Juliette

by Marquis de Sade

  ’Tis a crime I am soon to commit, I mused, something which would be commonly held a very black crime. But though it be black, though it be heinous, it is only one crime. And what is a single crime to a person who wishes only to live in the midst of a multitude of crimes, who wishes to live for the sake of crime alone, who idolizes it and nothing else?

  The whole morning I was restive, gloomy, testy, I fidgeted. I flogged two of my female hirelings, I was cross; I teased a child that had been entrusted to the care of one of them, then lured it into tumbling out a window: it died from the fall, this lifted my spirits somewhat, and I spent the remainder of the day at all sorts of little japeries, whiling the time away at all sorts of little savageries. I thought the promised supper would never arrive; but it did at last. I had issued orders that it be as lavish as the other of the day before, and as I had done then, I again drew Bernole upon a couch and flashed him my ass. Into it the ninny plunged, fuddled by my meaningless amorous prattle. An instant or two later the door is flung open and in storm Clairwil, Noirceuil, and Saint-Fond, swearing and armed; Bernole is dragged off my back and bound hand and foot.

  “Juliette,” a raging Saint-Fond declares, “you deserve to be butchered along with this monster for having betrayed the trust I have always placed in you. Would you live, eh? Then you have no choice: there are three balls in this pistol, take it and blow the churl’s brains out.”

  “Great heaven!” I shrilled theatrically. “What are you demanding of me? This man is my father—”

  “A father-fucking slut ought to be able to do a little father-killing.”

  “The choice is impossible—”

  “Rubbish. Come, be quick about it: take this pistol instantly, or die yourself.”

  “Woe is me,” I sighed, “my hand trembles, give me the weapon nevertheless. What must be, must be,” said I; “beloved father, will you pardon this act? I am under constraint, you observe it—”

  “Vile creature,” Bernole answered, “do as you are told. Aye, go ahead. But spare me having to listen to you. I do not wish to be made a fool of.”

  “Very well then, papa,” said Clairwil gaily, “since you don’t wish to be made a fool of, you shan’t be: just as you have guessed, your death is of your daughter’s contriving—and right indeed she is to want to murder the great scoundrel you must be for ever having given life to such a child.”

  Preparations are made forthwith: Bernole is tied to a chair fixed by spikes to the floor; I take up a position ten feet from him. Saint-Fond stretches out upon a divan and fits his member in my anus, Noirceuil supervising the introduction with one hand, stroking his own instrument with the other; to the right Clairwil is tonguing Saint-Fond’s mouth and tickling my clitoris. I take aim.

  “Saint-Fond,” I inquire, “shall I wait until you wet me?”

  “No, foul bitch,” he shouts, “kill him, kill him, the shot will bring my sperm out.”

  I fire. The ball enters Bernole’s brow; he expires; and with wild screams we all four discharge.

  Barbarous Saint-Fond rises and goes to peer at the victim; he stands over the body a long time, manifestly in ecstasy. (He always adored such situations.) He calls my name, would have me look also…. While I do he casts sidelong glances at me, studying my reaction; my sang-froid satisfies him. With a very mischievous smile Clairwil watches death stiffen Bernole’s limbs and drift over his contorted face.

  “Nothing arouses me like the sight of death,” Clairwil murmurs. And then, her eyes still riveted upon our victim, “Who’d care to frig me?”

  I step forward; Noirceuil slips his stave into my ass, Saint-Fond his into Clairwil’s; and we all discharge afresh. After which a most delicious meal is brought in and we take places around a table at whose head, as though presiding over the feast, sits the corpse.

  “Juliette,” says Saint-Fond, kissing me and laying the money down by my plate, “here is what I promised you. You will not take it amiss if I tell you that until today I allowed myself to harbor one or two little doubts as to the stuff you were made of. There is no longer any room for them. Your performance was irreproachable.”

  “You will excuse me,” put in Clairwil, “but I am not of that opinion. I seem still to notice the same failing in her: whenever Juliette commits a crime, it’s enthusiastically; but so long as her cunt is dry she might as well be paralyzed. One must proceed calmly, deliberately, lucidly. Crime is the torch that should fire the passions, that is a commonplace; but I have the suspicion that with her it is the reverse, passion firing her to crime.”

  “The difference is enormous,” Saint-Fond remarked, “for in such a case crime is but accessory, whereas it ought to have prime importance.”

  “I am afraid I share Clairwil’s view, my dear Juliette,” said Noirceuil; “you need further encouragement; this ruinous sensibility plaguing you must be dealt with. All the irregularities into which our imagination leads us,” he continued, “are exact indices of our degree of intelligence. Its vivacity, its impetuosities, in a superior being, are so powerful that it will stop at nothing; obstacles to surmount represent that many more delights; and their overcoming is not necessarily proof of depravity, as fools suppose, but evidence of the mind’s strengthening. You, Juliette, have now reached the age where your faculties are at their apogee; you enter your prime readied by earnest study, by solid reflection, by a wholesale rejection of all the curbs and all the prejudices imposed and acquired in childhood. No, you have no cause for worry, that long and careful preparation shall not have been for nothing, your career is going to be brilliant: a fiery and vigorous temperament, robust health, great heat in the bowels, a very chilly heart are there to second this ebullient, enlightened, and unscrupulous brain. We may depend upon it, my friends, Juliette will go as far as she possibly can; but I ask that she not tarry on the way, nor even pause, that if ever she casts a glance backward it be then to chide herself for having made such modest progress, and not to be amazed at the great distances she has covered.”

  “I expect still more,” said Clairwil. “Let me repeat: I expect Juliette to do evil—not to quicken her lust, as I believe it is her habit at present, but solely for the pleasure of doing it. I ask that in bare evil, evil free of all lewd accouterments, she find all the delight her lust affords her; I ask that she learn to dispense with all vehicles, with all pretexts for the doing of evil. This program carried out means no diminishing of libertinage’s charms, Juliette may go on savoring them as in the past, and ought to. But what I am resolutely opposed to is her having to frig herself in order to reach a criminal pitch; for the consequences of this kind of behavior are that the day her appetites fade, her desires quit her, she’ll be incapable of doing anything wrong at all; whereas by following my prescriptions, in crime she will always find the means to revive her passions. No further need to lay finger to cunt in order to perpetrate the wicked deed; but from perpetrating it she will derive the wish to frig herself. I find no clearer way of expressing the matter.”

  “My dear,” I replied, “there is nothing obscure in your philosophy; I grasp these theories because their practice suits me. Do you doubt it? I am prepared to prove it to you; put me to whatever test you like. Had you somewhat more carefully observed my comportment in the business we have lately dispatched, you would not, I am sure, have formulated these criticisms; I am come to the stage where I love evil for its own sake; only in crime, I have recently noticed, do my passions catch fire, and where the seasoning of crime is lacking I taste no joy. There remains a single point I would consult you upon. Of remorse I experience nothing anymore, I may truthfully declare that for me it has ceased altogether to exist, never a twinge of it regardless of the abomination I indulge in; but, do you know, I am sometimes ashamed of myself. I blush, like Eve abashed after eating the apple. Our activities, our extravagances, these are things whereof I would not be pleased to have intelligence leak out, things I am loath to own save to our close friends—why is it so? Why, pray explain to me, why is it that of
these feelings, remorse and shame, I am susceptible to the weaker although impervious to the more potent—in fine, where does the distinction lie between the two?”

  “In this,” answered Saint-Fond, “that shame reflects the wound inflicted upon public opinion by a given piece of wickedness, whereas remorse relates to the pain that wickedness does to our own conscience; in such sort that it is possible to be ashamed of a deed that causes no remorse when this deed offends conventional practice only without afflicting one’s conscience; and similarly it is possible to be unashamedly contrite if the deed committed accords with the usages and customs of our country, but jars with our conscience. For example: to stroll naked down the central alley in the Tuileries might well make a man blush, but could hardly make him remorseful; and a military commander will perhaps feel badly at having sent twenty thousand of his troops to their death in a battle, but he is not apt to be ashamed. However, both these troublesome feelings are to be finally eliminated by means of habituation. You now belong to the Sodality of the Friends of Crime; it may be safely predicted that participation in its activities will by and by rid you of your tendency to shame, of your capacity for it: you will acquire the habit of a pronounced cynicism, it will make short work of the weakness bothering you at present; and to accelerate the cure, I urge you to parade your misbehavior, to show yourself nude in public, frequently, and to strive after the most arrantly whorish effects in your dress; you’ll gradually cease to blush at anything; let the measures I am advising become seconded by doctrinal firmness, and all these sudden starts and annoying twinges will be things of the past, you will take a very different view of affairs: you shall sense nothing but pleasure there where once upon a time you were stricken by shame.”

  More serious matters were broached next: I was informed by Saint-Fond that the marriage of his daughter Alexandrine to Noirceuil, his friend, was about to be concluded at long last, and that he and his future son-in-law were agreed that the young lady should pass a season with me, living in my house, where she would be familiarized with, and adapted to, the tastes of the individual to whom she was going to be joined maritally.

  “We request you, Noirceuil and I,” Saint-Fond pursued, “to shape this little soul after your own. Cultivate it, nurture it assiduously, make it liberal provision of good counsel and bright example; will Noirceuil keep the girl by him if he finds her soundly formed? Perhaps. But it is most unlikely he’ll long abide her if she prove gauche or a prude. So endeavor, Juliette, to achieve something you can be proud of and which will be useful to us all; the pains you take will not be overlooked.”

  “Sir,” said I to the Minister, “you know that such lessons as these can only be given between a pair of sheets….”

  “Of course, of course, my dear,” Saint-Fond nodded. “That is what I have in mind.”

  “By all means, yes,” Noirceuil echoed.

  “Obviously,” said Clairwil. “How educate a girl save by lying with her?”

  “Quite,” Noirceuil continued; “our good Juliette will bed with my wife as often as she sees fit.”

  Saint-Fond took up fresh subjects; he outlined a cruel scheme he had devised for the devastation of France. “We are presently concerned,” said he, “by certain symptoms which could soon lead to a revolution in the land, and are disturbed especially by the untoward size of the population; the trouble might well have its origin there. The more numerous the people become, the greater the danger they pose; the awakening of minds, the spreading of a critical spirit, these are grave developments: only the ignorant remain placid under the yoke. Therefore,” the Minister went on, “we plan, firstly, to have done with all these grammar schools, the free ones, which are producing such alarming quantities of poets, painters, and thinkers instead of the drudges and pickpockets we ought to have. What need have we of such crowds of talent, why do we bother to encourage it in them? Less wit in the nation, I say, and some numerical retrenchment also: France requires a severe purging, the lowliest is the first sector to attack. We intend hence to have unsparingly at mendicants, that’s the class which breeds nine out of ten of our agitators; we are razing charitable institutions, the poorhouses, being determined not to leave the masses one single refuge where insolence can ripen. Bowed beneath chains a thousand times heavier than those worn by, let us say, the commoners in Asia, we propose to have ours crawl in slavery, and to this end we are prepared to use the widest variety of radical means.”

  “It will be a while before those means take effect,” Clairwil pointed out. “If it’s a sudden diminishment you need, then you had better resort to prompter ones: war, famine, epidemics….”

  “Ah, war,” said Saint-Fond, “we’ll not neglect a war, that’s scheduled. As for an epidemic, it is to be avoided since we ourselves might be its first victims. Regarding a famine, the total monopolization of corn we are working toward, as well as being profitable to us, will shortly reduce the people to veritable cannibalism. We are counting heavily upon this measure. The Council of Ministers approved it unanimously today. Speedy, infallible, prodigiously lucrative.

  “Won over to the principles Machiavelli set so clearly forth,” the Minister continued, “I have for a long time had the profound conviction that individuals can be of no account to the politician; as machines, men must labor for the prosperity of the government they are subordinated to, never should the government be concerned for the welfare of the public. Every government that interests itself in the governed is weak; there is but one sort of strong government, and it considers itself everything and the nation nothing. Whether there are a few more or a few less slaves in a State does not matter; what does, is that their bondage weigh onerously and absolutely upon a people, and that the sovereign be despotic. Rome tottered feebly along in the days when Romans insisted upon governing themselves; but she became mistress of the world when tyrants seized authority; all the power resides in the sovereign, thus must we behold the thing, and since this power is merely moral so long as the people are physically the stronger, only by an uninterrupted series of despotic actions can the government assemble the force it needs: until such time as it commands all the real power, it will exist in an ideal sense only. When we are eager to gain the upper hand over others, we must little by little accustom them to seeing in us something which is actually not there; otherwise, they’ll only see us for what we are, and this will regularly and inevitably be to our detriment….”

  “It has always seemed to me,” Clairwil remarked, “that the art of governing men is the one that demands more trickery, more duplicity, and more fraudulence than any other.”

  “Perfectly true,” Saint-Fond assented, “and the reason therefor is simple: there is no governing human beings unless you deceive them. To deceive them, you must be false. The enlightened man will never allow himself to be led about by the end of his nose, hence you must deprive him of light, keep him in darkness if you would steer him; none of this is possible without duplicity.”

  “But is not duplicity a vice?” I wondered.

  “I would rather tend to esteem it a virtue,” answered the Minister, “it is the only key unlocking the human heart. You cannot hope to live amidst men if you limit yourself to honesty; their sole and constant effort being to deceive us, what awaits us if we do not very quickly learn to deceive them? The foremost preoccupation of man and of the statesman, particularly, is to penetrate others without letting his own thoughts be known. Well, if duplicity is the only means for achieving this, duplicity is then a virtue; in a totally corrupt world there is never any danger being more rotten than one’s neighbors; rather, ’tis there to assure oneself of the whole sum of felicity and ease which virtue would procure us in a moral society. But the mechanism that directs government cannot be virtuous, because it is impossible to thwart every crime, to protect oneself from every criminal without being criminal too; that which directs corrupt mankind must be corrupt itself; and it will never be by means of virtue, virtue being inert and passive, that you will maintain c
ontrol over vice, which is ever active: the governor must be more energetic than the governed: well, if the energy of the governed simply amounts to so many crimes threatening to be unleashed, how can you expect the energy of the governor to be anything different? what are legally prescribed punishments if not crimes? and what excuses them? the necessity of governing men. There it is: crime is one of the vital mainsprings of government, I ask you now in what sense can this they call virtue be necessary in the world, when it is evident you cannot obtain it save through crimes? I may add that it is exceedingly necessary, for the government itself, that mankind in general be thoroughly corrupt: the more corrupt men are, the more easily they may be managed. In conclusion, examine virtue from every viewpoint and you always find it useless and dangerous.

  “Juliette,” Saint-Fond declared, addressing himself now to me, “if you still entertain prejudices touching this subject, I should like to rid you of them once and for all, they cannot have anything but the worst influence upon your destiny. Opinions are important in life, I should like to make certain that yours are wholesome; for it is dreadful, if one is born with penchants for evil-doing, not to be able to do evil save in fear and trembling. Hear me, my angel, take note of what I say: were your activities to hurl the entire natural order into confusion, you would be doing no more than exercising the faculties Nature gave you for that—faculties which Nature was perfectly aware you would employ for that; their employment is obviously not something Nature can object to or condemn, since instead of neutralizing these harmful faculties she originally gave you, or subsequently depriving you of them, she does nought but incite in you, continually, the desire to make the most of them. So do all the evil you like, and do it knowing it need not cost you a wink of sleep; take heart in the fact that whatever the species of wickedness you contrive, for violence it will never surpass or satisfy Nature’s greedy expectations, who welcomes destruction, loves it, lusts after it, feeds upon it; take heart, I say, knowing that you please Nature never so well as when, emulating her, you set your hand to ruinous work; and knowing that, if the question be of outrage, of infringement upon her rights, you never so injure her as when you labor at the creation she abhors, or as when you leave in peace this mass of humanity which is an eternal threat to her; for the true laws of Nature are crime and death, and we are most faithfully her servants when, smiting hard to left and right, in a rage like hers we indiscriminately cut down all inside our reach.”