Juliette

by Marquis de Sade

  “No,” said Clairwil, without the flutter of an eyelash, “it was to have been this evening, at supper, and that is the reason I dragged you home so early.”

  “But this voyage,” I said, “it worries me now; are you sure there is no danger?”

  “None in the least: I completely changed her mind, and I guarantee you that she has forgotten the idea. Let us have supper.”

  The meal was served us; I had taken my decision. To be the dupe of Clairwil’s tales, this was absolutely impossible; and Durand’s avowals, their frankness, their warmth had so impressed me…. Into the first dish I handed Clairwil I slipped the poison hidden between my fingers; she took a mouthful, swallowed, swayed in her chair, and fell, emitting a single furious scream.

  “Behold my revenge,” I said to my women, both bewildered by Clairwil’s sudden collapse.

  And I related the adventure to them.

  “Fuck!” I cried, “let us savor the sweet charms of vengeance, my dears, and acquit ourselves of a few horrors; the two of you, frig me as I lie upon that whore’s dead body, and may her example teach you never to betray your best friend.”

  We stripped off Clairwil’s clothes, we stretched her naked corpse upon a bed. … I put my hand to her cunt, it was still warm, I frigged her; donning a dildo, I fucked her. Elise gave me her ass to kiss; and in the meantime I tickled Raimonde’s cunt. I spoke to Clairwil as though she were ever alive, I addressed reproaches to her, invectives, as though she were able to hear me; I took up some withes, I lashed her unmoving body … I embuggered it. It never stirred, it was utterly without feeling; and at last I saw that there was no hope left, and I had that body put into a sack. And Clairwil’s own valets, who had hated her and who were as grateful to me as could be for having delivered them from such a wicked mistress, they agreed, once night had come, to go secretly with her body and drop it into the sea.

  I wrote forthwith to my banker in Rome to advise him that by virtue of the contract we had entered into, Clairwil and I, through which the moneys we had invested with him belonged to the one of us who might chance to survive the other, he could henceforth remit all revenues to me; whence it resulted that by merging the two fortunes, I secured myself an annual income of two million. In Italy, nothing is more quickly straightened out than a murder: I had two hundred sequins transmitted to the justice of Ancona, and there was not so much as an inquest.

  “And so, my fine friend,” I said to Durand when, the next day, I went to dine with her, “you thought to outwit me, did you? Clairwil let the cat out of the bag: how you meant to poison me last night, and would have had she not stood in the way.”

  “Treacherous to the last,” said Durand gravely, shaking her head. “Oh, Juliette, I told you the truth, believe it: I love you far too much to deceive you upon such serious matters. There is much of the scoundrel in me, perhaps more than in most others, but when I love a woman, I never play her false…. The blow, then, has not been struck?”

  “No; Clairwil breathes, she and I are about to resume our journey. I came to bid you farewell. And now I shall go—”

  “Oh, Juliette! I am poorly rewarded for all I have done—”

  “Better than you think, Durand,” I interrupted, with one hand tendering her a pocketbook containing one hundred thousand crowns, with the other exhibiting to her the tresses I had shorn from Clairwil. “Here are the ornaments of the head you proscribed, and here is the recompense for your generous friendship.”

  “Keep these things, keep them all,” Durand replied. “Juliette, I adore you. For what I have done I wish no reward other than the happiness of being able to give you my unrivaled affection: I was jealous of Clairwil, I do not hide it, but I might nevertheless have spared her had it not been for her terrible designs in your regard: I could not forgive her for having meditated the destruction of someone whose life meant more to me even than my own. I am far less wealthy than you, admittedly, but I have the means to live in magnificence, and can afford to decline the gift you offer me: with such professional skills as I possess I shall never lack for money, and I do not want to be paid for a service performed at my heart’s demand.”

  “No further separation between us ever again,” said I to Durand, “leave your inn, come join me in mine; you will take Clairwil’s domestics, her carriage, and we shall set off for Paris in two or three days.”

  The new arrangements were quickly completed; Durand retained but one of her chambermaids, to whom she was especially attached, dismissed all the rest of her household, and came to install herself in what had formerly been Clairwil’s quarters.

  It was easy to see, from the way that woman devoured me with her eyes, that she was on tenterhooks for the moment when my favors would reward her for her efforts in my behalf. I did not allow her to pine away for long; after the most sumptuous and elegant repast, I stretch forth my arms to her, she leaps into them, we dash to my bedchamber, lock the door, draw the shutters, and I surrender, with inexpressible delight, to the most libertine and the most lustful of women. Durand, in her fiftieth year, was not by any means devoid of merit; her forms were full, shapely, and well preserved; her mouth fresh, her skin soft and showing scarcely a wrinkle; a superb posterior, breasts still firm and very fair, very lively eyes, very fine features; and an energy in her pleasure-taking, tastes so bizarre…. Capricious Nature had created her with a deformity neither Clairwil nor I had ever noticed: Durand was unable, had never been able, to enjoy pleasure in the conventional manner. Her vagina was obstructed, but (and you will doubtless recall this detail) her clitoris, as long as a finger, gave her the most ardent liking for women. She would flog them, she would embugger them; she held commerce with boys also: I shortly discovered, from the inordinate size of her asshole, that, as regarded intromissions, she was wont to receive there what she was denied elsewhere. The initial advances were made by me, and I thought she was going to swoon from pleasure the moment she felt my hands upon her flesh.

  “Let’s undress,” said she, “one cannot enjoy oneself properly save when naked. I have, moreover, the keenest desire to look again upon your charms, Juliette, I burn to feast upon them.”

  Everything is removed in a trice. My kisses explore that beautiful body; and I am bound to say that perhaps, had Durand been younger, yes, I might not have found her anything like so interesting. My tastes were beginning to turn to depravation, and entering into my riper years, Nature was providing me with sensations far more intense than anything I had known in my springtime. The unique object of that woman’s fiery caresses, great tides of lust boiled up in me; my partner deployed a science and an art that are positively not to be described. Oh, how voluptuous are women seasoned in crime! what dimensions are revealed in their lubricities!

  You listless and uninspired prudes, insufferable creatures who dare not even touch the member perforating you, and who would blush to answer fuck with fuck when fucking, cast your eyes this way, come hither for some examples: come take a few lessons from Madame Durand, and learn the extent of your ineptitudes.

  After the initial caresses, Durand, less inhibited than when in the past Clairwil had been a party to our affairs, made declaration of her fancies and besought me to submit to them. As she knelt before me, I had, while heaping abuse upon her, to rub her nose now in my cunt, now in my ass; while rubbing my front against her, I had to piss upon her face. That done, I had to strike her all about the body with my fists and kick her everywhere, take up some nettles and flog her till she bled. When by dint of mistreatments I had beaten her down to the floor, I had, with my head between her thighs, to cunt-suck her for fifteen minutes while socratizing her with one hand and exciting her nipples with the other; next, once she was thoroughly heated, I was to let her embugger me with her clitoris the while she tickled mine.

  “I apologize for having to ask so much, Juliette,” the libertine said, once she had finished outlining the program, “but you know to what satiety can lead us.”

  “After thirty-five years of sustained
libertinage one must offer no excuses for one’s tastes,” was my reply; “whatever it may be, it is deserving of respect, for it is in Nature; the best of all is the one that pleases us most.”

  And starting in upon the operation, so amply did I satisfy her that she was nigh to perishing from delight. Durand’s voluptuous crises were without parallel. In all my life I had never seen a woman discharge thus: not only would she shoot her fuck forth like a man, but she accompanied that ejaculation by shrieks so loud, by blasphemies so energetic, and by spasms so violent that one could have mistaken her performance for an epileptic attack. I was buggered as solidly as if I had been dealing with a man, and from it experienced the same pleasure.

  “Well,” said she when she rose to her feet, “how do I strike you?”

  “Oh, fuck!” I cried, “you are delightful, you are a very model of lubricity; your passions set me ablaze, do to me everything I have just done to you.”

  “What! You wish a beating?”

  “Beat me, yes.”

  “And a slapping, a whipping?”

  “Make haste.”

  “Do you want me to piss upon your face?”

  “Of course, my darling, be quick, I say, for I’m very hot and I have a discharge pressing.”

  La Durand, with a longer experience than I in the rendering of these services, proceeds with such consummate skill that the explosion supervenes almost instantaneously, thanks to the heavenly titillations of her voluptuous tongue.

  “How you do discharge, my beloved,” she said to me; “how vehemently you respond to pleasure! How marvelously we get on!”

  “There is no denying it, Durand,” I answered her, “you have an astonishing effect upon my imagination: I am overjoyed to be connected with a woman like you. Mistresses of all a universe we shall be; through our alliance I feel we shall become the superiors of Nature herself. Oh, dear Durand, the crimes we are going to commit! the infamies we are going to achieve!”

  “Do you regret Clairwil?”

  “Can I when I possess you?”

  “And if I had invented the whole story merely in order to rid myself of a rival?”

  “A rare piece of villainy!”

  “And what if I had accomplished it?”

  “But, Durand, Clairwil told me that you had proposed to poison me for two thousand louis.”

  “I knew she would repeat that to you; neither did I have the slightest doubt but that, instead of being taken in by this confidence, you would simply perceive it for a clumsily mounted snare on her part, and subtle as I knew you to be, judge that the time had come for the crime which I was eager to have you commit.”

  “And why had the thing to be done by me? Could you not have executed it by yourself?”

  “I much preferred that my rival die by your hand; my pleasure, to be complete, required that the act be undertaken by you.”

  “Good heaven, what a woman you are! But she was ill at ease the other day, when we were your guests at dinner, she was unable to relish the pleasures you had readied for her; our conversation, she seemed apprehensive about it … she made a sign to you.”

  “I had created the conditions for that uneasiness, calculating what its repercussions would be upon you; and I estimated exactly, as you see, for her unquiet manner shortly rendered her guiltier in your eyes. Telling her I was willing to poison you for two thousand louis, I bred in her the suspicion that I might make a like proposition to you. Therein lies the explanation for her gesture, therein the reason why she dreaded our tête-à-tête, and her trembling, expression of the fear I engendered in her, produced upon your mind the precise effect I anticipated: two hours later, Clairwil was dead.”

  “Am I then to understand that she was innocent?”

  “She adored you … and so did I, and I could not bear having a rival.”

  “Gloat over your triumph, scoundrel,” I say, casting myself into Durand’s arms, “and, now, your triumph is entire: I worship you to the point where, had this crime to be committed all over again, I would commit it unprompted, without any of the motivations you created to facilitate it…. Why did you not declare your love for me from the very first in Paris?”

  “I dared not because of Clairwil’s presence; and when later you came back to see me, it was with a man, and then it was he who hindered me. And after that came my arrest. But I followed you, dearest and sweetest friend, never once did I let you out of my sight, I followed you to Angers, throughout Italy, all the while I carried on my trade I kept my eyes upon you. My hope sank as I watched your successive liaisons—Donis, Grillo, Borghese—and it dwindled almost to nothing when I learned that you had become reunited with Clairwil. Still, I followed you from Rome to here, and at last, tired of having been thwarted so long, I resolved to bring about the denouement: and the rest you know.”

  “Inexplicable and delightful creature! Who has ever provided such examples of treachery, sleight, spitefulness, villainy, jealousy!”

  “’Tis because no one has ever had either passions or a heart like mine. ’Tis because no one has ever loved you as I do.”

  “But when the fires die down in you, Durand, you will deal with me as you have just done with Clairwil; will I have time to protect myself?”

  “I am going to set you at ease, my angel, and reply strongly to your groundless suspicions; listen to me. You shall, I demand it, keep for yourself, and forever, one of your women, Elise or Raimonde. Choose which of the two it is to be, I shall not let you have the other, I tell you so in advance.”

  “Raimonde shall be mine.”

  “Very well. If ever Raimonde meets with a tragic and unaccountable end, let the blame fall nowhere but upon me. And now,” Durand continued, “I demand that you put a paper into this girl’s keeping, which authorizes her to denounce me as your assassin in the event you perish in some unhappy way at any moment during the course of our relations.”

  “No, I object to such precautions, I entrust myself to you, I do so gladly; I like the idea of placing my life in your hands. Leave Elise to me, leave everybody to me, don’t hinder my practices or contest my tastes. I am a libertine, I will not promise you good behavior, but I shall swear an oath to adore you everlastingly.”

  “I have no wish to tyrannize over you, Juliette; to the contrary, I shall myself serve your pleasures, I shall move heaven and earth for the sake of your physical enjoyments. But were your conduct ever to become ethical, I’d abandon you there and then. I am aware of the impossibility of captivating such a woman as yourself, a whore by temperament and on principle: ’twould, I realize, be to seek to set dikes to the sea. But I can always be the mistress of your heart, and that is what I ask … I insist that it belong to nobody but me.”

  “I swear that it shall be so.”

  “Ah, great pleasures are then in store for us; libertinage, to remain pure, must be kept free of sentiment: one must have but one friend only, sincerely love no one but her, and fuck with the whole wide world. Juliette, my best advice, if you care to hear it, is to dispense with this glittering entourage you move with; I myself plan to dismiss half my suite; we shall manage just as comfortably when we are fewer, and it serves no purpose to attract universal notice. Moreover, I wish to pursue my calling, and no one is apt to buy anything from a woman who goes traveling about like a queen.”

  “And I too,” I replied, “I wish to satisfy my tastes, I wish to steal, I wish to prostitute myself, and, you are quite right, such exhibition will interfere with my objectives.”

  “It ought, I believe, to be given out that I am your mother, with this title I shall be able to prostitute you myself; Elise and Raimonde, let them be your cousins. We shall market their charms too, and be sure of it, with one such harem we shall make money in Italy.”

  “And your poisons?”

  “I shall sell them in greater quantity, I shall sell them more dearly. We must, when we return to France, have spent not one penny of our own, and reach home with a clear profit of two million at least.”


  “What route shall we take?”

  “I am powerfully inclined to go south again. Calabrian and Sicilian depravity, Juliette, is something that exceeds even your fondest dreams; I know those regions well, there are mines of gold to be earned down there. Last year I sold five hundred thousand francs worth of poison in the mezzogiorno, and would have done far better had I been able to keep abreast of my orders. The Southerners are credulous, like all other lying people; telling their fortunes, I was able to persuade them of whatever I wished…. It’s a fine country, Juliette.”

  “I for my part am anxious to return to Paris again,” said I; “established there, would we not lead a better life than roaming about in such a way? Could we not do the same things there?”

  “We must at least visit Venice, whence we can proceed to Milan and then to Lyon.”

  To this I gave my agreement. We dined. Durand told me that she wanted to pay all our expenses. She would, to be sure, reimburse herself from our jointly earned profits; but she entreated me to accept the appearance of being kept by her. To that too I agreed. I was, I must tell you, as tactful in receiving her attentions as she was in showing them to me. Delicacy also matters in the sphere of crime; failure to understand this points to a woeful ignorance of human nature.

  “Is it true,” I asked my new companion, “that you possess the balm that ensures longevity?”

  “No such balm exists,” Durand replied, “those who distribute it are all quacks. The true secret to a long life is a sober and temperate life; sobriety and temperance not being among our virtues, we cannot, you and I, hope for miracles. And why should we, my dear? Better to live a little less long and to enjoy oneself: what would a life be divested of its pleasures? If death meant the onset of pain, then I would urge you to stretch your life out to the utmost; but since the worst that can happen to us is to slip back into the nothingness where we were before we were born, ’tis on the wing of pleasures we must fly through our apportioned term.”