“Do you? Your convent won’t take you in. To live in convents costs money. You have none.”
“I have friends there.”
“No, you don’t, now that you are poor.”
“I shall work.”
“Come, come, little fool, calm yourself, dry your tears; my women will look after you this evening, tomorrow I shall take you to Noirceuil, and if you are mild in your manners you may not find him quite so harsh in his, nor as mischievous as I have been.”
I ring, recommend the girl to the care of my tribades, have horses hitched to my carriage, and fly to Noirceuil’s house. He requests details; painting Fontange for him in none but truth’s colors, I could not fail to arouse him.
“Here,” says he, trundling out a very rigid prick, “behold, Juliette, the effect of your descriptive abilities.”
And bidding me accompany him into his boudoir, he engaged me to cooperate in several of those curious fantasies which rather double than extinguish the effects of desire, which are not pleasure-takings but which, with libertine spirits like Noirceuil, outvalue all the licit conjunctions whether of hymen or of love. We were two hours at play, for I too am fond of those little horrors. I satisfy them for men with the same pleasure they take in submitting me to them; their lubricity ignites mine; no sooner do I content them than I want them to content me in my turn; and after, as I say, several hours of foul frolicking, which cost us no loss of any kind, this, according to my recollection, was the declaration Noirceuil made to me:
“It is a most extraordinary caprice I have been dwelling upon for a very long time, Juliette, and I have been awaiting your return with impatience, having in all the world nobody but you with whom I could satisfy it. I should like to marry … I should like to get married, not once, but twice, and upon the same day: at ten o’clock in the morning, I wish, dressed as a woman, to wed a man; at noon, wearing masculine attire, I wish to take a bardash for my wife. There is still more … I wish to have a woman do the same as I; and what other woman but you could participate in this fantasy? You, dressed as a man, must wed a tribade at the same ceremony at which I, guised as a woman, become the wife of a man; next, dressed as a woman, you will wed another tribade wearing masculine clothing, at the very moment I, having resumed my ordinary attire, go to the altar to become united in holy matrimony with a catamite disguised as a girl.”
“Assuredly, good sir, this, as you yourself have said, is a curious caprice that has entered your head.”
“Yes, but since Nero married Tigellinus as a woman and Sporus as a man, I am originating nothing except the celebration of the two unions in the space of a single day and, of course, the whimsical idea of having you imitate me; there is the matter of the ties which already subsist between ourselves and the objects which shall be utilized in this farce, and here I think we have greatly improved upon Nero. Your two wives are, firstly, Fontange who, clad in mannish garb, will become your husband; secondly, your daughter who, dressed in the customary raiments of her sex, will marry a Juliette in man’s clothing. My husband and my wife, who shall they be, do you wonder? They shall be two children, Juliette, yes, two children sired by me and of whose existence you have until now been unaware, of whose existence, indeed, nobody knows. One of them is nearing eighteen, he is to be my husband: a Hercules for vigor and looks. The other is twelve; ’tis the incarnation of Eros. Both are the fruit of the most legitimate commerce; my first wife produced the elder, the younger was given me by the sixth. All told, I have had eight wives. That, I believe, you do know.”
“But did you not tell me that you had no children left?”
“These two have been dead to the world; both have been raised with great care, and in the strictest conformance with instructions, in one of my castles far off in Brittany. Neither one has ever seen the light of day. They have just been delivered to me here in town, they made the journey in a sealed coach. They are a pair of veritable savages, scarcely able to speak. But that is of little importance; properly guided, they will do very nicely for the ceremony; the rest is our affair.”
“And appalling bacchanalia, I take it, are to succeed these unusual weddings?”
“Exactly.”
“And Noirceuil, you wish to have my poor adorable little Marianne become one of the victims in these hideous orgies, is that it?”
“No, she’ll not be a victim, but she will be present, my lust demands that. No harm will be done her, of that you may be perfectly certain: your women will entertain her while we are at work, that is all….”
Noirceuil obtains my agreement to everything. It will soon be seen how the villain kept his word.
’Twas not immediately nor without difficulty that Mademoiselle Donis succeeded in understanding the peculiar arrangement of the forthcoming scene: virtue regularly has trouble accommodating itself to vice’s extravagances. Partly from fear, partly from eagerness to please, the unhappy girl did at last give her whole consent, but only after I had solemnly vowed that these scandalous weddings would conclude in nothing apt to alarm her modesty. The first ceremony took place in a small town lying two leagues from the magnificent castle Noirceuil owned outside Orléans, and in which the postmarital festival was to be celebrated; the second ceremony, in the chapel of that same castle.
I shall not fatigue you with the details of those two rites; you will be content to know that everything transpired decently, punctually, and in strictest accordance with tradition; the religious ceremonies were followed by their civil counterparts, enacted in an equally dignified manner. There were wedding rings, there were Masses, benedictions, constituted dowries, witnesses; nothing was lacking. Costumes and paint artistically disguised the two sexes, embellished them where necessary.
By two o’clock that afternoon Noirceuil’s dual project had been carried out: he had become the wife of one of his sons, the husband of the other, while I found myself the husband of my daughter and the wife of Fontanges. Everything completed, the gates to the castle were shut and barred. The weather being exceedingly cold, great fires were lit in the superb hall where we were to forgather; and severest orders having been issued that the impending bacchanalia be interrupted under no circumstances, we closed ourselves up inside those baronial surroundings. In number we were twelve.
We being the two heroes, Noirceuil and I sat upon a black velvet throne placed in the center of the hall; below the throne there were to be seen, all wearing crowns of cypress, the elder of Noirceuil’s two sons, named Phaon, eighteen years of age; the younger, aged twelve, whose name was Euphorbe; my daughter Marianne and Mademoiselle Donis; the two groomsmen at the weddings, agents of Noirceuil’s sodomite pleasures and his hired killers, one of whom was dubbed Desrues, the other Cartouche, each of some thirty years, both garbed as cannibals, with switches, daggers, and live snakes in their hands, both posted at our sides in the attitude of bodyguards; on the right of us as on the left, seated, were two of my tribades, Theodora and Phryné; at our feet, two whores, likewise naked, appeared to be awaiting our orders. These girls, simply picked out of a bawdyhouse, were a bare eighteen and twenty years of age, and both were of the most charming physiognomy: they were there as auxiliaries to the scene.
Surveying these preparations, I felt just a little apprehensive for my precious Marianne and was moved to remind Noirceuil of the assurances he had given me.
“My dear,” was his reply, “it ought to be plain to you that I am tremendously overwrought. Consider what it did to me this morning, to satisfy the incredible longing that had been preoccupying me for years. It crazed my brain, Juliette, that’s what it did, and I fear you have chosen a bad moment to remind me of promises of good behavior: let a little added irritation set the nervous system ablaze, and you know as well as I that all such guarantees go up in smoke. Let us enjoy ourselves, Juliette, let us amuse ourselves; perhaps I shall abide by my word; but if I do not, in the lewd pleasures which shall soon see us gripped in ecstasy, strive to find the strength to endure the misfortune you seem to d
read—a misfortune which, between us two, is by no means as dreadful as they make out. Think, dear Juliette, that for libertines like us, the hand is stayed by nothing, nor is the mind; that, for us, an object’s ten thousand titles to inviolable respect are that many reasons to outrage it further: the more exigent virtue appears, the sooner it pleases furious vice to defile and degrade it.”
One hundred candles lit that hall as the scene opened.
“Cartouche, Desrues,” said Noirceuil to his two ministers, “worthy emulators of the famous men whose names I permit you to bear; you who, like your patrons of whose high feats history shall transmit an indestructible record down to the last generations of mankind; you, I say, who have never failed to lend your arm to the noble and ennobling cause of crime, go undress the four destined to holocaust and whose brows are wreathed in the foliage of death’s tree, go strip them, and of their raiments, whereof there is no further need, make the employment I have prescribed to you.”
The emissaries step forward; the four victims are despoiled of every article of clothing, which is flung piece by piece into the roaring blazes that warm the hall.
“What baneful ceremony is this?” asks Fontange, seeing the fire consume everything she has been wearing, her skirts, her petticoats, even her shift; “why burn these garments?”
“Dear girl,” Noirceuil replies, “a little earth, some sod, you shall soon need no more than that for cover.”
“Good Lord! what do I hear! And what have I done to earn this?”
“Bring that creature to me,” Noirceuil says.
And while Laïs sucks him, while one of the whores toils over his ass, and while I excite him verbally, the libertine glues his mouth to the mouth of that enchanting girl, and pumps it an entire quarter of an hour despite Fontange’s resistance, which is keen but vain. Then, shifting his lewd attentions to her behind, “Oh, Juliette, she has an ass too! a beautiful ass,” he cries, working himself into an ecstasy before it; “’twill be delightful to fuck all that and to martyrize it….”
Therewith his tongue slips into the cunning little hole; meanwhile, upon his orders, I with one hand pluck out the silky hairs growing upon that lovely girl’s cunt and pinch her budding breasts with the other. He forces her upon her knees, bids his two men tongue her here and there, and ends with having her kiss his bum.
These commencements were trying for the young thing, her shame and discomposure were extreme; if anything was more powerful than these two feelings, ’twas the terror inspired in her by the preparations for what, as best she could tell, seemed due to follow. Trained to modesty, having received none but the best principles in the house whence she came, Mademoiselle Donis was necessarily in an evil situation; and nothing amused us more than the fierce conflict raging between her sense of decency and her perception of iron necessity. There was one point at which she sought to elude the inevitable.
“Stop that squirming and stay just where you are,” Noirceuil told her harshly; “do you not realize how delicate the imagination is in a man like me? A mere nothing disturbs it, the instant service fails, everything breaks down, comes all to pieces; understand that the divinest charms are null unless presented to us submissively and with obedience.”
And while he spoke the rascal was fondling the girl’s ass, ’twas over that angelic creature’s buttocks the impurest and most ferocious hands were wandering. “Bugger-fuck!” he exclaimed, pursuing his palpations, “how unhappy I intend to make this little jade! Look at these charms, and tell me whether they do not cry out for horrors!”
He then has her take hold of Cartouche’s prick, obliges her to frig it, savoring the sight of innocent hands accomplishing the chores of vice; and as the poor girl, all in tears, exhibits much disgust for the work but no skill, he orders one of the whores to give her lessons and compels the student to humbly thank her teacher.
“Some abilities as a fricatrice may well stand her in good stead,” Noirceuil remarked; “the frightful state of misery to which I propose to reduce her shall oblige her to do something to stay alive.”
He bade her tongue the two whores’ cunts; after that, to suck his prick; and enjoined the company to slap her hard upon the face whenever the slightest hint of repugnance could be read there.
“Very good,” said he, “let us give thought to hymeneal pleasures, we have devoted ourselves long enough to those of love.” Then, casting a murderous glance in Fontange’s direction: “Aye, well may she tremble,” said he, “and more than tremble in anticipation of the moment when I return to busy myself with her again.”
Laïs and Theodora are dispatched toward Phaon, at once Noirceuirs husband and his son; they soon succeed in erecting him, and lead the boy up to Noirceuil who, bent over me, nonchalantly presents his behind to the chaste consort whom my tribades guide his way. I was frigging him from below and he was tonguing now the one whore’s asshole, now the other’s.
“Have the customary ceremonies observed,” he says to Phaon’s conductresses, “this young bridegroom is not to make away with the favors offered to him until he has first shown himself worthy of them.”
Phaon kneels, adopts a worshipful attitude before the ass facing him, kisses it respectfully, rises to his feet, and, yielding to the impulses being developed within him, the handsome youth runs his instrument hilt-high into his dear papa’s ass. Membered like a mule, his capers and heaves soon produce quivers of joy in the patient, and rakish Noirceuil falls to simulating the little shrieks, the smirks and smiles of the bride undergoing her defloration; he sighs, he moans, his contortions are amusing beyond words. The youth, perfectly excited by everything surrounding him, soon discharges into the entrails hugging him happily. When he has completed his act he is obliged to reiterate the respectful gestures with which he began. Then he retires; but Noirceuil, very hot, wants fucking; his panting anus seems to be crying forth the need for pricks; Cartouche and Desrues sodomize him; while they do, he kisses the buttocks of Laïs and of Theodora to which, he avows, he has taken a mighty fancy. Niched underneath him, I suck him with all my strength; and he fondles whore’s ass. Fucked twice by each of his men, Noirceuil is ready for new things. “Now we shall play the husband,” he announces; “after having acquitted myself so well in the wifely role.”
Euphorbe, his second son, is brought to him. I am asked to pilot the engine; three lusty blows and the pucelage is no more. His weapon is still loaded when Noirceuil withdraws, and he comes forth with an ardent desire for Fontange. It is the whores who march her up to the line and who supervise the operation.
“Juliette,” says Noirceuil, “oblige me by violently biting this little girl’s cunt while I embugger her. Since during my pleasure I would that she experience a maximum of pain, your instructions, Cartouche and Desrues, are to seize each of you one of her hands, and to remove her fingernails with the blade of a pocketknife.”
Everything is put into execution. Fontange, stunned by this variety of simultaneous agonies, knows not whether it is her mutilated fingers which hurt her most, or the bites wherewith I lacerate her cunt, or the hammerings of the monstrous prick tearing her fundament. But ’tis, it seems, the embuggering which is creating the greatest difficulties for her ravaged frame; the titillations provoked in her behind appear to be nearly too much for her to endure. Her screams, her tears, her groans attain such a pitch of violence that Noirceuil, powerfully stirred by all he hears, teeters on the brink of crisis. He retreats from the breach.
“Oh, Juliette!” he cries, “what a delightful ass the slut possesses, and how I adore making her suffer. Would that I had all hell’s demons to help me bother her, each by means of an original and unheard-of torture.”
He has her turned over and held by the harlots; I open and present her cunt to him: he plunges impetuously into it, while burning sulphur is put before the wretched girl’s nostrils and her ears are shorn away. The maidenhead is blasted, blood flows, and Noirceuil, more aroused than ever, decunts, has the victim held aloft by his two trusties, an
d sets merrily to flogging her with martinets whose iron tips have been heated in the fire. He himself is whipped by the whores while he is acting, and he sprinkles kisses upon the asses of my tribades, whose buttocks are poised nearby on a level with his lips; I suck him and at the same time tickle his anus.
“We are comfortable in here, are we not,” says Noirceuil a few minutes later; “the severe cold reigning outside gives me a splendid idea.”
He wraps himself in a heavy fur mantle, has his two men and me don others, and we walk out of doors with a naked Fontange. In front of the chateau is a great marble basin now covered with ice; upon it Fontange is placed. Cartouche and Desrues, holding great horsewhips and large firecrackers, stand by the basin’s edge; Noirceuil, two or three paces back, watches, and I am at his side, frigging him. Fontange is told to skate six turns around the basin; when she strays too close to the edge, she is driven off by the whips; when she moves too far away, firecrackers are tossed at her, they explode about her head or between her legs. ’Tis a very gay spectacle, as the poor creature skids and slides this way and that, falling very frequently, each time all but breaking a leg.
“What!” exclaims Noirceuil angrily, seeing that she is about to complete her sixth circuit without having met with serious accident, “what! the slut is to come through unscathed?”
But the next instant, to Noirceuil’s relief, an exploding firecracker blows one of her breasts away, she totters, fractures an arm as she falls.
“That, by God, is a little better,” mutters Noirceuil.
She is borne back into the castle, unconscious; there, she is given that minimum of attention required to restore her to usefulness, her wounds are lightly bound up; and the stage is set for further scenes.
Noirceuil demands that my daughter frig me while he looks on; he avidly kisses the child’s pretty hinderparts while she is engaged at her task.