Juliette

by Marquis de Sade

  The first individual to present himself at our house was an old procuratore of San Marco who, after a narrow inspection of us all three, threw the handkerchief to me.

  “Perhaps,” was his tactful opening, “my taste might incline me toward the choice of one of your maids, but my pronounced debility would prevent me from enjoying the delights she offered me. I shall surely be more at ease with you, and I shall now explain what our commerce will involve.

  “You shall be so good,” the nasty fellow said to me, “as to apprise me of the date when your menstruation will be at fullest spate: we shall meet upon that day. With you lying on a bed, your legs wide-flung, I shall kneel before you, I shall sip the wine, I shall fuddle myself upon those menses I adore: and when from bibbing them I become very high, I shall conclude the sacrifice in the same temple where I have been worshiping, while one of your domestics—and the function cannot be entrusted to anyone save one of your female servants—will have the kindness to thrash me with all the force she can muster.”

  “Good my Venetian Lord,” I replied, “does your Serenity propose to repeat this lewd scene frequently, or is to be staged but once?”

  “Once,” the Procurator replied; “beautiful as you are, my angel, when a woman has satisfied this passion with me, I am incapable of renewing our acquaintance.”

  “Certainly, Excellency. Very well,” I said, “including supper, for a guest of your distinction never amuses himself in our house without honoring us with his presence at supper, ’tis one of our rules; including supper, then, and the whipper, that will cost you five hundred sequins.”

  “You are expensive, Mademoiselle,” said the Procurator, rising to his feet; “but you are pretty, and so long as you are young you are right not to sell yourself for nothing. Upon what day am I to come?”

  “Tomorrow: that which you are fond of is beginning today, the inundation will occur tomorrow.”

  “I shall be here without fail,” the Procurator assured me.

  And having, the next day, satisfied his foul passion, having had him drubbed with a bull’s pizzle, I received his disgusting homage, by which I feigned to be deeply moved, nay, overwhelmed. For my pay, over and above the five hundred sequins, I got a diamond worth at least twice that sum, and whereof the old rascal made me a gift in appreciation of my good manners.

  A very wealthy merchant named Raimondi was my next suitor.

  “Dear heart,” said he as he examined my behind, “is your ass intact?”

  “Most assuredly, Signor.”

  “Young woman,” he went on, spreading my buttocks, “you are telling me fibs; think not to impose upon a man who has my extensive knowledge and inveterate habit of asses.”

  “Ah, Signor, I shall conceal nothing from you … merely once or twice, not more, upon my honor….”

  And, without replying, Raimondi inserted his tongue into my asshole. He bade me stand up. He was all afire.

  “Listen,” said he, “I am going to explain my passion to you: you either take it or you leave it if it does not suit you. My whole pleasure consists in watching others fuck, that alone inspires me, without that wonderful spectacle I will not, I cannot accomplish anything. You will find me six handsome men who will one after the other encunt you before my eyes; I amuse myself with them while they fuck you, and when they discharge into your cunt, I carefully recuperate and meticulously swallow everything they have deposited in your vagina: your art consists in performing the impossible in order to expel that everything into my mouth. This operation completed, you offer me your behind: I sodomize you while your six men embugger me by turns. Once the sixth has discharged, I withdraw from your ass, I place myself upon a bed; you squat above me, and you shit into my mouth, while one of the men tongues your cunt, a second your mouth, a third masturbates in front of me, a fourth sucks my prick, and while I frig the fifth and the sixth with my two hands. Your mard tumbles into my mouth, and I eat it; that is quickly done. Then I get up from the bed; you take my prick into your mouth, you suck me exactly; all six men then come one by one and shit into mine: I swallow their shit, you swallow my fuck, there is the climax of the drama and its conclusion. But have a care, dear heart,” added the Venetian. “Have a care, for this great undertaking I have outlined to you is fraught with perils, they are grave and in number they are three: firstly, there is the chance that, despite your best efforts, you fail to eject into my mouth the sperm you have received in your cunt; secondly, it means trouble for you if you do not swallow mine; thirdly, you will regret it if you are unable to shit. Now, it were well that you be advised that each of these delinquencies is punishable by a hundred strokes of the whip, to be meted out by one of my six men; thus by failing to expel the six discharges, by refusing to swallow my fuck, and by not shitting, you accumulate a total of eight hundred lashes; one hundred if you have committed only one fault; et cetera. Speak.”

  “Signor,” was my answer to Raimondi, “your passion is not of the easiest execution, it entails great hazards. I should therefore fancy that, taking into account all the accessories I am to provide, two thousand sequins would not be an exorbitant figure.”

  “Your beauty is the deciding factor, I agree to the price,” the merchant announced.

  We took appointment, and two days later I satisfied him.

  Not long afterward Durand summoned me for a nobleman whose mania was not quite so dangerous. My friend frigged him, in the meantime he licked my nostrils, the outside and the inside of my ears, my eyes, my clitoris, the interior of my cunt, my asshole, the intervals between my toes, and my armpits. After an hour devoted to that ceremony he ended by having me suck his member and by discharging in my mouth. Durand had given me a week’s notice in order that I might have myself in a state of readiness, that is, of appropriate filthiness, for the quality of that libertine’s crisis was strictly proportionate to the greater or lesser degree of un-cleanliness in which he found the various parts.

  He told the whole town about us, and we were besieged by clients. There was one who brought two Negresses with him. Naked and flanked by those two women, I was to submit myself to frigging at their hands: the contrast of black and white shortly took effect upon him. Once aroused, he fell to flogging the Negresses, and kept at it until the blood was flowing; I sucked him while he whipped; and then he whipped me. Then it was the Negresses’ turn: knocked about by the iron-tipped martinets and the bull’s pizzle they alternately used upon him, he finished by embuggering me while one of the black women sodomized him with a dildo and he molested the ass of the other. From that personage I stole a superb diamond while I was in the act of sucking his prick; and apart from the gem, that extraordinary party cost him one thousand sequins.

  A more unusual one appeared. He had to be bound naked to a painter’s ladder; two of our servants thrashed him mercilessly; Durand sucked him. Perched on the top of the ladder, I shat upon his uplifted face. When at length his prick had lifted too, we made him kneel, we acted as his judges, interrogated him, sentenced him to be broken. All the instruments were there; but the bar was of pasteboard. Durand attached him to the cross; I delivered the beating, he discharged under the blows, gave us five hundred sequins, and fled off in confusion, ashamed to show his face to those with whom he had just indulged in such a peculiar caprice.

  Our girls were also brought out upon the stage. We sold Rosalba’s maidenhead eighteen times over, her anal pucelage thirty times; twenty-two times that of Lila’s cunt, thirty-six times that of her ass. And after having extracted six hundred thousand francs from the harvest of those four first fruits, we surrendered them to the secular arm.

  The French Ambassador wrote to me one day, requesting me to come to his residence with a girl, as pretty a girl as I could find. I bring him a child of sixteen, as lovely as daylight, and who, snatched from the bosom of a family she was fated never to see again, had cost me a veritable fortune. His Excellency has the two of us undress in a small chamber situated in the uppermost story of his house; in the cent
er of that room was a kind of deep hole, which one might have taken for a well. The Ambassador has us both lean over the edge, and gaze down into the shaft, that we might appreciate its depth; he observes our behinds, prominently displayed thanks to the posture we have adopted.

  “Suppose I were to push you in, both of you,” the lewd diplomat hazarded, “what would happen?”

  “Why, nothing dreadful provided we fell upon thick mattresses.”

  “Ha! ’Twould be into Hell you would tumble, sluts; that opening is the mouth of Tartarus.”

  And as he pronounces these words, from the hole mount tongues of flame, meant to frighten us; we recoil.

  “That pit, Excellency, is it then to be our grave?”

  “No doubt about it, for I see your doom spelled out upon your asses.” He was kissing them, pinching them, while speaking; and the behind of the young thing I had brought him was especially molested, he bit it and prodded it with a long needle. Nevertheless, there was as yet no sign of erection in his prick, even though, in consequence of his instructions, I had been stroking and shaking it as hard as I could: “Fuck!” I heard the libertine exclaim, and saw him wrap his arms around my companion’s waist and lift her off the floor. “Fuck!” he repeated, “what a pleasure to throw this baggage into the flames.”

  The threat was swiftly followed by the act, and immediately I had contrived to put some consistency into his tool, the rake flung the girl into the hole.

  “Frig!” he cried, “frig! frig! frig, bloody-fucking whore,” he shrieked as some mechanism, released by the impact of the girl’s falling body, sent flames shooting up from below.

  Then, seizing a poniard as he feels his discharge impend, he himself leaps into the hole to stab the victim, whose screams notify me of her death. I did not see the Ambassador again; an old woman paid me, counseled me to hold my tongue, and we never again heard tell of that notable.

  We were saying to each other, Durand and I, how odd it was that no women had been among our visitors, when Signora Zanetti, one of the wealthiest and most profligate ladies in Venice, communicated with us: she invited me to call upon her. That splendid creature, thirty-five years old, represented in the flesh the Roman noblewoman portrayed in classical sculpture. What a heavenly countenance! It was that of a living Venus, it was her figure, it was the complete assembly of all the goddess’ graces.

  “I caught a glimpse of you at Santa Maria della Salute the other day,” that charming woman said to me. “Like myself, you were there doubtless in search of some object of lubricity; for I credit you with intelligence, and nobody with any ever goes to such places except with lewd intentions. ’Tis the custom here: the churches serve as our brothels…. Do you know, my angel, you are very pretty; are you fond of women?”

  “How could one be indifferent to anything whereof you offer such an inspiring example?”

  “Ah, there’s the French gallantry; ten years in Paris gave me an understanding of that jargon. Please tell me frankly whether you like women, and whether you would enjoy frigging yourself with me?”

  “Yes, by all the gods.” And to lend weight to my words, I fling my arms around the neck of the beautiful Venetian and tongue her mouth for a quarter of an hour.

  “You are enchanting, my angel,” says she, fondling my breasts, “and I am going to pass some delightful moments with you.”

  We supped, and voluptuous frolic of the most piquant order crowned our lewd evening together. The most libertine of females, Zanetti had a prodigious grasp of the art of giving pleasure; few hands had ever frigged me with comparable skill or results. When we had each discharged five or six times, had exchanged lechings, suckings, dildo-fuckings, had, in sum, exhausted all the resources of the most far-reaching sapphism, “We may now fuck,” my tribade said.

  She rang.

  “Have I any men out there?” she demanded of her chambermaid, an exquisite hussy of eighteen.

  “Yes, my Lady,” was the reply, “ten of them have been in attendance; thinking that perhaps Signora may not be needing them this evening, they have retired most regretfully, for they are in sparkling form.”

  “Have you been handling them, buggeress?” asked the lovely Venetian.

  “Yes, my Lady, I have touched one or two, but there have been no discharges; Signora may verify this.”

  “Bring them in, rascal, I want to give my new friend a treat.”

  Rosetti promptly led in the ten young men, whose faces and figures I found much to my liking. The soubrette and her mistress furbish those weapons in the twinkling of an eye, and I find myself threatened by ten pikes, and it was all I could do to encircle the least of them with my two hands.

  “Well then!” said Zanetti, naked, her hair floating free, her face flushed, “all this is yours to enjoy; where do you wish to have those pricks placed?”

  “Fuck!” I exclaimed, awed by the prospect, “scatter them about, one here, one there, everywhere….”

  “No, my dear, the good things in life deserve to be desired,” she said, “content yourself with taking them in the cunt during this first round, that will excite you, you will then have developed a yearning for the rest; and leave matters to us.”

  Rosetti has by now undressed herself; she and her mistress, rubbing briskly, maintain our athletes in shining condition; and my lovely friend introduces them one after the other into my cunt. Between introductions the slut stretches herself upon me, gives me her cunt to suck while she sucks my clitoris, while the two youths embugger her, and the soubrette fits the prick of a third into the ass of the one fucking me.

  The pleasures I derived from this opening series of tuppings, ah, good friends, those pleasures exceeded anything you can imagine. Once all ten had given me a taste of their instruments, I rolled over and presented my buttocks; the embuggery was begun without the delaying of an instant; during it, my cunt was sucked by Zanetti, who was in a kneeling position and was heating a prick in either hand. My fucker was sodomized, and I was sucking Rosetti’s cunt, she was electrifying the tips of two pricks by frigging them against her bush, in such a way that I was alternately able either to suck her cunt or pump the pricks she was masturbating. When all the pricks had taken a turn in my bowels, we consolidated the tableau so as to form a single compact society. I lie upon my back on top of a man who embuggers me; another encunts me; with my right hand I facilitate the introduction of a third prick into the ass of Zanetti, who, lying upon a fourth, was receiving a fifth prick in her cunt; with my left, I rendered the same service to Rosetti, also being fucked before and behind; an eighth man was sodomizing my sodomizer; a ninth was in Rosetti’s mouth, the last in mine.

  “There is still room for two more,” Zanetti declared; “you observe that the pair sodomizing me and my chambermaid could perfectly well, without unbalancing the scene, each have a prick in the ass. Thus, a group of fifteen might easily be formed, and if it followed the lines of this one, it would be even more delightful.”

  But overcome, sotted with pleasure, I replied only by further heaving of my flanks; and delirium submerging the thirteen of us all at once, ’twas in a torrent of fuck we extinguished … or rather temporarily soothed our consuming lust.

  The whole gamut of postures was repeated with Zanetti as their center and prime beneficiary, and now playing a subsidiary role, I had the revitalizing pleasure of watching that rascal’s extraordinary antics. Sappho, Messalina, every precedent was dwarfed; ’twas a frenzy, a mindless, convulsive lasciviousness, a string of blasphemies so energetic, of sighs so impassioned, of moans so deep, and shrieks so shrill at the instant of crisis! Oh, I repeat, never had Venus a proselyte so apt, never was delirium so intense, never did whore disport with such abandon.

  But she was not content with that; after having fucked, now we must drink, and we did so with the same immoderation: the chambermaid joined us at table, but the men were dismissed; and when the three of us were raving drunk, we fell to frigging one another anew, like sluts, until the morning sun peered in upon
our saturnalia, at last obliged us to suspend them and in rest seek the strength necessary to begin afresh.

  Several days later, that charming personage returned my visit. I had, she affirmed, made a prodigious impression upon her, she could not get the thought of me out of her head.

  “Now that we are better acquainted, dear friend, I must confess my penchants to you,” she said. “I reek vice, and as reports agree that you have a very philosophical understanding, I have come in the hopes you will set my conscience at ease.”

  “Speak, my love,” I hastened to reply, “what are the sins you cherish the most? In which ones do you indulge with the greatest pleasure?”

  “Theft. Nothing amuses me like stealing others’ property; and although I have better than one hundred thousand livres a year, not a single day of my life goes by but I steal for enjoyment’s sake.”

  “Console yourself, my darling,” said I, taking my friend’s hand in mine, “and in her whom you love behold one of that passion’s greatest zealots. Like you, I cannot dispense with stealing, and as do you, I derive pleasure from it—pleasure! why, I too have made of thievery one of my most precious pastimes. Stealing, my dear, is a natural institution; not only is it not an evil, but, manifestly, it must be classified as good.

  “Let me add, dearest friend,” I went on, embracing Zanetti with fervor, “that I am gladdened to perceive that your principles are untainted by any residue of moral scruple.”

  “Upon all those questions nobody could be firmer than I,” the amiable Venetian declared. “Led by my mind into imagining a thousand infamies, there is nothing I deny myself when my passions speak.”

  “Goodness!” said I, “are you capable even of murder?”

  “Even of parricide; even of the most frightful crime possible, if ’twere possible to say that for us humans crime does rightly exist.”