He: “How do you consider the actions that are denominated criminal?”
I: “As Nature’s inspirations to which resistance is madness; as the surest means a statesman can employ to accumulate the substance of happiness and safeguard it; as essential to the workings of all governments; as the sole laws of Nature.”
He: “Have you committed crimes of every sort?”
I: “There is not one wherewith I am not stained, and which I am not ready to stain myself with again.”
Here Brahe outlined the history of the Templars. After an energetic commentary upon the death, both unjust and atrocious, to which Philip the Fair put their last Grand Master, Molay, for the sole purpose of laying hands upon the Order’s property:
“In us you see,” he said to me, “the leaders of that Northern Lodge which Molay himself instituted even as he awaited his doom in a cell of the Bastille. If we accept you into our midst it is only upon the most express condition that, upon the victim about to be presented to you, you swear to avenge our great founder, and at the same time to fulfill the clauses of the oath here set forth. Recite it aloud and intelligibly.”
“I do hereby swear” said I, reading from the vellum, “to exterminate all kings till none remain alive on earth; to wage incessant war against the Catholic religion and the Papacy; to preach liberty for all the world’s peoples; and to strive to build a universal republic.”
An awful clap of thunder dinned deafeningly; the pavilion rattled upon its foundations; the victim rose up through a trap in the floor, in his two hands lay the poniard with which I was to smite him; he was a fair youth of sixteen years, entirely nude. I take the proffered weapon, I drive the blade into his heart. Brahe comes up with a golden chalice, gathers the blood, has me drink first thereof, presents the goblet to the others one by one, and each drinks, pronouncing a barbarous phrase whose meaning is this: We shall die rather than break faith with one another. The platform descends, the cadaver disappears, and Brahe resumes his interrogation.
“You have just now,” says he, “shown yourself worthy of us; you have seen that we are of the same intrepid stuff we require in you, and that our wives are likewise dauntless. Are you so careless of the crime you have just committed as to be able to employ it even in your pleasures?”
I: “It augments them, it electrifies them; I have always regarded murder as the soul of libidinous delights; its effects upon the imagination are enormous, and lubricity is as nought unless depravity of spirit fuel its fire.”
He: “Do you admit of restrictions in the taking of physical pleasure?”
I: “I know not what they are.”
He: “All sexes, all ages, all conditions and sorts, all degrees of kinship, all manners of enjoying these various individuals, all this, I say, is then a matter of indifference to you?”
I: “I make no discriminations.”
He: “But you do nonetheless have preference for certain forms of enjoyment?”
I: “Yes, I am particularly disposed toward the stronger ones, those which fools dare call antinatural, criminal, ridiculous, scandalous, the unlawful, the illegal kind, the antisocial and ferocious ones: for those I have a predilection, and they shall always be the delight of my life.”
“Brother,” said Brahe, “take your place amongst us, you are received into the Society.”
And when I had sat down, “In asking now,” Brahe went on, “whether your wife’s attitudes and principles correspond to your own, we refer ourselves only to you.”
“They do. I swear to it in her behalf,” I replied.
“Then heed what I am about to tell you,” the Senator began.
“The Northern Lodge, whose chiefs we are, has a considerable following in Stockholm; but the rank and file Masons know nothing of our behavior, our secrets, our customs, they trust our leadership and obey our instructions. I have therefore to speak to you upon but two matters, Brother: our morals and our intentions.
“These intentions are to overthrow the Swedish throne as well as every other throne, everywhere, and principally those occupied by the Bourbons. But our Brothers in various parts of the world will attend to that; our task is here in our own country. Once upon the throne of the kings, there shall never have been a tyranny to equal ours, no despot shall ever have put a thicker blindfold over the eyes of the people; plunged into essential ignorance, it shall be at our mercy, blood will flow in rivers, our Masonic Brethren themselves shall become the mere valets of our cruelties, and in us alone shall the supreme power be concentrated; all freedom shall go by the board, that of the press, that of worship, that simply of thought shall be severely forbidden and ruthlessly repressed; one must beware of enlightening the people or of lifting away its irons when your aim is to rule it.
“You, Borchamps, shall not be permitted to share in this authority, your foreign origins exclude you therefrom; but you shall be entrusted with the command of the armies and above all the robber bands which, very early in the day, shall spread murder and rapine across the length and breadth of Sweden to consolidate our hold upon the countryside. When the time comes, will you swear faithful allegiance to us?”
“I swear it in advance.”
“We may then turn to the question of our morals.
“Their depravation, Brother, is appalling; the foremost of the moral pledges which bind us, after those political ones I have just indicated, is mutually to prostitute our wives, our sisters, our mothers and our children one to the other; to enjoy all those persons, pell-mell, in the presence of one another and, preferably, in the manner that God, as they say, punished at Sodom. Victims of both sexes serve in our orgies, and ’tis upon them falls the brunt of our desires’ irregularity. Is your wife of your own mind touching these immoralities, and as determined as you in their execution?”
“Be certain of it!” said Emma.
“That however is not all,” Brahe continued, “the most frightful disorders entertain us, there is no excess before which we hesitate. With us, atrocity is often carried to the point of stealing, of murdering in the street, of poisoning wells, streams, of perpetrating arson, of occasioning famines, of blighting livestock, and of sowing epidemics among men, less perhaps for the sake of our amusement than to weary the population of the present government and to cause it ardently to yearn for the revolution we are preparing. Do these actions revolt you or are you able to participate in the Society’s program without remorse?”
“The sentiment you refer to there has always been a stranger to my heart: the entire universe come to bits in my hands would not cost me a tear….”
Whereupon I receive the fraternal accolade from the entire assembly. They then bade me bare my behind, and each of those present, men and women alike, came forward to kiss it, suck it, and then thrust a muddied tongue into my mouth. Emma was exposed up to the waist; her skirts were held up by ribbons pinned to her shoulders, and she was subjected to the same homages; but lovely though she was, no word was spoken in her praise: the assembly’s regulations prohibited encomiums, I was given forewarning of it.
“We shall all undress,” said Brahe who presided over the meeting, “we shall then move on into the adjoining room.”
Ten minutes later we were ungarbed and ready, and we flocked into a large chamber lined with Turkish couches, the floor strown with cushions and large ottomans. The statue of Jacques Molay at the stake adorned the center of the room.
“You see there,” said Brahe, “the effigy of him we must avenge; let us, while awaiting that happy day, swim in the ocean of delights he himself was preparing for his Brethren.”
A mild warmth suffused that agreeable retreat which shaded candles mysteriously lighted. There was a sudden swirl and the next instant all had come to grips. I leap toward the fetching Amelia; her glances had aroused me, and till then all the heat in me was due to her; her desires fling her my way before my arms can fold around her. I could give you no clear picture of her charms: I was too overpowered then to be able to paint them now. Ther
e was never a mouth so sweet, never an ass so beautiful. Amelia bends away, of her own accord offering me the shrine in which she knows full well I am wont to do my worship, and I soon perceive that, be it from habit, be it from taste, the rascal is lending herself more for the sensation than to be obliging, and that no other attack would have pleased her nearly so much. The desire to embugger the three other women, and their husbands also, prevented me from losing my fuck in Amelia’s incomparable ass; and I hurled myself upon Steno, then sodomizing Emma. Enchanted by this stroke of good fortune, the Senator showed me a very brave behind, whereof I nonetheless took early leave in order to probe that belonging to Ernestine, his wife, a fair and voluptuous creature over whom I toiled for a long while. Fredegunda attracts me, however: Ernestine’s joys had been all daintiness and delicacy, but this one’s were all transports and frenzy. Leaving her, I flew to her husband. Ericsson, fifty years old, flutters under my prick like a dove under her mate, and the lecher answers my tooling with such fervor and zeal that he steals away my seed; but Brahe, who hails me then, is, by some fervent sucking, soon able to restore to my engine all the energy which Ericsson’s fine buttocks have just drained out of it; those Brahe presents to me, and whose anus I sound, quickly make me forget the happiness of a moment before. I fuck Brahe an uninterrupted half-hour and only quit him for Volf who has been sodomizing Ulrika, whose delicate ass obtains my sperm before long. What libertinage! what foulness of mind and filth of behavior in this last-named creature! Everything voluptuousness can have of the tartest, everything libertinage contains of the wildest was organized and applied by this Messalina. Grabbing my prick directly it had discharged, the slut did everything under the sun to revive it and lodge it in her cunt; but I proved invincible. Staunch adherent to the Society’s laws, I reached the point of threatening Ulrika with denunciation if she persisted another instant in her attempts to seduce me; furious, the rascal crammed my device back into her ass and flung and danced so ardently about that she squirted fuck in every direction.
While I was thus fucking every ass in the room, Emma, just as bountifully regaled, had not missed a prick; they had all, even mine, been in and out of her ass, but not all had discharged there; these were libertines of mark whom a single enjoyment, be it of an uncommonly fine ass, was not apt to electrify so keenly as to cost them their fuck, no, they did not part with it as readily as all that; they every one, for example, buggered me, and from not one of them did I get sperm. Ericsson, the most licentious of the lot, might well have fucked fifteen such ones as he had at his disposal, and it is doubtful whether his prick would have purpled. Young and vigorous though he was, Brahe, had it not been for the incredible episodes whereof we shall speak anon, would not have brought matters to their conclusion either. As for Steno, his struggles were over: bewitched by Emma, that voluptuous creature’s stunning ass had, so he said, sufficed, and his boiling fuck had flooded it. On the other hand, Volf, more refined in his needs, still lacking what he required for discharge, had also merely tuned his instrument, and it was only at supper, which was shortly announced, that I began to glimpse the essential peculiarities of my new acolytes’ tastes. This supper was awaiting us in another hall, where six fair boys of from fifteen to eighteen and six charming girls of the same age were at hand, naked, to serve us. After a sumptuous repast further orgies were celebrated and now the whole truth about those Swedish despots’ unruly passions finally came out.
Steno, as we know, had discharged with ease into Emma’s ass; he nonetheless desired, for the perfection of his ecstasy, that a young boy suck his mouth amorously and simultaneously finger his asshole while he himself fucked a man: such was his passion.
To rescue his honor, Ericsson had first to lash the skin off a pair of young persons, one male, the other female: without this preliminary he could never get anywhere.
There was Volf who would have himself embuggered while, for a solid hour he plied a cat-o’-nine-tails against the ass in which he proposed to discharge. Otherwise, no erection worth speaking of.
More mischievous yet, Brahe was not disposed to ejaculate until he had maimed a victim hard by the ass he coveted.
These passions were unfolded between fruit and cheese. Wine, hope, ambition, pride went to everyone’s head, all inhibitions were forgotten; the women, positively uncontrollable, were the first to set examples of the disorderliness which, by the time the evening ended, had cost six victims their lives.
As we were about to take our leave, Steno, in the name of the Society expressing his joy at having us in its midst, asked me if I were by any chance in need of a sum …; I thought it wisest to say no, at least for the moment. And for a week I heard nothing more from my new friends. Then, on the morning of the eighth day, Steno came to see me.
“We are going on a prowl tonight,” said he, “the women shall not be along; do you care to join us?”
“What have you in mind?”
“Some random crimes. We mean to do a little stealing, pillaging, assassinating, burning. In a word, to commit some horrors; are you with us?”
“Surely.”
“Meet us at eight o’clock at Brahe’s house in the suburbs; we leave from there.”
A delicious supper was awaiting us, and twenty-five troopers, chosen for superiority of member, were, in spending themselves in our asses, to impart to us the energy necessary for the projected expedition. We were fucked forty times apiece, which was more than I had ever been before at a single tourney. These preliminaries left us all afire, in such a state of agitation that we’d have taken a knife to the throat of Almighty God himself had the bugger-fucker existed.
Escorted by ten of the stoutest champions in the band, there we are roaming the streets like furies, blindly assaulting everybody in our path: as one by one our victims were robbed and killed, their bodies were tossed into the canals. If we stopped anything worth the bother, we’d rape it first, murder it afterward. We broke our way into several humble dwellings, which we devastated once we were done terrorizing, mutilating, and finally butchering their inhabitants; we permitted ourselves every imaginable and every nameless execration, and left screams, flames, and blood in our wake. We found the patrol, we attacked it, put it to flight; and ’twas only when we were glutted on atrocities that we wended our way homeward as the sun rose to shine upon the debris left by our scandalous orgies.
Needless to say, we had it printed in the press that such were the frightful abuses the government was perpetrating, and that so long as the royal regime prevailed over the Senate and the law, no fortune would be in safety, no citizen would walk in peace abroad or breathe in peace at home. The people believed what they read and sighed for a revolution. Aye, so it is the poor fools are hoodwinked, so it is the common population is at once made the pretext and the victim of its leaders’ wickedness: always weak and always stupid, sometimes it is made to want a king, sometimes a republic, and the prosperity its agitators offer under the one system or the other is never but the phantom created by their interests or by their passions.5
However, the hour was approaching, such was the desire for a change that this was the sole subject of conversations. A more discerning and an abler politician than my associates, at the very moment they were convincing themselves that success was at hand, I saw that the wind lay in the other direction; calmer than they, I sounded out opinion, and from the immense quantity of people I found firmly attached to the king and his royalists I drew the conclusion that the senatorial revolution was destined to be stillborn. It was then that, faithful to the principles of egoism and villainy to which I have been devoted all my life, I resolved to change camp on the spot, and inhumanly to betray the one into which I had been received. Of the two it was the weaker, that was obvious; it was neither goodness on the one side nor badness on the other that decided me, force was the only deciding factor, and it was only with force I wished to keep company. I would have unfailingly stayed with the senators had I believed their faction not the better (I knew perfectly
well that it was the more vicious), but the more powerful; the evidence convinced me that it was not: I turned traitor. This, it will perhaps be said, was infamous; so be it. But infamy meant little to me when my welfare or safety lay in treason. Man is born to pursue his happiness on earth, and for no other purpose; all the vain considerations opposed thereto, all the prejudices which hinder him are better flouted than heeded, for it is not the esteem of others that will render him happy; he is happy only if he is so in his own opinion, and it will never be from laboring toward his prosperity, whatever the road he chooses for getting there, that he will be able to lose self-respect.
I request private audience with Gustavus; I obtain it; I reveal everything to him, I name those who have sworn to dethrone him, I give him my word not to leave Stockholm until he has investigated the conspiracy I allege, and I ask no more than a million by way of reward if my warnings prove founded and exact; eternal imprisonment if false. The monarch’s vigilance, aided by my disclosures, averts the catastrophe. On the day the insurrection was to break out, Gustavus was up and in the saddle before dawn: he sent the people home, isolated the plotters, won over the military, seized the arsenal, and all that without shedding a drop of blood. This was not at all what I had been counting upon; gloating in advance over the terrible consequences I fancied my treachery would have, I too was up with the sun and gone out to see all those heads fall: the imbecile Gustavus spared them every one. I was aghast. Oh, said I to myself, how I regret having broken faith with those who at least would have drenched this kingdom in blood. I have been deceived; they accused this prince of being a despot, and look at the clumsy oaf! he is meek as a lamb when I give him the means and the occasion to fortify his tyranny! Bah, a plague upon the fellow!
“Ah, mark my words,” said I to all those who cared to listen to me, and they were not many, “your prince is jeopardizing the future instead of taking this precious opportunity to plant his scepter, as he ought to do, upon a hill of corpses. Brief will be his reign, believe me, and unhappy his end.”6