Juliette

by Marquis de Sade

  “Pray do not interrupt anything on my account, Signor,” I hastened to say to him, “simply remember that she is not the one you have contracted for.”

  “And I am dreadfully sorry about it,” the rake replied, his words punctuated by gasps of pleasure, “I am dreadfully—sorry—for her ass—the most beautiful ass in creation, the—tightest fitting—oh, with this there are—wonders to be achieved. However,” he went on, backing out of the breach, “I shall not discharge, ’twould be wiser for me to husband my forces. There,” said he, wiping his prick, recovering his breath, “let us talk business for a moment.”

  Raimonde retired from the room; and the three of us, Cordelli, Durand, and I, drew up chairs and sat down.

  “My impatience got the better of me,” he explained; “I arrived just as you were getting up from the table, Madame Durand told me that you were amusing yourself with the one reserved for me. Seeing Raimonde with our friend, I formed a desire to have her, and I must own that the having of her made me regret that not she but the other one is to be my victim. ‘ ’Tis Juliette’s favorite,’ Madame Durand informed me, ‘Juliette will never agree to part with her.’ Mademoiselle,” the seducer continued, taking hold of my hand, “listen to me. I am a generous man to deal with; I own millions, having for the past twenty years pocketed every penny of the profits from the celebrated Senigallia Fair:2 a few thousand sequins more, a few thousand sequins less, trifles I do not deign to take notice of when my passions are at stake. I do not know Elise; but I know your Raimonde, she pleases me infinitely. I have seen divine behinds in my day, I never fuck any save the warmest and the snuggest. This girl must be superb in distress; and, to put it simply, she is one of the most suitable women for victimization I have beheld in years. This then is what I am going to do: Sight unseen, I shall take the other one, because I said I would, and I shall take this one too, in this case knowing what I am getting: will six thousand sequins be acceptable for the pair?”

  “Hardly,” I replied, feeling greed, love of gold crowd every other sentiment out of my heart. “Twenty thousand sequins and you get the two of them.”

  “But,” Cordelli reminded me, “I have already bought one for a thousand.”

  “Consider the bargain broken; I sell them together or not at all, and I am not going to let them go for anything under the price I just named.”

  “I can only approve my friend’s decision,” Durand put in; “it strikes me that you are lucky to obtain the darling of her affections so cheaply.”

  “A girl I worship, and I sell her to whom? to a villain who intends to kill her!”

  “Yes indeed,” the Italian admitted, “and to kill her to the tune of ghastly tortures, I assure you.”

  “Well, such amusements must be paid for, Signor. Make up your mind, for let pity reassert its rights in my heart and you’ll end up with nothing.”

  “Your merchandise is expensive, Mademoiselle,” the tradesman observed. “But, damn my eyes! you catch me at a moment when the heat of lust puts right reason to rout. Show this voucher to my bookkeeper and he will immediately disburse the funds. In the meantime let us have a look at the other girl.”

  “Scoundrel,” I whispered to my friend, “this is another example of your work. You seem to be determined to leave me nobody.”

  “Oh, Juliette, for that blame nought but my love; think not that you shall ever regret having lost everybody else, for in having me you shall have more than a whole world.”

  And she went off to collect the money.

  I summoned Elise.

  “Charming!” the rake exclaimed once he clapped eyes upon her. “Little wonder that you ask such a figure for such an article.” And hastening to undress the girl, his enthusiasm but rose when he was able to admire her charms in their entirety. He submits that delicate and sweetly modeled ass to a searching examination; he kisses it indefatigably, spreads it, tongues it, fucks it, comes forth to kiss it anew; and ardent though they be, the caresses he lavishes upon it, he cannot tear himself away from the divine object.

  “Have the other one come in, we shall compare the two side by side.”

  Raimonde appears and, soon just as naked as Elise, she offers her examiner everything needed to facilitate his observations. The scrupulousness wherewith he proceeds is not to be imagined: the buttocks especially claim his narrow-eyed attention. While he concentrates upon his study I lay a light hand to his member, frig him slowly; his hands stray now and then to my buttocks, which he fondles while thrusting his tongue into my mouth; and then he embuggers Elise, while slapping us smartly, Raimonde and me.

  “Truth to tell, the one is worth no less than the other,” he confides to me in private, “and both are delightful. I shall cause them much suffering.”

  “Which, in your view, is the better ass?” I asked him.

  “Oh, Raimonde’s, no doubt about it,” he replied, kissing that lovely personage with feeling; “better for temperature, better for fit…. Juliette, lie down upon that bed,” the insatiable libertine said, “I am of a mind to ass-fuck you also.”

  He has Elise station herself to my left, Raimonde to my right: he then kneads and pinches their two behinds while fucking mine. Then, abruptly breaking off contact, “Enough,” he says, “else I discharge. Time is passing; let us be on our way.”

  The two girls retire to make themselves ready for the journey. Finding myself alone with the Italian, “Don’t deny it,” I say, “it was my companion who induced you to choose Raimonde. Eh?”

  “I shall not hide from you that she is eager to see her die.”

  “The vixen! ’Tis jealousy: a sufficient motive, in so far as I am concerned. Oh, never fear, my mind is made up, those two wretches must be treated infernally.” I was frigging him as I spoke, he was standing in front of me, I was rubbing his prick against my breasts, tickling his anus. “And,” I wondered, “exactly what form of torture are you reserving for them?”

  “You would not have it be mild?”

  “Ah, if it were up to me, their torments would surpass anything you can imagine.”

  “Delicious creature…. That is the way I like women to be; they are more ferocious than men if they will but give outlet to their aptitudes.”

  “Behind that lie natural reasons,” I answered, “their organs are more finely constructed, their sensitivity profounder, their nerves more irascible: barbarity is not a trait of the individual of inferior sensibility.”

  “Precisely; and with a much keener imagination than the one we have, a woman cannot help but embrace excesses more avidly: which is why, in crime, women always go farther than we. Let a duel be announced, a gladiatorial combat, a public execution, and you see women flock to watch the spectacle; take a count of the onlookers, each time you will find women outnumbering men ten to one. A great many fools,” the tradesman added, “dupes of this incredible faculty for feeling they notice in women, fail to realize that extremes coincide, and that it is precisely at the source of this capacity that cruelty has its origin.”

  “Because cruelty is in itself but an extension of sensitivity,” said I, “and because the great horrors we commit are always owing to the higher degree of our soul’s sensitivity.”

  “Listening to you, it is as though one were conversing with an angel, dear heart,” said Signor Cordelli; “kiss me and kiss me again, I am as much taken by your mind as by your charms. You ought to attach yourself to me.”

  “I am inviolably attached to my friend,” I replied; “only death will sunder us.”

  “She would come with you.”

  “No, we wish to see our native land again.”

  At that point I heard Durand’s footsteps. Going to greet her, I was able, as we stood out of range of Cordelli’s hearing, to learn of the pretty coup she had just executed.

  “I tampered with the voucher,” Durand told me. “We have double the sum.”

  “Forty thousand sequins?”

  “Yes, they are already locked safely away.”

 
“Celestial creature!”

  “Do you regret the transaction now?”

  “Not anymore. But when Cordelli next sees his bookkeeper?”

  “By then the crime will be consummated. One word of complaint out of the scoundrel and one word from us will have him broken on the wheel.”

  “Kiss me, cleverest of friends!”

  “Come and take your half of the money.”

  “What need is there of that? Let us first attend to Cordelli; we shall divide our earnings when we return.”

  “I would like you to have the entire sum; it gives me greater pleasure to see you at the summit of opulence than to increase my own wealth.”

  And Cordelli having sent for us, we all set forth. After a several hours’ drive we reached the tradesman’s castle, a veritable fortress situated upon a spur of rock jutting out into the sea. By a little farm lying at the base of the rock the carriage drew to a halt, for the road went no farther. From that point on there were steps to climb, four hundred of them in all, these being the sole means of access to that redoubtable house. Before beginning the ascent we had to pass an iron gate, to which the tradesman had the key; there were six other gates like it at intervals along the stairway, and Cordelli opened and carefully closed each of them as we proceeded up. Durand, noticing my expression of surprise gradually yield to one of alarm, saw fit to reassure me. To Cordelli she said: “Yes, the description you gave me of your house’s whereabouts was exact, and our servants, who will easily find the place, have instructions to come to fetch us tomorrow morning if by ten o’clock we are not back in Ancona.”

  “I am well known throughout the region,” said the tradesman, likewise eager, as it seemed to me, to put me at ease; “but you need not have troubled to give your orders, Madame Durand, you have my promise that we shall be returning to the city tonight, and you know me well enough to be sure that my word is my bond.”

  Our two girls were not so easily reassured. A kind of premonition always accompanies impending woe, the unlucky pair felt it in all its force, the knees of both were buckling from terror.

  A final gate is unlocked and then shut behind us; we are welcomed by two women of sixty.

  “Everything is ready?” asks Cordelli.

  “Since this morning, Signor,” one of the women replies; “we did not think you would be coming so late.”

  We advance; it is a rather somber, low-ceilinged hall we enter first.

  Cordelli moves to a window, draws the curtain aside. “Look where we are,” says he.

  And great was our astonishment to see that we were some three hundred feet above the sea, and nearly surrounded by water.

  “This rock describes a curve,” the Italian explained; “here, at its outermost point, we are about half a league from the mainland. One may make as much noise as one likes, there is slight chance of being heard by anybody.”

  We left that room, mounted a flight of stairs which brought us to another: in it the scene was to take place.

  Never perhaps had my eyes beheld anything quite so horrible. Upon a round dais located in the center of that room, itself circular, we made out, upon entering, all the divers instruments necessary to every known form of torture. Among them were some so execrable, so inconceivable and outlandish that I had never even dreamed of their existence. Two huge swarthy men, six feet tall, wearing fearful moustaches, of terrifying mien, naked as savages, stood at attention amidst that array of equipment, visibly ready to carry out the orders they were waiting to receive. Fifteen corpses of youths and young girls decorated the smoke-streaked stone walls of that evil den; and upon four stools surrounding the central dais were seated two girls of sixteen and two boys of fifteen, all in a state of absolute nudity. The old women, who had entered along with us, closed and bolted the doors; Cordelli glanced at us, relishing our astonishment.

  “This is where we are going to operate,” said he. “Rarely,” he observed for the sake of our two handmaids, “yes, very rarely does anyone leave this room having once come through its portals. Look sharply there, Dona Maria, have the clothes removed; start a fire; and let’s settle down to work without further delay … I feel the fuck tingling in my balls; and seldom have I been in such a mood for horrors.

  “Juliette,” the lewd man said to me, “I appoint you my satellite, the general agent of my pleasures; undress and keep close by my side. Mindful of nothing but the service, of the imperious needs and wants of my prick and of my ass, you shall minister carefully to both of them during the entirety of the scene. If I call for a fucking, you shall wet my asshole with your spittle; with your tongue you shall moisten the pricks that are to sodomize me; you shall yourself introduce them into my behind. If I elect to fuck, you shall guide my tool into the holes I am moved to perforate, which you shall oil with saliva from your lips. At no time while performing your duties shall you neglect this capital detail: once you have completed the oral preparation of whatever it may be, prick or ass, your mouth must be glued immediately to mine, and must suck it diligently and at length. Moreover, an attitude of deepest respect shall distinguish your bearing and govern your actions: it shall not be forgotten that no one is admitted into this place except slaves or victims.

  “You, Durand, shall lead the objects up to me, you shall present them to me, and remember, both of you, to do nothing without first giving me your asses to kiss.

  “As for you,” he went on, addressing the elders, bare-armed and naked from the waist down, wielding a handful of slender green switches, “you shall follow close after me, and you shall exert yourselves upon my flanks and buttocks at such times as, in your judgment, they may benefit from stimulation.

  “You, Bloodletter, and you, Barbaro, not only shall you fulfill your role as executioners, but you shall take all good care to perforate my behind each time you see me present it to you amorously; Juliette then shall seize your engines and shall fetch them up and introduce them into my ass, conforming to the instructions already given her.

  “As regards you young people who, seated upon these four stools, and in the most respectful silence, are awaiting what it pleases me to prescribe to you, submissiveness is your lot. Think not that the ties through which you are connected to me, since you are all four my offspring though begot of different mothers, think not, I say, that familial ties are going to prevent me from dispatching you upon a prolonged and harrowing journey to death: be advised that I only gave you life in order to be able to deprive you of it, that infanticide is one of the sweetest of my pleasures, and that it is the very nearness of our kinship that will ensure my delight in martyrizing you.

  “As for you, my lovely children,” he continued glaveringly, cruelly rallying my two women, “after what I have paid for you, no one will contest my right to do with you everything a more than ordinarily perverse imagination may suggest to me … and you can look forward to atrocious discomforts. I hope shortly to come to know all the effects of pain upon your sensitive constitutions.”

  Hearing those words, the unhappy creatures fell upon their knees before Cordelli. Already undressed by the duennas, their rich black hair floating in disorder upon their breasts of alabaster, their tears wetting the feet of the tyrant, all this lends an indescribably affecting quality to the spectacle of their grief and their despair.

  “Fuck my soul,” Cordelli says, sinking back into an armchair while I pollute him with one hand, socratize him with the other. “How fond I am of misfortune’s tragic effects, how they stiffen me…. Say, my pretty little jades, what if I lend you a dagger? You could stab yourselves or each other to death, I would not be unwilling to watch you do it.” And as he spoke the monster laid brutal hands upon those two charming girls’ fresh and delicate breasts: he pinched them, compressed them violently, and appeared to glean uncommon pleasure from aggravating their mental sufferings by means of a quantity of little physical bullyings, inflicted, his hardening prick announced, to his lust’s advantage.

  “Bring me their asses,” he told one of the duenn
as, “adjust them so that the holes are on a level with my lips. You, Durand, suck me; Juliette shall continue to frig me as I lie in your mouth.”

  Thereupon he bit those two faultless asses and left marks of his teeth upon ten or a dozen different places. Then, slipping his head between Raimonde’s thighs, so fiercely did he chew upon her clitoris that the poor girl fainted. Enchanted at achieving such an effect, he began to subject Elise to the same trial; but the girl twitched, the knave missed the mark, his teeth clamped instead upon the lips of her vagina, a piece of which he carried away. Bruised and shocked though they were by these initial attacks, he wanted to fuck them both in that state. The order is given, the girls are laid belly down upon a long divan, their heads directly underneath the cadavers adorning the walls. And there, served by me, the rascal dipped alternately into their two asses and their two cunts, during a space of twenty minutes. After this, he found a bundle of switches, and having had one of the girls get down upon all fours and the other kneel upon her shoulders, in such sort that he could get at Elise’s divine buttocks and Raimonde’s exquisite teats, he martyrized those fleshy forms, now individually, now collectively; for better than thirty uninterrupted minutes he lashed them, all the while the duennas, kneeling behind his ass, belabored his buttocks with a silver hatpin. Elise and Raimonde exchanged positions, so that he could thrash her buttocks whose breasts he had just finished beating, and worry the breasts of her whose ass he had been molesting hitherto. When everything was bleeding profusely, basins of water were brought forward, wounds were stanched, and Cordelli, in furious erection, commanded one of his sons to come to him. In that delightful child all the gifts of a lavish Nature were combined: an enchanting countenance, a fine and fair skin, a pretty mouth, lovely hair, the most adorable ass.

  “He does indeed greatly resemble his mother,” the rake observed, kissing the boy.

  “What became of the poor soul?” I asked the Italian.