“Yes, my friends,” Noirceuil went on, “it is, you may be sure, impossible for any person who finds authentic pleasure in lewd and voluptuous activities ever really to combine their practice with that of delicacy, which unto these delights is nought but the very kiss of death and which is based upon the premise that joy is to be shared, a premise no one who intends seriously to enjoy himself can ever accept: shared, all enjoyment becomes dilute, the wine becomes watered. The truth is generally recognized: encourage or allow the object which serves for your pleasure to take enjoyment therein, and straightway you discover that it is at your expense; there is no more selfish passion than lust; none that is severer in its demands; smitten stiff by desire, ’tis with yourself you must be solely concerned, and as for the object that serves you, it must always be considered as some sort of victim, destined to that passion’s fury. Do not all passions require victims? Well then! in the lustful act the passive object is that of our lubricious passion; spare it not if you would attain your end; the intenser the sufferings of this object, the more entire its humiliation, its degradation, the more thorough will be your enjoyment. They are not pleasures you must cause this object to taste, but impressions you must produce upon it; and that of pain being far keener than that of pleasure, it is beyond all question preferable that the commotion produced in our nervous system by this external spectacle be created by pain rather than by pleasure. There you have it explained, the mania common to that crowd of libertines, who, like us, must, if they are to obtain successful erections and emit sperm, commit acts of the most atrocious cruelty, gorge themselves on the blood of victims. Some there are whose pricks are not even faintly to be stirred, save when they contemplate that doomed object of their lubricious fury—and save when they themselves are uniquely responsible for the violent sufferings it is undergoing. You wish to subject your nerves to a powerful agitation; you very rightly suppose that the painful commotion will prove stronger than the pleasurable; so you employ it with favorable results. ‘But beauty,’ I hear some sentimental imbecile protest, ‘beauty melts, interests, it invites to sweetness, to forgiveness: how is one to resist the tears of the pretty girl who, clasping her hands together, implores mercy of her executioner?’ Indeed! This is precisely what one is after, it is from this agitation, this terror the libertine in question extracts his most delicious enjoyment; would he not be in a sorry plight if he were to have to act upon an inert, insensible body? and the objection cited is quite as ridiculous as that of the man who maintained you should never eat mutton because sheep are mild animals. Lust’s passion will be served; it demands, it militates, it tyrannizes, it must therefore be appeased, and to its satisfaction all other conditions are totally irrelevant. Beauty, virtue, innocence, candor, misfortune, the object we covet will not be sheltered by any of these. To the contrary. Beauty tends to excite us further; virtue, innocence, candor embellish the object; misfortune puts it into our power, renders it malleable: hence, all those qualities tend only to inflame us the more, and we should look upon them all simply as vehicles to our passions. More, these qualities afford us the opportunity of violating another prohibition: I allude to the variety of pleasure derived from sacrilege or the profanation of objects that expect our worship. That beautiful girl is an object of reverence for fools; making her the target of my liveliest and rudest passions, I experience the double pleasure of sacrificing to that passion both a beautiful object and one before which the crowd bows down. No need to expand upon this idea, it has only to enter the mind and one’s brain whirls. But one does not always have such objects ready to hand; however, one has habituated oneself to achieving pleasure through tyranny; and one is anxious to enjoy oneself every day—what then? Why, one must learn to delight in other, lesser pleasures: hardheartedness toward the downtrodden, the refusal to succor them, the act of plunging them oneself into misery if one possibly can—these in some sort substitute for the sublime pleasure of causing a debauchery-object to suffer. The sight of these wretches is a spectacle which very well lays the groundwork for the commotion we are accustomed to experience upon receiving a dolorous impression; they reach out to us, implore our aid, we withhold it—there’s the spark; a further step, and there’s the fire lit, thence are crimes born, and nothing is surer to touch off the explosion of pleasure; but I have fulfilled my task. How, you wanted to know, how can one accede to pleasure through suffering pain, or making others suffer it? I have answered you with a theoretical demonstration. Let’s now confirm it in practice, and hewing to the line of the argument, I would request that the tortures inflicted upon these young ladies be piercing, that is to say, as piquant as it is within our power to make them.”
We rose from the table, and rather more in the spirit of jest than of charity, the victims’ hurts were briefly looked to. I can’t say why, but that evening Noirceuil seemed more than usually enamored of my ass; he could not leave off kissing it, toying with it, praising it, sucking and fucking it; twenty times over he embuggered me; he would suddenly snap his prick out and give it to be sucked by the little girls; next, he would return to me and slap my flanks and buttocks with extraordinary force; he forgot himself even to the point of frigging my clitoris. All this heated me prodigiously, and my behavior must have appeared frightfully whorish to my friends. But how was one to satisfy oneself with a trio of exhausted children and two worn-out, shrunk-pizzled libertines? I proposed the idea of having myself fucked before them by my valets; but Saint-Fond, reeling with wine and aboil with ferocity, objected, saying that he’d have nothing brought in from the outside unless it was a brace of tigers, and that since there was fresh meat available, it ought to be devoured before it spoiled. Thereupon, he set upon those three charming maids’ little asses: he pinched them, bit, scratched, tore them; blood was already flowing left and right when, whirling toward us, his prick glued up against his belly, he declared very bitterly that it was a bad day, he simply could not think up the means to make the victims suffer in the way he wished.
“Everything that enters my mind today,” he said, “falls short of my desires; can’t we put our heads together and invent something that will keep these whores three days in the most appalling death agonies?”
“Ah,” I said, “you’d discharge before they were halfway to the grave, and the illusion dispelled, you’d come to their rescue.”
“I am vexed, vexed indeed, Juliette,” Saint-Fond retorted, “to see that you do not know me better than that; how very gravely you are mistaken, my angel, if you believe my passions are the sole aliment to my cruelty. Ah, like Herod, I should like to prolong my ferocities beyond life itself; I am frenziedly barbaric when I’m stiff, yes, and cold-bloodedly cruel when I’ve shed my fuck. Very well, Juliette,” the villain continued, “look here: I’m going to discharge, we’ll begin the serious torturing of these sluts once every drop of fuck is out of my balls, and you’ll see whether or not I relent.”
“Saint-Fond, you seem greatly aroused,” said Noirceuil, “your speech makes that amply clear. Sperm is to be darted, there’s the crux of the thing; it can be accomplished right away if you take my advice. ’Tis this and ’tis simple: we shall impale these young ladies on spits, and while they roast there over the fire, Juliette, frigging us, will baste three handsome joints of beef with our fuck.”
“Oh, by Christ,” said Saint-Fond, rubbing his member on the bleeding buttocks of the youngest and prettiest of the trio, “I swear to you that this one here will suffer worse than that.”
“Yes? What the devil are you scheming to do to her?” asked Noirceuil, who had just scabbarded his weapon anew in my ass.
“You’ll see,” was the rascal’s reply.
And he sets to work upon her with his powerful hands, he breaks her fingers one by one, dislocates her arms and legs, and runs the point of a little stiletto about a thousand times into her, to the depth of about an inch.
“I think,” said Noirceuil, still housed in my bowels, “she’d have suffered quite as much from a spitting.�
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“And spitted she is going to be,” Saint-Fond rejoins, “now she’s been gashed a bit. Punctured thus she’ll be more sensitive to the heat than if she’d been put to turn over the fire intact.”
“I dare say you’re right,” Noirceuil agrees; “let’s prepare the other two in the same manner.”
I seize one, he takes the other, and still solidly implanted in my ass, the rascal puts her in the same state as she whom Saint-Fond has martyrized. I imitate him and we soon have all of them roasting before a blazing fire, while Noirceuil, damning every god in the sky, discharges in my bum, and I, gripping Saint-Fond’s prick, spray his fuck upon the three charred bodies of the unhappy victims of lust most dreadful.
All three corpses were flung into a pit.
We resumed our drinking.
Invaded by new desires, the libertines called for men; my lackeys were summoned, they were the whole night long laboring in Saint-Fond’s and Noirceuil’s insatiable asses; and for all that weren’t able to lift the pricks of those gentlemen, whose verbal outbursts, however, were astonishing; and it was in the course of that séance that I recognized more clearly than ever before how certain it was these monsters were as cruel upon cold principle as in the greatest heat of passion.
A month after this adventure, Noirceuil introduced me to the woman he wished to have become my soul-mate. As his marriage to Alexandrine had been postponed yet again, this time owing to Saint-Fond’s bereavement, and because I think best not to describe that charming girl before I reach the appropriate point in my story—the point, that is, at which she came into my full possession—we’ll now turn our attentions to Madame de Clairwil and the arrangements I made with that unusual person to cement our liaison.
Representing her to me, Noirceuil had been authorized in his use of superlatives. Madame de Clairwil was tall, splendidly proportioned; her glance, always keen, was often too fiery to withstand; but her eyes, large, dark, were more imposing than pleasing, and in general the aspect of this woman was more majestic than agreeable: her mouth, somewhat rounded, was fresh, her lips sensual, her hair, jet-black, fell to her knees; her nose was modeled to perfection, her brow was regal, rich were the lines of her bust, wonderfully smooth was her skin, though ’twas not untinged a little with sallowness, her flesh was ripe but firm; in short, this was the figure of Minerva adorned with Venus’ amenities. Nevertheless, whether because I was the younger, or because my physiognomy had in grace what hers had in nobility, men invariably found me the more pleasing. Madame de Clairwil astonished, I was content to beguile; she compelled men’s admiration, I seduced them.
To these imperious looks Madame de Clairwil joined a very lofty intelligence; she was exceptionally knowledgeable, I have never known her peer for an enemy to prejudices … which she had rooted out of herself while yet a child; and I have never known a woman to carry philosophy so far. As well, she had numerous talents, her command of English and Italian was complete, she was a born actress, danced like Terpsichore, was an accomplished chemist, physicist, made verse prettily, drew nicely, was well read in history, had geography at her fingertips, was no mean musician, wrote like Sévigné, but went perhaps a trifle too far in her witty sallies, the regular consequence being an insufferable overbearing way with those who failed to come up to her level; and almost no one ever did; she used to say that I was the one female in whom, until now, she had detected a trace of true intelligence.
This splendid personage had been five years a widow. She had never borne any children, to them she had an aversion which, in a woman, always denotes lack of feeling; one might fairly say that for lack of sensibility Madame de Clairwil had not an equal. She indeed prided herself upon never having shed a tear, upon never having been touched in the least by the fate of the unlucky. “My soul is callous, it is impassive,” said she, “I put any sentiment whatever at defiance to attain it, with the exception of pleasure. I am mistress of that soul’s movements and affections, of its desires, of its impulsions; with me, everything is under the unchallenged control of mind; and there’s worse yet,” she continued, “for my mind is appalling. But I am not complaining, I cherish my vices, I abhor virtue; I am the sworn enemy of all religions, of all gods and godlings, I fear neither the ills of life nor what follows death; and when you’re like me, you’re happy.”
With such a character, Madame de Clairwil, one was swift to guess, might have adulators in good number, but very few were her friends; she no more believed in friendship than in benevolence, and no more in virtue than in gods. Along with all this went enormous wealth, a splendid house in Paris, an enchanting one in the country, luxuries of every kind, the age when a woman is at her peak, an iron constitution, faultless health. If there be any happiness at all in this world, then it cannot but belong to the individual in command of all these advantages and attributes.
At our very first meeting Madame de Clairwil confided in me, giving evidence of a frankness I found startling in a woman who, as I have just done telling you, was so proudly persuaded of her superiority; but she was never aloof toward me, I must say it out of fairness to her.
“Noirceuil described you accurately,” she said; “’tis evident we have similar minds, similar tastes; we seem made to live together, so let us join forces, we shall go far. But above all, let’s banish all restraints—from the start they were invented for fools only. Elevated characters, proud spirits, quick intelligences like ours make short shrift of all those popular curbs; they are aware that happiness lies on the farther side, they march courageously to its attainment, flouting the paltry laws, the sterile virtues, and the harebrained religions of those abject, worthless, swinish men who, so it does seem, exist only in order to dishonor Nature.”
Several days later, Clairwil, with whom I was already grown infatuated, came to supper. We were two and alone. It was then, at this second encounter, we poured out our hearts to each other, acknowledged our peculiarities, detailed our sentiments. Oh, what a soul she had, that Clairwil! I believe that if vice itself could dwell in this world, it would have chosen the depths of that perverse being for the seat of its empire.
In a moment of mutual confidence before we were to betake ourselves to table, Clairwil leaned close to me; we were indolently reclining in a nook paneled by mirrors, velvet-covered pillows supported our heaving flanks; the soft light seemed to beckon to love and to favor its pleasures.
“Is it not true, my angel,” said she, kissing my breasts, licking my nipples, “that ’tis through masturbating each other two such women as ourselves must become acquainted?”
And drawing up my skirts and petticoats as she uttered those words, the tribade darted her tongue deep into my mouth; and libertine fingers touched the mark.
“It is,” she observed, “there pleasure lies, it slumbers there, on that bed of roses. My sweetest love, wouldst have me wake it? Oh, Juliette, I shall put you in ecstasies, will you permit me to catch fire from their heat? Little minx! your mouth gives me answer, your tongue hunts mine, invites it to voluptuousness. Ah! do unto me that which I have done unto you, and let’s die in pleasure’s embrace.”
“Let us undress,” I suggested to my friend, “lewd debauch calls for nakedness—and, do you know, I’ve not the faintest idea how you are made, I wish to see everything, I must, I must. Let’s be rid of these inopportune raiments—ah, I want to see your heart throb, your breast quiver from the excitement I cause in you.”
“What an idea,” Clairwil murmured, “it hints at your character, Juliette, I adore it; we’ll do just whatever you like.”
And in a trice my friend was as naked as I; several minutes went by during which we studied each other in silence. The sight of the beauties nature had lavished upon me began to inflame Clairwil; I feasted my eyes upon hers. Never has there been such a lovely figure, never such a bosom…. Those buttocks! O God! ’twas the ass of that Aphrodite the Greeks reverenced; and how deliciously it was cleft, unwearyingly I kissed those wonders; and my friend, at first letting me mos
t obligingly have my way with her, proceeded next to pay back my caresses a hundredfold.
“Now don’t fret, leave everything to me,” she said, having me lie down on the ottoman and spread my legs wide, “let me show you I am capable of giving a woman pleasure.”
Whereupon two of her fingers began to work my clitoris and my asshole, the while her tongue, plunged a goodly depth in my cunt, avidly lapped up the fuck these titillations started. Never before had I been thus frigged; three times in a row I discharged into her mouth with such transports I thought I’d faint away. Clairwil, insatiable in her thirst for my fuck, and making ready to procure herself a fourth round, deftly and knowingly altered her approach; so that it was now one finger she inserted into my cunt, another wherewith she played trills on my clitoris, and her agile, her voluptuous tongue probed into my anus….
“What skill! What consideration!” I exclaimed. “Ah, Clairwil, you are like to be my undoing.”
And further spurts of whey were the product of that divine creature’s industry.
“Eh then?” she demanded, when I had returned somewhat to my senses, “what say you, do I not know how to frig a woman? I adore women; is it then any wonder that I am versed in the art of giving them pleasure? What else could you expect? I’m depraved, dear heart. Is it my fault if Nature gave me tastes that differ from the ordinary? I find nothing more unjust than a law that prescribes a mingling of the sexes in order to procure oneself a pure pleasure; and what sex is more apt than ours in doing unto each other that which we do singly to delight ourselves? Must we not, of necessity, be more successful in pleasing each other than that being, our complete opposite, who can offer us none but the joys at the farthest remove from those our sort of existence requires?”
Juliette Page 33
