Juliette

  “And hence some captures,” I interrupted.

  “Captures, rapes, burnings, murders, whatever the criminal chances happen to be I exploit them to the full, because Nature endowed me with a propensity for every crime and the means for committing them all, and because there is none I do not cherish and that does not afford me sweetest joy and make me glad in my heart.”

  “And justice?”

  “Inexistent in this country; that is why I chose it for my domicile in the first place: with money, you do anything you like here, and I spend a lot.”19

  Two of Minski’s masculine slaves, evil-looking blackamoors, announced that supper was served; they knelt before their master, respectfully kissed his balls, then his asshole; and we removed into the next room.

  “No special trouble has been gone to on your account,” said the giant. “If all the kings on earth were to come to see me I’d not depart one inch from my custom.”

  But some description should be given of that dining room and of the accessories in it.

  “The appointments you see here,” said our host, “are alive; they move when the signal is given.”

  Minski snaps his fingers and the table in the corner of the room scuttles into the middle of it; five chairs dispose themselves around the table, two chandeliers descend from the ceiling and hover above the table.

  “There is nothing mysterious about it,” says the giant, having us examine the composition of the furniture from closer on. “You notice that this table, these chandeliers, those chairs are each made up of a group of girls cunningly arranged; my meal will be served upon the backs of these creatures; my candles are stuck into their cunts; and our behinds, yours as well as mine, settling into these chairs—they are comfortable—will rest upon the soft faces and the elastic breasts of these maidens; wherefor it is I pray you lift your skirts, mesdames, and you, messieurs, remove your breeches so that, in accordance with the words of Scripture, ‘flesh may rest upon flesh.’ “

  “Minski,” I observed to our Russian, “the role assigned to these girls is arduous, above all if you are long at table.”

  “The worst that may befall,” Minski retorted, “is that it kill a couple of them, and such losses are too easily repaired to permit me to bother about them for a minute.”

  As we tucked up our skirts and the men climbed out of their breeches, Minski demanded a look at our asses; he fondled them, he nibbled them, he nuzzled them, and we remarked that of our four bums, Sbrigani’s, through a refinement of taste easy to imagine in such a person, enjoyed his particular favor; he tongued and pumped it for nigh on fifteen minutes; that ceremony ended, we took our places, bare-skinned, on the bubs and visages of Minski’s sultanas, or rather his slaves.

  Twelve naked girls of between twenty and twenty-five brought the dishes; and as they were of massive silver and very hot, scorching the breasts and buttocks of the elements composing the table, there was a pleasant convulsive stir produced, it resembled the rippling of waves at sea; above twenty entrees or roast platters decked the table, and upon side tables, built of four grouped girls each, and which also ambled up at the snap of a finger, were ranged wines of every kind.

  “My friends,” said our host, “as I have already informed you, only human flesh is served here; those plates are pure of any other ingredient.”

  “We’ll try some,” said Sbrigani; “it is absurd to turn up one’s nose at anything, aversions are based on nothing better than the lack of habit; all viands are fit nourishment for man, Nature offers them all to him, and it is no more extraordinary, after all, to eat a human than to eat chicken.”

  So saying my husband dug his fork into a joint of boy which looked to him especially well prepared and, having carved himself a generous two pounds of it, fell merrily to; I imitated him; Minski encouraged us; and as his appetite was in the same class with his passions, he had soon licked a dozen platters clean.

  He drank the way he ate; he had tossed off his thirtieth bottle of Burgundy by the time the second course came on; this he washed down with champagne; and Aleatico, Falernian, and other rare Italian vintages were swallowed at dessert.

  Yet another good thirty bottles of wine were in our cannibal’s guts when, his senses sufficiently enlivened by all these physical and moral excesses, the rogue declared that he was now in a discharging mood.

  “I had better not fuck any of you four,” he admitted, “it would kill you; but you can at least cooperate in my pleasures, you can watch them. The spectacle is rousing. Well now, whom would you have me tup?”

  “I want,” said I to Minski, who was bending lewdly over my breasts and seemed to be taking a growing interest in me, “I want you to encunt and then to embugger a little girl of seven right here in front of me.”

  Minski gestures and the child appears.

  The libertine’s rapings were facilitated by an ingenious contraption; it was a kind of high stool, splay-legged and of iron, upon which the victim lay either belly up or belly down, depending upon which orifice she was called upon to present; to the stool’s four legs the victim’s four limbs were then made fast, who from the, position thus assumed offered the sacrificer either a wide-open cunt, if she was lying belly up, or a wide-open ass, if she was lying belly down. You have no idea what a pretty little thing she was whom the barbarian was preparing to immolate, and you have no idea how it amused me, the unbelievable disproportion between the assailant and his quarry. Minski rises in a rage from the table.

  “Strip,” he orders, “all of you, off with every stitch. You,” he goes on, pointing to Zephyr and Sbrigani, “you will bugger-fuck me while I am in action, and you,” he adds, fingering Augustine and me, “put your asses where I can kiss them side by side.”

  We take up our stances; the child is clapped upon the stool and tied belly up to begin with; I do not exaggerate when I affirm that the member by which she was about to be perforated was thicker than her waist. Minski rattles off a string of oaths, he whinnies as animals do, he sniffs the hole; I took pleasure guiding that monumental member, no art was employed in the enterprise, Nature alone was counted upon for success, and the whore came to our aid as she does every time it is a question of an atrocity which amuses, serves, or delights her. Three bone-cracking heaves and the tool is lodged: skin splits, blood pours, and the little maid faints.

  “That’s it, that’s it,” shouts Minski, breathing very hard, “good, that’s what I wanted.”

  Oh, my friends! the crime moves toward completion; Minski is being bum-stuffed, he kisses, bites, chews now Augustine’s buttocks, now mine; a ringing yell announces his ecstasy, he utters wild blasphemies…. The scoundrel! the rake! Discharging, he has strangled his victim, she breathes no more.

  “Never mind,” he says, eyeing the child, “no need to tie her this time, she’ll lie still.”

  And flopping her over stone dead as she is, the libertine sodomizes her, the while strangling one of the girls who had been serving the table and whom he has summoned into reach.

  “Why indeed!” said I when he had unleashed his second discharge, “do you then never taste this pleasure without it costing some individual his life?”

  “It often costs the lives of several,” the ogre replied. “If I had no human beings to kill I do believe I would have to give up fucking. For it is death’s sighs answering my lubricity’s that fetches forth my ejaculation, and were it not for the death my discharge occasions I don’t know how I’d be able to discharge at all.

  “But come with me into the next room,” the Russian continued, “ices, coffee, and liqueurs are awaiting us.” Turning then to my two men, “Friends,” said he, “you fucked me to perfection; you found my asshole large, did you? I dare say. But agreeable nonetheless? I’m sure of it; the fuck you spattered into it tells me so. As for you charming ladies, your asses distinctly delighted me and in token of my gratitude, for the next two days I accord you the run of my seraglios, enjoy yourselves there, my beauties, they are rare facilities I place at your di
sposition.”

  “Liberal host,” said I to the giant, “we ask no more of you; voluptuous satisfactions ought to crown lewd preparations, and the rewards of libertinage ought to be earned in the service of lubricity.”

  We entered; from the odor reigning in the room we were quick to divine of what species were these ices Minski promised us: and indeed in each of five white porcelain bowls reposed two or three mards, exquisite in form and exceedingly fresh.

  “I always take them after dinner,” the ogre told us, “nothing is more helpful to the digestion and at the same time nothing so pleases my palate. These turds come from the best asses in my harem, and you can eat them safely.”

  “Minski,” I rejoined, “an appreciation for these dainties is slow to come by; we might perhaps fancy them in a moment of passion, but you catch us somewhat unprepared—”

  “Just as you like,” Minski replied, picking up a bowl and tossing off its contents, “everyone must be his own guide in these matters. Go right ahead with the liqueurs, I shall not be having any until after.”

  It was a lugubrious chamber we were in, and the illumination typified the rest: four and twenty skulls enclosed each a lamp whose light emerged through the eye-sockets and the jaws. Glimpsing my horror, the ogre, his prick high and nodding, made as if to approach me; I met him with skill enough to divert his desires elsewhere. Young boys were serving our coffee, I had him embugger one of them, he was twelve years old and dropped dead off the end of Minski’s prick.

  Realizing after a while that in our fatigued condition we were no longer able to keep pace with him, Minski had his slaves conduct us to a superb gallery where in four mirror-paneled alcoves stood the beds we required for rest. A corresponding number of girls were under instruction to chase away flies and burn incense during our sleep.

  It was late when we awoke. Our attendants led us to the bathrooms where under their expert care we were wonderfully refreshed; and thence to the adjoining conveniences where they had us shit in a manner no less comfortable than voluptuous and hitherto unknown to us: they dipped their fingers in rose water, then inserted them into our anuses; gently and caressingly they detached and removed whatever matter they encountered there, but so tactfully, so cunningly that you savored all the pleasure of the operation without any of its pain: the vessel once emptied, they tongued it clean inside and out, and this with unequaled address and dexterity.

  Upon the stroke of eleven a messenger arrived to announce that Minski had granted us the honor of visiting him in his bed. We entered his chamber; it was spacious, upon the walls were magnificent frescoes representing ten libertine groups which for composition were probably the highest thing ever attained in obscenity. At the far end of that room was a wide semicircular apse paneled by mirrors and containing sixteen black marble columns, to each of which a girl was bound, her rear being exposed to view. By means of a pair of cords placed like bellpulls at the head of our hero’s bed, he could subject each of those sixteen asses in the distance to a different form of abuse, the torture lasting until he released the cord. Independently of the girls aforementioned there were six others plus a dozen boys, some agents and some patients, who remained on hand in nearby antechambers for such night-service as their libertine overlord might require. The first thing he did as we approached his couch was to show us his erection, putting on a horrible-grin as he pointed that gigantic engine in our direction; he demanded the sight of our asses, we complied; while palpating Augustine’s, he vowed he would get himself into it before the day was out; the poor thing trembled at those words. Minski frigged Sbrigani purple and made prolonged ado over his buttocks as well; they fell to some reciprocal ass-sucking and appeared to take great pleasure from that; then Minski asked, would we like to see him hurt those sixteen girls tied to the columns, all sixteen at one stroke? I urge him to start his machine; he gives a tug on his tackle and the sixteen wretches, screaming in unison, are simultaneously attacked about the hindquarters in sixteen different manners, one is pricked, the next burned, another scourged, yet another tweezed, raked, scored, grated, stabbed, slashed, chopped, etc., and all that so forcefully that the alcove is drenched in blood.

  “Were I to pull harder,” Minski explains to us, “and it sometimes happens that I do, everything depends upon how things stand with my balls, but, as I say, I have merely to pull harder on my lanyard and the lot of them are done for; I like to go to sleep lulled by the thought that at the bare hint of a desire I can perform sixteen murders.”

  “Minski,” I say to our host, “your supply of women is large enough to permit you to make a little sacrifice: it is in my friends’ behalf as well as my own I ask you to treat us to this charming scene.”

  “I consent,” Minski replies, “but my custom is to discharge while operating; this little slut you have in your train, her ass intrigues me—let me sodomize her and the moment my fuck lands in the bottom of her bowels you’ll see my sixteen women die.”

  “That will surely make seventeen!” Augustine shrilled, imploring us not to surrender her to the monster; “how do you expect me to endure such an experience?”

  “With patience and understanding,” says Minski.

  And, having his attendants undress her, he engaged her to assume the appropriate posture.

  “Have no fear,” he continued, “no woman has ever resisted me and I fuck younger than you every day.”

  Deciding from the Russian’s manner and mien that objections would only serve to irritate him further, we dared not even manifest our regrets.

  “It’s only a little whim,” Minski whispered to me, “it will be satisfied in a trice. This girl provokes me, blame it all upon her ass; whether I kill her or simply cripple her, it’s the same thing, you’ll have two other and much prettier ones to replace your loss.”

  As he spoke, two of his serving girls in the room prepared the passage, moistening the instrument and guiding it to the hole. Minski was so practiced in these horrors that he accomplished them virtually without effort; two thundering blows sent his mast-sized weapon crashing to the depths of the victim’s ass, and with such dazzling speed we hardly saw its length disappear; the villain emitted a whoop of delight, Augustine swooned, and the gore ran down her thighs. Minski, in seventh heaven, only waxes the hotter; four girls and as many boys crowd around him, so well trained are they in their duties that not an instant elapses but all is ready; Augustine lies somewhere beneath the giant’s bulk, she has quite vanished. Her assassin swears, nears the mark, he discharges, wrenches the cords; sixteen death-dealing devices enter simultaneously into play, the sixteen bound creatures scream as one and expire at the same time, one with a dagger in her heart, the other with a bullet there, this one her brains dashed out, that one her throat slit, in short, variously but concurrently.

  “It does appear to me that your Augustine was right,” Minski remarked coolly. “Indeed yes, her predictions have been amply borne out by the event.” And it was then, as he debuggered, that the poor girl’s body came back into sight: it had been pierced in ten places by that many thrusts of a dagger. How the scapegrace had contrived to manage this without our noticing, and to wring Augustine’s neck into the bargain, I have no idea.

  “Oh, I adore strangling them while fucking them,” that terrible libertine owned phlegmatically. “Let’s have no tears, I promised you I would give you two prettier ones in exchange and I intend to keep my word…. There was nothing for it, my friends, certain asses have always affected me that way; and when I am dealing with pleasure-objects, you understand, my desires are always so many death sentences.”

  The duennas dragged my poor Augustine’s corpse into the center of the room where the sixteen dead girls already lay; and Minski, after surveying this heap, after having handled each of the bodies, bitten into a few buttocks and several breasts, designated three of them for his kitchen, one of these being the mortal remains of our late companion.

  “Have them dressed and cooked for dinner,” he instructed his head ste
ward. Turning away from the carnage, he invited us to follow him into the next chamber for a tête-à-tête.

  At this point Sbrigani caught my eye. His opinion, communicated to me in a murmur, was that we had perhaps beware of this monster and ask to leave the premises as soon as possible. But, I said to myself, a request to depart could hardly entail greater risks than remaining here; however, upon entering the room Minski ushered us into, I was content to put on an aloof air which, conveying my disapprobation of his late proceedings, allowed him to infer how suspicious they had made me touching his designs in my own regard.

  “Come, come,” said the ogre, having me sit down on a couch beside him, “I am surprised at you, Juliette. For I thought you much too much of a philosopher to miss that girl, or to suppose for one instant that the laws of hospitality were operative in the house of a man with a soul like mine.”