“My love, are you then without belief in another life?”
“I would be greatly ashamed to have to own to belief in such nonsense. But, fully enlightened as you are upon that and related questions, I doubt whether I have much to teach you thereanent, and I am confident that, imbued with the basic principles of philosophy, both the immortality of the soul and the existence of God are to your consideration extravagances not worth a minute’s thought. The falsity of all those doctrines being manifest, there is one which I construct upon their wreckage and it may perhaps claim to a certain originality. I base it upon a multitude of experiences. I maintain that what is taken for a naturally inspired horror of death is merely the fruit of the absurd fears which we, starting in childhood, develop regarding this total annihilation, fears initiated by the religious notions our elders stupidly cram into our young heads. Once cured of these fears and reassured concerning our fate, not only do we cease to behold death with alarm and repugnance, but it becomes easy to prove that death is in reality nothing more nor less than a voluptuous pleasure. You will admit, first, that one cannot help but be certain that death is one of the necessities of Nature, who does not create us save to die; if we begin, it is in order to end; each instant advances us nowhere but toward that terminal point; everything indicates that death is Nature’s final and sole aim. Now, I ask how it is possible to doubt, in the light of acquired experience, that death, as a natural necessity and as something needed by Nature, can be anything else than a pleasure, since all palpable evidence proves convincingly that every one of life’s necessities is pleasure-producing. Therefore, I reason, there is pleasure in dying; it is therefore possible to conceive that, with reflection and with philosophy, one may convert into very voluptuous ideas all death’s ridiculous frights, and that sensual excitement may even bring on thoughts of death and induce in one an eager expectancy of death.”
“That doctrine, entirely new, and not without plausibility,” I said to my friend, “would be dangerous to publish. Think of how many people are held in check by nothing except fear of death and who, once liberated from that dread, could calmly—”
“One moment,” said my delightful friend, “I have never sought to discourage anyone from crime; rather, I have always toiled to remove all the obstacles stupidity has strewn in its path. Crime is my element; Nature brought me into the world to advance its cause, and my task and ambition are to multiply to infinity all the means to commit it.
“The trade I have elected and which I exercise more out of libertinage than from material necessity, proves my extreme desire to promote crime; I have no more ardent passion than that of propagating it generally, and if I could envelop the whole world within my toils, I would blast it to dust without hesitation or remorse.”
“And against which sex does your libertine fury plot with greater delight?”
“It is not a person’s sex that arouses me, it is his age, his ties with others, his condition. When the suitable factors are found in a man, I extract greater enjoyment from immolating him than a woman; when they converge in a woman, the preference goes automatically to her.”
“And what are these standards of suitability?” I inquired.
“I ought not tell you.”
“Why not?”
“From these confessions you will draw no end of fallacious inferences, likely, subsequently, to have a damaging effect upon our relationship.”
“Ah, my dear, you have already said enough: I am then to assume that your favors are so many condemnations to death?”
“Certainly; have I not told you so? Listen to me, Juliette, and put your fears away. Far be it from me to disguise the fact that any object I use for the simple and unique purpose of consumption, and with which I enter into no other relationship, must undergo the fate of any other commodity. But if, on the other hand, in that object I encounter sympathetic intellectual traits, imaginative qualities such as those I have found in you, then, be assured of it, rather than severing connections with such an object, I do but tighten them by every means at my command. In the name of the most tender affection, cease, my love, to harbor doubts; I offered you the surest guarantee of my good faith, you decline it out of tact, do not leave me to suppose now that your mind is at odds with your heart. Besides, have I any powers you yourself do not dispose of?”
“Most assuredly you do,” I answered, “and I am far from knowing the whole range or subtlety of your capacities.”
“As you like,” my friend said, smiling, “but be persuaded that this art of mine shall, with you, be put to no other use than to constrain you to love me.”
“Ah, count upon it; I realize that between villains there is never any conflict, and believe me, but for the awful suspicions you stirred up in me, I would never have sacrificed Clairwil.”
“Do I detect a note of regret behind that avowal, Juliette?”
“Not at all, not at all,” said I, showering kisses upon my friend, “let us have an end to the discussion thereupon; I give myself into your keeping, I repeat it, you can place your trust in my heart as I put my reliance in yours; our strength is in our union, and nothing will dissolve it. Now tell me the rest of what I am eager to hear about the factors which incite you to the consummation of crime: I am anxious to find out whether they concur with mine, and so far I notice great similarities.”
“I told you that age had a great deal to do with it: I love to wither the plant at the noon of its perfection: between fifteen and seventeen years old, that is the stage at which I consider roses fittest for gathering, especially when they are in flawless health and when Nature, whose purposes I know how to cross, seems to have designed the object to live in exuberant well-being to the end of a long and happy life. Ah, Juliette, how I enjoy performing such interventions! Ties irritate me also: I delight in depriving a father of his child, a lover of his mistress.”
“A tribade of her handmaid?”
“Why yes, little minx; is it my fault if unfathomable Nature made me the rascal I am? If it is to me the object belongs, then the pleasure is twofold. I also said that the person’s condition contributes significantly to the excitement of my imagination: here, I am partial to the two extremes, wealth and high estate, or obscurity and misfortune. Generally speaking, I aim, when striking, to produce as many disastrous aftereffects and melancholy repercussions as possible, I like it to cause much weeping, I discharge at the sight of those tears. Their abundance or bitterness brings forth my fuck, the harder and more copiously they flow, the more powerful my spasm.”
“Oh, gentlest, most charming friend,” said I, my head beginning to reel, “frig me, I beseech you; you see what your words are doing to me; I have never known anyone whose attitudes were in closer harmony with my own. Next to you, Clairwil was a mere child; you are what my happiness demands, you are the woman I have been seeking, never leave me again.”
And Durand, to take fullest advantage of my ecstasy, having helped me to a couch, frigged me with three fingers as I had never in my life been frigged before. I replied in kind; I sucked her clitoris; and when I spied her asshole opening and closing like a flower thirstily responding to the sweetly descending dew, I put on a dildo and flung into her bum, frigging her still while I embuggered her. That vent was of unprecedented diameter. My instrument had a girth of eight inches, a length of twelve; I but brought it up and it vanished out of sight. And when it was gone, then the whore let loose oaths, she shuddered and shook like a lunatic; and well I saw that if Nature had excluded her from knowledge of the common kind of pleasures, she had richly compensated Durand in bestowing upon her the extremest sensitivity to these. One of my new friend’s outstanding talents lay in her ability to give pleasure while receiving it; she was so supple, so elastic, that even as I embuggered her, she wound herself like a vine around my body, succeeded in kissing my mouth, and in inserting fingers into my fundament. Sometimes forgetting everything else in order to concentrate upon her sensations alone, she would then curse with greater vigor tha
n I had ever known in a person; and from whatever angle one considered this remarkable woman, one discovered that, child of crime, of lust, and of infamy, every last one of her physical and moral qualities contributed to making her the most exceptional libertine of her century. Durand wanted to do for me all I had done for her. She embuggered me and, lewdly frigged by her, I comfortably withstood the same dildo, I discharged thrice in response to its blows; and, I say again, I had never had dealings with a woman who so grasped the art of giving pleasure.
From there we returned to drinking, and when we were very high, “Come,” Durand said to me, “let us go out into the streets and befoul ourselves with a little libertinage. Let us go and see the funeral preparations that have been made for the fifteen-year-old girl, a lovely creature, whom I poisoned yesterday at the solicitation of her father who, after having nicely fucked her, wanted to be revenged for an indiscretion she then committed.”
We went out costumed in the manner of the courtesans of the country; night had fallen.
“Before anything else,” said my friend, “I suggest that we betake ourselves down to the harbor and frig a few sailors; we ought to be able to uncover some monsters. You simply would not believe the pleasure I find in squeezing the juice out of those sausages….”
“For shame, whore,” said I, kissing her, “you are tipsy.”
“A little, perhaps; but do not conclude that Bacchus’ aid is necessary to light the fires of libertinage in me. Divine powers are ascribed to that rascal, I know, and I never undertake lewd exercises in a better mood than when I have stuffed myself upon delicate cooking and fine wines; but without those stimulants I am perfectly capable of overstepping the last limits of decency and modesty—you shall see.”
No sooner did we reach the port than a host of sailors and stevedores crowded around us.
“Holla, good friends,” Durand cries, “no hurly-burly, behave yourselves and fret not, we are going to satisfy you, every last one. Here, look at this girl: she is French.1 She entered the business only yesterday; and now she is going to sit down on that bollard, she is going to lift her skirts, and she is going to offer you whichever side best suits your tastes; and I am going to frig you upon her charms.”
This speech was applauded by the throng. The first of at least fifteen suitors wants to see my bare bosom: his uncouth attentions might have spoiled its appearance had not my companion forbidden him any gestures; he had therefore to restrict himself to covering my breasts with fuck; they were shortly awash. The second wants me, sitting on the bollard, to spread my thighs as far apart as possible, in order that he can be frigged against my clitoris. I prove unable to resist the massiveness of the member whose tip, guided by Durand, nuzzles the approaches to my vagina; impelled by an involuntary reflex, I leap forward and incorporate it up to the height of the balls. No sooner does the funny chap feel himself caught than he clutches me in his arms, lifts me up, lifts up my skirts and exhibits my ass to the whole assembly. One of those frenetics advances, claps his hands to my bum, palpates it, spears it, and there am I, carried by two partners, the object of both their caresses and homages.
“Hold,” says Durand, “give her something firm to take purchase upon”—and, with those words, she puts an enormous member into each of my hands. “What an engaging group,” the bawd observes, presenting her behind to a fifth seaman. “Here, my friend, here is my ass, let us include ourselves in the scene, form one of its episodes; I cannot, alas, propose you anything else, Nature is to blame for my disability; but reassure yourself, the heat of my asshole and its narrowness will make you forget any craving you may have for my cunt.”
Other postures were struck betimes. I dealt with better than fifty of those low fellows. My companion rubbed them with a water just prior to penetration, and by that means I was able to receive them all without fear: I was fucked forty-five times in less than three hours. Durand did nought but essay them; she fetched them up to me afterward, and they terminated, according to their choice, either in my ass or in my cunt. The lewd thing sucked practically everything she could get her hands upon, since she had a palate for pricks, and was not, need I remind you, a woman to curb her tastes. Our bandits once satisfied, we must drink with them, for that was the custom.
“And it is one of the best parts of all,” Durand murmured to me, “you have no idea how, in vile company, I relish plunging into whatever is characterized by swinish intemperance, filthiest debauchery.”
When we were done feeding it was because neither of us could swallow another mouthful. We had devoured not one, but two huge meals, paid for by those scoundrels, twenty of whom had contributed two sequins apiece, which came, all told, to nearly five hundred francs. During that banquet we drank, we ate, we let ourselves be handled, pawed, fucked, and we besotted ourselves, in fine, to the point where, the two of us sprawled on the floor in the center of the tavern, we gave ourselves to that mob upon strict condition that they first vomit, piss, and shit all over our faces, before sticking us. They all consented to those terms, and by the time our nasty orgy was ended, we were half-drowned in urine, ordures, and sperm.
“Children,” said my companion once order had been restored, “it now behooves us to make ourselves known to you and, in recognition of the fine supper you have given us, to make some samples of our merchandise available to you. Among you would there be anyone with a personal grudge to settle, or some vindictiveness to express? We are going to supply him the means. Purveyors of the best poisons in Italy, specify your requirements to us, and upon whom the product is to be used.”
Would you believe it, my friends? (for, oh, just heavens, what progress humankind has made in depravity) a clamor rose up, and with one voice they begged us to be liberal in the distribution of our baneful gifts; and there was not a single one who lacked, so he claimed, a most excellent purpose to put them to. All were provided for; and that libidinous soiree may perhaps have rendered us the cause of sixty murders.
“Come,” Durand said to me, “the hour is not late, further adventures may be awaiting us. And I have the most positive urge to go and verify the success of my pretty little fifteen-year-old’s death.”
And so we bade our hosts farewell after having embraced them warmly.
Reaching the square in front of the cathedral we came at once upon a funeral procession. In Italy it being the tradition to expose the dead in their caskets, Durand had no trouble identifying the features of the lovely child upon whom her venom had done its work.
“There she is, there she is,” she whispered excitedly, “oh, fuck my soul! let’s stand over here in the shadows and frig each other as she goes by.”
“Rather than that,” I said, “let’s precede her into the cathedral; we will station ourselves in a chapel and do what you suggest while watching the burial.”
“The final is the better moment, you are right,” said Durand; “quick, let’s go in.”
We were fortunate enough to find a secluded spot directly behind the confessional in the very chapel where the young body was to be laid to rest. We shrank back against the wall, and there we stood, fingering each other’s organs while the ceremony went forward, and timing our movements in such a way that no fuck would escape us until, the casket having been lowered into the vault, our discharge could, after a fashion, serve as holy water unto the deceased. All was soon over, the priests and mourners withdrew; but the work of sealing the tomb was left incomplete, and we saw that the gravedigger either had intentions we could not yet divine, or preferred, in view of the late hour, to come back and finish his masonry the next day.
“Ha!” said Durand, “let us linger here, an incredible whim has just entered my head. ’Twas a pretty creature they buried, eh?”
“Well?”
“We’ll pluck her out of that tomb, my dear, you’ll frig me upon that delicious face, beautiful still despite the funereal darkness gathering upon the brows. Say, are you afraid?”
“No.”
“Then let us stay.”
By and by the church is closed. We are alone in it.
“How I like this lugubrious silence,” said Durand; “how it invites to crime, how it quickens the passions—it reflects the stillness of the grave. And, I tell you so, death puts the thrill of lust in me. To work.”
“Stay,” I murmured. “I believe I hear sounds.”
And we hasten back to our niche. Ye gods! what did we perceive? Someone else was beating us to the treasure; and who? Heavens above, what execrable depravation! The father himself was coming to gloat over his abominable deed, he was coming to consummate it; the gravedigger preceded him, a lantern in his hand.
“Lift her forth,” he was told by the father, “so great is my grief that I must once again take her in my arms before losing her forever.”
The casket reappears, from it the body is removed, then laid out by the gravedigger upon the steps of the altar.
“Very good, my friend, that will do; leave me for a time,” says the incestuous and barbaric author of that charming girl’s days, “I wish to weep undisturbed. Let me shed my tears at my ease, you may return in two hours’ time, and I shall reward you for your zeal.”
The doors are closed again.
Oh, my friends, how am I to describe the horrors we witnessed? Describe them I must, however: they are aberrances of the human heart I am exposing, and I am bound to unveil its every nook and cranny.
Although the church had been locked shut, for added safety the rascal barricades himself inside the chapel, lights four tapers, places two at the head, two at the feet of his daughter, then draws away the shroud; and she lies naked before him. Unspeakable quiverings of pleasure then take possession of him; his twitching muscles, his hoarse respiration, the upstanding prick he trundles into sight, everything paints the ignited state of his soul.
“Damn my eyes!” he cries, “there it is, the thing I did … I repent me not…. Go, ’twas not your waggling tongue I punished, but my villainy I contented; the idea of killing you stiffened my prick, I’d fucked you a little too often, now I am pleased.”
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