on their way; as for you, your individual services shall not be required until we have had our fill of these inaugural delights, and you shall only then be informed of your remaining duties, with the fulfillment of which these lewd scenes will close.”