Juliette

by Marquis de Sade

  Work was resumed.

  However, to preserve the liveliness of the scene, I reheated his prick in my mouth, and Durand stimulated him verbally.

  “Cordelli,” she advanced, “though impressive, your ferocity is inadequate.”

  “How so?”

  “Once you have done your worst, there shall yet remain worse to do.”

  “Prove it to me.”

  “Easily. With your leave I shall myself organize the torture of your remaining daughter; and I am confident that you shall behold greater things than those your timorous imagination has devised so far.”

  “Go ahead,” the tradesman rejoined.

  “Utilizing implements I see there,” said my companion, “you shall have your man delicately peel off the girl’s skin. Once flayed, she shall be whipped with thorns; after that, rubbed down with vinegar; and the operation demands to be repeated seven times. The nerves finally reached, small nails, red hot, shall be planted in them; the body may then be deposited in a fiery brazier.”

  “Marvelous,” Cordelli said. “I agree to it, Durand, but I warn you: if it fails to make me discharge, I will subject you to the same torture.”

  “As you like.”

  “To work.”

  The little maid is led up. ’Twas the prettier of the two. The unlucky creature had the loveliest possible figure, superb golden hair, a virgin’s look, and eyes whereof Venus herself would have been envious. The unkind Italian was moved to kiss that charming little ass yet again; for, as he said, “I must pay my respects to it one last time before my barbarity causes its roses to fade. Ah, my friends, own that it is a lovely ass!”

  And, profoundly stirred by the horrors impending, Cordelli soon passes from encomiums to deeds.

  The girl is embuggered and after several charges the villain quits the field in order to relish as a bystander the cruel sight of his henchmen’s more massy members perforating this pretty little posterior. Essay is made; but, as you surely realize, success is obtained only at the price of the total demolition of the anus. Cordelli, while this was going forward, was sodomizing the executioner; the other one has at the cunt of the young person who, treated in that hard fashion, gives us the image of a lamb in the clutches of two lions. Greatly affected by the scene, the profligate flits from the ass of one executioner to the ass of the other and, at last esteeming himself sufficiently heated, commands the torture to begin, appointing Durand its supervisor.

  Again, words are not enough to describe the sufferings of the poor child once the Italian took his bundle of thorns to the new skin which came to light when the outer layer had been removed. But it was something else again when that second skin was removed and the third lashed; the wretch’s shudderings, the way she ground her teeth and squirmed were infinitely pleasurable to see. Cordelli, remarking that I was frigging myself while watching, himself lent a hand to tickle me; but, absorbed by his victim’s torture, he entrusted the masturbator’s role to Durand, and my friend, quite as aroused as I, asked for the same attentions she was lavishing upon me. The operation lasted a considerable while, we discharged three or four times during it; all the creature’s epidermal wrappings were taken off without direct damage to her vital organs. Matters became far more grave when the nerves were attacked with the heated nails. Her screams rose in pitch and volume; she was equally inspiring to see. Cordelli decides to embugger her in that appalling state; he makes the attempt, succeeds, and continues to drive home the nails all the while he sodomizes her. Excess of pain at length consumes everything still keeping her alive, and the miserable child expires upon receiving her assassin’s fuck in her bowels.

  An icy seriousness then characterizes his features and his bearing. He dresses himself, has his executioners don their clothes, and together with them and the duennas he departs into an adjoining room.

  “Where is he going?” I asked Durand, with whom I found myself alone.

  “I have no idea.”

  “And if he is scheming something? If it is to be our turn now?”

  “It would be to get what we deserve.”

  “Durand, I am confounded. How can you have taken it upon yourself to come to this house without being better acquainted with its owner?”

  “He is rich. The hope of getting his, gold seduced me, it seduces me still. I am persuaded the rogue has his wealth cached somewhere hereabouts. Could we but put him out of the way, and rob him. … I have some powder with me, its action is swift. An instant and the thing would be done.”

  “Such a deed, my dear, sorts ill with our principles: to respect vice eternally, to smite virtue only. By destroying this man, we halt a criminal career and perhaps save the lives of thousands, of millions, of creatures: ought we to do it?”

  “Juliette, ’tis true what you say.”

  Cordelli reappeared, followed by his escort.

  “Ah, good sir, we were wondering where you have been,” said Durand. “Off performing some secret infamy, I venture to guess.”

  “You are mistaken,” the Italian replied, opening a door communicating the room where we were and the one into which he had penetrated by another entrance; “there,” he continued, showing us an oratory adorned with all the attributes of established religion, “there is where I have been. When one is in such a woeful case as I, who surrenders to the temptations of dreadful passions, one must undertake at least a few good works to appease the inevitable wrath of the Lord.”

  “Right you are,” said I, “allow us to imitate your excellent example. Durand, come with me, we are going to beg God’s forgiveness for the crimes this man has induced us to commit.”

  And closing the door, we shut ourselves up inside the oratory.

  “Damn me,” I said to my friend, whom I had led thither only in order to discuss affairs with her in privacy, “damn me if there’s not a change wrought in my ideas, and if that fool of a fanatic merits anything else than to die. Scruples were misplaced here: with his weak-watered soul, that bugger will not long persevere in vice; who can tell, these we have been witness to may perhaps be his last ventures into that domain. We are in a position to take the straight way with him, and at once.”

  “I foresee no difficulty in ridding ourselves of the entire pack,” Durand observed. “It would be well, however, to preserve one of the old women, for we need a guide. Believe me, this tradesman has his treasure hidden somewhere under this roof; we shall find it, never you fear, and the find will be important.”

  “There are those servants who will be coming to fetch him this evening.”

  “They shall be given refreshments to drink.”

  We rejoined the others.

  “Now here we are as blessed as you,” we said, “but, for God’s sake, give us some refreshment—we are dying of thirst.”

  Immediately, upon an order issued by Cordelli, the two crones serve a good meal to the master and his acolytes. At the third glass of wine, Durand skillfully seasons first Cordelli’s plate, then his two executioners’; there was no way of envenoming the duennas, who were partaking of no food. In a trice the powder produced the expected effect, and our three villains toppled out of their chairs as though felled by Divine Vengeance. Durand sprang upon the more agile of the two elders. “Away,” she cried, stabbing her to the heart, “go join your unworthy accomplices; had your master been an authentic rascal like ourselves, he would have been saved. But seeing that he believed in God, I had no choice but to send him to the Devil. As for you,” Durand said to the other one, “if we let you live ’tis upon express condition you cooperate with us. We shall start by throwing these bodies into the sea; and then, conducted by you, we shall search this castle from top to bottom. There is treasure about, we are after it. Tell us first, are there any other people here?”

  “Now? No, Mesdames,” the trembling crone replied, “I am the only domestic left in the house.”

  “What do you mean by that? There are other masters?”

  “I believe,” said she, “that there may yet be some vi
ctims. But promise you will spare me, I shall show you every part of the house.”

  Before turning to anything else we disposed of the corpses. While dragging them to the windows and pushing them out, we asked the old servant whether Cordelli had been in the habit of coming here frequently.

  “Three times a week,” she replied.

  “And hideous massacres each time?”

  “You were able to judge of his behavior. Come,” she said when we had completed our first chore, “I shall take you down to the dungeons. There may still be some game in the larder.”

  ’Twas there, one hundred feet and more underground, the villain kept his provision of victims locked away. Each was in a separate cell: of twelve cells we found nine occupied: five lodged very attractive girls ranging between fifteen and eighteen years of age; boys of between thirteen and sixteen were confined in the other four; most of these victims had been debauched and ensnared in different Italian cities; however, two of the girls, one of sixteen, another of eighteen, were natives of Ragusa in Albania, and they were exquisite creatures indeed.

  In the midst of examining them, sounds reached us, faraway but distinct; we hastened up to find out what was the matter. It was the arrival of our servants and of Cordelli’s, climbing the stairway to the castle. We received the Italian’s valets first, they were three in number: we bade them enter the dining hall, still littered with the remnants of our meal, we offered them wine to drink, and by means of the swift-acting powder we soon reduced them to the rank of their former master. Descending then to where our help was waiting, “Go back to town,” we told them, “we intend to spend another twenty-four hours here. Cordelli is retaining his servants, we need no others.” And our carriage left; we returned to the captives.

  As we were poring over them, “Durand,” I said, “I am pleased to come by these two Albanians, they will fill the gap now that Elise and Raimonde are gone; and my reply to the signs of discontent I already notice in your expression, my reply, I say, is that I shall sacrifice them whenever you wish, just as readily and just as easily as I did their predecessors.”

  “Women. Must you forever be surrounding yourself with women?”

  “I cannot do without them. But I need only one heart; ’tis yours alone I aspire to keep forever, my treasure.”

  “Flatterer, one must yield to all your little whims!”

  Lila, that was the name of the sixteen-year-old, and Rosalba were therefore released at once, but placed none the less under lock and key in one of the castle’s finest chambers. Those poor girls had been a week in their insalubrious dungeons, ill-fed, with only straw to lie upon, and ’twas plain to see, the experience had shaken them severely. Both were still in a state of frightened shock; but when I kissed them, caressed them, tears came to their eyes and they hugged me, showered me with kindnesses. They were sisters as it turned out, daughters of a rich trader in Ragusa with whom Cordelli had been in correspondence; he had persuaded their father to send them to Venice for their education, and the scoundrel invented a report of their death, thereby was he able to make them his.

  “I am going to do the same,” said Durand, “and take one of those girls.”

  “Do so, my dearest,” said I, “that is not the sort of thing that can ever provoke my jealousy.”

  “Monster!” said Durand. “The more delicate of us two, I am loath to have anything distract me from the cherished idea of you.”

  “Cease, my love, cease to mistake carnal pleasures for moral distractions,” said I. “I have already told you that my doctrines, while they may be different from yours, are unshakable withal; that I could fuck and frig myself with every inhabitant of this planet, and still not for an instant be weaned away from the tender sentiments I have sworn to preserve for you as long as I live.”

  We installed the three other girls and the four boys in the hall of tortures, and after having amused ourselves with them for half the day, we refined the horrors Cordelli had committed and caused those seven to perish under circumstances a thousand times more cruel. That accomplished, we slept for two hours and then resumed our searches.

  “Precisely where he keeps his money I am unable to tell you,” said the old woman, “nor indeed do I know for a certainty whether there is any here; but if there is, it should be in a cellar near the one where he stores his wine.”

  We went down. Two stout bronze doors barred access to those cellars; and we had no tool to force them. However, the more difficulties we encountered, the greater, needless to say, grew our determination to surmount them. After much hunting and prowling about we discovered a little window which gave into that cellar, and which was protected by only two iron bars. By common impulse we both sprang forward and peered through: inside, we made out six great chests: you may imagine how our zeal redoubled at the sight. At length we manage to loosen and pry out those bars. I scramble through the window, in a state of keenest excitement I lift the lid of the first of the chests. Alas, what is our disappointment to discover that those huge coffers contain nothing but instruments of torture or articles of women’s clothing. Furious, I was ready to abandon the quest. But Durand was not yet willing to admit defeat. “There must be something else in here,” she insisted; “let us look patiently.”

  I reach into the chest again; my fingers touch a ring of keys. One of them bears a tag: Key to the Treasure Room.

  “Ah, Durand! No need to waste our time in this cellar, what we seek lies elsewhere, this tag proves it. First we find doors without keys, here now are keys but no doors. Dona Maria, is there anything you can say to help us? Only speak up and your fortune is made.”

  “For the life of me, there is nothing I can tell you. Only that if we continue to search we may find something.”

  “Go fetch me a twig from the hazel tree I saw growing in the courtyard,” Durand ordered.

  When the old woman returns with it, my friend takes the twig lightly between thumb and forefinger and gazes at it attentively. For a moment the little stick hangs motionless. Then its free end rises, drawn to the left by some hidden suasion; Durand walks down a long gallery at whose end we come to another door. I try the keys; the door opens; the twig then gyrates rapidly between Durand’s fingers. There were ten enormous chests in that room and, indeed, they were not women’s garments we found in them, nor instruments of torture, but coins, coins of purest gold, several million of them.

  “Splendid,” said I, full of courage and joy, “we have simply to carry it away.”

  It was easier said than done. To call in the aid of the domestics would be to beckon to trouble. Impossible to lift those chests, to transport them out of the castle. They had therefore to be emptied. Before the choice facing us, we preferred to carry off less but to carry it off in greater safety. The old duenna, the two girls, Durand, and I, we each filled a sack with as great a load of the loot as we could bear, and from then on, for eight successive days, proceeded to remove Cordelli’s hoard. We gave it out that he was spending the month at his country seat, that he had invited us to come every day to be his guests; in the meantime we chartered a vessel for Venice. On the ninth day we went aboard, after having, while upon our last trip to the castle, cast the duenna into one of the cisterns, burying our secret by drowning it with her.

  During the voyage the weather was superb, the sea very calm, the attentions of our women excessive, their flesh excellent: thus rested and in high spirits we arrived at Venice.

  Incontrovertibly, it is a magnificent and imposing sight, that of a vast city floating upon the waters; as Grecourt somewhere says, it seems as if sodomy has chosen Venice for its citadel and inviolable asylum, there to be able conveniently to extinguish, in the circumambient sea, the pyres wherewith fanatism might undertake to punish it; certain it is that unto sodomy this place provides sectaries without number whose devotion to the cult is outdone by the population of no other town in Italy.

  In Venice the air has a languid, caressing quality, conducive to thoughts of pleasure, but often unwh
olesome, especially when the sea is at low tide; the wealthier citizens then go to spend as much time as they can upon the delightful estates they own on the mainland or on the neighboring islands. Despite this uninvigorating climate many are the venerable persons one sees among the inhabitants, and Venetian women age not so quickly as elsewhere.

  As a rule, the Venetians are tall and comely, their physiognomy is cheerful, their manner spirited, and this far-famed nation deserves to be loved.

  I devoted the first days after our arrival to investing my newly acquired assets; notwithstanding Durand’s entreaties that I keep all of Cordelli’s gold for myself, I insisted that we divide it equally. Our shares amounted to enough to earn each of us an annual return of roughly one million five hundred thousand livres; this, added to what I already had, brought my yearly revenues to around six million six hundred thousand pounds. But lest such a sizable fortune cause us to appear suspect in Venice, we took all the steps necessary to create the belief that our affluence was. the product merely of our charms and of the effects of our magical arts upon the simple. We opened our doors, in consequence, to everybody of the one sex and the other who was seeking voluptuous entertainment or instruction. Accordingly, Durand had built a laboratory and a cabinet with special mechanical effects along the same lines as the one she had formerly had in Paris. It was fitted with disappearing floors, sliding panels, boudoirs, dungeons, and everything that can deceive the eyes and impress the imagination. We hired some elderly female servants, who were speedily trained in all these maneuvers; and our two young Albanians were under orders to lend themselves, with alacrity, complacency, and submissiveness, to whatever chores either of us might assign them. You will recall that they were virgins; that fact, coupled with everything we could reasonably expect from their charming faces and their youthfulness, enabled us to hope that those two little properties would produce rich yields once they had been brought under intensive cultivation. Moreover, I was to be at their side, and to resume all the old brothel exercises you saw me practicing years ago in Paris, when I first entered the career; the which, here in Venice, I was taking up again out of sheer libertinage, for mine were not necessitous circumstances—I believe I have made that plain to you.