I do as I am told. The girls undress their queen, then shower her with the prettiest caresses. Three of them suck, one her mouth, another her cunt, the last her asshole; they are replaced at their posts by the other three; the first team relieves the second; and the exercise was conducted at a very smart pace; they picked up withes and bestowed a gentle scourging upon Catherine, each toiling over a different part of her body. The men stepped forward and while they were at work, this or that girl would now and again approach to kiss mouths and stroke members. When the Tsarina’s body was all a bright scarlet she had herself rubbed with spirits; then, sitting on the face of one of the little maids, who was ordered to tongue her vent, she received a second, kneeling, between her thighs, who sucked her clitoris; the third sucked her mouth; the fourth, her teats; and she frigged the remaining two, one with either hand. The six lads, now grouping themselves likewise, put prickpoint to everything of the six girls’ behinds they could reach. No, I had never beheld anything so voluptuous as this exquisite ensemble; its maneuvers cost Catherine a discharge. I heard her moan and utter blasphemies in Russian, it was her custom.
Another scene was enacted immediately. It was she who now frigged the girls, each in her turn; but she sucked only their fundaments; and while she was sucking them, the men were tickling hers. This calling for the participation of only two subjects, the ten others did before her eyes what she herself was doing. After a little everything changes again. Now she stuffs a prick into her cunt and, lying atop him who is fucking her so, she offers her ass to another who sodomizes her mightily; to left and to right she chafes a prick upon a girl’s buttocks; he who embuggers her is flogged, and all the rest cluster around her, in suggestive attitudes. Thus did the six men fray her cuntwise and asswardly; after which, she served the six girls up for fucking, all by herself she fitted pricks into avenues of pleasure, sucked each engine as it emerged from this breach or that, meanwhile herself titillating the clitoris and kissing the mouth of the girl; she sprawls upon the sofa and has herself mounted by the men, one after another: each, raising her thighs, was to tup her in front and behind; as this was going forward, each of the girls had to squat above her brow, kiss the man serving her, and then piss on her face. During this scene the rascal shed another great quantity of fuck. It was at its conclusion that she summoned me. I was at the end of my tether, Tantalus’ sufferings were as nothing next to mine, and to see me thus was what the whore had wanted.
“Are you stiff?” she inquired ironically.
“Have a look at it, slut!” I stormed.
That insolent reply pleased her beyond words.
“Why then,” she went on, turning around, “my ass is at your disposal. It’s full of fuck, you can deposit yours in there along with the rest.”
And the saucy creature sucked one of her men’s asses while I sodomized her. Ass after ass was presented to her lips; I handled the asses of the girls while I fucked away, and despite all I could do, my seed escaped me. She forbade me to leave her ass, then commanded the men to fuck me back into fucking form; her orders to the girls were to give me their buttocks for kissing, and their cunts to her for tonguing; so it was that three times in succession my fuck flowed.
“Let’s perform some cruelties now,” Catherine proposed; “I am spent, I must resort to severities.”
Each man then got down on all fours, a girl got astride him, so that each couple offered a pair of vulnerable asses. Catherine armed herself with a whip of the kind executioners use in Russia for administering the knout,8 and with her royal hand the trollop lashed all those fair behinds so thoroughly that blood lay in puddles on the floor; I was whipping her at the same time, but simply with birch rods, and after every twenty cuts I had to kneel behind her and lick her anus.
“I am going,” she told me, “to martyrize all these individuals, but in a rather more serious manner; once I have had my pleasure from them I propose to put them to no very pretty death….”
The men seize the girls, spread their legs wide apart and hold them thus; Catherine sends whistling blows of her whip into the poor souls’ gaping vaginas, from which she fetches forth streams of blood. Next, the girls lay hold of the men and Catherine plies her scourge upon their pricks and balls.
“What concern can any of that be to me now?” she was asking. “Drained and limp, it’s worthless, there’s nothing to be done with such tripe but feed it to worms; frolic with these individuals, Borchamps, they’re yours and I’ll take my turn watching you.”
Directed and encouraged by me, the girls bring the men’s members aloft again and I am fucked another two times by each of them; I push my prick into all those dozen fundaments, I arrange various tableaux, and Catherine masturbates while observing me.
“That will do,” says she, “let us move on to more important matters.”
The victims entered; but what was my astonishment at seeing one of those young men so closely resemble the Empress’ son that for a moment I could believe it was the Tsarevitch himself.
“I should hope,” Catherine said to me upon noticing my surprise, “that you are able to read my intentions.”
“Gauging your mind by the standard of my own,” was my answer, “I take it that this is the person upon whom we are going to test the poison you have selected for the young man who could easily be his twin.”
“Exactly,” Catherine admitted; “I shall be deprived of the pleasure of witnessing my son’s agonies, this fellow’s will give me an image of them. My illusion will be agreeable; I’ll discharge you perfect floods.”
“Delicious mind,” I cried, “what a pity you are not the whole earth’s queen, and I your prime minister!”
“Assuredly,” said the Empress, “we’d achieve a great many wicked things together, and it would be a planet inhabited by our victims….”
Before anything else Catherine had herself fucked by those four ill-starred young men while I embuggered them and the dozen other subjects were either flogging or frigging us, or adopting obscene poses.
“The first six men with whom we began our fucking,” the Empress told me, “are my ordinary executioners; you shall see them in action upon that pretty quartet. As for these women, does your lubricity doom any of them? If so, point them out now and I shall dismiss the rest so that we can quietly amuse ourselves contemplating the destruction of these unfortunates.”
Two of those charming creatures having made a strong impression upon me, I designated them for death, and then only fourteen of us remained: six executioners, a like number of victims, the Tsarina and I.
The living image of Catherine’s son was the first victim to appear on the stage. I myself presented him the fatal drink whose effects were not felt until half an hour later; by then we had both, and in every manner, enjoyed him fairly to shreds; when we were done, his pains began, and they were terrifying. Ten minutes after his first convulsions the wretch expired, before our avid gazes; and during the spectacle, Catherine had herself embuggered uninterruptedly. Then she had each of the other young men one after the other bound fast atop her body: she pecked at them, she frigged them, while the executioners, into whose ranks the whore had incorporated me, hacked and slashed those knaves to mincemeat as they squirmed and thrashed upon her; the torments we subjected them to were beyond number and example. The two girls I had asked leave to execute by myself perished under treatment just as rigorous as that which the men had undergone, and I dare say I may even have improved upon the horrors the Empress had ordered. I opened the cunt of one of them and stuck fifty or sixty minikins into the walls of her vagina; then I fucked her. Each thrust of my prick, driving those tiny pins in to the head, wrung piercing shrieks from the unhappy creature, and Catherine avowed she had never invented anything so delightful.
The corpses were removed, and Catherine and I sat down to a private supper; we were both naked. She waxed very passionate, bestowed unstinting praise upon my rigidity of prick and principle, and for me foresaw the most brilliant future at her Court
once I had brought about her son’s death. The poison was entrusted to me, I promised to take action on the morrow. Twice again did I fuck Catherine the Great in the ass, and we parted.
For quite some time I had been the young prince’s familiar; Catherine had, on purpose, encouraged those frequentations; she had even wanted me to frig myself in that young man’s company, in order to excite her lewdness by the details I would give her concerning the person of this child her rage doomed. The tête-à-tête had taken place; on another occasion Catherine, in hiding, had even watched us indulge in a bout of buggery. This liaison favored the carrying out of our plan. The Tsarevitch, as was his wont, came one morning to take breakfast with me, and it was then the blow was struck. But from long exposure to his mother’s attempts on his life, the young prince had made a rule of never eating anything in town without swallowing some antidote as soon as he felt the faintest signs of an indisposition. Thus, our perfidious scheme came to nought; and the unjust Catherine, immediately suspecting me of having lost my nerve, greeted me with invectives and had me arrested as I left her palace. You know that Siberia is the fate of all this cruel woman’s state prisoners; my holdings were confiscated, my personal effects seized, I was led off to that horrible place of exile; there, like the others, I had to turn over a dozen animal skins to the commander every month, and when I failed to do so, was flogged to ribbons. Siberia was the grim school where I converted this punishment into a kind of need which has become so violent in me that, for my health’s sake, I absolutely cannot forego having myself whipped once a day.9
Upon arriving in those remote parts I was given a hut whose former occupant had just died after fifteen years of detention. It was divided into three rooms; light entered them through windows of oiled paper. It was built of pine, the only floor was a deep layer of old fishbones, which shone like ivory. The roof was covered over, rather picturesquely, by the foliage of the trees growing around. For security against the incursions of wild animals the place was surrounded by a ditch and a palisade of thick stakes reinforced by horizontal planks; the upper ends of those stakes were sharpened to a point, so that one was protected as though by a fence of spears, and when the outer gate was shut one was quite as safe as in a little fortress. Inspecting the hut I came upon the former tenant’s larder: it contained dry biscuits, salted reindeer flesh, some earthenware jugs of ale; that was all. Such was the joyless abode to which, after my day of hunting, I would return, to weep over the injustice of monarchs and the brutal unkindness of fortune. Nearly ten years did I spend in this cruel retirement, having no company save that of a few other luckless souls in the same plight as I.
One of them, Hungarian by birth, an utterly unprincipled man and who was called Tergowitz, appeared to be the only person there with whom I had anything in common. He at least had a rational approach to crime; the others committed it like the animals they tracked in the awful Siberian forest. Tergowitz alone, instead of soliciting the compassion of God, generally thought to be the cause of our woes, confined himself to cursing the deity every day; although he was guilty of every crime under the sun, his iron soul afforded no room to regrets, and if he was sorry about anything, it was to be obliged, owing to the circumstances we were in, to neglect his penchants. Like myself, Tergowitz was nearing thirty; his face was agreeable, and the first thing our exchange of confidences led to was an evening of embuggering each other.
“Mark you,” explained the Hungarian as soon as we were finished, “it’s not the absence or need of women that drives me to what I have just done, but simply taste. I idolize men and abhor females; even if we had three million of them here, I’d not touch a one.”
“Tell me,” I asked my comrade, “is there anyone else in this miserable region whom we might associate in our sodomite pleasures?”
“Yes,” said Tergowitz; “not far from here dwells a Pole named Voldomir, fifty-six years old, as handsome a man as there’s anywhere to be found … and as fanatic a bugger; he has been in these wastelands for eighteen years; he is passionately fond of me and, I’m sure, will be most willing to become acquainted with you. Borchamps, let’s the three of us join forces and get ourselves out of this melancholy part of the world.”
That same day we went to find the Pole. He lived fifty versts10 away: someone that distance from you is your neighbor in Siberia. Voldomir, exiled for horrible crimes committed in Russia, struck me as a very attractive person indeed, but of remarkable ferocity; his manner of address was gruff, flintlike, and misanthropy seemed grained in his every feature. It was not until after Tergowitz had given him one or two cogent details upon my character that he envisaged me with a less hostile eye. As soon as we had supped, we all three reached mechanically into our breeches. Voldomir had a superb member, but the leatheriest ass I had beheld in all my life.
“He never brings in any skins,” Tergowitz explained to me, “that assures him of his daily beating.”
“Very certain it is,” declared the Pole, “that a lashing affords me greater pleasure than anything else in the world, and if you’d like to practice your arm on them, I’ll lend you my buttocks.”
Wielding the switches he provided us, Tergowitz and I were an entire hour thrashing the Pole, who for all we could do seemed hardly to feel a thing. At length, however, electrified by the ceremony, the rake caught hold of my behind and into it thrust his colossal and unmoistened prick, I was fucked in a trice; Tergowitz bum-tupped him the while; and despite the excessively cold weather, we left the smoky hut and ass-fucked each other in the snow. That prodigious engine caused one a good deal of pain, and the scoundrel watched me suffer with an unpitying smile. Snatching his stave out of my ass, he buried it in Tergowitz’s, and for nearly two hours scraped and tore us both, without discharging; I would embugger him while he was fucking my comrade. But, younger than he, less jaded, I discharged inside his bowels.
The Pole had still not loosed his seed when at last he put his member away. “Unfortunately,” he said, “I am obliged to deny myself these pleasures, or indulge in them alone, for I am utterly incapable of bringing them to their proper conclusion without shedding blood, a great quantity of blood; for lack of men to kill, I slaughter animals and smear myself with their gore. But when the passions are keen, it is a great hardship to be reduced to these makeshifts….”
“Ah,”, said Tergowitz, “avowing our tastes to our new comrade, I believe we can inform him that we have not always confined ourselves to foxes, bears, wolves….”
“But where the devil can you find victims?” I demanded of my friends.
“Among our fellow prisoners.”
“Notwithstanding the fact they share your hard lot? You have no mercy upon them who, like you, have been treated unmercifully?”
“What do you call mercy?” the Pole asked me. “That sentiment, chilling to the desires, can it find entry into a stern heart? And when a crime delights me, can I be stopped by mercifulness, the dullest, most stupid, most futile of all the soul’s impulsions? Never has my soul been susceptible of any such feeling, believe me when I tell you so, and that my contempt is boundless for the man who is such a fool as to conceive it for an instant. The urge, the need to shed blood, the most imperious of all needs and urges, brooks no interference whatever; he who speaks to you now slew his father, his mother, his wife, his children, and repents not, no, nor has ever felt a twinge of remorse. With a little courage and untrammeled by prejudices, a man can do what he likes with his heart and his conscience. Habit adjusts us to anything, and nothing is easier than to develop the habit which pleases best: merely surmount the initial revulsions, if you have any fire in you, you’ll succeed. Prick in hand, accustom yourself awhile to the idea that frightens you, you’ll soon come to cherish it: that’s the method I have followed to familiarize myself with all known crimes: I yearned to commit them, but they scared me; fixing my mind upon them, I’d masturbate, and I perform them today as effortlessly as I blow my nose. The erroneous notion we entertain of others is always the
thing that impedes us in criminal affairs, our childhood training leads us, ridiculously, to consider our own selves of no account and others as all-important. Whence it proceeds that any iniquity wrought against this respected fellow being appears a great evil to us, although harming one’s neighbor is natural, and Nature’s laws are never so well complied with as when we prefer ourselves to others and seek pleasure in tormenting them. If it be true that we resemble all other products of Nature, if it be true we are worth no more than they, why persist in believing ourselves governed by different laws? Are plants and animals acquainted with mercy, pity, social obligations, brotherly love? And in Nature do we detect any law other than self-interest, that is, self-preservation? The one great trouble is that human laws are the fruits of nothing but ignorance or prejudice; the men who framed them consulted their stupidity alone, were guided by their mean-spiritedness, their narrow interests, and their myopia. A nation’s lawmaker must never be born on its soil; otherwise he will simply transmit to his people legalized versions of the infantile nonsense he learned in their midst, and his institutions, lacking the force of greatness they ought to have, will never inspire awe; for how can you ask that men have respect for laws which contradict those Nature engraves in them?”
“Ah, my friend,” said I, carried away by enthusiasm at finding his sentiments so similar to my own, and embracing this charming personage, “the theses you have just expounded conform to opinions which have long been mine, and in me you see someone possessing a soul at least as stoutly armored as yours.”
“I am not quite as advanced as you,” the Hungarian said to us, “I have never assassinated anybody apart from my sister, my niece, and a few comrades hereabouts, in collaboration with Voldomir; but I have itching fingers and most content I’d be were the occasion for a crime to offer itself to me every day of my life.”
“Friends,” said I, “people united through so many similarities of disposition and outlook ought never separate, and when they have the misfortune of being prisoners together they should join forces to break out of the bondage to which human injustice has reduced them.”