Juliette

by Marquis de Sade

  “Never. Never. Victory goes always to the stronger, and for strength crime has not its match. Such ideas betray an unpardonable weakness in you.”

  “This is my first reverse—”

  “Your second, Juliette. Let me refresh your memory: only after you emerged from a prison where you ought rather to have gone to the gallows did fortune begin to heap her favors upon you.”

  “True. I’d forgot that adventure.”

  “And its moral. Take courage, Juliette; be patient.”

  Nothing under the sun could have extinguished the fires of libertinage that burned at all times in this remarkable woman. There was but one bed in the room, and would you believe it? she suggested we all four of us get into it and while away the time frigging one another until Saint-Fond’s arrival. But as it turned out, neither I nor either of my women was in a sufficiently composed state to cooperate in her extravagances; and so we chatted instead as we awaited further developments.

  Like Clairwil, Monsieur de Saint-Fond considered that, we being prisoners there, it were wiser not to storm the chateau; under such circumstances, the employ of ruse, he felt, ought to precede that of violence, and this was the stratagem he used.

  The rider who had gone out with our letter returned with two youths-unknown to us; they brought Cloris’ father a message, it ran as follows:

  “To hold women in an affair concerning men only is not befitting to gallantry. Free these ladies; in their stead, accept as hostages these young men, one my first cousin, the other my nephew; you may believe that their safety is more precious to me than that of the women now in your power. As well, put aside all fear regarding your own loved ones; they are indeed under detention, but here at my house in Paris; consider me responsible for them; and I vow to you they shall be in your midst within the space of three days. Again I say to you, keep my kinsmen and let the women go their way; I myself shall be at your house four hours after this reaches you.”

  Here we had to use our wits very cleverly. The note was not read out to us, it was not until later we learned its exact contents; for the moment we could only guess its drift.

  “Are you acquainted with these young gentlemen?” old Cloris asked me.

  “Most certainly,” said I, “they are related to the Minister; if they have come to substitute themselves for us, you couldn’t have better hostages.”

  They were discussing whether to set us at large or no when one of our captors spoke up: “This may be a trap; whatever, I am against letting the women out of our hands. Why not keep them all? That means two hostages the more.”

  To this the others agreed, and the fools (for pursuant to the design of things, virtue can lead nowhere but to folly), the stupid clods, the animals, shut us all inside the same room.

  “Be assured, Mesdames,” said one of the Minister’s alleged relatives, “we are here to help you. Those are our instructions; two hours from now, the entire body of the Paris police—to which we belong—shall have the chateau surrounded: we shall protect you during the siege. We are well armed, never fear; and were these people, finding they have been tricked, to decide to attempt anything against you, you shall be defended.”

  “My one fear,” Clairwil remarked, “is that these idiots wake up to the fact they have made a mistake in putting us all together. We shall be helpless if they separate us.”

  “Very well,” said I, much more at ease than I had been hitherto, “we have simply to unite ourselves inseparably.”

  “What,” Clairwil declared, “you who but a moment ago shuddered at the mention of a roughly similar distraction, do you now dare broach the idea?”

  “Why, I’ve grown much calmer,” I replied, “and, Clairwil, these two lads are both very pretty to look upon.”

  One of them, Pauli by name, was in truth but twenty-three, and he had the gentlest face, the most delicate features in the world; the other was probably two years older, his appearance was effeminate but he was quite as handsome, and his prick was a veritable splendor.

  “I am confident that these gentlemen are at our disposition,” said Clairwil; whereupon we fell to kissing our champions and caressing them with such ardor that we were soon able to read consent in their expressions.

  “Yes,” Clairwil resumed, “since they are so emphatically of our mind, this is how the thing should be gone about. Pauli is going to fuck you, Juliette; I’ll be served by Laroche; when we’re both encunted, Elvire will frig my clitoris with one hand, my asshole with the other; Montalme will do the same to you. Both of them being within our fuckers’ reach, our fuckers will toy with them according to their fancy: you must not suppose that we’ll lose by thus dividing our fuckers’ attentions, not at all, those attentions will be intensified, there’s nothing like this arrangement to keep a prick in size; all voluptuous women would be well advised to employ it. But let me proceed. Taking careful note of the sensations being experienced by our young studs, as soon as they observe them nearing discharge, Elvire and Montalme will deftly snatch these pricks out of our cunts and transfer them into our asses in order that no fuck be spent other than there; once both are discharged empty, we’ll exchange man and woman. But you and I, proximately placed, will be concerned with ourselves only: we shall kiss each other, we shall tongue each other, my love, and the while,” she added in a whisper, “we’ll watch these vile beings, these base drudges toiling to give us pleasure like so many slaves Nature has created to be our tools and whom we suffer to exist solely in the interest of our passions.”

  “Precisely,” I rejoined. “I do not understand how one can even hope to be aroused unless one holds that attitude.”

  And the very next instant there the two of us are, sprawled on the bed, our skirts pulled up above the navel, legs flung wide. First of all, the tribades seize each an engine, these we ready, steer into position, then engulf with our panting cunts. If Clairwil was briskly fucked by Laroche, certainly I had no cause to complain of Pauli; his member was not quite so thick as his colleague’s, but it was of goodly length, and I felt it stab to the final depths of my womb; frigged meanwhile in heavenly style by Montalme, voluptuously kissed by my friend, we had each passed through nerve-rending crises when the piece of legerdemain so skillfully executed by Montalme advised me of my young lover’s impending ejaculation; and then my thirsty ass was flooded by streams of nectar-sweet sperm. While it was pouring into me, the adroit Montalme probed three fingers into my lately vacated cunt and continued to rub my clitoris throughout. A loud shrill oath from my friend told me where matters stood with her; we were simultaneously whelmed by a third discharge as once again fuck washed abundantly into our entrails.

  “Now we’ll exchange,” said Clairwil, “try some Laroche while I take Pauli.”

  Both of them young, both vigorous, our athletes recommence their efforts without even asking to catch their breath, and I found myself being fucked by one of the most beautiful pricks imaginable.

  At that point Clairwil, who had gone on kissing me, tonguing me uninterruptedly, ignoring everybody else, paused to murmur in my ear: “I have something perfectly abominable in mind.”

  “Ah, by fuck,” said I, “let’s to work. What would you do?”

  “No. I want to surprise you,” she said. “Content yourself with knowing that this idea alone is flushing the whey out of my loins.”

  And therewith joy smote the rascal; her convulsions, her thrashings would rather have chilled than gladdened her fucker had he been acquainted with their cause. Restored somewhat to her senses, still being fucked by Pauli, she spoke to me again, again in an undertone: “I think I’d better explain it to you, else you won’t be able to play your part in the thing. There is going to be fighting; we shall be attacked; we’ll resist. I propose that we ask these young men for weapons, and, as thanks for all the services they’ve done for us, that we shoot them dead during the battle. Blame for these murders will be laid upon our enemies; and Saint-Fond, further impressed by the dangers you’ve run, will probably reward you
that much more liberally.”

  “Oh, thrice-damned slut,” was my reply, discharging like a whore as Clairwil divulged this exciting scheme, “it’s good, good, what you advise.”

  As I spoke I oiled Laroche’s prick; and he, finding himself on the verge of another explosion, hastily decunted, burrowing into my bum at the same instant I discharged, which coincidence hurled me into transports such as I doubt my powers to describe, there being nothing, I affirm, absolutely nothing so delicious for a woman as to feel a prick penetrate her ass at the same instant she is overtaken by an orgasm. A brief moment later we heard gunfire outside; we all sprang up from the bed.

  “They’ve come,” says Clairwil; “give us pistols so that we can defend ourselves, my lads.”

  “Here you are,” says Laroche. “Each is loaded with three balls.”

  “Good,” Clairwil replies, “and be sure they’ll be soon lodged in somebody’s heart”

  The noise mounts, shouts ring out in the chateau: “To arms!”

  “See to the priming,” cries Laroche; “you ladies had best group yourselves behind us, we can act as a shield for you.”

  Things now began to happen very fast. Already driven back in the lower part of the chateau by the detachment sent from Paris, our captors raced up toward where we were, meaning to kill us before surrendering; but their assailants were hot on their heels. Our door was forced; the pistol-shots were deafening. Stationed behind our defenders, we chose this moment for ridding ourselves of the weight of gratitude. Two bodies lay in a welter of blood at our feet, and our cunts were yet slimed with the fuck of the young men our iniquity slew. Their deaths were of course ascribed to our captors; the officers in charge of our detachment lost little time revenging their murdered comrades. Old Cloris and the young ladies alone remained alive: they were packed into a coach and, escorted by six of the policemen, were taken off to the Bastille. The rest of the police, having hitched the horses to our carriage, conducted us to my house, where I besought Clairwil to stay for supper.

  She agreed to do so; we scarce had seated ourselves in the drawing room when my butler announced Saint-Fond.

  I turned quickly to my friend. “Shall we tell him about our little horror?”

  “No.” She pursed her lips. “You must always do whatever you want. You must never tell all you’ve done.”

  The Minister entered, we declared ourselves thankful for the measures he had taken in our behalf. He in his turn declared that he was very sorry indeed a personal affair of his had caused us such inconvenience.

  “Eight men were killed in the course of the thing, perhaps ten,” he informed us, “among them the two lads I sent to you. It’s rather a pity about them.”

  “A pity?” Clairwil repeated. “How so?”

  “Oh, I’d been fucking them both for quite a while, you know.”

  “Tush,” she chided, “is this Saint-Fond we hear expressing pity for objects he’s fucked?”

  “Merely regret at their loss. They were nimble boys, and wonderfully serviceable in my covert operations.”

  “Never mind, there are many pebbles on the beach,” said I, showing Saint-Fond to his chair at table; “let’s forget about the slight harm that’s been done and talk instead about your successes.”

  During the meal the conversation as usual revolved around philosophical questions; afterward, the Minister having business to attend to, and we being exceedingly tired after a trying day, the company separated. At the supper held on the morrow, my unlucky Palmire, fetched for the purpose to Paris from her dungeon in the country, was mercilessly sacrificed after enduring a thousand tortures, one more barbarous than the other. Saint-Fond obliged me to strangle her while he gave her an ass-fucking. For Palmire I got twenty-five thousand francs; a lively description of my perilous captivity in the chateau earned me twenty-five thousand more.

  The following two months were unattended by any event worth signaling. I had just celebrated my eighteenth birthday when Saint-Fond, visiting me at home one morning, told me he had been to see Madame de Cloris’ sisters at the Bastille; they were both, he considered, far prettier than she whom we had butchered; and indeed the younger of the two, who was my age, struck him as positively lovely.

  “So, my Lord,” I asked, “shall it be a trip into the country?”

  “Yes, exactly,” was his reply.

  “And the old man?”

  “Oh, some spice in his soup perhaps….”

  “As you like, but that will mean the loss of three prisoners at one stroke, and you realize that the warden depends entirely upon them for his livelihood.”

  “He won’t go hungry. Replacements are easy to come by.”

  “I should like you to put one of Clairwil’s relations first on the list. The creature in question has been playing the prude with our friend, to whose libertinage she has some strange objection. That leaves two vacancies to fill; I have candidates for them now, I’ll give you their names in a week.”

  “I’ll have the documents in order,” said the Minister, “but one thing at a time.” He drew out a memorandum book and penciled a note: “Gentleman: lunch. Ladies: outing.” Whereupon he looked up at me and smiled. “Off you go tomorrow, Juliette. Take Clairwil along; she’s charming and for imaginativeness has no peer. We’ll contrive something delicious.”

  “Shall you require men and tribades?”

  “No, I think not. Private scenes are sometimes preferable to orgies: the narrower stage is more favorable to meditation, more conducive to horrors. And in cozier surroundings one is less apt to be shy.”

  “Two women to assist at least?”

  “Two women well on in years; find me a pair in their sixties, it’s a caprice. I’ve been many times assured that nothing is quite so stimulating as natural decrepitude; this might be the occasion to try some of that.”

  An hour later I was in conference with Clairwil. “I have only one suggestion to make,” said she after I had sketched the Minister’s project. “Those young ladies doubtless have lovers, favorites at any rate; we must locate them, make off with them, and include them in the festivities: these situations ordinarily afford any number of possibilities.”

  I hasten to the Minister’s residence, report Clairwil’s idea to him; it meets with his approval; the date of the party is postponed a week; and a hunt for the lovers is got under way.

  The wicked treachery necessary for their discovery was sheer joy for Saint-Fond. He takes himself to the Bastille, has each of those girls cast into a cell, interrogates first one, then the other, causing them to tremble now with hope, now with fear, and sometimes with both at once, all most cunningly; he finally learns that the younger, Mademoiselle Faustine, is in love with a young man by the name of Dormon, of the same age as she; and her sister, Mademoiselle Felicity, who is twenty-eight, has given her heart to one Delnos, a year or two her senior and renowned throughout Paris for his good looks. Four days sufficed to have these young men behind bars; the charges leveled against them were somewhat vague and altogether false but, because never seriously examined, more than sufficient in an age when the abuses of privilege and influence were such that even the valets of high-placed personages were in the habit of jailing just about whomever they liked. These latest victims lay but a night in the Bastille; they were conveyed the next to my country domain whence the young ladies had been brought the previous day. Clairwil and I received our guests as they arrived and locked them away, but in separate chambers; so that, though they were all lodged under the same roof, they could not suspect that they had their beloved for neighbor.

  After an enormous dinner we removed to a drawing room where all stood in readiness for the projected execrations. Garbed as Roman matrons and making up switches, the two sexagenarians were awaiting orders. Saint-Fond, impressed by Clairwil’s magnificent ass, wished to render it homage before doing anything else. Resting upon a sofa, the hussy presented it to him in the most artistic manner; and while I sucked her clitoris, Saint-Fond darted six inc
hes or more of tongue into her entrails.

  By now, he is erected; he embuggers Clairwil, kissing my ass meanwhile; the next instant he sodomizes me, as he does so caressing Clairwil’s voluptuous behind.

  “And now to work,” says the Minister, “any further delay will cost me a discharge: there’s no resisting such asses as yours.”

  “Saint-Fond,” Clairwil says, “I have two boons to ask you. You have a notable capacity for cruelty. Pray exercise it to the full, my dear, that is my first request. The second is that you enable me to exercise mine: entrust to me the murder of these young men. Torturing males is still my favorite pastime; you enjoy tormenting persons of my sex, I am equally fond of making representatives of yours suffer, and from martyrizing these two pretty fellows I expect to derive no less satisfaction, and possibly even more, than you will reap from massacring their two mistresses.”

  “Clairwil, you are a monster.”

  “I know I am, my dear; and the one thing that mortifies me is to have to own myself outdone by you every day.”

  Saint-Fond declaring his desire to see each of the four lovers in turn, one of the old attendants brought in Dormon, he whose mistress was Faustine.

  “Young man,” Clairwil began, “you are standing before your master, therefore see to it that the most complete submissiveness characterizes your behavior and a most scrupulous truthfulness your replies; it is in his Lordship’s hands that lies your life.”

  “Alas,” the unhappy one replied, “there is truly nothing that I have to say, Madame. As to what I could have done to merit arrest I have not the faintest notion, nor can I understand why I am become the victim of fate.”

  Clairwil was devouring him with her eyes. “Were you not to wed Faustine?”

  “My whole heart and soul were set on making mine the happiness of having her to be my wife.”