Juliette

by Marquis de Sade

  “That which they call love is, in short, nothing else than the desire to enjoy; so long as it exists, worship is of no help; so soon as it is satisfied, worship is impossible: which proves that it was certainly not from worship the respect was born, but the contrary. Glance at examples showing the lowly position women occupied in the past and yet occupy in a great many lands today, and you will conclude, if you are yet in any doubt, that the metaphysical passion of love is in no wise innate in man but is the fruit of his erroneous thinking and mistaken practices, and that the object which gave rise to this passion, generally scorned everywhere, ought never have blinded him.

  “Such is that scorn amongst the Croats, more particularly known to geographers as Uskoks and Morlacks,13 that when they refer to their wives, they employ the same coarse expression the vulgar commonly use in connection with a vile animal.14 They never suffer them in their beds, women in that part of the world sleep on the bare ground, without a murmur and with utmost alacrity do as they are told, and are mercilessly beaten at the least hint of disobedience; their subordinate situation, their drudgeries, and their fare remain unchanged at all times, even when they are with child: they are often seen to give birth in open fields, pick up their offspring, wash it in the nearest stream, bring it home, and resume their chores; and observers have remarked that in this country the children are a good deal healthier and more robust, the wives a good deal more faithful, than elsewhere; it would seem that Nature is loath to relinquish the rights which decadent habits and false delicacy seek to strip her of in our climates without achieving any other result than abasing our sex in ranking it evenly with the other Nature created to be its slave.

  “In Zaporozhian Cossack country women are excluded from the clan; those who serve-for propagational purposes are relegated to islands, and when in need men go thither to use them, but haphazardly, indifferently; need eliminates all considerations of age, looks, kinship, in such wise that the father begets children on his daughter; the brother on his sister; and no other laws with these people, save such as need establishes.

  “There are places where, when women menstruate, they are treated like beasts; they are penned, caged, shut up tight, food is thrown to them from a goodly distance—so tigers are fed, or bears; do you fancy these people go to much bother loving their wives?

  “In the kingdom of Loango, in Africa, pregnant women are yet more rudely dealt with; once in this state, they are reckoned more than ever impure, misshapen, and disgusting; and indeed, pray tell me, what is there more frightful to see than an expectant mother? Gravid and stark naked, it is thus the entire sex ought to be shown to its admirers, since they have a liking for the grotesque and the horrible.

  “A woman gives birth, and the blacks of Barray suspend all commerce with her for four years and upward.

  “The wives of Madura, alluding to their husbands, speak in circumlocutions; which signify the profound respect they have for them.

  “The Romans and the Celts held the right of life and death over their wives, and exercised it often; this is a right we have by Nature: flouting her and weakening her laws, when we neglect to use it.

  “Their bondage is grim throughout almost all of Africa; she esteems herself beyond words fortunate when her husband deigns to accept her attentions.

  “They are so ill-treated, so unhappy in the principality of Juida, that those who are recruited for the harems of the prince prefer, when they can, to kill themselves rather than be taken there, this sovereign never making dalliance of a woman without, they say, subjecting her to execrable discomforts.

  “Do we bend a glance at those magnificent retreats in Asia: there we see proud despots, whose desires have the force of orders, exposing purest beauty to all such nasty whims as imagination may compose, and reducing to the lowest level of degradation those insolent divinities whom we, to our disgrace, revere.

  “The Chinese have the loftiest contempt for women, and consider them hardly fit to be used, and even less so to be seen.

  “When the Emperor of Golconda would go out to take the air, a dozen of the tallest and strongest girls in his harem, disposing themselves some atop the others, some before and some behind, form a kind of dromedary, the four sturdiest being its legs; His Majesty is hoisted up into the saddle, and off they trot. I leave you to speculate upon this monarch’s conduct inside his pleasure palaces, and upon what his astonishment would be if someone were to tell him that the very same creatures he uses for bum-wipes were objects of worship in Europe.

  “The Muscovites are unwilling to eat anything that has been killed by a woman.

  “Ah! be certain of it, my brothers, it was not to see us grovel in the grips of a sentiment so base as love that Nature put muscle and intelligence on our side: it was to rule that weaker and deceitful sex, to force it into our desires’ service; and we totally forget her intentions when we accord some independence, let alone some ascendancy, to beings whom she made to be absolutely in our power.

  “We fancy there is happiness to be found in the affection we fancy women to have for us; but that sentiment, always meretricious, is always measured out, so much, so little, depending upon the need a woman calculates she has of us, or upon the sort of passion we flatter in her; let age whiten our hairs, or let there be an adverse shift in our fortunes, so that we can no longer serve her pleasures, her greed, or her pride, and she abandons us upon the spot, frequently to become our most mortal enemy. In any case, we have no crueler foes than women, even those who adore us sincerely; if we consult them for our pleasures, then they tyrannize over us; if we snub them, then they look for revenge and always end up doing us ill; whence it results that of all man’s passions, love is the most dangerous and that against which he should take the greatest care to defend himself.

  “To judge whether love be madness, is not the lover’s distraction sufficient proof of it? or that fatal illusion he entertains, which causes him to ascribe such charms to the object he dotes upon and goes scampering about praising to the skies? Not a flaw that has not been rewrought into a virtue; not a defect that does not become a beauty; all that is ridiculous in her is changed into grace; ha! when the tempest subsides and the lover, open-eyed, can coolly inspect the contemptible object of his enthusiasms, must he not, as he blushes before his despicable error, at least make firm resolutions never to be misled in the future?

  “Inconstancy and libertinage, those, my brothers, are the two antidotes to love; accustoming us to dealings with these false divinities, they both exert a gradual erosive action upon the illusion, till finally it is all eaten quite away; you cease sooner or later to adore what you see every day: thanks to the habit of inconstancy and of libertinage, the heart loses, little by little, the dangerous softness which permits it to be susceptible to the impressions of love; surfeited, it hardens, it toughens, and the patient may soon be considered cured. What! shall I go mope before the door of this creature who only lets me in at last to put the remnants of my good humor at further defiance, shall I endure all this when, if I pause to think an instant, I realize that with perfect ease and at the price of a few francs I can have the hire of a body just as fair as hers? We must bear it ever in mind that the woman who strives to get us the most inextricably into her captivity is certainly concealing flaws which would rapidly disgust us if we knew what they were; do we but set our imagination to envisaging these details, to probing after them, to guessing at them; and this preliminary exercise initiated at the same moment love is born will perhaps succeed in extinguishing it. Be she a girl? She surely exhales some unhealthy odor, if not now then later on; is it worth your while, sir, to pant after a cesspool? Be she a woman? Another’s leavings may, I admit, momentarily rouse our desires…. But our love … and what’s to be idolized here? This vast mold that’s cast a dozen brats…. Picture her giving birth, this treasure of your heart; behold that shapeless mass of flesh squirm sticky and festering from the cavity where you believe felicity is to be found. Undress this the idol of your soul, un
dress her, even at some other time: is it over these two crooked and stubby thighs you propose to rave? Or over this unclean, fetid gulf where they meet? Ah ha, it’s perhaps this apron of matted hairs hanging untidy between those same thighs that is due to fire your imagination … or else these two flaccid globes drooping flappily onto her navel? Would it not be on this nearer side but on the farther she harbors charms worth your homage? Lo, here they are, these two wattles of weary tallow-colored flesh, sheltering a livid hole that connects with the other: oh yes, these are the wonders your mind battens on, and it is for their sake you sink yourself into a condition lower than the condition of an earthworm? But what’s this? I am mistaken? you are not attracted by any of this, there are much finer qualities than these that spellbind you: it is that traitorous cunning character, those perpetual dishonesties, that lying tongue, that shrewish scolding tone, this voice like a cat’s, or this whorishness, or this prudery, for woman spends her life in the one or the other of those two extremes; this calumny … this spitefulness … this contrariness … this witless inconsequence, ever nagging, caviling, cawing stupidity… Yes, yes, I see it clearly, such are the attributes you cherish in “her, and they doubtless merit going into a dither over.15

  “Think not that I exaggerate matters: if all these defects are not combined in the same individual, the one you worship surely has her share of them; if they escape your eye, that’s because they are screened from your sight, but they exist, fear not, they exist: clothing or education may disguise what would revolt you if you saw it, the defect is none the less real even though you see it not, or not yet; hunt for it before attaching yourself, you will ferret it out every time, and if you be wise, my friend, halt there rather than throw happiness and tranquillity to the winds for the enjoying of an object which, certainly, infallibly, you will soon start to loathe.

  “Oh, my brothers, contemplate a little the host of sorrows this baneful passion brings in its wake … the cruel maladies caused by the sufferings it gives, the material expenditures, the loss as well of sleep, of ease, of appetite, of health, the obligatory renunciation of all other pleasures; realizing the gigantic sacrifices it entails, and profiting from all these examples, do as does the prudent helmsman who steers not for the reef littered with the hulks of a thousand shattered vessels.

  “Eh, can you not forego these dubious pleasures when life has so many other, genuine, ones to offer? Why, what is this I say? life offers you the very same ones, and gives them to you free of any disagreeable accompaniments or aftermaths. Since libertinage assures you the same enjoyments and in return asks only that you clear them of this icy metaphysic, which adds nothing to pleasures, feast unrestrictedly upon everything that appeals to your senses; and in order to use a woman must you necessarily love her? We all of us here feel, it seems to me, that a woman is made much better use of when she is not loved or at least that loving her is perfectly gratuitous so long as matters are taken no farther than that. And what need have we to take them farther, I should like to know, wherefore prolong our pleasures by a ludicrous flight of melancholy and madness? After five or six hours of her, have we not had quite enough of this woman? One night more, a hundred nights more would only yield us the same pleasures; while other objects hold new ones in store for you. What! millions of beauties await you, and you’d be such a fool as to bind yourself to one? Would you not smile at the simpleton who, invited to a magnificent banquet, ate of one dish only, though fivescore others were offered to his delectation? It is diversity, it is change, that makes for the happiness in life, and if every single object on earth can procure you a new delight, what manner of lunatic are you who would be the prisoner of somebody who can afford you only one?

  “What I have said of women, my brothers, may also be applied to men. Our defects are just as serious as theirs, and they are as unluckily moored to us as we to them, the putting on of any shackle is a folly, every bond is an attempt against the physical liberty which is our due, and which we ought to enjoy here on earth. And while I am wasting my time with this being, whatever it is, a hundred thousand others are growing old around me, who would much more merit my homage.

  “And, further, is it a mistress who can satisfy a man? Is it then, as slave to his goddess’ velleities and whims, which he must labor to content, that he will be able to devote attention to his personal desires? Superiority is necessary in the pleasurable act; he of the two who shares his joy has less of it, he who obeys has none; get thee gone, idiotic delicacy which causes us to find charms … even in our sacrifices; these pleasure-takings, purely intellectual stunts, can they compare to those which involve our senses? The love of women is like unto that of God: in either case, we feed upon illusions. In the former, we wish only to love the spiritual, making abstraction of the corporeal, in the second, we ascribe a body to a spirit; and in both, we tumble to our knees before fictions.

  “Let us enjoy ourselves to the full: such is Nature’s law; and as it is altogether impossible to love for long the object we enjoy, let us calmly accept that things be with us as they are with those creatures we sometimes unjustly deem inferior. Do we observe the pigeon or the dog return and salute his companion when finished with her? bow and scrape, kiss her paw or claw? If loves flares up in a dog, this love could as well be called need, is nothing else than need; once the bitch has satisfied him, indifference, aversion characterize his attitude toward her until he begins to desire again; but his desire will not be for the same female; all those he comes across will each in turn become the object of the inconstant male’s attentions; and if a dispute arises, yesterday’s favorite will be sacrificed as today’s rival. Ah, we err when we depart from these models, closer than we to Nature; they act in much nearer harmony with her laws; and if Nature has allotted us a few more sensitive faculties than they, this is in order that we refine their pleasures. From the moment we recognize that if the human female is more than an animal the difference is made up wholly of shortcomings, why must we reverence this portion which in fact humbles her? We may love her body, as the animal loves its mate’s; but let us have no sentiments for what we suppose distinct from the body, since precisely there is located that which counterbalances the rest, that which alone ought to make us reject her entire. Yes, oh yes, the womanish character, her surliness, her unwholesome mind, her perfidious soul, these ought always to dampen in me any inclination to enjoy a woman’s body, and if you would gauge to what extent his reason has been impaired by metaphysical frenzy, only listen to the love-sick exclaim that it is not his beloved’s body he wants, but her heart—her heart! that thing which should rather make him flee in horror from her presence. This extravagance has no parallel; more, beauty being nothing but an affair of convention, love can be no more than an arbitrary sentiment once beauty’s traits, which are what cause love to be born, are not uniform.

  “Love thus being simply the taste describing the requirements of a given individual’s organs, it is a physical impulse, neither more nor less, and with it delicacy of feeling, sophisticated modes of courtship can have nothing to do; for it is now plain that I love a blonde because she has attributes which establish close link with my senses; you love a brunette for similar reasons; and with both blonde and brunette, the material object becoming the instrument for the relief of our eminently material need, how are you going to apply your delicacy and your disinterest to this piece of plumbing? Do you fancy something metaphysical there? Then pride has induced you into prodigious error; a single glance should suffice to blast the illusion. Would you not call him mad, who in all earnestness insisted that he was fond of the sweet william’s scent but indifferent to the flower? There is no imagining into what incredible absurdities a man may tumble, who will become attached to and guided by every metaphysical mirage.

  “But, and here I anticipate a possible objection, but this worship has existed throughout the ages; the Greeks and Romans deified Love and his mother. To this I reply, the thing may have come about with them as it did with us; in Greece a
nd Rome women foretold the future also. Whence, probably, was born respect for them and from that respect, worship; I have already described how it may come about. However, concerning objects of worship, one ought to refer only very sparingly to the Ancients; peoples who adored fecal substances under the name of the god Sterculius and the sewers in the shape of the goddess Cloacina could readily worship women, so often likened by odor to those two classical divinities.

  “And so let us finally use our common sense and treat these ridiculous idols as the Japanese treat theirs, whenever they fail to obtain satisfaction from them. Let us worship away or pretend to worship, if you like, until our prayers have been answered and the desired thing has been obtained; once it is ours, let’s despise it; if we are refused, we’ll give the idol a hundred blows with a stick, to teach it to disdain our wishes; or if you prefer, we shall imitate the Ostiaks who when irked by their gods promptly take a lash to them; with a god that proves thoroughly useless there is but one thing to do: pulverize it; a feigned belief will be quite enough at those moments when you are in hope of results.

  “Love is a physical need, let us avoid ever considering it anything else.16 ‘Love,’ writes Voltaire, ’is the imagination’s embroidery upon Nature’s homespun.’ The aim of love, its desires, everything about it is physical; forever shun the object which would seem to demand anything more; absence and change are the sure remedies for love; one soon thinks no more about the person one has stopped seeing, and new delights efface the memory of old ones; regrets surrounding such losses do not long endure; irretrievable pleasures may of course engender bitter regrets, but those which are so easily replaced, those which are every moment reborn at every street corner, over these not a tear need be shed.

  “And think now, what if love were not an evil but something truly good, that which does really make us happy, why, we should have to spend a fourth part of our lives without any enjoyment at all! What man dares suppose he will be able to captivate a woman’s heart when he is past sixty? At sixty, however, if he be soundly made, he has still another fifteen years’ potential enjoyment ahead of him; but he has lost his looks and so must bid happiness adieu! We shall accept no such monstrous proposition; if age withers the roses of springtime, it does not extinguish either the desires or the means to satisfy them; and the pleasures one tastes in later years, ever more elaborate, more choice, further divested of that stony metaphysic, a very grave to voluptuousness; these pleasures, I say, are a thousand times more delicious gathered in the depths of debauchery, of crapulousness, and of libertinage than were those he used long ago to procure his fair mistress; in those days he toiled for her sake, and at present his only concern is for himself. Watch him, mark those refinements, observe how he clings to something which he knows he can caress for but a fleeting instant; what a wealth of details in his lewd amusements, how he wrings every drop of enjoyment from each … notice how he would make free of everything and how he wants all thoughts, all attentions to be concentrated upon him. The mere suspicion of pleasure in the object he is using would alarm him, infuriate him, he wants its submission, and that is all. Fair-haired Hebe averts her eyes, she cannot hide her revulsion; it matters not to seventy-year-old Philater, it is not in her behalf he exerts himself; and even these gasps and shudders of horror he produces only contribute to his mounting delight; disgust is easy to inspire; he is obliged to apply pressure; a few threats, then he opens his stinking mouth and sucks into it a sweet pure tongue; the young beauty quails; and suddenly here’s the image of rape and consequently, for Philater, one pleasure the more. At twenty did he experience the like? They would rush upon him, deluge him with kisses, bewilder him with caresses, he’d hardly have time enough to desire them, and it would be over in the twinkling of an eye, without his being sure it had happened at all. Indeed, can that be called a desire which is satisfied before it has had the chance to be born? And where can there be desire if it has not resistance to overcome? If then pleasure is only stirred up by the irritations of resistance encountered, and if the latter is only bred by aversion, it may become delicious to cause aversion, and all the caprices which disgust a woman may then become more sensual and a hundred times better than love … love, the absurdest of all follies, the most ridiculous, and doubtless the most dangerous, whereof I think I have given you adequate demonstration.”