“Ply those whips,” I ordered my valets, “lash some blood from this little ass that so recently afforded me such delights.”
She was lying flat upon a narrow bench, straps held her in position and her head, pulled up at a sharp angle and maintained there by an iron collar, offered itself to the kisses wherewith I covered her mouth as I presented my ass to Sbrigani who was sodomizing me while Madame Donis’ domestic flogged him. With each hand I frigged the prick of a valet; each of them, armed with a cat-o’-nine-tails, hacked at this or that part of our exciting victim’s body. At the height of this scene I loosed the second of two thundering discharges, and when at last I espied those charming buttocks in full bloom, so tattered and torn that for all those stripes and cuts nothing more was co be seen of the once satin-smooth skin, I had a chandelier taken down and Aglaia hanged by the hair from the ringbolt in the ceiling; then, opening her thighs wide and securing them thus by cords, I myself caught up a martinet and belabored the most delicate parts of her body, two-thirds of my blows landed inside her gaping cunt. I was beyond words entertained by the poor girl’s convulsive jerks, the more amusing for being performed in mid-air; it would now be a lurch backward to avoid the strokes I dealt her from before, now a forward lunge to avoid those I aimed at her behind; and not one of those acrobatics failed to cost her a handful of hair. And I was discharging myself nigh out of my mind when a truly delicious idea entered it; this idea was too much to Sbrigani’s taste not to be translated into action on the spot. We disinterred the cadavers of Aglaia’s two forebears, we buried them to the waist in two deep holes; facing them we placed the last of her line in a third hole, dug yet a little deeper, from which her head and shoulders emerged, and ’twas opposite that hideous sight we left her to perish slowly. A ball from a pistol rid us of the nursemaid and, laden with an immense booty, Sbrigani, our two menials, and I set out at once for the capital of the Papal States where we were greeted by our two girls who, with the rest of our movables, were awaiting us at the address we had given them earlier in Florence.
As we made our entry into Rome, “Oh, Sbrigani!” I exclaimed, “here we are at last in this superb capital of the world! How instructive it is to meditate upon the strange parallel that asks to be drawn between the Rome of ancient days and this other that is contemporary. With what astonishment, and with what scorn, I am going to see statues of Peter and Mary poised upon the altars of Bellona and of Venus. Few ideas so exalt my imagination. O you people besotted by religion, by it. laid low,” I mused as I scanned the features of these modern Romans, searching for some traits reminiscent of the grandeur and glory of those erstwhile masters of the world, “to what a point has the most infamous, the most loathsome of religions succeeded in degrading you! What would a Cato say, or a Brutus, if he were to see a Julius, a Borgia parading his insolent pomp upon the august ashes one of those heroes confidently recommended to the respect of later generations and the awed admiration of the universe?”
Despite the oath I had taken to enter no church, I could not resist a desire to visit St. Peter’s. This monument, it cannot be denied, not only beggars description, it is far superior to anything the most fertile imagination could conceive. But that part of the human spirit is also afflicted, as one realizes the humiliating truth, in seeing that such great talents were exhausted, such colossal sums were expended, in honor of a religion so stupid, so ridiculous as the one we have had the misfortune to be born into. For magnificence the altar is quite beyond compare, isolated, set between four wreathed columns, mounting almost the full height of the church, and placed upon the very tomb of St. Peter, who for all that did not die in Rome nor indeed ever show his face there.
“Oh, what a couch for embuggerment,” I declared to Sbrigani. “You shall see, my friend, just leave it to me and inside a month Juliette’s rectum will play host, upon this superb altar, to the modest prick of the Vicar of Christ.”
And, my patient auditors, only wait a little and the sequel will show you whether my prediction was accurate.
Coming to Rome it was my belief that I ought to establish myself under altogether different colors here than those we had flown at Florence. Provided with several letters of recommendation I had obtained from the Grand Duke, and in which, as I had requested, he referred to me as a countess, and having the means to back such a title, I took a house of the sort that would silence any discussion of the legitimacy of my pretensions. My first care was to place my funds in investment. The enormous theft operated at Minski’s retreat, the other lately achieved at Prato, the half a million francs Madame Donis’ Fontange was not destined to see, my Florentine earnings, all this added to what I had amassed in the course of my tour through north Italy made up a capital yielding eight hundred thousand livres a year; an income of sufficient size, you observe, to permit me a house rivaling anything maintained by the most brilliant princes in the entire land. Elise and Raimonde were my ladies in waiting, and Sbrigani thought it would better promote my interests if he were no longer to pass as my husband, but as my gentleman squire henceforth.
I went to pay my calls in a perfectly regal carriage. Among my introductions was a letter to His Eminence, Cardinal de Bernis, our ambassador to the Holy See, who received me with all the gallantry to be expected from that charming emulator of Petrarch.
My next stop was at the palace of the beautiful Princess Borghese, a very libertine woman whom you shall soon see taking a leading role in my adventures.
Two days later I presented myself at Cardinal Albani’s residence: Albani, the greatest debauchee in the Sacred College, and who that same afternoon must absolutely summon his painter and have him do a portrait of me in the nude, for inclusion in his gallery.
After that it was Duchess Grillo, a delightful woman gone preposterously to waste upon the gloomiest of husbands, and over whom I went fairly wild at first sight. My special acquaintances ended there, and it is in this charming circle you are about to behold me revive all the turbulent exploits of my youth—yes, good friends, yes, of my youth, I may employ the term since I was then starting my twenty-fifth year. I had not as yet to complain of Nature, however; she had deteriorated none of my features, to the contrary, she had given them that look of ripeness and that definition which are regularly absent in girlhood, and I may say in all truthfulness that if I had been considered pretty hitherto, I could now assert claims to the extremest beauty. My waist had lost nothing of its slenderness, my breasts, still fresh, round, firm, had held up miraculously. Exuberantly poised and of an agreeable fairness, my buttocks showed not a sign of the rough and lewd usage I had time and again exposed them to, the hole between them was a trifle large, to be sure, but of a fine reddish-brown hue, hairless, and whenever displayed certain to attract tongues; my cunt too had lost much of its narrowness, but with the aid of coquetry, ointments, and craft, I could at will make all that sparkle as brightly as any virgin’s new penny. Regarding my temperament, it had acquired strength over the years, and was now something truly terrifying and always under the control of my mind: when got properly started, it was absolutely indefatigable. But for the purpose of setting it surely into motion I was coming to rely upon wine and spirits; my brain once spinning. I was capable of anything; I also employed opium and other love-stimulants Durand had prescribed and which were on open and profuse sale in Italy. You ought never to fear irritating your lascivious appetites by such means, art is always more helpful than Nature, and the one disadvantage to trying a drug is the obligation you fall under to continue taking it for the rest of your life.
The beginning of my stay at Rome was distinguished by the conquest of two women. One was Princess Borghese. Not two days passed before she let me read in her eyes all her desire that we become intimately acquainted. She was thirty years of age, vivacious, engaging, witty, and profligate; pretty was her figure, magnificent her hair, bright were her eyes, she had imagination, a prepossessing manner.
Next, Duchess Grillo: less forward, younger, better behaved, and love
lier, her bearing was a queen’s, she was modest, of seemly reserve, was not so energetic as the Princess and quite lacked her imagination, but was incomparably more kindly than she, more virtuous, more sensitive. Equally taken by these two women, it goes without saying, after the brief sketches I have given of them, that whilst the one had a stimulating influence upon my mind, the other won her way immediately into my heart.
A week after our initial meeting the Princess invited me to supper at her little property just outside the city.
“We shall be alone,” she told me; “everything about you intrigues me, my dear Countess, and I am determined to make the most of this promising discovery.”
You will readily understand that after such advances it was not long before all ceremony was abolished between us. The weather was sultry. Following an abundant and voluptuous repast served by five charming girls in a garden where the scent of roses and jasmine combined with the sweet murmur and coolness of plashing fountains, the Princess drew me off to a lonely summer-house lost in a glade of sheltering poplars. We entered a circular room, around whose wall, which was entirely sheathed by mirrors, ran a long sofa standing but six or eight inches off a floor everywhere strewn with pillows and cushions; here, in a word, was one of the prettiest temples Venus had in all Italy. We were escorted there by the young serving girls who left us to ourselves after lighting several lamps in which perfumed oil shed a soft glow behind shades of green gauze.
“My treasure,” suggested the Princess, “let us henceforward address each other by our first names; I abhor everything that reminds me of wedlock. So call me Olympia; and I may call you Juliette, yes, my angel? You will permit it?”
And the most ardent kiss was bestowed lingeringly upon my lips.
“Dear Olympia,” said I, folding this bewitching creature in my arms, “what would I not permit you? When she adorned you with so many charms did not Nature accord you rights to every heart, and must you not necessarily seduce all those upon whom you bend your burning gaze?”
“You are divine, my darling Juliette, kiss me a thousand times over,” said Olympia, sinking upon the sofa. “Oh, my sweetest friend, I feel it for a certainty, yes, of nothing have I ever been so sure, we are going to do many and wonderful things together…. But I must tell you the truth about myself, the whole truth—oh, I tremble…. ’Tis that I am such a libertine; no, no, dear soul, you must not misunderstand me. I adore you—but it isn’t love for you that inflames me now: when possessed by lust I become immune to love, forget it completely, and it is only lewdness I recognize.”
“O heaven!” I cried, “is it possible that in two places a full five hundred leagues apart, Nature created two so identical souls?”
“What, Juliette!” was Olympia’s rapid response, “you are libertine too? If ’twere so we could pollute without loving each other, we could discharge like a pair of sows, immodestly, indelicately, we could include others in our riotings—ah, let me devour you, my chit, my dove, let me kiss you to death; credit satiety for all that, credit habit, credit our lavish style of living, our leisure and opulence: accustomed to denying ourselves nothing, everything now palls on us, and fools have no conception of whither one may be led by this surfeit and this apathy.”
As she chatted Olympia was undressing me, undressing herself, and no sooner were we both naked than we came to grips. Borghese’s first gestures were to catch my knees, to separate my thighs, to run her hands caressingly over my buttocks, between them, and to dart her tongue as far into my cunt as it could reach. Besotted by pleasure, I was easy game for the tribade; she is shortly quaffing off mouthfuls of my fuck, I spring into action, roll her onto the cushions strewn about that boudoir, and sprawl upon her: while, my head wedged between her legs, I cunt-suck her with all my might, the rascal, her head between my legs also, renders me the same service: thus do we discharge six or seven times.
“We are too few,” Olympia points out to me. “Unaided, two women cannot hope to satisfy each other; we had better have my menials in, they are pretty, the eldest is under seventeen, the youngest fourteen. But they are capable. Not a day passes but each dips her fingers in my cunt; shall I summon them?”
“Don’t hesitate to do so on my account, I am as fond of all that as you; I applaud any contribution to libertinage, anything that increases it is precious to my senses.”
“And nothing that stirs them ought to be neglected, they cannot be subjected to effects too numerous nor too strong,” Olympia rejoined; “ah, those shy or skittish women, the wretched creatures,” she went on, “who, experiencing no pleasure save it be inside the bounds of love and legitimacy, idiotically fancy that where there is no adoration there can be no fucking.”
But a moment after the Princess rang for them, the five girls, too well trained to require instructions and who had doubtless been waiting nearby in expectation of the call, marched in, nude. All had lovely faces, supple, shapely bodies, and when they gathered round Olympia, which is what they did at once, it seemed to me these were the Graces frolicking about Venus.
“Juliette,” the Princess said to me, “I shall sit opposite you, these five girls will turn their coordinated and knowing attentions upon you and by means of the most amorous titillations, the most lascivious postures, they’ll bring your fuck forth, I am confident of it; I shall watch you discharge, I ask no more. You have no idea the pleasure it gives me to see a beautiful woman lose her head to joy: I shall frig myself in the meantime, I shall let my mind rove and you may be sure it will wander far.”
To this proposition my lubricity could raise no objection, I therefore signified my assent. Olympia distributed orders: one of these girls, squatting over me, offered me a pretty little cunt to suck; I myself lying upon the padded straps of a bed which was at the same time a kind of aerial swing, my buttocks were posed above the face of a second girl whose task was to lick my asshole, a third, stretched upon me, sucked my cunt, and I frigged the remaining two, one with either hand; observing this spectacle, Olympia, who was staring avidly, held in one hand a silken cord which led to the car wherein I was suspended, and by means of gentle tugs she got it to swaying, this motion prolonging, multiplying the tonguings I was giving and receiving, and heightening their voluptuousness to an unbelievable point. For pleasure, never before, I do believe, had I experienced the like of it. Thereupon—and now Olympia achieved the impossible, the undreamt of: she contrived to improve the already perfect—thereupon, I say, coming from I could not tell where, the sounds of delightful music reached my ears. As though the exotic fables of the Koran were suddenly come true, I thought I had been transported into Islam’s paradise and there surrounded by the houris the prophet promises the faithful, it seemed to me their intention in caressing me was to drive me mad amongst the uttermost excesses of lubricity. Olympia was causing the swing to sway in cadence with the music; I was gone quite out of my mind, between me and real existence all ties had been dissolved save that last one maintained by the profound throbbings of my joy. My ecstasy lasted an hour; then Olympia climbed into the swing. Deliciously inspired by the music, I polluted my hostess for another hour and a quarter in her voluptuous machine; after that, following a short interval of repose, we resumed our pleasures and varied their form.
She and I lying upon the heaps of cushions carpeting the floor, we placed the prettiest of the girls between us. She frigged us both manually; two other girls, established between our thighs, cunt-sucked us; and the remaining two, straddling our chests, gave us their cunts to suck. Thus were we occupied for nearly an hour; next, the girls rotated their posts. We cunt-sucked those who had just been cunt-sucking us, and those who had just been cunt-sucked by us in turn sucked our cunts; and the music played on. Olympia finally asked me, would I care to have the musicians join us?
“Yes, call them in,” I said, and declared that I would like to have the entire world standing there, seeing me in this state of inordinate happiness.
“Oh, my cherub, my heavenly creature,” caroled
Olympia, sprinkling passionate kisses upon my mouth, “you are an arrant, shameless little whore, I adore you for it. That is just what every woman should be, that is what all of them are save the fools amongst them, and fools they are who do not sacrifice everything to their pleasures; fools? in what terms describe the stupidity of those who can worship any god but Venus? who can observe any rule apart from that of prostituting themselves to individuals of all sexes, all ages, all sorts and conditions? Oh, Juliette, the most sacred of the laws writ in my heart is whorishness; the purpose of my life is to shed fuck, shedding it is my primary need and sole pleasure: I should like to be a prostitute, but a cheap one.
“To be a whore—the thought burns in my brain and sets a fever racing through my blood. I want to be hired to the most exacting libertines, I want to be obliged to employ a thousand wiles and artifices to rouse the most lethargic rakes, and to satisfy the least easy to please; I want to be their toy, their butt, their victim, let them do with me what they will, I’d gladly endure anything, everything—even tortures.
“Juliette, shall we be whores? Let us, my dearest, let’s go awhoring, let’s sell ourselves, let’s get ourselves to a gutter and open grinning cunts to whole passing nations, our cunts, our mouths, our assholes, let’s open all our holes to every filthy stopper. Ah, fuck my eyes, girl, my head is beginning to reel; like the fiery charger, I thrust heaving flank to meet gashing spur; I am flying to my undoing, I know it, I know it well, it is inevitable … and I do not care. Bah, I am almost vexed by this credit and the titles that are mine and which, favoring my misconduct, also deny it notoriety—I would that all the earth be privy to the things I do, I would that they drag me like the lowliest of wretches to the fate their abandon designs them to…. Do you fancy I dread that fate? No, whatever it may be, I’d rush thither unafraid…. The stocks, the pillory, the scaffold itself would for me be a privilege, the throne of delight, upon it I’d cry death defiance, and discharge in the pleasure of perishing the victim of my crimes and over the idea that in future my name would be a byword for evil, at whose mere mention generations of men would tremble. Such is the pass I have come to, Juliette, this is where libertinage has brought me, this is where I wish to live my life and die, I vow it to you; were I less fond of you I would be unable to declare these things to you. You would hear more? Know then that I feel I am on the eve of casting myself headlong into frightful debauchery: at this very moment the last inhibiting prejudices wither away before my eyes, the remaining restraints dissolve: I decide to perpetrate the blackest crimes, my mind is made up—and the scales drop from my eyes: I see the abyss yawning at my feet, and jubilantly I hurl myself over the brink. I spit contemptuously upon that illusory honor whose having costs so many women their felicity, which they trade away in exchange for no recompense at all. Honor exists where? in opinion; but the single opinion that matters, that which alone confers happiness, is one’s own, and not others’. Be wise enough to scorn the opinion of the public, which depends not upon us, have the intelligence to annihilate the stupid sentiment of honor which only leads us to happiness by way of privations, do this, I say, and you will very quickly discover that it is possible to live quite as comfortably, quite as contentedly, once become the object of universal opprobrium as when crowned by the sorry diadem of fair fame. O my companions in libertinage and crime, join me in mocking at this empty honor as we do at all other vile superstitions: a piece of moral licentiousness or the most ordinary physical fucking is worth a million times more than all the false pleasures honor accords. Ah, you shall someday realize, after my own example, how voluptuous delights are ameliorated once this phantom is exploded, and like me you will improve your enjoyments the more thoroughly you despise it.”