Juliette

by Marquis de Sade

  12 How simple it would be to demonstrate that the present revolution is purely the handiwork of the Jesuits, and that the Orléanais-Jacobin crew who fomented it were and are nothing but descendants of Loyola! (Note to a subsequent edition.)

  13 At the period these mountaineers were active in the service of Austria’s reigning house, they won themselves the name of Pandours. They inhabit the southern regions of Austrian Croatia. Pandour means highwayman.

  14 Saving your presence.

  15 The difference between a man and a woman, of this we may be perfectly confident, is quite as pronounced, quite as important as between man and ape; our grounds for refusing to include women in our species would be quite as valid as for refusing to consider the chimpanzee our brother. Next to a naked woman stand a man of the same age and naked too; now examine them attentively, and you will be at no pains to discern the palpable and marked difference which (sex aside) exists in the composition of these two beings; you will be obliged to conclude that woman is simply man in an extraordinarily degraded form; there are internal differences as well, and these are brought to light by anatomical comparison: the dissection should be performed carefully and simultaneously.

  16 Upon this subject the celebrated Ninon de Lenclos, though a woman and a zealot, has interesting things to say.

  17 A dead God! Nothing so droll as this incoherent term out of the Catholics’ lexicon. God means eternal; dead means noneternal. Blithering Christians, what do you propose to do with your dead God?

  18 An important question raises itself here; literary minds, it seems to us, are peculiarly qualified for an attempt to settle it, and that is why we venture to propose it as a subject for their earnest consideration. Does moral corruption in a people come from the flabbiness of their government, from their country’s physical location, or from the excessive size of the population clustered in their urban centers? Notwithstanding Juliette’s contentions, moral corruption does not depend upon location, since there is as much moral disorderliness in the northern cities of London and Paris as in the southern cities of Messina and Naples; weak rule would not appear to be the cause either, since as regards these matters the law is much more severe in the north than in the south, without that preventing the disorder from being the same; no, we are driven to the conclusion that moral corruption, whatever be the terrain or the regime, results from nothing but the too heavy concentration of too many individuals within a small area; that which masses compactly degenerates; and every government that would avoid corruption within its borders must curb the growth of population and, above all, break large groups into smaller to preserve the purity of their constituents.

  19 The far less inconvenient way would be for the state to allow persons of condition to do all they wished in return for money and to buy absolution for every crime; better this, surely, than to have them die on the scaffold. The latter measure is of no profit to the government; the former could easily become an important source of revenue, yielding funds to cover all sorts of unforeseen expenses which are met today by levying countless taxes: these are onerous to innocent and guilty alike, whereas what I propose distributes the burden equitably, the heavier share of it falling where it fairly belongs.

  20 See Cook’s account of his second voyage.

  21 This upon the authority of Mr. Ramusio Dapper.

  22 History of the European Peoples, III.

  23 See Herodotus.

  Notes for Part Four

  1 On page 192 of his Persian Letters.

  2 These particulars, the reader should be reminded, were exact at the time Madame de Lorsange was touring in Italy. Everybody knows the changes that have transpired since, both in Florence and in other parts of this fine country. (Note added.)

  3 Very great, says Machiavelli, must be the accomplice’s devotion if the personal danger he sees himself exposed to is not greater still; which proves that you must either select for your lieutenant someone related very intimately to you, or destroy him when you are finished with his services. (Discorsi, Lib. III, Cap. 6.)

  4 Everybody who has even a mild leaning toward crime recognizes his portrait in this paragraph; may he then extract all possible benefit from what precedes and from what follows it upon the way of living delightfully the kind of life Nature has appointed him to, and may he be persuaded that these counsels are those of a person-who speaks from experience.

  5 We may elucidate this idea by saying that the good dinner may be the source of some physical delight, and that saving the lives of the three million victims would cause only moral delight, even to an honest spirit; which establishes a great difference between these two pleasures; for moral delights are mere intellectual enjoyments, uniquely dependent upon opinion, arbitrary and doubtful, and this to the point that a vicious spirit senses none of the enjoyments of virtue; corporeal delights, however, are physical sensations, upon which opinion has absolutely no bearing at all, and which are similarly felt by all human beings and for that matter by animals too; whence it proceeds that preserving those three million people from death would be a pleasure no more substantial than the flimsy prejudice it is founded upon, and which only a small fraction of humanity would feel; while the dinner would be a pleasure felt by everybody, and hence far superior; wherefrom it is plain to be seen that were the choice even between a gumdrop and the entire universe, any wavering would be equally illogical and inexcusable. This argument serves to demonstrate the immense advantages of vice over virtue.

  6 There is truly no limit to what one may obtain from women simply by causing them to discharge. Experience shows that one has only to make their cunts leak a few drops of fuck, and they are ready and eager for the most revolting atrocities; and if those women who have a native fondness for hideous crimes cared to reflect a little upon their emotions, they would admit the astonishingly powerful connection that exists between physical emotions and moral aberrations. The wiser for recognizing this, the sum of their pleasures would henceforth increase by leaps and bounds, since they would correctly situate the germ of voluptuousness in the disorders which they could from then on carry to whatever extreme their lust might demand. I give an illustration. Arsinoe had but a single pleasure, that of fucking. A libertine lover mounts her; and chooses the moment of her ecstasy to suggest a criminal scheme to her. Whereat Arsinoe notices that her joys increase tenfold; she does what he proposes, and the heat engendered by this crime adds to the fire of her lust: Arsinoe has thus enriched her repertory by one pleasure the more. Any woman may do as much; all of them should: imitating Arsinoe, to the allurements of a first form of enjoyment they too will add the spice of a second. Every immorality leads to another, and the more of them you associate to fucking, the happier you must necessarily become.

  7 “See his Collected Verse, Vol. I, p. 28, last edition.

  8 Jacques Vallée, Seigneur des Barreaux, whose connections with Théophile de Viau were intimate, was born at Paris in the year 1602. The impunity and the libertinage of these two rakes was quite unparalleled. The well-known sonnet alluded to here (and it is one of the most execrable pieces of poetry to be found in that or any other age) was, it is said, composed during an illness; Vallée afterward disavowed it. And indeed it is not a production any healthy man would own to. Paraphrased in this manner, our readers may perhaps find it somewhat less unendurable.

  9 Cardinal de Bernis addressed the convives in Italian; Juliette has rendered his scandalous verses into French. Here we reproduce her version, which reveals much poetic skill, much verve. Even if these were not entirely lost in English translation, they would be less than sufficiently appreciated by the English reader whose susceptibilities they might offend.—Tr.

  10 Chaufour: everybody knows the story of this hero of buggery, burned publicly at the stake on the Place de Grève by judgment and order of the whores whose power was uncontested in Paris at that time.

  11 That belonging to John the Baptist, the beloved bardash of Mary’s son.

  12 He is usually regarded
as the patriarch of monks and the institutor of their rules.

  13 Last king of the Jews.

  14 Nine out of every ten men who take it upon themselves to frig women are less than adequately convinced of their patient’s urgent need at such time to have pleasure penetrate into her through every pore. He who would procure her a voluptuous emission must hence manage in such sort that he keeps his tongue in her mouth, is able to fondle her breasts, has a finger in her vagina, another upon her clitoris, a third in her asshole. Idle were his expectations of attaining the mark who neglects but one of these circumstances. Whence it is that at least three are required in order to drive a woman truly out of her mind.

  15 So are those officers denominated who stand the watch and arrest thieves in Rome.

  16 See his treatise on pleasure.

  17 The sustained pleasure it affords is uniquely responsible for the custom the Asiatics have of keeping women under lock and key: you’ll not suppose that jealousy is at the root of this practice? Can jealousy exist in the heart of a man who has two or three hundred wives?

  18 This project was actually conceived while I was at Rome, and I alter nothing but the names of the actors.

  19 Let me render thee this homage, charming and never to be forgotten friend. Thy name is the only one I have been unable to take it upon myself to disguise in these memoirs. Thou wert ever the philosopher, that is thy role in my writings and thou must surely forgive me for my eagerness to make thy identity known to the whole world.

  20 The more unusual it was, the more pleasure it was bound to give, of this none of the rational participants could be in any doubt; for thus it is with all lubricities. No passion in the world demands so many aliments as that one; there is none that needs to be tended with more care: the more it asks, the more one must give it; and what we receive therefrom depends strictly upon what we sacrifice to it.

  21 And what passeth all understanding is that the Jacobins of the French Revolution wanted to smash the altars of a God who spoke precisely their own language. Yet more extraordinary, they who detest and want to destroy the Jacobins act in the name of a God who speaks like the Jacobins. If this be not here the ne plus ultra of human folly, I ask you where it is to be found. (Supplementary note.)

  22 The Peter of the Christians is nothing else than the Annac, the Hermes, and the Janus of the Ancients; all individuals to whom the gift of opening doors to some beatitude or other was attributed. In Phoenician or in Hebrew the word peter means to open; and Jesus, playing thereupon, could say to Peter: “Since thou art Peter”—that is to say, he who opens—“thou shalt open the gates to the kingdom of heaven,” just as taking from peter only its meaning of the Oriental word kepha, which means building stone, he had said: “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.” Mine was once used to denote what is brought forth from a mine; similarly, may they not have called opening what was extracted from the quarry, to which the name opening was formerly given? Thus, the words to open and stone may have had the same meaning, whence the pun made by Jesus, that imbecile who, as everyone knows, never opened his mouth but riddles, anagrams, or puzzles came out of it. His talk is all tedious allegory, where places are joined on to names, names to places, and the facts always sacrificed to illusions. At any rate, this apostolic word is a very ancient one, dating from long before the days of Christianity’s Peter. Most mythologists have recognized it as the title of a person appointed to care for the posterula.

  23 There was then in Rome a certain Gerardius Brazet, regarded as the Holy See’s official poisoner; he had envenomed eight popes, upon the orders of those who were anxious to succeed them. The Vatican pontiffs of that time, says Baronius, were such great villains that never before in any age had the like of them been seen, nor so many scenes of horror.

  24 It is of him they said that he mounted the throne like a fox, reigned there like a lion, and died like a dog.

  25 Of her the poet Jacopo Sannazaro, the Neapolitan Petrarch, tells us:

  Hoc jacet in tumula Lucretia nomine sedra,

  Thaïs Alexandria filia, sponsa nurus.

  26 But let us translate straight out of Tacitus: “He caused the Christians to be put cruelly to death for having set fire to Rome. These Christians,” the historian continues, “were people hated for their infamy, and because of a rogue named Christ, their spiritual leader, who had been executed under the reign of Tiberius. But after having been repressed for a while this pernicious sect bred up a stench anew, not only in its place of origin but in Rome itself, whither all roads lead and, as it were, all sewers too. First to be seized were those who professed openly to belong to this vile cult, their avowals led to the arrest of a great crowd of similar wretches, who were convicted of atrocious crimes. Hatred for them was general and unbounded, whereof the proof is the disgraceful deaths they were made to die, covered by the skins of wild beasts and left to the dogs, or affixed to crosses and left to rot, or again burned in heaps like faggots, to light the streets and highways (it is the source of the expression lux in luce). Nero willingly lent his gardens for these spectacles. He would be seen, dressed as a driver, mingling among the people or seated in a chariot. Those executions of Christians amused him hugely, he often took a direct hand in them.”

  Listen now to what Lucian tells us of this same sect: “It is an assembly of ragged vagabonds, fanatical of eye, frenzied of gesture, uttering moans, doing contortions, swearing by the son begot of the father, predicting a thousand awful calamities to the Empire, reviling all those not of their belief.” Such was the Christian religion from the very outset: a horde of troublemakers and scurvy fellows followed about by whores. The woes of this rabble finally interested the weaker members of society, as usually happens; had the sect not been persecuted it would have faded away and never anymore been heard of. It is incredible that one such heap of impostures, atrocities, and gibberish could have held our forefathers spellbound for ages. When shall we become wise enough to be irrevocably and forever done with all this?

  27 My intimates know that throughout my Italian travels I was accompanied by a most attractive and engaging woman; that simply out of lewd philosophic principle I introduced this person to the Tuscan Grand Duke, to the Vicar of Christ, to Princess Borghese, to their Royal Highnesses the King and Queen of Naples. They may therefore be perfectly certain that everything I say relating to the voluptuous side of the journey is authentic, that I have depicted nothing but the accustomed behavior and characteristic attitudes of the persons I mention, and that had they been witness to these scenes, they could not have rendered sincerer accounts of them. I take this occasion to assure the reader that the same applies to the descriptive part of my narrative; it is scrupulously exact.

  28 Nearly all the world’s peoples have enjoyed the right of life and death over their offspring. This right is perfectly natural; and of what may one better dispose than of what one has given? If there could be gradations of the alleged crime of murder, that is, if one could rank in their order of greater or lesser evil, things which contain none, infanticide would surely stand at the bottom of the scale: the prompt facility every man possesses to repair this trifling misdemeanor entirely effaces the little amount of badness in it. From a narrow study of Nature one finds that our first instinctive urge is to destroy our issue, and destroyed it would infallibly be if pride did not often advocate sparing it.

  29 Regeneration or, better still, transformation is the term we ought to use for this change we see take place in matter; it is neither depleted, nor wasted, nor spoiled, nor corrupted by the different forms it assumes; and one of the main causes of its durability and vigor may perhaps consist in the seeming destructions which subtilize it, accord it greater freedom to form fresh miracles. Matter, in fine, does not destroy itself to change from and assume new modification, any more than does, as Voltaire says (and it is from him this note is extracted), a cube of wax you melt into a round puddle smash in changing shape. Nothing less out of the ordinary than these perpetual r
esurrections, and there is nothing stranger in being born twice than once. Wherever you bend your glance in the world, you encounter resurrection: caterpillars resuscitate as butterflies, an orange pip you plant resuscitates as an orange tree, all the animals buried in the ground resuscitate as grass, as potatoes, as worms, and nourish other animals whereof they rapidly form part of the substance, etc., etc., etc.

  30 The penalty decreed against child-murdering mothers is an unexampled atrocity. Who then has a greater right to dispose of this fruit than she who carries it in her womb? If in all the world there is an article of property to which no outside claim can be fair, it is surely this one. To interfere with the usage a woman chooses to make of it is stupidity carried beyond any conceivable extreme. Indeed, one must set a very high price by the human species to punish an unhappy creature, simply because she has not been concerned to double her existence nor eager to confirm the gift she unwillingly prepared. And what a curious calculation it is, this that leads to sacrificing the mother to the child! The crime committed, there is one creature the less on earth; the crime punished, now there are two. How clever one must be to reckon thus! And how intelligent our lawmakers are! And we allow such laws to remain in force! And we have the simple good-naturedness not to obliterate them along with the memory of the witty rogues who made them!

  31 At this point, the story becomes infinitely more comprehensible.

  32 Beaulieu reports the episode.

  33 Come now, Braschi, enough of these timid details, we want bold strokes and a broad canvas. Look here: the proscriptions of the Jews, of the Christians, of Mithridates, of Marius, of Sulla, of the Triumvirs; the slaughterings of Theodosius and Theodora, the furors of the Crusaders and the Inquisitors, the savageries of the Templars, the Sicilian massacres, those of Mérindol, of St Bartholomew, of Ireland, of Piedmont, of the Cévennes, of the New World: the total shows twenty-three million, one hundred and eighty thousand human beings murdered in cold blood on account of their opinions alone! The man who is fond of murder foments opinions in order that they give occasion for assassination.