Juliette

  “My name, Madame, is Bernole,” the stranger begins, “a name with which you are surely unacquainted. It would be less unfamiliar to the mother you lost, to that excellent woman who, were she alive, would not allow you to continue this however lucrative existence of shameless disorderliness and misbehavior.”

  “Sir,” I interrupt, “your tone does not strike me as fitting to somebody who has come to ask a favor….”

  “Softly, Juliette, softly,” Bernole replies, “it is nonetheless possible that I am going to ask you a favor and equally possible that I have rights that allow me to adopt this tone which displeases you.”

  “Whatever be your rank, Sir, I would have you know that—”

  “And I would have you know, Juliette, that if I have come to ask your help, you ought to be flattered by the request. Kindly look at these papers, young lady: a glance will inform you of my need of that help and at the same time of your duty to grant it.”

  I had but to scan those documents. “My God,” I gasped, “what, my mother! She was guilty … and with you?”

  “Precisely, Juliette; I am your father,” and Bernole spoke most crisply. “I brought you into this world—I was a cousin of your mother, my parents had prepared the match, we were already betrothed when the offer of another marriage, a more advantageous one, induced them to alter their plans. They sacrificed your mother—at a time when she was pregnant, you were in her womb. She and I contrived to deceive the man whom you knew as your father, he was completely taken in. You are not his child, but mine; I can prove it. Below your right breast is a birthmark, a brownish spot the size of a small coin…. Juliette, have you one such mark?”

  “I do, Sir.”

  “Then recognize your father, oh, cold, unfeeling soul! Or if you are not willing to believe me, read through these papers with a little attention, they will banish every shred of doubt. After the death of your mother … and it was a horrible death, the vicious doing of one Noirceuil, the same with whom you, excused by no ignorance of the facts, dare maintain a criminal relationship, and who would be broken on the wheel tomorrow if only we had the necessary evidence—and, unfortunately, it is lacking; after her death, I say, I was deluged by every imaginable piece of misfortune. All I had, I lost. I lost all your mother left me as well. For eighteen years now I have subsisted thanks to public charity alone; but I have found you at last, Juliette, and all my sufferings are soon to be over….”

  “Sir, I have a sister who in all likelihood is still floundering amidst hardships caused by the prejudices I rid myself of very early on; is she also your child?”

  “Justine?”

  “That is correct.”

  “She is indeed my daughter. The woman who bore her loved me, that love endured despite every obstacle; I alone had the joy of making her a mother.”

  “Great heaven!” cried the unhappy Justine, “my father lived and I knew him not! Dear God, had Thou but brought us together I would have been a comfort to him and soothed him in his distress, I would have shared with him the little I had and my sympathy would have compensated for the unkindness which, sister, he had probably to endure at your hands.”

  “My child,” declared the Marquis, out of all patience with Justine after the night he had spent with her, “if you are allowed the honor of being present at this gathering, it is not to afflict us by your jeremiads. Pray continue, Madame.”

  Knowing me as you do, my friends, you must realize that this affair was distasteful to me, in as much as there are few souls so poorly attuned to gratitude and filial sentiments as mine; I’d not dropped one tear at the loss of the person I had always assumed to be my father, would it have been natural for me to be moved by the calamities which had befallen this other one fate restored to me? And the bestowing of alms, I need hardly remind you, was not a pastime to which I was much given; I considered charity the worst use money could be put to; and this insolent beggar might talk as he liked about being my father, the fact remained that to satisfy him I had either to part with some silver or plead in his favor before a Minister who, quite as stern, quite as unbending as I in his attitude toward such matters, could hardly be expected to lend a complacent ear to my importunings. To be sure, this individual was my father, of that there could be no question, the proof was there, but to it Nature incited in me no response at all, none. It was with sheer indifference I stared at the person standing in front of me. The silence lasted several minutes.

  “Sir,” said I at last, “the tales you tell me may be perfectly true; however, I see not the faintest reason for being obliged to listen to them. I have principles, Sir, steadfast principles which, unluckily for you, are totally incompatible with this commiseration you implore. As for the titles of paternity, here you are, I hand you back the papers which establish them, and let me also give you the assurance that I haven’t the least need of them: whether I have a father or whether I do not have a father, you would surely have trouble realizing how little I care. And so my advice to you, Sir, is to relieve me very promptly of your presence unless through obstinacy you wish to compel me to have you thrown bodily out that window.” I rise, intending to ring for my servants without further ado; but Bernole rushes forward, stays my hand.

  “Ungrateful child!” he cries, “do not punish me for a sin over which I have shed a lifetime’s tears—you are of illegitimate birth, aye, alack, but does my blood not run in your veins for all that? and do you not owe me your aid? If you cannot heed the feelings Nature seems to have forgot to put in your breast, will you not hark to the plaintive accents of misery and of despair?” Sinking down before me, clutching my knees, wetting them with his tears, “Juliette,” says he, gazing up at my face, “Juliette, enormous wealth is thine, and it is but a crust of bread thy penniless father begs of thee! Girl, think on thy mother, wouldst thou refuse succor to the man who loved her? The only man to have loved her who bore thee nine months in her womb, hast thou no respect for him? Attend the prayer of the lowly, else Heaven shall smite thee in thy wickedness.”

  Undeniably, pathos abounded in the wretch’s speech; but there are hearts which harden rather than melt before the efforts of those who strive to appeal to them. Like the kind of wood that toughens when exposed to fire, it is in the very element which one would suppose ought to consume them that they acquire an added degree of force. Thus, instead of exciting sentiments of compassion in me, Bernole’s antics were fast hurling me into that lubricious furor which the refusal to perform a good action begets, a mild version, this, of what happens inside us when we acquit ourselves of an evil one. At first it was the icy stare of indifference I bent upon Bernole; my glance now warmed, became the fiery one of pleasure; and my throat constricted as there filtered through my veins that perfidious delight which fastens upon us at the thought or the recollection or the designing of an act of badness;8 my brows knit, my breathing quickens, and feeling myself grow ever harsher because this harshness is agreeable, because it is arousing … because I am readying to discharge. … “I have told you,” I declare to the boor groveling at my feet, “that I don’t care who you are, that I shall never care who you are, and that I never give anything to the needy; and so I shall say it once again, and this shall be the last time: kindly get out of here. Or do you want to rot in some dungeon?”

  A wave of madness sweeps over the man: employing now imprecations, now pleas, then invectives and then expressions of endearment, he beats his head against the floor, opens a gash in his brow, my apartment is spattered with his blood…. This blood is my blood; I watch it well forth, and I am happy. Happiness chokes me. After several exquisite minutes, I ring.

  “Expel this clown from my house,” I instruct my servants, “forcibly; but get his address before you do.”

  I was obeyed…. Overwrought, inflamed, I was obliged to have immediate resort to my women who were two hours toiling to restore me to my senses. Mighty effect of crime upon a heart like mine! It was written in the sacred book of Nature, that everything apt to outrage the Natu
re common spirits invariably misunderstand was sure to constitute, for me, the means to pleasure.

  Both Noirceuil and the Minister were dining with me that day; I asked the former, was he acquainted with an individual called Bernole, who claimed to have been my mother’s lover and to have fathered me?

  “Yes,” said Noirceuil, “I knew a Bernole. He had investments with your father and his money was lost along with your family’s when I operated its ruin. If I remember rightly he was indeed fond of your mother, over whom he fairly grieved when she was gone; I dare say it was through no fault of his I wasn’t hanged…. Do you mean to tell me the fellow is still about? Then it is high time he were put properly out of the way.”

  “We can lodge him in the Bastille before the day is out,” said Saint-Fond. “Juliette has only to ask—”

  “No,” Noirceuil broke in, “it would be a mistake to hurry, for there are possibilities here, it seems to me. I already envisage a pathetic scene—”

  “Exactly,” I said. “And dungeons—piffle, such scoundrels merit worse than that. Noirceuil and you, Saint-Fond, you have labored earnestly at the reformation of my soul; that your efforts have not been vain is going to be proven upon this occasion. Since we are to trouble to commit a piece of mischief, we might as well make it a full-blown crime. The plan is simple, there can be no other: while the dog dies by my hand you’ll be fucking me.”

  “Blast me,” exclaimed the Minister, quaffing off another glass of champagne, “you are marvelous, Juliette.” And divesting himself of his breeches, “What a mind the child has. She has but to air a thought and lo! my prick soars. Do you really believe you shall have the determination to execute your scheme?”

  “I swear it upon the head of this prick I inspire,” said I, catching hold of the purpling member Saint-Fond had just enlarged.

  And I being bent forward at the moment, Noirceuil advanced a hand toward my ass while gripping his risen stave hard. “By fuck, Saint-Fond, I always told you she was a delicious creature, did I not?” and he scraped his engine between my parted buttocks.

  “Come, come, gentlemen, hear me out if you please. The undertaking must be embellished by some pretty details. It strikes me that Bernole and I ought to meet again: I’ll tell him I am dreadfully sorry about what happened today, declare it was all a misunderstanding, I’ll deceive him by means of advances, we’ll kiss, don’t you know, I’ll have him in love with me in half an hour, beside himself, out of his mind, he’ll stick me…. No, that’s not enough, he has got to embugger me … and he will. You, Saint-Fond, at this point you’ll suddenly appear, at the critical instant you’ll burst into the room, the instant, that is to say, he is about to discharge: you are my lover, you are furious, you intend to punish me, pointing a dagger to my breast you enjoin me to kill Bernole or perish myself. So I kill him, of course. We shall include Clairwil in the scene, she will surely be able to contribute something original to it.”

  Discussions preparatory to a crime never fail to please rascals. These two waxed so enthusiastic as they listened to me that there was shortly no restraining them anymore. The door to a boudoir opens, several individuals join us as auxiliaries, and my ass receives plenteous offerings from each of these monsters whom my perfidious imaginings had hurled into a very lather of lust. The storm abated, a draft for five hundred thousand francs was delivered to me, and with it I had the promise of a million payable the day the project was enacted.

  The prospect of this reward tempted me sorely; impossible to turn back now. I rush to my estate; there, I take pen in hand and write to Bernole. Kind Sir, I begin, filial devotion has found its way into my heart at last, and as I write I weep: it is the pure country air, apparently, that has dispelled the ferocity we inhale from the foul atmosphere of Paris; come visit me here in these idyllic rustic surroundings, in this place where Nature reigns uncontested, and let me give vent to the feelings Nature inspires in me for you. My man arrives…. Ah, the joy of duping him, very sweet it was, sweet beyond belief or telling; I was fairly quaking from delight. The first thing I did was display to him the luxuriousness of my circumstances, he was dazzled; my artful caresses completed his seduction.

  After we had supped in richest style, “By what possible means,” I asked, “can I hope to right the wrongs I did you, all because of my wicked mind? Monsieur Bernole,” I declared, “my position is not easy. I was afraid. I must watch my step very closely. I am the Minister’s confidante, his friend; great is his power, he need but lift a finger and I am doomed. In you, as you stood before me, I detected nothing of a father; no, let me say it out, the emotions which assailed me were not a daughter’s, they were something a thousand times more tender and more delicate, and that accounts for why, dreading lest I succumb to them, I was obliged to feign coldness, to behave harshly, aye, cruelly. What else could I do? Overcome by affection, by the most sacred love…. Eh, Bernole, you loved my mother, I would also have you love me; but if we are to know happiness together, discretion is required of us both, discretion, that is all; are you such a man as a woman may rely upon?”

  The upright and decent Bernole shuddered at hearing these words.

  “My Juliette,” replied he, deeply stirred, “I seek to reawaken your sense of filial love only; that alone is due me, religion and honor, to which I am yet attached, prevent me from accepting any other. Tax me not with immorality for having lived out of wedlock with your mother: we both believed that such voluntarily contracted ties as bound us together were valid in the eyes of heaven, and these we respected; ’twas not lawful, what we did. I am aware of that, I was aware of it then, but our error was one Nature comprehends and forgives, but what you propose to me is abhorrent to her.”

  “Why, Bernole, yours is a benighted mind!” I cried, my solicitations having brought me to the point of kissing him and laying a hand upon his thigh. “You whom I adore, alas,” I went on with mounting heat, “are my sentiments of no interest to you? Come give life a second time to her whose sole glory is to have been sired by you: my first existence I owe to love, let me owe it another also; you gave me life, will you not make that life worth living? Oh, my Bernole, ’tis so, ’tis so: without you I must die.”

  Two breasts white as snow and prettily shaped, which as though by accident pop into sight that same moment, eyes full of dreamy longing, of languor, and of lust … straying hands wandering up the paternal legs to unbutton the paternal pantaloons and with skill to fondle and stroke the half-stiffened instrument that brought me into this world; at length Bernole’s reluctant passions are roused….

  “Good God, what are these assaults,” he exclaims, “and how am I to withstand them? How spurn the living image of her whom I worshiped up until the very end?”

  “And today, Bernole, your beloved is restored to you—behold in me she whom you loved in the past—she breathes; by the sweet kisses her mouth thirsts after bring her entirely back to life—ah, do you realize the state you are putting me in?” I demand. “Only see,” I add, lifting my skirts, flinging myself upon a couch, “yes, look, look, and resist if you dare.”

  Gullible Bernole, quite swept off his feet, falls into the trap I have laid for his virtue; she who caresses the sot is thoughtful only of the base scheme that is soon to procure his undoing. Possessed of a vibrant member, wiry, spirited, and above all uncommonly long, Bernole fucked very adequately, yes, delightfully; stimulated by his performance I treated him generously, clutched his buttocks and pulled him firmly to me. That for awhile; then, slithering down beneath him, I merrily pump this prime cause of my existence; after which, resuming my place, I pack him away into my cunt, ball-deep: inordinately heated by my tricks, Bernole looses a discharge; I answer with one of my own, as my incestuous entrails become host to a fresh batch of the same seed he sowed long ago in my mother’s womb. Thus did I conceive. I shall tell you about my pregnancy a little later on.

  Unhinged by love, under the sway of that deity forgetting the dictates of the honor and the probity which had so well ru
led his conduct hitherto, Bernole implores me to let him stay the night. Greatly excited by the idea of being fucked by the father my viciousness has passed the death sentence upon, I consent to everything. Bernole’s efforts surpassed my hopes: I was soundly tuppered seven times over, and all the while obsessed by my ferocious designs, out-discharged him two to one as I dwelt upon the prospect of burying on the morrow him who had been so ill-starred, first to be my father, then, worse yet, to give me such pleasure. Midway along in our exercises, alluding to my dread lest carelessness lead to a pregnancy that would discover our intrigue, I steered round an exquisite ass by way of suggestion that he change itinerary: but crime, alas, was so foreign to my virtuous father’s heart that, would you believe it? he proved not to have the least notion how to go about these infamies (infamies, I borrow his expression) which, he was at pains to have me understand, if he performed them, it was out of prudence and excess of love; the well-tooled sophist buggered me thrice—these rehearsals were necessary for the play that was to be staged the next day; so keen was their effect upon me I fainted away from pleasure.

  There arrived that longed-for tomorrow when I was to savor the unspeakable charms of a crime I was in a perfect panic of eagerness to perpetrate. I looked forth upon the day in its dawning: Nature, whom I was about to outrage so gravely, had never appeared to me in such beauty; and glancing in a mirror I saw myself as prettier, healthier, more winsome than ever I had been before; within me there were hidden stirrings, never had they needled me so sharply, so imperiously as now they did. Rising from my bed, I sensed myself dominated by a lust … by a wickedness … I was devoured by a craving for abominations; and in me there was something beyond words bitter: it was despair at being incapable of carrying horror to the full extent described by my desires….