“Of the two pleasures a woman can procure, which do you prefer, cunt-fucking or sodomy?”
“It has befallen me to disappoint the man who encunted me, but never him by whom I was bum-fucked.”
This reply was much appreciated also.
“And your attitude toward oral pleasures?”
“I adore them.”
“Do you like to have your cunt licked?”
“Infinitely.”
“And do you lick well the cunts of others?”
“With industry and enjoyment and, I have been told, with art.”
“It may then be presumed that you enjoy sucking pricks?”
“Draining them.”
“You swallow?”
“I gorge myself.”
“Have you had offspring?”
“No, none.”
“Do you intend to refrain from having them?”
“I shall do everything in my power to avoid them.”
“You therefore dislike progeniture?”
“I detest it.”
“Were you perchance to become pregnant, would you have the courage to abort?”
“Certainly.”
“Has your sponsor with her the sum constituting your entrance fee?”
“Yes.”
“Are you wealthy?”
“Exceedingly.”
“And have you ever devoted any of your money to charity?”
“Of course not.”
“Nor have you ever performed a religious gesture since childhood?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
Clairwil handed the fee over to the Executive Secretary from whom in return she received a small brochure; I was instructed to read it aloud. This printed document was headed by the title Instructions to Women Admitted into the Sodality of the Friends of Crime.
From a drawer Madame de Lorsange took an envelope, opened it. “I have kept the paper,” said she, “for it is interesting. Listen to its contents:”2
The estate or condition into which was born she who is to sign this matters not in the least, she is a woman, and as such created for the pleasures of man. It were hence seeming to prescribe to her a mode of comportment which would enable her to make the rendering of her services advantageous to her purse and agreeable to her fleshly needs. We shall suppose her married. For those who, though unmarried, live nevertheless with a man, whether as his mistress or as his whore, are bound by the very same chains as those who exist in wedlock’s irons, and they will be able to employ the following recommendations to similar purpose, that is, the escaping from those chains or the lightening of them; wherefore note will be taken that the word man as used here generically means lover, husband, or keeper, or in fine any individual arrogating to himself rights to a woman whatever her sort, because, be she in possession of millions, yet she must still earn money from her body, the first law for all women being never to fuck save through libertinage or for the sake of gain; and as she is often obliged to pay those who please her, she must accumulate the necessary reserves therefor, by means of her prostitutions to those others who do not please her; it being fully understood that all that follows concerns her behavior in society only, the Statutes she having just sworn to observe and uphold fixing her behavior within the confines of the Sodality.
1. To attain to the apathy that must be preserved, she will, regardless of whether it be for money she fucks or for pleasure, take constant care to keep her heart inaccessible to love; for if she fucks for pleasure, she’ll obtain little if in love, love being the veritable and certain kiss of death to enjoyment: her inevitable concern to give pleasure to her lover will prevent her from tasting any herself; and if she fucks for money, if in love she will never dare squeeze it from her beloved; which, however, ought to be her unique object and occupation with the man who pays her.
2. Eschewing all metaphysical sentiments, she will always therefore accord preference to him who, if it be for pleasure she fucks, erects quickest and most sizably, has the prettiest prick, or the hardest; and if it be for gain she fucks, to him who fees her most amply.
3. She must scrupulously and at all times avoid such personages as are called fops, idle fellows, dancing masters, and the like, that dronish breed pays as poorly as it fucks; let her resort rather to valers, stableboys, porters, drudges, butchers, such are the breeches energy inhabits, such souls keep secrets safe; menials are plentiful, moreover, they can be changed like skirts, and with never a moment’s fear of an indiscretion.
4. Whatever be the man into whose clutches she falls, let her take care not to consider his proprietorship exclusive; fidelity, an infantile habit and romantic sentiment, can bring about nothing but the downfall of a woman, can be nothing but the cause of woes without end, and never the source of a single pleasure; and indeed, why should she be faithful, since, and she may be very sure of it, in all the world there is no such thing as a faithful man? It is ridiculous, is it not, that the more fragile, the weaker sex, the one forever open to every enticement into every pleasure, the one whose surrender thereto is authorized by daily and manifold seductions—absurd, is it not, that it should be this sex that resists temptation while the other has as means for evil-doing nothing but his unaided solitary wickedness! And more, what’s the use to a woman of her fidelity? If her man loves her truly, he must be of sufficient delicacy to tolerate all her failings, and even to share vicariously in the delights she procures herself and to rejoice therein; if he loves her not, a silly creature she, who would be bound utterly to someone who deceives her day in and day out; woman’s infidelities, faults if you wish, are natural, those of a man proceed from his duplicity and his viciousness; the species of woman we have in mind, that is, a healthy and intelligent woman, will hence spurn no occasion to be unfaithful, rather she will seek such occasions and exploit them as often as possible, and to the full.
5. Deceit is a characteristic no woman can forego, it has ever been the weapon of the weak; always confronted by her superior, how shall she withstand oppression unless she have frequent recourse to lies and imposture? Therefore, let her fearlessly use these arms, Nature furnished them to her in order that she have some defense against her enemies; men wish to be dupes, an agreeable illusion is easier for them to swallow than a bitter reality; and so ought she not disguise her wrongs instead of proclaiming them?
6. A woman should never appear to have a character of her own, she must, artfully, borrow that belonging to this or that person whom it is to her greatest interest to flatter at the moment, whether it be for the sake of her lust or her greed; seeing to it nevertheless that this flexibility does not deprive her of the energy essential for plunging into all such sorts of misdemeanors and crimes as are pleasing to her passions or apt to serve them, examples being adultery, incest, infanticide, poisonings, robbery, murder, all those, in fine, which may be to her liking and which, behind the mask of deceit and the treachery we recommend to her, she may undertake without fear, pause, or regret, because Nature placed these impulses in woman’s heart and only false principles acquired along with education prevent her from acting in accordance with them every day, as she ought to do.
7. Far from alarming her, let the most extensive, the most sustained, the most crapulous libertinage become the basis of her most cherished occupations; if she lends an ear to Nature, she will discover that from her she has received very pronounced leanings, very violent ones, toward this sort of pleasure, and there being no grounds here for fear and fewer yet for restraint, she ought to indulge herself therein constantly: the more she fucks, the better she answers Nature’s expectations of her. Nature is not to be outraged save by continence.3
8. Whatever the act of debauchery her man may propose to her, let her never balk; readiness and good will are her surest means for maintaining a hold over him she wishes to keep. A man soon wearies of a woman’s favors; what happens if she lacks the ability to revive his interest? He ceases to care for her, begins next to loathe her, and abandons her shortly afterward;
but he who remarks a woman devoted to the study of his tastes, to anticipating his desires, to kindling and to satisfying them; ah! that man, finding the woman in his possession always new, is much more apt to settle down to contenting himself with her; the woman is now in a position to deceive him, and deceiving her man is the fondest and the most unrelentingly pursued objective of the individual belonging to the sex whose duties we are sketching here.
9. Let this charming individual very assiduously avoid an air of prudishness and of modesty when she is with her man; few indeed they are who appreciate such posings, and great is the risk of promptly alienating those who are repelled by them. Let her simulate them in public, if she deems this imposture necessary, anything in the direction of hypocrisy is to be recommended: it is one further means to deceit, and she should neglect none of them.
10. She cannot be too strongly urged to avoid pregnancies, either by making extensive use of those various manners of fucking which deflect the seed away from the vessel where conception occurs, or by destroying the foetus once she suspects its existence. Pregnancy is telltale, spoils the figure, endangers the health, is bad from every point of view; let her indulge, preferably, in antiphysical pleasure, this delicious form of it assures her simultaneously greater enjoyment and greater safety, nearly all women who have tried it will have no other; the thought, moreover, of the enormously increased pleasure they thus give men ought surely, and here we consider their amour-propre alone, to spur them to adopt it exclusively.
11. Let a very hardened heart be her protection against a sensibility which is certain to be her undoing; a woman susceptible of sympathies must expect nothing but the worst, for weaker, more delicate, thinner-skinned than men, she will be rent much more cruelly by all that assails this sensibility; whereupon she may bid all pleasure farewell. Her complexion moves her to lust; if, owing to this excess of sensibility we are seeking to destroy, she enslaves herself to one man only, as of that moment she deprives herself of all the charms of libertinage, the libertinage which, in view of the way Nature has constructed her, alone befits her, can alone render her truly happy.
12. Let her meticulously avoid any practice of religion; these infamies which she ought long ago to have spat upon can only, as they affright her conscience, recall her to a state of virtue she shall not re-enter without being forced to renounce all her habits and all her pleasures; those frightful platitudes are not worth the sacrifice they demand; and like the dog in the fable, she will as she chases after them relinquish the reality for the appearance. Atheistic, cruel, impious, libertine, wanton, insatiable, a sodomite, a tribade, incestuous, vindictive, bloodthirsty, hypocritical, and false—such by and large is the description of the woman who will find her rightful place in the Sodality of the Friends of Crime, such are the vices she will have need of if she would find happiness within the Sodality.
The spirited reading I delivered of these precepts convinced the assembly I had taken them quite to heart, and amidst claps and hurrahs I stepped down into the press.
The couples distracted from their proceedings by the rites of my admission now fell back to their merrymaking, and I was soon under assault; at this point I lost view of Clairwil and was not to see her again until supper.
First to hail me was a gentleman of fifty.
“By Jesus, I’m blind if you don’t have the look of a whore,” he exclaimed, steering me toward a couch, “and you talk like one, too. I liked your style, slut, it put my prick in the air.”
So saying the lecher encunts me. He scrapes away for a quarter of an hour, the while kissing me fervently; then, claimed by a woman who plucks him straight off my belly, he deserts me without having discharged. It’s next a lady in her sixties who approaches and, thrusting me back upon the couch before I can rise, she frigs me and has me frig her at great length. Three or four men have been watching us; one of them suddenly moves in and embuggers the matron, who lets forth a screech of pleasure. Another of the men, noticing I had been entering into a sweat beneath the old Lesbian’s fingerings, had offered me his prick to suck; and now that the woman leaves off toying with me, the rascal glides from my mouth to my cunt; he had the prettiest prick in the world and wielded it like a god; a girl steals it away from me and stows it impetuously into her slit; my rival nods to me, I answer the summons and she sets to cunt-licking me: she got his fuck from the man whom I’d hoped to drain, and by and by she got mine too. A pair of youths sauntered up and joining us formed the most pleasant group, encunting us both; my companion went off with the lad who had just served her, leaving me alone for a moment. Here now was a personage I recognized as a bishop for whom I had toiled in the past when with Madame Duvergier; he encunts me also, after having me piss on his face. The next to come, and this ecclesiastic was also a familiar face, popped his member into my mouth and let fly therein. A very engaging young thing arrives to have herself frigged, I suck her with all my heart; her heaving flanks are caught firmly in midflight by a man of about forty, who bum-stuffs her; it is not long before the libertine has done the same to me, while tupping he reviled us most energetically, calling us nuns, cunt-suckers, and as he sodomized the one he spanked the behind of the other.
“What are you doing to these two buggeresses?” asked a well-made young man who strode up then and socratized him on the spot; “take that, villain,” he went on, “it’s not woman-ass that will cure what ails you.”
Once again I was left to myself and was recovering my breath when an elderly man presented himself, he had a fistful of withes and meant to warm my hind parts therewith and to have me warm his prick.
“You’re the one they admitted tonight, are you not?” he began.
“I am.”
“A pity I haven’t come across you until now,” said he, “I have been busy in a seraglio. You’ve got a damned pretty ass, bend over, let me get into it.”
And he stormed triumphantly through the gate, I got his fuck. A delightful young man appeared and dealt with me in the same way, though he lashed me far more stoutly; next, one after the other, a procession of ten persons, six of them men of the law and four men of God; they all fucked me bumwise. I was quite afire, I repaired to a public convenience: as women were using only those where men were in attendance, it was a lad who, after settling me upon the throne and helping me off again, asked if he could lend me his tongue. By way of reply I thrust my ass at his nose, and so pleasantly did he clean it that fuck escaped me. Returning to the assembly hall I remarked some men waiting about, apparently to waylay women emerging from the privies; and indeed one of them steps up and asks leave to kiss my ass, I wheel it about, his tongue probes a moment, he straightens up, and from his sorrowful expression I divine his disappointment at finding the cupboard so bare. It is without a word he hastens away from me to join a youth just then entering the same privy; and I profit from a brief respite to survey the scene. Believe me when I say that there, in that spacious room, the over-all spectacle was one such as distanced anything the most lascivious imagination could possibly conceive in the course of threescore years: what a wealth of voluptuous attitudes! how many curious doings, what a variety of tastes and preferences!
Oh, great God, I murmured, how wondrous indeed is Nature, how splendid, and how delicious are these, all the passions she gives us.
But everywhere my eye roved, it was to be amazed at the same extraordinary state of affairs: save for the utterances incidental to the action, sometimes shrill exclamations of pleasure, and much blasphemy, sometimes loud, there was no other sound, one could have heard a pin drop. Over all that was astir the most entire order reigned; were some altercations to arise, and it happened very rarely, a gesture from the President or the Censor restored peace and quiet in a trice; the most decent activities could not have transpired amidst greater calm. And thus I was made quickly to realize that, of all the things there are in the world, the passions are those that command the greatest respect from human beings.
Men and women in ever growing numbers w
ere beginning to remove to the seraglios; tickets were being distributed by the President, a smile upon her lips. I was now had at by several women; then by several more; I frigged with no fewer than thirty-two of them, a good half of whom were past forty: they sucked me, fucked me frontwise and behind with dildoes, one had me piss into her gullet while I lapped her cunt, another suggested we shit on each other’s bubs, she larded mine generously, I was’ unable to repay her in kind, unfortunately; while a man labored in his asshole, a second man gobbled up the excrement steaming on my chest; and after that he shat there in turn, as he did so discharging into the mouth of him by whom he had just been sodomized.
The President developed a sudden craving for me; she appointed a man to relieve her at her post, and we came to grips: kissed each other, tongued each other, sucked and caressed each other nigh to death. With the exception of Clairwil, never had I seen a woman discharge so abundantly nor so lewdly; her favorite stunt was to receive a bum-fucking the while, her cunt crushed upon a woman’s face, that woman sucked her and she herself cunt-sucked another woman: we went brilliantly through this exercise, and the whore resumed her chair.
Back came the men, in force: among this second wave I found few encunters but buggers aplenty, an occasional masturbater, and a dozen or so mouth-fuckers; one of the latter had himself pumped by a youth while snuffling under my armpits, licking them softly ever and anon, which procured me a very pleasant sensation. I was given five or six floggings; three or four rectal injections, which I flushed into the mouths of those who had administered them; I was got to fart, there were bidders for my spittle; I spent thirty whole minutes sticking thousands of pins into one squire’s buttocks and balls, and thus bestudded did he keep himself for the rest of the evening; the mania of another was to run his tongue over a woman’s body, he was two hours lapping my eyes and mouth and ears and nostrils and between my toes, and finally inserted his tongue in my asshole, and discharged. Several women insisted upon fucking me with great, massive dildoes; one led up a man and had me heat his prick by chafing it upon her asshole, and next required me to push the fuck into it with the tip of my finger; a dear little creature utterly besmeared my buttocks with her shit, behind her stood a middle-aged man, he embuggered her while eating the mard clean off my ass; I was informed they were father and daughter. There were other such couples; I beheld brothers embuggering their sisters; fathers encunting their daughters; mothers fucked by their children; in a word, every possible scene of incest, of adultery, of sodomy, of lechery, of whoring, of foulness, of impiety, each under a hundred various forms and a hundred various colors took place before my eyes, and surely at no bacchanal of old was there ever such a concurrence of so much nastiness and so much infamy.