Juliette

by Marquis de Sade

  “Even were it at the risk of a thousand lives. Speak.”

  “If you but knew how bored I am with my husband!”

  “Despite his indulgence?”

  “Is it for my sake he behaves as he does? He prostitutes me out of libertinage, out of jealousy; thus appeasing my passions, he reckons to forestall the birth of desires in me, and he prefers that it be through his will and choice I am fucked rather than through my own.”

  “A droll policy.”

  “It is the one he practices, it is that of an Italianized Spaniard, and there is nothing worse on the face of the earth.”

  “And you desire….”

  “To poison this tiresome man, to become regent once he is out of the way. The people prefer me to him, they adore my children; and I shall rule alone; you shall become my favorite, and your fortune is made.”

  “No, Charlotte, I shall not live with you, I am not attracted by the role you offer me; in addition, I am fond of my own country and am eager to return there soon. But you may rely upon my aid, since Ferdinand, who has a store of poisons of every sort, doubtless keeps them out of your reach. From me you shall have what you need; but a good turn in exchange for a good turn, Charlotte, bear in mind that what I promise is yours only provided I get your husband’s treasure. What does it amount to?”

  “It cannot exceed eighty million.”

  “In currencies?”

  “In ingots as well as in piasters, ounces, and sequins.”

  “How do we proceed?”

  “You see that window,” said Charlotte, pointing to a casement window not far from the one at which we were standing, “have a wagon with some good horses underneath it the day after tomorrow; I shall steal the key and hand everything down to you in sacks.”

  “And the watch?”

  “No sentinels are posted on this side.”

  “Listen,” I said to Charlotte, whose undoing I was excitedly plotting at that very moment, “there are steps I must take in order to obtain the poison you require, and I do not care to venture into this delicate matter unless I am sure of where I stand. Sign this paper,” said I, writing it out on the spot, “I shall then feel safe in acting, and neither of us will have anything further to worry about.”

  Blinded by her love for me, pressed by the extreme desire to be rid of her husband, Charlotte signed; and, signing, proved that prudence is rarely the consort of great passions. Herein as follows is the text she ratified:

  I shall steal all my husband’s treasure, and give it in payment to her who supplies me the poison necessary to send him to the next world.

  C. de L., Reg. N.

  “Excellent,” said I, “that puts me entirely at ease. The day after tomorrow, at the hour fixed, you may count upon the wagon. Serve me well, Charlotte; and so shall you be served in return. Now let us turn to play.”

  “Ah, dearest friend,” cried the Queen, overwhelming me with kisses, “what services you render me and how I adore you!”

  The fool! how far from reciprocal were my feelings. Oh, it was no longer possible to maintain the illusion, we had shed overmuch fuck together; I delighted only in the thought of her doom, and the document to which she had thoughtlessly put her name guaranteed it.

  “Shall we frig each other,” she said, “before calling in the accessories to our debauchery?”

  And without waiting for me to answer, the whore pushes me upon a bed, kneels between my thighs and sucks me, the while tickling my cunt and my asshole both at once. ’Twas then I availed myself of the faculty women have for mental infidelities; it was from Charlotte I was receiving voluptuous sensations, I was covered by her pollutions, her kisses, and yet no thought absorbed me save that of betraying Charlotte.

  Adulterous wives, there is your portrait: lying in your husbands’ arms, to your master you abandon only the bodily part of yourselves, and the sensations that arise in you are never but a response to your lover. The cuckolds delude themselves, supposing they are the cause of the raptures into which their motions plunge you, when actually, rub as much as they please, they are incapable of igniting even a spark. Bewitching sex, continue this deceit, it is natural; proof thereof resides in the suppleness of your imaginations; compensate yourselves thus, when you cannot do otherwise, for the preposterous chains of chastity and of wedlock, and never lose sight of the fact that if Nature made you a cunt for men to fuck, her hand at the very same instant created you the heart needed to betray them.

  Charlotte waxed drunk on my sperm, and I must honestly avow that it spilled forth in floods at the idea, delicious for a mind like mine, of forever ruining her who was responsible for its outpouring. She flings herself upon my breast, we pollute each other with ardor, she sucks my mouth, my nipples, and as I frig her to perfection, the tribade is shaken by twenty spasms in a row. We entwine ourselves, each buries her face between the other’s legs; tongue to clitoris, libertine finger in asshole and cunt, we sot ourselves upon each other’s fuck, all the while preoccupied by very dissimilar thoughts.

  Finally, Charlotte, all afire, is in a mood for libertinage, she rings, she would have me be the center of everything at first; the pregnant woman, within reach of my right hand, is offered to my vexations; the girl, straddling my chest, simultaneously offers me the sweetest cunt to lick and the most charming ass. Charlotte excites the pricks and herself pilots them into me.

  “I am infatuated by the idea of having a queen for my bawd,” I declare to Charlotte; “go to it, whore, ply your trade.”

  But engines of the size of those Ferdinand has procured for us are not easy to accommodate; and however veteran may be my charms, I am unable to endure, without preparation, such monstrous attacks. Charlotte therefore moistens the thoroughfares; to the entrance of my cunt and to the fucker’s gargantuan member she applies an ointment thanks to which, at the first lunge, the monster is able to pass to the midway mark. However, the pain is so sharp that, expelling a furious cry, I send flying the little girl who has been perched above my chest; I struggle, thrash, seek to rid myself of the shaft. My efforts are countered by Charlotte, she pushes us together, my fucker and me, and thus aided, the hero thunders to the farthermost depths of my womb: I had never suffered so much. But these thorns are soon transformed into roses; such is my rider’s skillfulness, such the power of his strokes, that at the fourth heave of his loins my fuck answers, and from then on everything moves smoothly. Charlotte, favoring the act, stimulating the organs and the asshole of my fucker, to my left hand offers her buttocks, which I molest with quite as much violence as I do those of the pregnant woman, and the little girl, tongued by me, splashes her dulcet ejaculation upon my face. What energy in that Calabrian! He saws me for twenty minutes, finally erupts, and refucks me three more times without retiring from the lists; I put him aside after an hour of this. His comrade replaces him. While I am fucking with this second one, Charlotte decides she would like to see both of them in my body. She arranges our positions. I am in the second fucker’s arms, stretched out on top of him, ’tis I who do the fucking while he lies quietly still; I handle, I maltreat a cunt with my right hand, my left is socratizing an ass, my tongue is licking a clitoris. The first man, assisted by the Queen, presents himself at my asshole; but habituated though I am to this mode of pleasure-taking, we battle for a quarter of an hour, without his succeeding in making the least headway into the breach. These multiple efforts cause me an incredible agitation: I gnash my teeth, foam at the mouth, I bite everything I can get at, I drench with fuck the prick ploughing my cunt, ’tis upon that prick I vent my wrath at being unable to incorporate another one anally. By dint of perseverance and cunning, it is nevertheless beginning to progress, I feel it; my encunter stirs from his passivity, contributing a heave of the loins to facilitate his comrade’s task. I utter a piercing scream, I am embuggered. … It beggared comparison with anything I had ever experienced previously.

  “What a divine spectacle!” cried Charlotte, masturbating smartly in front of us, and sometimes b
ending near to kiss me. “Christ! what an aperture! Happy Juliette!”

  And I discharged, and I was like one run amuck, I lost sight of everything, was deaf to everything, all my powers of sensation had concentrated in my erotic regions; I belonged uniquely to joy.

  Both my men, without withdrawing, simultaneously fought another fierce bout, and when I dislodged them, fuck covered me down to the heels, it seeped from my pores.

  “Your turn, slut,” I say to Charlotte, “duplicate what I have just done if you care to know the meaning of pleasure.”

  She requires little urging; promptly stuffed before and behind, the jade proves to me that if her husband has been allowing her a few amusements, with a view to placating a libertinage which might pose dangers to his own safety, he has not been entirely wrong. Like us cruel in her voluptuous moments, the bitch asks me, while she cunt-sucks the little girl and is being fucked in cunt and ass, to tease the pregnant woman. That poor soul implores my mercy; I am not to be moved. Angered and heated by lewdness, I bring my knee up against her stomach, she totters backward and falls, I leap and stamp upon her belly; then I beat her, I throttle her; watching it all, Charlotte eggs me on, stammering forth horrors. Having got herself double-fucked twice, the whore at last dismisses the men, and rises. We quaff off two bottle of champagne and pass back into the salon where we find all the company already gathered. Everybody was relating his prowesses; it was easy to deduce that it had not been in our boudoir alone that pregnant women had met with abuse: not one of them was able to hold herself upright; Gravines’ especially … she was about to enter labor; and the villain had flogged her half to death.

  Dinner was magnificent in the extreme; the girls waited upon us at table, and the pregnant women, lying on the floor beneath our feet, were the targets of all kinds of hard treatment. Seated next to Clairwil, I found the opportunity to mention to her the trick for which I had laid the groundwork; although I could give her only one or two details, she perfectly grasped my design, congratulated me, affirmed that I was the cleverest and the most venturesome woman she knew.

  Electrified by the delicate fare and the exquisite wines, we removed, tipsily, to a superb hall readied for the orgies that we needed to celebrate. There, the agents were Ferdinand, Gravines, La Riccia, Clairwil, Charlotte, Olympia, and myself. The victims: the four pregnant women, the four young girls who had waited upon us at dinner, and the eight comely children in the one sex and the other whose asses had dispensed the brandies which followed coffee. Fourteen stout warriors, at least as grandly proportioned, as high-strung as those we had drained in the morning, appeared, their lances couched; they were all naked, quivering, and respectfully, with bated breath, awaiting the laws it would please us to decree in their regard. The stage required to be lit, since we had tarried long at table and the hour was advanced: five hundred candles, hid by green gauze shades, produced a soft and most agreeable light throughout that hall.

  “No more privacy, no more intimate conversation,” said the King; “henceforth we must operate within full view of one another.”

  Thereupon, in the most anarchical fashion, we fling ourselves at the nearest object to hand: we fuck, have fucked, are fucked; but cruelty always presides over lewd doings as disorderly as ours. Here, breasts were being kneaded and wrung; there, asses were being lashed; to the right cunts were being stretched, gravid women were being martyrized to the left, and moans and sighs of pain or of pleasure, mingled with lamentations to one side, with awful blasphemies to the other side, were for a good while the only sounds to be heard. Little by little, however, the more energetic outbursts heralding discharges began to ring forth; Gravines was the first to utter his yell. Alas! no sooner had he pronounced the expressions announcing his delirium than we saw fall at his feet, in the middle of the swirling groups surrounding him, a woman, her throat cut, the fruit torn from her womb, and mother and child bathed both in blood.

  “That is not my way of going about it,” said La Riccia, ordering one of those swollen sows to be tied fast to the wall. “Your attention, if you please,” said he, “kindly watch.”

  He dons a pair of hobnailed boots, places his hands on the shoulders of two men and catapults himself feet first at the belly of the would-be mother who, her seams split, rent, bloodied, faints in her bonds and looses her worthless fruit, upon which the lustful nobleman straightway sprays his foaming seed. Very close to the spot where this occurred, being fucked at once frontwise and from behind, sucking the device of a youth who chose this moment to discharge into my mouth, frigging a cunt with either hand, I could not help but share the Prince’s pleasures, and after his example I surrendered my sperm. Doing so, I cast a glance at Clairwil: someone was embuggering her; a young girl was sucking her cunt and the slut was flogging a little boy; she too discharges. Charlotte, en-cunted, was sucking a little boy, frigging a couple of girls, and was having a pregnant woman flogged upon the belly. Ferdinand was operating upon a girl: he was plucking at her parts with red-hot pincers; he was being sucked apace, and when he sensed his discharge near, the villain, armed with a scalpel, sliced off his victim’s nipples and tossed them at us. Such, roughly speaking, were our pleasures when Ferdinand suggested that we move into an adjoining chamber where an ingenious machine, said he, was ready to put the pregnant women to an interesting death. The two of them who are left are in consequence affixed to large steel plates, one woman facing upward, the other facing downward, in such sort that their bellies are in exact perpendicular line: the upper plate is elevated ten feet above the lower.

  “All right,” says the King, “make ready for pleasure.”

  Everyone presses around, and several minutes later Ferdinand touches a lever, and the two plates, one rising, the other descending, come together with such force that the two creatures, colliding, are, they and their fruit, shortly squashed to a pulp. You will, I trust, have no trouble understanding that not one of those present was able to resist this spectacle, not one who did not salute it with a fuck and other expressions of divine praise.

  “Shall we move on to another room?” said our amiable host. “Other joys may be awaiting us elsewhere.”

  This enormous hall was occupied by a vast theater; seven different sets of equipment for inflicting that many varieties of death were in a state of readiness there; four torturers, each naked and handsome as Mars, stood by to administer each torture, the first of these being fire; the second, the whip; the third, the rope; the fourth, the wheel; the fifth, the pale; the sixth, decapitation; the seventh, general dissection. Each guest was provided with a separate loge containing a gallery of fifty portraits of children, boys and girls, all as pretty as one could hope to see. We assumed our individual places, each accompanied by a fucker, a little girl, and a little boy, whose functions were to minister to our pleasures during the executions. Next to each portrait hung a silken cord activating a bell.

  “Each shall, in his turn, select a victim from among the fifty representations surrounding him,” Ferdinand announced; “he shall ring the bell corresponding to the object of his choice, his victim shall appear immediately in his loge; he shall dally with that victim for a moment. You will notice that from each loge a staircase leads up to the stage; preliminaries over, the guest shall march his victim up, direct him to the torture he deems most arousing, then inflict it himself, if he cares to; otherwise, he shall signal to the torturer in charge, and the victim, taken promptly in hand by that officer, shall be sacrificed before his eyes. But for your pleasures’ sake I urge you not to act save one by one: we have no need to hurry, dear guests, and life’s best spent hours are always those one spends wresting life away from others.”

  “Damn me,” Clairwil said to the King, “if I have often encountered an imagination so fertile as yours.”

  “Oh,” rejoined the Neapolitan, “mine is a claim to only very modest glory. All these fantasies used to raise the pricks of my forebears, those tyrants of ancient Syracuse. In my archives I uncovered traces of these horrors
, studied them, for they impressed me in the most favorable sense; I enjoy reviving tradition with my friends.”

  Gravines rings first; his choice falls upon a youth of sixteen, superb to see. The boy appears, and Gravines, who has sole rights to the use of him, whips him, sucks him, bites his member, crushes one of his testicles, embuggers him, and finally sends him off to be burned: as a sodomite, the sarcastic Duke declares, it is only fitting that he perish by fire. Clairwil rings next and, needless to say, her choice also settles upon a male: he was scarcely eighteen years old, he was as fair as Adonis; the wicked soul sucks, frigs, fustigates him, has him lick her cunt and ass; then, springing up to the stage with him, the buggeress impales him with her own hands, having herself embuggered by one of the torturers in the meantime.

  Olympia’s turn follows; a thirteen-year-old girl is the object she chooses. She caresses her, and has her hanged.

  After her comes Ferdinand. Like Clairwil, he chooses a youth. “I am fond of torturing women,” he explains, “but I take even greater pleasure in killing individuals of my sex.”

  The adolescent appears: twenty years of age, membered like Hercules, with the face of Love. Ferdinand has himself tupped, tups in return, flagellates his victim, conducts him to the apparatus upon which he is to be broken. Broken, the victim is strapped to a wheel and left to expire there, at the rear of the stage.

  La Riccia’s fancy is caught by a maid of sixteen, lovely as the Goddess of Youth, and after having subjected her to all manner of abominations, he has her chopped up into small pieces.

  Charlotte rings for a little girl of twelve, and once she is done frolicking with her, the Queen, while being fucked by two men, has the child beheaded.