“And so I see for you, in the case of the crime done, enjoyment firstly, in the doing of it, a further enjoyment, subsequently, for having done it; and in the other case, I see nought but a decided privation, a privation whence you will suffer not once, but continually and increasingly, as with every day your caprices become more numerous, and every day demand further resources to be satisfied; and by way of compensation, I see nothing but the solitary feeling, a feeling that for everybody is temporary and dilute, that is entirely frivolous for you, of having accomplished not a good deed, but an exceedingly ordinary one. For I might perhaps excuse you for doing it were it in any sense what they call heroic, since that would at least mean some satisfaction for your pride; but no, instead I see no pleasure whatsoever accruing to you. Your deed is not great, it is not glorious; it is merely common. You accomplish no good through ensuring Fontange’s enjoyment of the money, and you do yourself a very great disservice by not preventing it. But that would suppose, you say, getting rid of this little girl in order that she never find out I have robbed her. Well indeed! once you have no difficulty conceiving of murders committed for lewdness’ sake, it seems to me that it should be just as easy for you to conceive of those warranted by material considerations. Both sorts are inspired by Nature; both have the same aim, and proceed from the same passions. You commit lust-murder to put yourself in a proper frame of mind for sensual pleasure; you commit all kinds of other murders for the identical purpose of satisfying a passion. Between this murder and that murder there is not a particle of difference: any difference you were to try to establish between them would be frivolous; only the motives behind them permit distinguishing one murder from the next. Now, assuredly, Juliette, it is far more legitimate to commit the misdeed prompted by a powerful interest than merely for the sake of an agreeable ejaculation. You are quite prepared to murder for mental stimulation, for your imagination’s comfort, and yet you dare not do it when a fortune is at stake!
“From the foregoing two sets of alternatives emerge: first, if the transports Fontange procures you are greater than those you can expect from her property, the right course is to preserve Fontange, find a husband for her, and enjoy the milksop pleasure of having done your duty, of having done well with respect to Fontange, but very ill with respect to yourself: for, make no mistake about it, to perform a good deed is one thing, but to deprive oneself of a bad deed is something else, and it cannot be taken so lightly. There are perhaps times when some small amount of merit may attach to the performance of a kindly act; none ever exists in denying oneself the pleasure of performing a wicked one; because the former shines in the eye of the public, the latter does not. The second set of alternatives is this: if the pleasures you may expect from this supplement of fortune are to you of greater moment than Fontange’s well-being, you must waste no time getting rid of her: for you cannot enjoy both these happinesses, and you must perforce sacrifice the lesser, the weaker of the two.
“Let us now determine what kind of sentiment you owe to Madame Donis…. None, so far as I can see. Sensual pleasure brought you together, crime separated you. Were she yet alive, you would certainly owe her nothing; dead, she is obviously entitled to still less. ’Twould be absurd, extravagant to continue to have any feelings whatever for a person who can no longer benefit from them; to this person’s shades, neither respect nor consideration, neither love nor remembrance is owing; he can be allowed no place in your imagination, because his presence there could not be anything but disagreeable, and you know that it is included among our principles never to permit any ideas to enter the mind save pleasant or voluptuous ones. Well, this train of ideas points smoothly, and logically, toward mistreatment of the daughter, since ’twas out of lust you killed the mother; these ideas would be disrupted, would inevitably be spoiled if you were now to go and render the daughter a service. Hence, not only is there no disadvantage in your refusing to be helpful to the girl in any way, but it is even necessary to your pleasure that you render her exceedingly unhappy. The idea engendered by the unhappiness into which you are about to plunge her will renew those of the atrocities you wrought against the rest of the family; and from the interweaving and combining of all these ideas there shall necessarily result for you a voluptuous whole, certain to be disintegrated by contrary behavior on your part.
“Do not allege to me the tender feelings for Madame Donis that inhabited you once upon a time. It would be absurd to reawaken them; not only because you have damaged them through your crime, but because one must take good care not to preserve the least tender feeling for someone who exists no longer; it would be to wear out the heart’s faculties needlessly, and to impair the effectiveness of its action upon more real objects; nothing should be of less concern to us than a person deprived of life.6 Thus, as regards Madame Donis you are in a position where you have every right to offend her, since you owe her nothing, and where, offending her, you offend nobody, since she exists no more; and so, I repeat to you, it would be the most dreadful folly for you to hesitate. But, do you tell me, you hear an inner voice which seems to be urging you to resist; you ask me whether this is the voice of Nature? No, Juliette, no; this voice, about whose source you cannot conceivably be in error, is no other than that of prejudice: if it still sways you, lay it up to weakness, and to the fact that the criminal deed involved here is less familiar to you than those you ordinarily indulge in, even though it amounts to nothing else than the theft you are fond of and commit day in and day out. Here, it is most certainly the voice of prejudice you are hearing, instead of that of Nature, for when Nature speaks, her urgings are invariably to seek happiness, no matter at whose expense. Therefore let it be the most critical kind of audition you accord that voice, sift the chaff out of its message, you will then hear it in all its purity, and ceasing to drift anxiously, buffeted by doubts, you will then act in confidence and peace, without any fear of outraging Nature whom, to the contrary, you will be serving when you accomplish the crime that you know she would have you commit, who assures you pleasure from committing it.
“Thus, what I would do, were I in your place, would be to amuse myself thoroughly with this girl, to rob her, and then to put her in such a damnable plight that you could at any moment add further height to your happiness by feeding it upon the charms of seeing her languish; which, from the standpoint of voluptuous pleasure, is preferable to killing her. The felicity I recommend to you will be infinitely keener; beyond the physical happiness acquired from enjoyment, there will be the intellectual happiness born of the comparison between her fate and yours; for happiness consists more in comparisons of this sort than in actual physical enjoyments. It is a thousand times sweeter to say to oneself, casting an eye upon unhappy souls, I am not such as they, and therefore I am their better, than merely to say, Joy is unto me, but my joy is mine amidst people who are just as happy as I. It is others’ hardships which cause us to experience, our enjoyments to the full; surrounded by persons whose happiness is equal to ours, we would never know contentment or ease: that is why they say, and very wisely indeed, that, to be happy, you ought never look upward, but always at those who are below you. If then ’tis the spectacle of the luckless who must necessarily complete our happiness by the comparison they furnish between themselves and us, one must take care not to relieve such downtrodden as exist; for by raising them, through this aid, from the class which provides elements for your comparisons, you deprive yourself of these comparisons, and hence of that which improves your pleasures. However, simply to limit oneself to withholding aid from the needy in order to preserve this class useful for the comparisons whence the best portion of your happiness derives, that is not enough; you must neglect no opportunity to generate misery, both in order to increase the size of this class generally, and in order, particularly, to create a sector of it which, your own personal handiwork, sharpens the delights that are going to result for you from the comparisons it will provide. Thus, in the present instance, your complete pleasure would consist in
making away with this girl’s inheritance, in then reducing her to beggardom, in constraining her as it were to come begging at your gate, where you would cruelly refuse her the pittance she asks; thus, by drawing the spectacle of misery into your immediate vicinity, improve your enjoyment through comparison as intimate and at the same time as advantageous to you as possible, since all the woe confronting you is of your unique fabrication. That is what my advice to you would be, Juliette, that is what I would do if I were you. … I would have a daily erection thinking about these delicious ideas, standing before the still more divine spectacle of the distress I would have caused; and in the midst of these rare pleasures, I would exclaim, Yes, there she is; by means of a crime I got possession of her; and this inheritance I have usurped, I spend upon pleasures so sweet that nothing I do is not crime; I am, through my behavior toward her, nothing but criminal, I am perpetually in a state of crime; not one of my pleasures is untainted by it…. And with an imagination like yours, Juliette, oh! how heavenly such a complication must be!”
Noirceuil was very hot by the time he reached the end of his digression, and as since my return we had still done nothing together, we now moved straight to a sofa. Lying there in his arms, I admitted that at no moment had I been visited by doubts concerning the fate of little Fontange, and that what I had said to him had been said only in order to give him the occasion to expound his doctrines. I promised him the young girl, assuring him that, however interesting she might be, we would not fail to establish her in a quagmire of grinding poverty, after having wrung all we wanted from her.
“Well, well, Juliette,” said Noirceuil, fondling and kissing my buttocks, “if you depraved yourself in the course of your travels, I was not idle during the same period either; and you have returned to find me a thousand times worse than I used to be; there is not a single horror I have not accomplished since we last saw each other. Will you believe it? I am responsible for the death of Saint-Fond; I aspired to his post, I missed getting it; but nothing will prevent me from succeeding the man occupying it at present; his doom is a matter of time only, the machinery is in place; and once I hold office, which I ambition for what it will put in my hands, to wit, all the power of the idiot prince and all the wealth of his kingdom, then, oh, Juliette, the mountain of pleasures that shall be ours! Crime, such is my wish, must stamp every instant of my career; you will not weaken with me as you did with Saint-Fond, and together we shall go far.”
By and by I had to present my ass to that maniac; but he withdrew from it without leaving any fuck behind him.
“I am waiting for someone,” he explained. “Allow me to inform you: she is a very attractive creature of about twenty-five, whose husband I have had jailed: this in order to get possession of the wife. If she opens her mouth, he can be put to death tomorrow; but as she adores him, I think she will keep silent. She also has a child, whom she idolizes; my aim is to induce her to forsake the lot; I propose to fuck the wife, have the husband broken on the wheel, and send the child to the workhouse. I have been preparing the operation for two months; up until now, the young woman’s love and virtue have held out admirably. You shall see how pretty she is. I should like you to help me seduce her. What has occurred is as follows.
“A murder was committed in her house; she was there when it happened, along with the victim, her husband, and another man. Her testimony is crucial; the other man has deposed against the husband, but this woman’s evidence is needed, and the case cannot progress until she gives it.”
“Rascal! this entire intrigue smacks of your confection: you had the man killed by the witness whom you seduced and who has sworn ’twas the husband did the deed; you want the wife to corroborate the thing, both for the pleasure of making her yours and for that other pleasure, more piquant still, of turning her into her husband’s assassin.”
“Quite right, Juliette, how well you know me! All that is my doing. But I am eager to round out my crime, and I count upon you. Ah, my dear, it’s a voluptuous discharge I see ahead of me when this evening I shall fuck that woman.”
She arrived. Madame de Valrose was indeed one of the prettiest creatures you could hope to see: petite, but exquisitely shaped, well fleshed, with a dazzling fair skin, the world’s loveliest eyes, breasts, and an ass that made the mouth water.
“Good evening to you, Madame,” said Noirceuil, “you have reached your decision?”
“Good Lord,” that charming woman replied, her eyes filling with tears, “how can you expect me to agree to such a horrible thing?”
“Take care, Madame,” I broke in sharply; “Monsieur de Noirceuil, having acquainted me with your business, has authorized me to offer you a word of advice. Bear in mind that as matters now stand, your husband is doomed, for to that end but a single witness is required, and one exists, as you are aware.”
“But he is guiltless, Madame; the witness who accuses him is the murderer himself.”
“You shall never convince your judges of it. This witness had no relations whatever with the dead man, but your husband had a good many. Therefore, I repeat, you should consider your husband as done for, incontestably. When, in the light of this terrible certainty, Monsieur de Noirceuil, whose influence you know to be great, offers to save him if you agree to testify against him, I for my part—”
“But what purpose does it serve, this testimony, since Monsieur is eager to save my husband?”
“Without that testimony he cannot do it; it will enable him to show irregular procedure, and that slander doubtless exists, if not perjury, once the accused’s wife testifies against him.”
“Then shall I not be punished?”
“A convent… whence we will have you out again in a week’s time. Madame, that you are able to hesitate is more than I can understand.”
“But my husband will believe that I sought to undo him, he will blame me in his heart; and in mine this idea shall weigh forever. It shall lie between us everlastingly: I save my husband only by creating an undying distrust which means eternal estrangement, which means—”
“Agreed, but is that not better than sending him to the gallows? And if you truly love him, should you not grant his life greater importance than the possession of his affections? If he dies, will you not also be separated forever?”
“Terrible alternative! And if I am being deceived … if this avowal seals his doom instead of saving him?”
“This injurious suspicion,” said Noirceuil, “is my reward for wishing to be of help to you, Madame, and I thank you.”
“Why, yes, Madame,” I put in heatedly, “Monsieur de Noirceuil ought by all rights to drop your case this very minute; how dare you cast such aspersions upon the most virtuous of mortals?”
“For the aid he proposes he has set a price that dishonors me. I worship my husband, never have I broken faith with him, never, and it is not when he is beset by cruel troubles that I need crown his misfortune with such a woeful outrage.”
“This outrage is imaginary: your husband will never learn of it. Manifestly, you are an intelligent person: how then, I wonder, can you cling to these illusions? It is not, moreover, your heart Monsieur de Noirceuil is seeking, but simply your favors, which should greatly reduce the hurt in your eyes. But, I shall further add, even were this hurt to exist, even were it grave, of what account can it be when your husband’s life hangs in the balance?
“By way of conclusion I may say a word in defense of the price Monsieur de Noirceuil asks. Ah, Madame, you are ill-acquainted with the spirit of the age if you fancy that kindnesses are accorded for nothing nowadays. Actually, in return for a service which your entire fortune would not begin to pay for, Monsieur de Noirceuil, by demanding nothing beyond a little forbearance on your part, is willing to accept exceedingly little, it seems to me. In short, your husband’s life is in your hands; it is saved if you accuse him, lost if you do not. There is your dilemma. Speak.”
And at that point the dear little woman was seized by a dreadful fit of sobbing which so
aroused Noirceuil that the scoundrel had out his member and gave it to me to frig before Madame de Valrose’s very eyes. She fainted.
Juliette Page 136
