“Suitably close by every spot likely to become a theater for your atrocities.”
“Good; and no lights along the pathways?”
“None; darkness beseems crime, you shall enjoy it in its full horror. Let us be off, my Prince, and stray into these labyrinths, and accept the challenge to do our worst.”
We all of us set forth together, the two libertines, the three victims, and I. Entering an alley flanked by hedges, Saint-Fond exclaimed that he could not proceed another step without first fucking; and seizing the youngest of the girls, the villain blasted both her maidenheads before rejoining us ten minutes later. During his absence, I sought to excite the old Prince; but in vain. Nothing seemed able to rouse his prick.
“Do you then intend not to fuck?” Saint-Fond asked him, laying hands on the second girl.
“No, no, go on, depucelate,” answered the old lecher, “I’ll restrict myself to vexations; pass them on to me one by one when you’re through with each.”
And getting the youngest of those little girls into his clutches he torments her in the unkindest manner while I suck him with might and main. The while Saint-Fond carries on with his deflowering, and having put the second girl in the same state as the first and turned her over to the Prince, he grabs the fourteen-year-old.
“You have no idea how much I enjoy fucking in darkness this way,” says he; “the shades of night are a goad to crime and enormously facilitate committing it satisfactorily.”
Saint-Fond, who had got this far without discharging, now let fly into the eldest girl’s ass; and then he and the Prince held parley. It was agreed between them that Saint-Fond should retain for himself her who had just drained out his sperm; in exchange, he ceded the two other girls to the Prince, and that worthy, armed with all the equipment necessary for the tortures he was contemplating, staggered off in an ecstasy, leading his victims by their chains; while I accompanied my lover and the one who was to die by his hand. When we were gone off a distance, I told him of my theft, we both laughed heartily, and he assured me that, as was his custom, the Prince, prior to coming to our party, had visited a brothel with a view to putting himself in the appropriate mood; and that nothing would be easier than to convince him his treasures had been stolen there.
“You are a friend of this man, I suppose?”
“I am friend to no one,” the Minister gave me answer; “my connections with this original have been advantageous so far, he is on the best of terms with the King; but when that changes, let him fall into disgrace tomorrow, and I’ll be the first to tread upon him. He divined my tastes, I don’t know how; he gave me to understand his were similar, he proposed we collaborate, I acquiesced—that’s the extent of our relationship. What is it, Juliette, do you dislike the fellow?”
“I find him unbearable.”
“Upon my soul, were it not for the political considerations I’ve just mentioned, I’d be only too happy to see him in your power. Nevertheless we can perhaps arrange his downfall. For, my dear, you please me to such a degree, there is nothing I am not willing to do for you.”
“You were saying, were you not, that you have obligations toward him?”
“I have a few.”
“Well then, how, in the light of your principles, how can you for one instant tolerate being in his debt?”
“Leave everything to me, Juliette.” And then Saint-Fond, changing the subject, praised me anew for the manner in which I had conducted this feast. “You are,” said he, “a woman of taste and wit and the better I come to know you, the more I am persuaded that I must attach you to me.”
And then for the first time he addressed me in the familiar tu, and he granted me the yet greater favor of employing that term with him.
“I shall serve you my whole life long if such be your wish, Saint-Fond,” I replied; “I know your tastes, I shall satisfy them and if you desire to bind me more closely to you, you will concur in the satisfying of mine.”
“Kiss me, heavenly creature, one hundred thousand crowns shall be delivered to you tomorrow morning—see if I do not guess your heart’s desires!”
It was at that point an old beggarwoman accosted us, asking for alms.
“What’s this!” cried Saint-Fond, surprised. “Do they let the rabble in?” The Minister gazed inquiringly at me; he detected the smile upon my lips and grasped the jest at once.
“Delicious, delicious,” he murmured. “Eh then, what is it you wish?” he went on, turning to the crone.
“Alas, my Lord, a few pennies out of charity,” replied she; “come, deign to look upon my misery.”
And catching the Minister by the hand, she guided him into a mean little hut lit by a lamp hung from the ceiling, and where two children, one male and the other female, and no older than eight or ten, were lying naked on some rotten straw.
“Behold this unhappy family,” the pauper said to us; “it’s been three days since I was able to give them a crust of bread. Have the kindness, you who are reputed so very rich, to give me the wherewithal to sustain my children awhile in their sorry existence. Oh, my Lord, I know not who you are; but are you acquainted with Monsieur de Saint-Fond?”
“I am,” said the Minister.
“Ah then! you see his handiwork before you. He had my husband taken off to jail; he deprived us of the little that we possessed of goods; such are the cruel circumstances we are reduced to since above a year….”
The great thing about this scene, my friends, the thing in which I could take pride, was its complete authenticity: I had unearthed these wretched victims of Saint-Fond’s injustice and rapacity, I now presented them to him in the flesh, to reawaken his wickedness.
“Ah, the scoundrel!” exclaimed the Minister, staring fixedly at the humble woman, “yes, I know him well, by God I do, and you shall come to know him too: he stands before you…. Oh, Juliette, ’tis cleverly you have prepared this confrontation, my soul is in a very ferment…. How then, what is your complaint? I’ve sent your husband to prison, he is innocent—that is true. I’ve done better yet: your husband is no more. Until now, you have eluded me; for I meant to treat you likewise.”
“What wrong have we done you, my Lord?”
“That of dwelling in my neighborhood, and of owning a small property you were not disposed to sell to me. But it is mine now, ruining you I have dispossessed you. And now you come begging to me. Do you think I care if you die of starvation?”
“But these poor children?”
“France contains about ten million too many of them: weeding the garden is to render society a service.” Peering down at the children, he rolled first the one, then the other over with his foot. “Not bad stuff, though. It needn’t go entirely to waste.”
Whereupon, his prick prodigiously stiffened by all the foregoing, the wag bends, seizes the little boy, and embuggers him on the spot; next catching hold of the little girl, he does the same with her. Then, very heatedly he cries: “Lousy old bitch, show me your bewrinkled bum, I require the sight of your flapping buttocks in order to unload.”
The old woman weeps, she resists; I lend Saint-Fond my aid. Having heaped insults upon that woebegone ass, the libertine penetrates it, while trampling on the brats, literally crushing them beneath his boots as he sodomizes their mother, and at the moment of his discharge he fires a bullet into her brain. And we depart from that den of misfortune, dragging along the fourteen-year-old victim, whose buttocks Saint-Fond had been kissing the whole time he was in action.
“Well, Sire,” I said as we were strolling away, “from now on that family’s property is yours to do with as you like; that was not the case until this evening. Those people had solicited help, their pleas had obtained a hearing, trouble was brewing; not, to be sure, that they could have caused you any serious worries; but they would have proved a nuisance. I found them out at work, I lured them here; now you’re rid of them.”
Saint-Fond was in a state of inconceivable exaltation. “Ah, how sweet is crime,” said he, the sinceres
t feeling manifest in his tone, “and how voluptuous its aftermaths! Juliette, you cannot imagine how my every fiber has been electrified by the deed you have just led me to commit…. My angel, my divine creature, my one god, only say: what is it you would have me do for you?”
“You are pleased, I know, when one gives voice to one’s longing for money—will you then increase the promised sum?”
“It was a hundred thousand crowns, I believe?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll have twice that amount, Oh, Juliette. But wait, what is this?” cried the Minister, recoiling at the sight of two masked men who were approaching us, pistols in their hands. “I shudder; I am not one of your courageous fools…. Ho there, gentlemen! What do you want?”
“You’ll soon see,” replies one of the two, binding Saint-Fond fast to a tree and pulling his breeches down to his heels.
“But what do you intend to do?”
“To give you a lesson,” said the other man; he is brandishing a cat-o’-nine-tails, and already swinging it at the ministerial behind, “to teach you to deal as you have just done with those poor folk in the cottage.”
And after he has laid on three or four hundred strokes, which serve mainly to bring Saint-Fond’s wearied tool into the air again, the other hoves up and completes his ecstasy by introducing a gigantean prick into his anus. Having fucked, the fucker takes up the whip in his turn and whips; when he is done whipping, his companion bum-tups my lover—who, throughout, palpates the young girl’s buttocks to the right and mine to the left; Saint-Fond is untied, the two men vanish into the night, and we wander off again down obscure lanes.
“Oh, Juliette, I must say it to you ever and ever again, you are divine…. But, you know, that last episode gave me a fright—there’s nothing like subjecting one’s nerves to an initial commotion before imparting that of voluptuousness to them: the average man will always remain in total ignorance of such contrasts and gradations.”
“Fear acts powerfully upon you?”
“Prodigiously, my dear. I’m probably the greatest coward on earth, the which I own without the least twinge of shame. Being afraid is an art, it is a science, the art and science of self-preservation, and of capital importance to man; so that it is a patent absurdity to link honor to bravery in the face of dangers. I place my honor rather in dreading them all.”
“Ah, Saint-Fond, if fear can have such an effect upon your senses, think what must be its effect upon those who are the victims of your passions!”
“Exactly, and it is thence comes my keenest pleasure,” the Minister rejoined; “the very essence of my enjoyment is in making those victims so suffer in the selfsame way from the thing which plagues my existence…. But where are we? this garden of yours, Juliette, is vast indeed.”
“We are at the edge of one of the pits prepared for the victims.”
“Ah yes,” said Saint-Fond, stooping and reaching out a hand, “the Prince must have performed a sacrifice hereabouts, I do believe I feel a corpse.”
“Let’s pull it out,” I suggested, “and see who it is…. She seems to be the youngest of the three sisters—and not quite dead either. I dare say the rascal throttled her, then buried her alive. Well, we’ll revive her, and you’ll have the fun of slaying two.”
Our attentions did indeed bring the poor child back to life, but she was unable to tell us what the Prince had done to her once she had lost consciousness. The two sisters hugged each other, shedding many tears; and the barbarous Saint-Fond informed them that he was about to kill them both. Which is what he went ahead and did; however, since I have a good many adventures of this kind to relate, rather than risk being tedious, I shall forego a description of this one. Suffice it to say that the monster discharged into the ass of the younger of the two creatures while finishing her off; we tossed some dirt into the pit; and we pursued our way.
“Innumerable are the fell deeds which may afford pleasure; but to my knowledge there is none that causes it more deliciously than destruction, wanton murder,” that arch-libertine affirmed. “No, there is no ecstasy to compare with the one you taste as you indulge in this divine infamy: were this amusement to become more generally widespread, I can assure you the earth would be depopulated inside a dozen years. Dear Juliette, your performance of a moment ago encourages me to suppose that you are as fond of crime as I.”
And I gave Saint-Fond plainly to understand that it stimulated me not one whit less, and if anything, more, than it did him. It was then we perceived, in a clearing among the trees, and by the light of the moon, what appeared to be a little convent.
“And now what have we here?” asked Saint-Fond. “Does she mean to drown me in delight?”
“Truth to tell,” said I, “I do not know where we are.” I knocked on the door.
It was opened by a nun advanced in years.
“Venerable and beloved mother,” I said to her, “will you show your hospitality to two strangers who have wandered off the beaten path?”
“Enter,” the good lady replied; “though this be a nunnery, the virtue you invoke is not alien to our hearts, and we shall as willingly practice it with you as we have done with an elderly seigneur who a short while ago made the same request: he is with the women of the house who have just risen for matins.”
From what she told us, we realized that the Prince was there too. We joined him; he was surrounded by a group made up of another nun and half a dozen pensionnaires aged from twelve to sixteen. Yet covered with the blood of his latest victim, the old lecher was already beginning to behave disrespectfully.
Quickly we entered the room, the nun who was there addressed herself to Saint-Fond.
“Monsieur, will you put a halt to this ungrateful person’s effrontery. In return for the kindness we have shown him he has done nought but insult us.”
“Madame,” replied the Minister, “my friend, scarcely more moral than I and like myself detesting virtue, is very little disposed to reward it; your pensionnaires look exceedingly attractive to me; either we set your damned convent afire this instant, or by God, we rape the six of them.”
Thereupon, with one hand seizing the smallest, and with his fist lashing out at two nuns who seek to protect her, Saint-Fond violates her there and then, frontwardly. Need more be said? The five others had soon undergone the same fate, except that Saint-Fond, fearing lest his tool weaken, ignored cunts and perforated assholes only. As one by one they emerged from his clutches, the Prince took charge of them and flogged them till they bled, synchronizing that ceremony with the other of kissing my buttocks which, he oft repeated, he prized, he cherished, he adored. Saint-Fond, keeping a firm grip upon himself, had discharged not a drop; he has at the two nuns, one of whom is over sixty, shuts himself up with them in an adjoining cell, and comes back thirty minutes later, alone.
“Eh, my friend, what have you done with those duennas?” I inquire of the Minister, who rejoins us in a very overwrought state.
“Remaining in control of this establishment,” he informs us, “meant getting rid of those warders: I started by sporting with them in that cell, I have a passion for weather-beaten asses. Then, discovering a stairway that leads down to a well, I cast them in.”
“And these pullets, what’s to be done with them? I trust we aren’t going to leave them alive,” says the Prince.
Further horrors were perpetrated, whereof I’ll say only that they were ghastly; the convent was emptied.
The two libertines, having by now emptied their balls also, and seeing day about to break, desired to return to my house. There, a sumptuous breakfast, served by three naked women, was awaiting us; we all had hearty appetites. The Prince asked Saint-Fond’s leave to spend a few hours in bed with me; and my lover, flanked by two manservants, had himself fucked until the sun was well up in the sky.
The old nobleman’s struggles and wigglings constituted no great threat to my modesty; after going to great pains and lengths he contrived to introduce himself into my asshole, though ??
?twas not for long he stuck there; Nature dashed my hopes, the instrument bent, and the villain, who hadn’t even the strength to discharge—for he had, he maintained, shed his fuck twice in the course of the evening—fell asleep, his snout wedged in my behind.
As soon as we rose, Saint-Fond, more enchanted with me than ever, gave me a draft for eight hundred thousand francs, payable at the Royal Treasury; and he and his friend quitted my house.
Generally speaking, all the succeeding parties resembled that inaugural one, save for particular episodes I with my fertile imagination took care to vary constantly. Noirceuil was almost always present, but apart from the Prince I had not seen any strangers at any of them.
I had been at the helm of that great vessel for three months, steering it with all possible success, when Saint-Fond informed me I had a ministerial crime to commit on the morrow. Oh, dread consequences of a barbarous policy! The victim? Surely, my friends, you would be hard pressed to guess his identity. ’Twas Saint-Fond’s own father, a gentleman of sixty-six, in every way the soul of respectability; he had been disturbed at his son’s irregularities of comportment, dreading lest they prove his undoing; he had argued with him, warned him, even spoken to his disadvantage at Court, with the aim of constraining him to leave the Ministry, very rightly believing that it were better for this scoundrel his son to retire of his own accord, rather than be banished from the stage.
From the outset, Saint-Fond took his interference ill; he stood to gain a yearly three thousand from his father’s death and accordingly did not long delay coming to a decision. Noirceuil arrived with the particulars; and noticing that I appeared somewhat to waver at the prospect of this major crime, he thought by means of the following speech to cleanse the projected deed of the taints of atrocity my weakness idiotically ascribed to it.