Juliette

by Marquis de Sade

  “Great God, what a sacrifice! O thou whom I love,” said she, drawing from her bosom a locket containing the portrait of her intended, “why must I be placed between infidelity and infamy! Your Grace, would it not be a noble thing, to content yourself with the happiness of saving an innocent man’s life—”

  “Impossible. And you have not an eternity to make up your mind; I give you one minute. Your father’s crimes are such that it were better for you to take rapid advantage of my charity.”

  And, leaving her to meditate her decision, Zeno moved into a neighboring boudoir with Lila to prepare himself for the infamies that were animating him. I nodded to Rosalba, whose powers of penetration were showing new signs of development with every passing day; and, height of wickedness, we, Rosalba and I, fell to preaching to the girl.

  “Ah, beware, Signorina,” Rosalba warned her, drawing her a little to one side and employing a confiding tone, “do not trust that libertine; he is capable of anything who is capable of demanding your honor in exchange for your father’s life. Once he has had his way with you he will play you false; and who is to say whether, to cover up his crime, the monster will not immolate you upon the still-palpitating remains of the worthy author of your existence? But, supposing that he does abide by his word, how will your fiancé view this sacrifice? It is of the species which love is little inclined to overlook, and you must consider it a certainty that he will never pardon you; I tell you, beware of all the snares being set for you. You are undone if you weaken….”

  At this point I address Virginia in my turn, pretending not to have heard the drift of Rosalba’s speech to her.

  “Signorina,” say I, “only too well do I know that at your age nice scruples and fine feelings are the gods to which one fancies it one’s duty to devote oneself. This stubborn constancy you maintain toward your lover, ought it, I ask you, to outweigh all the filial sentiments owing to your father? Zeno, the most upright of men, is incapable of deceit; remember, besides, that it is not your heart he solicits, but merely your body. Ceding it to him, you will remain no less pure in your lover’s eyes.

  “Ah, believe me, lovely Virginia, in the situation where circumstances place you, it would be sinful to refuse. Will you coolly watch your father walk to his death when an instant’s complacency on your part could save him? And, Virginia, there is this too: are you sure that the fidelity to which you would sacrifice everything is being as religiously observed by your lover as by you? and are you yet unfamiliar with the way of all flesh? Were it to happen, now, that the man you love had less than your share of virtue, think of how bitterly you would repent having immolated your father to an unrequited sentiment! No, Signorina, you cannot disdain the proposal that has been made to you, you cannot, I repeat, without guilt; the modesty you are going to set aside is a virtue created by convention, whereas the filial piety you would outrage by not yielding, that, my dear, is Nature’s true sentiment, the authentic and priceless sentiment you cannot stifle without perishing from grief.”

  Fancy, if you will, my friends, the anguished perplexity that such words were able to produce in this timorous and sorely beset soul; so upset was she in her mind that her moral forces were near to deserting her. Zeno’s return occurred at that point, and he arrived in such a state of indecency that there could be no further doubt, his unhappy victim was lost. The rascal had a towering erection, and Lila, naked, led him in by the end of his prick.

  “Well, has she reached her decision?” he stammered.

  “Yes, my Lord,” I replied, “yes, indeed, this young lady is too reasonable not to feel that she owes much more to her father than to her alleged virtue, and she is prepared to lay it by here and now.”

  “No, no,” cried the poor girl, tears springing to her eyes, “I would rather die….”

  But, seizing her without further ado, we, my women and I, stripped off her clothes and in two minutes, despite her struggles, her nudity stood revealed to the Chancellor’s impure gaze.

  Dear God! what forms! what skin! what rosy freshness! Not Flora herself could have matched those charms. Zeno admired them avidly, and each of his multitude of lewd kisses seemed to coincide with the discovery of a new wonder. We offered the ass to him: great heaven! what allurements, what firmness, what rotundity! and when we pried it open, when to Zeno’s eyes we exposed the cunning little aperture, object of his desires, we thought him about to expire of pleasure as he fucked it with his tongue.

  “Let us see how she looks when aroused,” said the Chancellor; “Juliette, and you, Rosalba, tickle the sensitive parts of her body; watching you at work, I am going to have myself worked upon by Lila, and as you progressively inflame this damsel, my mouth, straying over her charms, will verify the glow of pleasure in them.”

  I was not sorry to be entrusted with this chore, for, ever since my first glimpse of that celestial creature, I had been fairly dying to frig her. We attacked so skillfully, my companion and I, that lust soon began to gleam in Virginia’s beautiful eyes; and the pretty rascal, trembling ecstatically in our arms, summons Zeno’s prick to the destruction of her maidenhead. Lila brings the Chancellor’s engine up to the gate; the libertine thrusts; as he is lightly weaponed, and as Virginia has been exhaling whey in abundance and now discharges afresh, all difficulties vanish, there he is, master of the fort; I alone am holding the victim, frigging her at the same time; as for Lila, crouching atop Virginia, she presents her handsome posterior to the lecher’s kisses; and Rosalba flogs him.

  He was rushing toward the crisis when I checked him, a hairs-breadth short of it.

  “You cannot afford a thoughtless expenditure of munitions,” I reminded him, “do not forget that another stronghold awaits storming.”

  “True,” he conceded, retreating.

  And, in a flash, to his lewd covetings we swung around the most divine ass Nature had fashioned since the creation of Ganymede’s. Zeno contemplated it.

  “Buggerblast me!” said he. “What a treasure mine eyes do behold!” But rather than amuse himself bestowing further praise, the scoundrel, profiting from the help we provided him, soon forced the barriers. Virginia, through the position I had made her assume, lay upon my face and I sucked her cunt while the Chancellor sodomized her; my friends were frigging, handling, ministering to Zeno. Everything enfolded him in pleasure, everything hastened the escape of the fuck which he soon shot to the depths of the world’s most beautiful ass, despite the outcries, the writhings of the victim, who had not endured this assault as patiently as the other.

  “What a fucking I have had,” said he as he drew forth his member. “Oh, Juliette, save only for yours, no ass on earth can produce such a sensation; I am still in its grip—”

  “Come, my friend, let us dispatch that letter.”

  “For a certainty,” the monster replied to me, “I have just acquired, from fucking this girl, all sorts of reasons to condemn her father. However,” he added in a subdued voice, “however, Juliette, I do not intend to limit myself to that piece of mischief.”

  Then lower:

  “I shall not stop there, Juliette. I would like my wickedness to dazzle you, my dear, and for the means necessary to further fuckery I count upon the episode about to follow.”

  “Do you mean to allow its object to remain alive for long?”

  “Why,” said Zeno, “I believe that if I were to add a little postscript to the letter, the authorities would come here to my palace to arrest her; and as between now and then I shall have achieved a fresh erection, perhaps I shall be in her ass at the moment they arrive to take her away to death.”

  “You are to be congratulated upon the idea,” I say to Zeno, “act upon it quickly.”

  The appropriate lines are annexed to the missive, the courier departs for the city, and we return to our lewd play. From the manner in which I saw Zeno caressing Virginia’s buttocks it was easy to tell that he was inwardly scheming against that splendid behind. There is no imagining the atrocities an ass inspires, when one h
as enjoyed it thoroughly.

  “Ah ha! you want to whip it, do you? You want to tear that magnificent ass to shreds, my friend; and you hesitate to do so? To work, Lord Chancellor,” I say, “satisfy yourself; in my pocket I have a lotion which, applied to the stripes, will efface all sign of them in three minutes. And if, as proof of what she has suffered, the baggage wishes to show the marks, the evidence will contradict her, and everything else she has to say will that much more surely have the sound of calumny.”

  “Juliette,” Zeno exclaimed, “you are delightful, I shall never cease to proclaim your merits.”

  Thereupon, listening now to nothing but the voice of his passion, the villain has us hold Virginia and, swearing like one of the damned, with barely one hundred strokes he transforms a peerless behind into mincemeat. He starts in upon the second hundred, and I take his prick into my mouth; my two women flog him while he flogs Virginia; and soon his prick begins to lift, and when ’tis up, and hard, he hurls himself like a madman upon the girl, sodomizes her, and discharges shrieking.

  “Oh, Juliette!” he declares once he has finished, “what a shame I cannot myself immolate this slut, what pleasure it would give me to kill her! With her profound sensitivity she would be responsive to every torture we could invent, the one more divine than the other. Think, to flay that bosom! to burn those buttocks! Juliette, Juliette! I would like to roast her heart on her belly, then eat it upon her face.”

  When I drew forth my lotion and prepared to anoint Virginia’s wounds, Zeno stayed my hand. “No,” the monster said to me, “leave my marks upon her, I want her to wear them to the scaffold, I want her to have the possibility of exhibiting them, I want her to dare not do so; the idea strikes me as droll….” And with horrid remarks and cruel jibes we slew and slew again all hope in the poor girl, sporting with her thus till the sbirri were there.

  For Zeno’s fatal letters had succeeded but too well; Grimani’s daughter was placed under arrest.

  “Just Heaven!” the wretch cried upon perceiving the effects of the Chancellor’s traitorous maneuvers; “you deceived me, villain, but my judges will hear me and I shall be revenged for your horrors.”

  “Do your duty, gentlemen,” the phlegmatic Zeno said to the officers, seeming to ignore the imprecations being addressed to him, “take this girl away; grief appears to have addled her brain.

  “Has action been taken,” the monster went on to ask, “upon my recommendations that the culprits be put promptly to death?”

  “Your Worship,” said one of the policemen, drawing forth two bloody objects from underneath his cloak, “here is how your orders were executed.”

  And Virginia sinks to the floor in a swoon, having recognized the severed heads of her father and her beloved.

  Zeno turned to me with a smile. “Quite a scene, is it not?” he whispered. “It is restiffening my prick, I will have you note. Let us obtain privacy so that we can devote ourselves to further horrors.”

  “By all means. Keep the heads, Sire, and send those myrmidons away.”

  “Very good, gentlemen,” said the Chancellor, “that will do: Virginia will be in a Venetian dungeon within two hours. Leave these relics here, and return to your other duties.”

  “One moment,” I murmured to Zeno, “the fellow who brought the heads, would he be the trusty who performed the decapitations?”

  “Yes.”

  “If that be so, then there is a refinement to outrage we can ill afford to neglect. Unhandsome as he is, and his hands still steeped in gore, the man who just beheaded the girl’s father and her lover must now fuck her, so it would seem to me.”

  “Decidedly,” said Zeno; “there are delicious things to be done in life, one must be careful to omit none of them.”

  One of the sbirri leaves, Zeno enclosets himself with the other, with Virginia, with the two heads, with the three women, and with me. We give our attentions to the victim, mindful to place the heads before her so that, upon opening her eyes, they be the first objects she sees. To the headsman is appointed the task of summoning the girl back to life, and upon recovering her senses, they are the grisly vestiges of her dear ones she beholds, ’tis in the arms of her executioner she finds herself. I was frigging that ill-favored man while he was ministering to Virginia.

  “Fuck this attractive girl,” the Chancellor said to him.

  “Your Grace!”

  “’Tis an order; you assassinated the father, continue at present, fuck the daughter; you killed the lover, I want you to fuck the mistress now.”

  Smitten by these words as though by a thunderbolt, Virginia sinks back again upon my breast, nearly unconscious.

  “Softly, softly,” I say to Zeno, “since, unfortunately, this is to be your last discharge, it ought at least to be complete, and we should use every means at our disposal to make it brilliant.”

  Put in charge of affairs, herein as follows was the voluptuous grouping I adopted. The sbirro slides underneath Virginia, encunts her, opens and presents the sublime creature’s buttocks to Zeno, who embuggers her; one in each hand, Virginia holds the severed heads in place upon the executioner’s chest, I give him my cunt to suck, turning my behind toward Virginia; Zeno frigs, to right and to left, my two friends’ asses; a charwoman flogs him. Before that onslaught of delightful sensations, the lewd Chancellor could not be expected to hold out forever; by and by, he discharges; we all do the same; Virginia is borne out inert from this scene of horrors.

  We leave. The Chancellor in person conveys his victim to the prisons of the Palace of Justice; and twenty-four hours later, thanks to our depositions, Virginia’s sentence is handed down. That was the moment we were waiting for. By dint of gold and seductions, Zeno arranges to have another girl take her place at the block; and Virginia returns into our clutches. We ourselves act the part of her executioners, a substitution whence she derives no benefit. God! what a scene it was! the thought of it had me seeping for a week afterward; I can recall few infamies which wrought upon me as that one did.

  Women, in the meantime, continued to arrive in droves at our house; some to have their fortunes told, the others, in security and secret, to wallow in the rarest and most extreme forms of libertine misconduct. Owing to measures we had taken, we were in a position to furnish our female clientele with boys and girls, and that under conditions of inviolable clandestinity. We also provided everything needed by youthful couples who, embarrassed by the obstructions created by parents, were grateful to take shelter with us. Other matches were made in obscurely lit apartments, where the men were unable to recognize the women we supplied to them. To how many fathers did we thus contrive to give their daughters; to how many brothers, their sisters; to how many priests, their penitents!

  There came to me one day two women, of twenty and twenty-five, both charming, and who, having both taken a fancy to me, besought me to direct their games and in them to play a third. We all three had supper together; their mania consisted in sucking my mouth and my cunt. They proceeded by rapid shifts, in such a way that she who had just cunt-tongued me now tongued my mouth, and she who had been kissing my mouth moved instantly to my cunt. During this luxurious to-and-fro my role was to frig them simultaneously and uninterruptedly, one with either hand, and after that, fitted with a dildo, to fuck them in turn; while she who was not being fucked was having herself tongued by her who was; exceedingly lubricious they were, that pair. There is no imagining the things they invented, the things they said in the course of their lewd antics. One of them, I recollect, was so carried away that she was moved to go and have herself fucked by the inmates of a hospital full of syphilitics.

  Welcome, you who will now explain to me the workings of the imagination in persons of my sex; for my part, it is beyond me. In general, those two libertines were as lively, as clever, as amiable as they come: my own belief is that Nature is infinitely more lavish in her favors to tribades than to other women, and that just as she accords them a richer, more flexible imagination, so she has provide
d them with superior means for experiencing pleasure and bestowing delight.5

  Another adventure which you will insist upon hearing was the extraordinary outing I made in the company of four Venetian ladies.

  They waited for a stormy day, then arrived to fetch me in a gondola at a moment when flashes of lightning were flickering across the sky. We headed a certain distance out to sea; the storm broke; claps of thunder filled the air.

  “This is the instant, come,” said the rascals, “let us frig one another; and let it be with streams of sperm we hurl our defiance at the tempest.”

  And the sluts spring upon me like a quartet of Messalinas. Bless me, I reply in kind: too sensitive to pleasure to be chilled by such everyday natural phenomena, I join them in blaspheming the chimerical God who, it is said, produces them. Meanwhile, the thunder rumbles, lightning leaps in all directions. Caught in the rising swell, our gondola is tossed about like a cork; and we swear, we discharge, we brave alarmed Nature, risen in wrath against all existing things, and respectful of our pleasures alone.

  Another very pretty woman sent to request me to come to lunch at her palace. I was obliged, while she surveyed the proceedings, to pollute her fifteen-year-old son; after that, we frigged each other in his presence. She had her daughter called down, who was one year younger. She ordered me to excite that maiden, while she had her son embugger her; next, she herself held her daughter before the youth’s sodomite attacks. While that was going forward, I was cunt-sucking the daughter and the mother was exciting, lingually, the asshole of the young lady’s fucker. Never had I met with a more cold-bloodedly libertine nor more composed intelligence. The moment she learned that we traded in poisons, she purchased a complete store of them. I asked her whether she planned to employ any with the pretty objects we had lately enjoyed.

  “Why not?” she answered. “When I indulge in these infamies, I never restrict their scope.”