Juliette

  “We dare not wed our wife’s sister; Hudson Bay savages do so whenever they are able: they recognize no other match. Jacob married Rachel and Leah.

  “We dare not fuck our own children even though there are few more delicious pleasures; in Persia, intrigues are exclusively of that variety, and ’tis the same in three-quarters of Asia. Lot lay with his two daughters and got them both with child.

  “We consider the prostitution of our wives a very great indelicacy: in Tartary, in Lapland, in America it’s a courtesy, it’s an honor to prostitute your wife to a stranger; the Illyrians take them to assemblies of debauchery and, the while supervising the proceedings, force them to fuck whoever takes a fancy to them.

  “We think it an outrage to modesty when we expose ourselves naked to the sight of others: almost all southern peoples go about thus unclad without any subtle intentions; the Priapic and Bacchic festivals of antiquity were so celebrated. Lycurgus, by a law, obliged girls to appear nude when they attended public theaters. The Tuscans, the Romans had nude women serve them at table. There is a country in India where respectable women are never seen in clothes; these are only worn by courtesans, the better to excite concupiscence. Think of that; quite the opposite, isn’t it, of our conventional notions concerning modesty?

  “Our generals forbid the rape of the defenders of a captured fortress; Greek commanders gave their soldiers the right as a reward for valor. After the capture of Carbines, the army of Tarentum collected all the boys, the virgins, and the young women who could be unearthed in the town, stripped and exposed them in the market place, where everybody chose what he wanted, either to fuck or to kill it.

  “The Indians of Mount Caucasus live like brute beasts, they couple indiscriminately. The women of the Isle of Homes prostitute themselves to men in broad daylight, doing so even on the steps of their god’s temple.

  “The Scythians and Tartars revered a man who through debauchery wasted himself into impotence while yet in his prime.

  “Horace portrays the Britons, the English of today, as being most libertine with foreigners; this folk, says the poet, had no native modesty; they lived all aheap in a promiscuous community, brothers, fathers, mothers, children, anyone suited to the satisfaction of Nature’s needs, and the resulting fruit belonged to whoever had been the first to lie with the mother when she had been a virgin. These people ate human flesh.19

  “The Tahitians satisfy their desires publicly, would blush at the thought of enacting them in hiding. Before them, Europeans displayed their religious ceremonies, consisting in the celebration of that ridiculous mummery they call Mass. They in their turn asked to be allowed to display theirs: it was the rape of a little girl of ten by a grown boy of twenty-five. What a difference!

  “Debauchery itself is worshiped: temples are raised to Priapus; Aphrodite is at the start beheld as the goddess of fertility and increase, later as the principle of the most depraved lusts, adoration concentrates upon her ass, and she who initially was regarded as the idol of generation soon becomes the tutelary divinity of the grossest outrages man can perpetrate against population. Man, you see, grew ever in knowledge and intelligence: he had inevitably to progress: he ended up vicious. This cult, sinking into desuetude along with paganism’s eclipse, revives in India; and the lingam, a sort of virile member Asiatic girls wear suspended from their neck, is nothing but an article of furniture whose use is required in the temples of Priapus.

  “A traveler arriving in Pegu rents a girl for the duration of his stay in the country; with her he does whatever he pleases; afterward, much enriched by her experience, she returns to her family and if anything finds a surfeit of suitors eager to marry her.

  “Indecency itself can become modish: witness France, where for a long time male genitals were represented in brocade-work applied to the vest and where brightly colored codpieces were very fashionable.

  “Among nearly all the peoples of the north one meets with the traditional prostitution of sisters and daughters, a custom which strikes me as altogether reasonable; he who practices it calculates to receive something in return from the man he panders to, or at least to watch him in action, and this lubricity is delicious enough to be worth going to considerable trouble to obtain. There is another, an exceedingly delicate, sentiment connected with prostitution of this type, and it is enough to induce certain men to make their wives’ favors generally available, as do I; that which usually motivates our gesture is this: we derive unheard-of stimulation from covering ourselves with an especially poignant obloquy; the more one multiplies the effects of one’s shame, the greater the pleasure one extracts from it. Thus it is we like to degrade, besmirch, mistreat the object that we amuse ourselves giving over to be fucked; we delight in dragging it through mud, making it wallow in filth, in fine, in doing rather as I do: carrying one’s wife and daughter to the brothel, forcing them to solicit in the streets, holding them oneself during the act of prostitution.”

  “Excuse me, Monsieur,” I broke in, “but did I understand you to say that you have a daughter?”

  “I had one,” Noirceuil replied.

  “By the wife whom I know?”

  “No, by my first wife; the one I have in the house at present is my eighth, Juliette.”

  “But with tastes like yours, however could you have become a father?”

  “I have been one several times, my dear. There are no grounds here for surprise. The thing can be done, one sometimes overcomes one’s repugnances when pleasures may be the reward of an honest effort.”

  “I believe I understand you, Monsieur.”

  “Like almost everything else, this is ridiculously simple. And yet I’ll have first to acquire a high opinion of you before, in giving you an explanation, I disclose how little I merit one myself.”

  I gazed at him admiringly. “Unusual man, charming individual,” I exclaimed, “my devotion to you shall only grow as you give me accumulating proof of your disdain for vulgar prejudices; the more criminal you exhibit yourself to these my avid eyes, the deeper my heart’s veneration for you shall be. The irregularity of your imagination sets mine in a ferment; I aspire only to imitate you.”

  “Ah, by God,” murmured Noirceuil, running his tongue into my mouth, “I have never beheld a creature more analogous to me; I’d adore her if ’twere in my power to love a woman…. Would you imitate me, Juliette? I defy thee to do so. If what were enclosed in my heart could be opened to the light, it would so horrify the race of men there’d perhaps not be one amongst them all who’d dare come within sight of me. Impudence and crime, libertinage and foul infamy, I’ve carried them to the last degree; and if I know the taste of regret, ’tis, I do swear with utmost sincerity, owing to nothing but despair at having done so little, so very much less than I ought.”

  Noirceuil was in a state of prodigious agitation, sufficient to convince me that the avowal of his errors excited him almost as much as their very performance. I drew aside the ample robe he was wearing and, seizing his more than iron-hard member, I set to juggling it, to dandling and palpating it gently: from the scarlet orifice fuck dribbled in a steady stream.

  “What a tale of crimes that prick has cost me!” he cried, “what a host of execrable things have I done in order that it might surrender its sperm a slight shade more hotly. Upon this globe’s whole extent there is not a single object I’m not ready to sacrifice to its comfort: this tool is my god, let it be one unto thee, Juliette: extol it, worship it, this despotic engine, show it every reverence, it is a thing proud of its glory, insatiate, a tyrant; I’d fain make the earth bend its knee in universal homage to this prick, I’d like to see it guised in the shape of a terrific personage who would put to a death of awful torments every last living soul that thought to deny it the least of a thousand services…. Were I king, Juliette, were I sovereign lord of this world, supreme here, my supremest sovereign pleasure would be to walk about with killing henchmen in my train, to massacre instantly whatever displeased my very sensitive glance. … I
’d tread the full length and breadth of my domain everywhere upon a carpet of corpses, and I’d be happy; I’d wade across an infinite scene of destruction, and to the sea of blood wherein my feet would steep I’d add my flowing seed.”

  Drunk also, I sink down before this wondrous libertine; incontinently, I do enthusiastic worship to the spring of so many fell deeds whereof the mere recollection incomparably aroused him who had committed them; I take that article in my mouth, for fifteen delicious minutes I suck upon it. …

  “Stay, stay, we are too few,” says Noirceuil, who was little fond of solitary pleasures. “Leave me be; that prick could be your undoing were you to pretend to the honor of fetching a discharge from it all by yourself: concentrated upon a single point, my passions are like the sun’s rays a magnifying lens collects into focus: they straightway cinder the object in their path.”

  And, foam flecking his lips, Noirceuil’s strong hands began to worry my buttocks.

  That was the moment when one of Gode’s captors returned with news of her entry into the prison of Bicêtre and of the stillborn infant she foaled shortly afterward.

  “Excellent,” said Noirceuil, sending the man on his way with a tip of two louis; “one cannot,” he confided to me in a whisper, a smile on his lips, “overpay the messenger bringing tidings of such welcome events. Two louis—that matches the little prank we’ve just treated ourselves to … and notice, Juliette, look here! see how my prick takes on an air of increased majesty.”

  And immediately summoning into an antechamber his wife and the youthful fop who’d sired the child just destroyed, Noirceuil advised him of what had come to pass, embuggering the youth as he spoke, while Madame de Noirceuil, kneeling, mouthed the Ganymede’s member, and while, under instructions, the pederast kissed my buttocks; and in the midst of this, Noirceuil caught firm hold of his wife’s breasts from below and gave them so fair a wrenching as to nearly tear them loose from her body; the lady’s screams soon brought the fuck spitting in a torrent from his prick.

  “Tell me Juliette,” he continued, ordering the young man to evacuate into his cupped palm the fuck he’d squirted into his bowels, and rudely smearing that rich paste all over the face of his wife, “tell me, is not my sperm pure? Have you ever seen such fine sperm? Am I wrong in having you worship the god whose substance is so magnificent? Never did he whom fools designate prime mover to the world possess a more active or refined, a nobler; this be very godsfuck—but have them get out of here,” he cried, “away with them all. I regret having had to interrupt our conversation.

  “We today punish libertinage,” my master resumed when we were alone again; “and from Plutarch we learn that the Samnites daily and in conformance with legal prescriptions betook themselves to a place known as the Gardens, and that in a promiscuous confusion they there comported themselves in a manner almost too lascivious to be imagined. In that blissful locality, the historian goes on to say, the heat of pleasure melted distinctions of sex and blood ties altogether away: one became husband to the wife of one’s friend; the daughter communicated intimately with her mother; and yet more often one saw the son play the whore to his sire alongside the brother busily embuggering his sister.

  “The first fruits of a young girl are highly prized by us. The inhabitants of the Philippines make thereof no case at all. In those islands there are public officers who are very handsomely paid to devirginate girls on the eve of their nuptials.

  “Adultery was publicly authorized in Sparta.

  “Our opinion of women who take to whoring is low; on the other hand, the esteem in which a Lydian female was held corresponded to the number of her lovers. Their earnings from prostitution made up their dower, they had no other.

  “The ladies of Cyprus, in quest of riches, would go down to the ports and publicly lie for pay with whatever foreigner disembarked upon that island.

  “Moral depravation is vital to a State; the Romans were aware of this, and throughout the Republic consequently set up brothels stocked with boys and girls and built theaters where girls danced naked.

  “Babylonian women were prostituted once a year in the Temple of Venus; Armenian women were obliged to deliver themselves in virginal condition to the priests of Tanais who, firstly, bum-fucked them and only accorded them the favor of a frontal deflowering provided they had with seeming courage withstood the inaugural assaults: an imprudent gesture, a tear, a twitch, a sob or a scream was enough, they were deprived of the honor of the subsequent ministrations and hence of the possibility of marrying.

  “The Canarese of Goa expose their daughters to a very different ordeal: they prostitute them to an idol equipped with a member of iron, and its bulk is huge; they forcefully hurl, or impale, the girls upon this dreadful dildo which has first been heated to a suitable temperature: it is thus conventionally and very significantly enlarged that the poor child sets out in search of a husband, who’ll not have her unless she’s been prepared through this ceremony.

  “The Caïmites, you will recall, were a second-century heretical sect; they held that one attains paradise only through incontinence. Every infamous act, it was their belief, had a tutelary angel, and, worshiping these angels one by one, they would give themselves over to incredible debaucheries.

  “Owen, that ancient English king, by law had it established in his realm that no girl could wed unless she had been devirginated by him. In the whole of Scotland and in some districts of France the great barons enjoyed this privilege.

  “Women no less than men arrive at cruelty by way of libertinage; think of the three hundred wives of the Incan Atabaliba, who, of their own accord and as one, prostituted themselves in Peru to the Spanish and aided them in the massacre of their own husbands.

  “Sodomy is general everywhere in the world; there is not a single tribe, race, or nation unacquainted with its practice; in all history not one great man who was not addicted to it. Sapphism is equally universal. This passion, like the former one, is natural because in Nature; at the earliest age, at the period of greatest candor and innocence, before she has come under alien influence, it takes shape and deep root in the little girl’s heart; thus, Lesbian behavior and proclivities, implanted by Nature, bear her ratifying seal of lawfulness.

  “And bestiality used to be popular everywhere. Xenophon tells us that during the retreat of the Ten Thousand the Greeks used goats exclusively. This custom is very widespread in Italy today; the buck surpasses the female of this species: its narrower anal canal is warmer; and this animal, very lusty by nature, needs no prompting, it will begin to agitate itself as soon as it notices that one is about to discharge: I know whereof I speak, Juliette, for it is from experience.

  “The turkey is delicious, but you must cut its throat at the critical instant; time the operation carefully, and the constriction of the bird’s bowels will cause you a fairly overwhelming pleasure.20

  “The Sybarites embuggered dogs; Egyptian women gave themselves to crocodiles; American women appreciate being fucked by monkeys. By late report statues have also been put to use: everyone has heard of the page boy of Louis XV who was found discharging on the fair-assed Aphrodite. And there was a Greek who, arriving at Delphi to consult the Oracle, found in the Temple two marble genii and during the night rendered his libidinous homage to that one which he considered the lovelier. At dawn, spent, he lay a crown of laurel upon the effigy, in thanks for the pleasures he had received.

  “Not only do the Siamese consider suicide justifiable, they even believe that self-slaughter is a beneficial sacrifice to the soul and that, by this means, the way will be opened to happiness in the next world.

  “In Pegu, when a woman has given birth, she is turned for five days over a charcoal fire; it’s to purify her.

  “The Caribs purchase infants while they are yet in the mother’s womb; with a certain dye they mark the child’s belly straightway it is born, depucelate it later, at the age of seven or eight, and not infrequently slay it after having made this use of it.


  “In the island of Nicaragua a father is permitted to sell his children for purposes of immolation. When this folk consecrate their grain, they sprinkle fuck upon it and dance around this twofold product of Nature.

  “To every prisoner in Brazil destined to be executed, a woman is given; he takes his pleasure with her, and the same woman, whom he sometimes impregnates, assists in hacking him to pieces and participates at the meal that is made of his flesh.

  “Before they came under the suzerainty of the Incas, the ancient Peruvians—that is to say, the earliest Scythian settlers who were the first inhabitants of America—had the custom of sacrificing their offspring to the gods.

  “The people who dwell by the banks of the Rio Real for the circumcision of females (a ceremony common to several nations) substitute a rather curious practice: when girls become nubile, sticks covered with large ants are thrust into their womb; the insects sting and bite horribly; the sticks are carefully replaced in order to protract the torture which never lasts less than three months and is apt to go on for a good while longer.

  “Saint Jerome reports that in the course of his travels amongst the Gauls he saw the Scots with great relish consume the buttocks of young shepherds and the breasts of young maids. Personally, I’d have much more confidence in the first of these dainties than in the second and, along with every anthropophagic people, I believe that woman-flesh, like that of all female animals, is necessarily much inferior to what may be cut from males.

  “The Mingrelians and the Georgians are renowned for being the most beautiful races on earth and simultaneously for being the most addicted to every sort of luxury and crime; ’tis quite as if Nature had contrived thus to advise us that, far from being displeased by this misbehavior, she wished to lavish all her gifts upon those with whom it was most positively chronic. Amongst these folk abandoned to joy, incest, rape, child-murder, prostitution, adultery, assassination, thievery, sodomy, sapphism, bestiality, arson, poisoning, rape, parricide—these and a quantity of others of the same kind are virtuous prowesses and are proper to boast of. Do they meet in assemblies, ’tis for nought save to chat about the enormity of their base achievements: reminiscences of past and designs for future undertakings compose the matter of their favorite conversations; and it is thus they arouse one another to the accomplishment of further exploits.