Juliette

  “Juliette,” the Superior announced, “we have just afforded you the two greatest pleasures a woman can enjoy; you must be candid now, and tell me which of the two gave you the greater delight.”

  “Truth to tell, Madame,” said I, “each gave me such pleasure I cannot decide which gave me the more. Reverberations are yet going through me of sensations at once so confused and so voluptuous that I would be hard put to assign them their proper origins.”

  “Then we’d best try it again,” Télème observed; “the Abbot and I will vary our attacks, the lovely Juliette will have the goodness to interrogate her sentiments and to favor us with a more exact account thereof.”

  “Most willingly,” I said; “I am of your mind that ’tis only by beginning afresh that I’ll be able to decide.”

  “Charming, isn’t she?” murmured the Superior. “There’s more than enough there to result in the prettiest little whore we’ve developed in decades; but this thing must be managed not only in order that Juliette discharge deliciously, but so that some of the pleasures she is about to taste have their delightsome repercussions upon ourselves.”

  Pursuant to these libertine projects, the tableau was composed in this manner:

  Télème, who’d just fucked my cunt, arranged himself in my ass; his device was a shade thicker than his confrere’s, but, novice though I was, Nature had apparently so well modeled me for these doings that I confronted an increased diameter with an accommodating elasticity. I was lying flat upon the Superior, in such wise that my clitoris was directly over her mouth, and the gay wench, happily sprawled on the hard stone floor, was sucking like a babe on a teat; her thighs were wideflung. Between them, Laurette, bent over her, was treating her as I was being dealt with and, rocked by pleasure, the lewd thing was frantically masturbating Volmar on one side and Flavie on the other. Behind Laurette, Ducroz was gently frigging his tool on her buttocks, but without penetrating them; the question of honor—that of this child’s two pucelages—concerned no one but me.

  All these scenes of fuckery were preceded by a moment of suspense, of calm; as though the participants wished in stillness and contemplation to savor voluptuousness in its entirety, as though they feared lest, by talking, they might let some of it escape. I was requested to be attentive, alert in my pleasure-taking; for later I should be expected to report on the experience. I swam in a wordless ecstasy; and, I confess, the incredible pleasures evoked by the strident and persisting activity of Télème’s prick in my ass, the lubricious agonies into which I was plunged by the Abbess’ tongue flitting over, needling my clitoris, the luxuriant scenes environing me, the combination of so many lascivious elements gripped my senses in a delirium and in that delirium I wanted to live an eternity.

  Télème was the first to try to speak; but his stammers, his gasps much better expressed his disorder than his ideas. We could make out nothing in this incoherence but oaths, although he seemed to be endeavoring to say that the extreme heat and constriction of my anus had driven him wild.

  At last, mastering himself, he made it known that he was ready to discharge into the most divine of all asses: “I know not whether Juliette will be more content to receive my fuck in her entrails than she was to feel it spewed into her cunt; but, for my part, I swear that, sodomizing her, I feel ten thousand times more pleasure than I got in her vagina.”

  “Purely a question of taste,” remarked Ducroz, who had augmented the tempo and force of his friggery upon Laurette’s ass and who was kissing Flavie’s apace.

  “A question of one’s philosophy, of the manner of one’s reasoning,” contended Volmar, being sharply frigged by Delbène and tonguing Ducroz; “although a woman, my opinion is the same, and I protest that were I a man, I’d never fuck anywhere but in assholes.”

  Pronouncing these impure remarks, the voluptuous creature discharges. Télème follows a moment later; he waxes furious; twisting my head toward him, he rams a foot’s length of tongue into my mouth; meanwhile, Delbène is sucking me with such telling effect that I cease to struggle. I wish to scream my pleasure, Télème’s squirming tongue stops my words, the libertine drinks my sighs; I flood my suckeress’ lips, fill her mouth, flood her throat, and she herself speeds a torrent into Laurette’s gullet; Flavie joins us the next instant and the charming thing ejaculates her fuck while swearing like a trooper.

  “Now on to something else,” says Delbène, regaining her feet. “Ducroz, encunt Juliette, she’ll lie in your arms. Volmar, also lying on her belly, will busy herself pumping Juliette’s asshole; I’ll slip under Volmar to suck her clitoris; while Télème encunts me, Flavie will do what she can for his anus as Télème devotes a free hand to massaging Laurette’s cunt while he fucks mine.”

  Further outpourings in homage to Cypris terminated this second experimental affray; and then I was questioned.

  “Oh, my heart,” I answered Delbène—it was she conducted the inquiry—“since I must reply truthfully, I shall affirm that the member that was introduced into my hind parts caused me infinitely more intense and more delicate sensations than that other which traveled me frontwise. I am young in years and in experience, shy, unacquainted with and perhaps ill-made for the pleasures wherewith I have just been gratified beyond all common measure; it were wholly possible that I be mistaken upon the kind and violence of these pleasures themselves, but you demand to know what I have felt and I have told you.”

  “Come, give me a kiss, my angel,” spoke Madame Delbène, “you are a splendid girl and in fitting company. Ah, no doubt of it,” she proceeded enthusiastically, “no doubt whatever can exist, no pleasure can match what you have in the ass: woe betide those simple-minded, fainthearted chits who, lacking significantly in imagination, dare not attempt the true adventure. Impoverished creatures, these, they shall never be worthy to sacrifice to Venus, and never shall the Goddess of Paphos reward them with her favors!4

  “Oh, may I now be embuggered too!” cried the whore, kneeling on a divan. “Volmar, Christ’s guts! Where are you, Volmar? Flavie! Juliette! Outfit yourself with stout weaponry, and you, Ducroz and Télème, stiffen your pikes and set them mischievously to worrying the assholes of these three bitches! And there’s my own ass, mark the hole? Fuck it, all of you! Laurette, lie quiet there before me while I have at you as my impulses bid me.”

  The Superior’s orders are acted upon. From the manner in which the libertine welcomes her attackers, ’tis plainly to be seen how inured she is to this hard use. While one of the actresses is toiling over her, a second, bending beneath her, tickles her clitoris or nips her labia; through synchronization of these twin activities, the patient’s joy is mightily enhanced, it is never really entire save when a steady and soothing frontwise masturbation to the bumwise intromissions adds the tart seasoning which can be imparted by a knowledgeable fricatrice. The mounting irritation drove Delbène mad: in this woman, passions spoke an imperious language. We soon began to notice that the little Laurette was the target less of Delbène’s caresses than of her rage: she was becoming covered with bites, pinches, scratches.

  “O Jesusfuck!” Delbène finally screamed as Télème sodomized and Volmar titillated her, “ah fuck! fuck! I’m discharging, you are slaying me with delight, enough! Enough, ’tis done … let’s sit down now, let’s talk a bit…. There’s more to it than just experiencing sensations, they must also be analyzed. Sometimes it is as pleasant to discuss as to undergo them; and when one has reached the limit of one’s physical means, one may then exploit one’s intellect. We’ll make a circle. Calm yourself, Juliette, you have a worried air—are you still afraid that we’ll fail you? There’s your victim,” she said, pointing to Laurette, “you’ll encunt her, you’ll embugger her, the thing is a certainty. Rely upon a libertine’s promise, as you may upon his excessive behavior. Télème, and you, Ducroz, place yourselves close by me; while speaking I’d like to handle your pricks, I want to put them back in size again, my fingers will infuse them with energy, I want that energy to electrify my sp
eech. You’ll see my eloquence swell, not like Cicero’s, in accordance with the gestures and movements of the people clustered round the tribune, but like Sappho’s, in proportion to the fuck she wrung from fair Damophile.

  “I do declare,” were Delbène’s next words, spoken once she had reached the state appropriate for holding discourse, “in this world I wonder at nothing so much as at the moral education girls are commonly given. It would appear as if its one aim were to instill notions and doctrines that contradict all the natural impulses in our maidens. Is anyone able to tell me, for I sincerely wish to know, of what use a prudent, well-behaved woman can be to society? and whether there is anything more superfluous than the practice of this virtue which, with every passing day, only further numbs and mines our sex? We women exist in two situations wherein these practices are recommended to us; I am going to undertake to prove that, in either phase of a woman’s life, they are of the most thorough inutility.

  “Up until the time a girl marries, of what conceivable advantage can preserving her virginity be to her? And how can folly be carried to the point where one believes a female creature is worth more or less for having one part of her body a little more or a little less enlarged? For what purpose has Nature created every human being? Is it not for giving mutual aid one to the other, and consequently for giving others all the pleasures it is in one’s power to dispense? Well, if it be true that a man may expect very great pleasures from a young girl, do you not fly in the face of Nature’s intentions and laws when you saddle this poor little thing with a ferocious virtue that forbids her from lending herself to this man’s impetuous desires? Can you allow such barbarity without advancing some justification for it? And what justification are you going to propose in order to convince me that the child in question does well by remaining a virgin? Your religion, your customs, your habits? And, I ask you, what baser drivel, what more contemptible arguments can you find? I’ll leave religion aside, I know all of you well enough to be certain of the slight credit you accord that trash. But, conventions, ah, conventions—may I be so bold as to ask you what they are? If I am not mistaken, the term applies to the kind of behavior observed by the individuals of a nation at home and in public. Now you will surely agree that these conventions ought to be based upon furtherance of individual happiness; if they do not ensure it, they are ridiculous; if they are harmful to it, they are atrocious, and an enlightened nation must set straightway to work rectifying these conventions directly it is manifest that they no longer conduce to the general welfare. You will now demonstrate to me what, if anything, in French customs and manners, insofar as carnal pleasure is concerned, can truly be said to conspire to our national happiness; in the name of what do you constrain this dear little creature to hang on to her maidenhead, this in flagrant disregard of Nature—Nature, who advises her to be rid of it—in disregard, likewise, of her health—her health which restraint can only wreck! Are you going to reply that all this is so that she can be pure when she arrives in her husband’s arms? But is this fancied necessity that she be pure anything other than the invention of prejudice-racked minds? What! To give some fellow the frivolous pleasure of plucking first fruits, you’re going to have the wretched lass deny herself for ten years? she’s to cause five hundred suitors pain in order to provide one with a moment of fool’s delight? Can you think of anything more outlandish, does any more ill-conceived scheme exist? Can you, I ask, can you show me a more flagrant example of outrage to the general interest? Has the common welfare any greater enemy than these abhorrent conventions? Long live those people who, dwelling in ignorance of these disgraceful puerilities, to the contrary esteem only the young persons of our sex in proportion to the disorderliness they exhibit in their conduct! Only in these multiple and iterated extravagances does a girl’s true virtue reside; the more she gives herself, the more lovable she is; the more she fucks, the more happiness she distributes and the more she is instrumental to her countrymen’s happiness. They are sordid barbarians, these husbands who stick by the vain pleasure of plucking a rose: ’tis despotism, they claim this right at the expense of other men’s well-being. An end to this disesteem for the girl who, having no previous acquaintance with them, has not been able to wait to make them a gift of the most precious thing she has and who, if she has heeded Nature’s promptings, has had every reason for not waiting. Shall we now investigate the necessity of virtue in women whose situation is that of a wife? The matter is now one of adultery, I should like to go thoroughly into this popularly alleged misdemeanor.

  “Our customs, manners, religious beliefs, codes, regulations—all these sordid local factors merit no consideration in this survey; the point is not to discover whether adultery is a crime in the eyes of the Laplander who permits it, or of the Frenchman who hammers it, but to make out whether humanity is wronged or Nature offended by this act. In order to entertain such a hypothesis, one must first be in total ignorance of the scope of the physical desires with which the common mother of mankind has endowed both sexes. Obviously, if one man were sufficient to a single woman’s desires, or if one woman could appease the ardors of any single man, then, within the framework of this hypothesis, whosoever violated the law would also outrage Nature. But if the fickleness and the insatiability of these desires are such that more than one man is necessary to women as an abundance of women is to men, you will, I presume, concede that, such being the case, whatever law opposes their desires is tyrannical and plainly at daggers drawn with Nature. The pseudo-virtue called chastity, unmistakably the most ridiculous of existing superstitions in that this mode of being does nothing in the slightest to make others happy and wreaks incalculable harm on the prosperity of everyone, since this virtue imposes exceedingly cruel privations upon all; this pseudo-virtue, I say, being the idol which dread of adultery makes us worship, every sane mind ought first of all to give chastity an eminent position amongst the most odious devices whereby man has seen fit to encumber and rout the inspirations of Nature. Let’s probe to the heart of the matter: the importance of the need to fuck is no less high than our need to eat and drink, and one ought to indulge in them all with equal unrestraint. Modesty, and of this we may be perfectly sure, was originally designed as nothing but a stimulant to lust: the engaging idea was to postpone desire’s fulfillment in order to increase excitement, and fools subsequently took for a virtue what was merely a contrivance of libertinage.5 It is as ridiculous to pretend that chastity is a virtue as it would be to assert that it is a virtue to deprive oneself of food. May it be clearly noted: it is almost, always the stupid importance we assign to something which in the end elevates it to the stature of a virtue or of a vice; let us have done with our unseemly prejudices: let it become as ordinary and simple a matter to inform a girl, a boy, or a woman that one has an inclination to sport about with him or her, as it is, when one is in a foreign household, to request means to alleviate one’s hunger or thirst—let it become an everyday affair and you’ll see the prejudice collapse and disappear, you’ll see chastity cease to be a virtue and adultery cease to be a crime. Come, come! what wrong do I commit, what injury do I do when, encountering some attractive creature, I say:

  “‘Pray avail me of that part of your body which is capable of giving me a moment’s satisfaction, and, if you are so inclined, amuse yourself with whatever part of mine may be agreeable to you.’

  “In what way does my proposal injure the creature whose path I’ve crossed? What harm will result from the proposal’s acceptance? If about me there is nothing that catches his fancy, why then, material profit may readily substitute itself for pleasure, and for an indemnity agreed upon through parley, he without further delay accords me the enjoyment of his body; and I have the inalienable right to employ force and any coercive means called for if, in having satisfied him according to my possibilities—whether it be with my purse or with my body—he dares for one instant withhold from me what I am fairly entitled to extract from him. Only he offends Nature who refuses what may oblige h
is fellow; I outrage her not in the least, not I, when I offer to buy what arouses my interest and to pay the fairly arranged price for what is lent for my use. No, no, I repeat: chastity is no virtue; it is a conventional form, that’s all. The libertine intelligence, perpetually in search of refinements, invented chastity as such; chastity is artificial, in no wise natural; and a girl, a woman, and a boy, granting their favors to the first comer, prostituting themselves with effrontery and in every sense, everywhere, all the time, would possibly—I don’t deny the possibility—be committing something contrary to the usages that might be current in their country; but in no wise would they or could they thereby be doing wrong either to their neighbors—whom such behavior does not wrong, but rather serves—or to Nature—whose purposes are nought but furthered by all the excesses of libertinage it is in our mortal power to indulge in and perpetrate. Continence, be very certain of it, is the virtue of fools and enthusiasts; it is laden with perils, has not one good or wholesome effect; to men it is just as pernicious as to women; it damages health, in that it allows semen to stand and putrefy in the loins, whereas this semen has been produced to be expelled from the body, like any other secretion or excretion. In brief, the most frightful moral corruption is incalculably less a threat to one’s well-being; and the most celebrated among the world’s peoples, as well as their most illustrious individual representatives, have always been the most debauched. The having of women, freely and in common, is the express wish of Nature, the arrangement is widespread in the world, animals set us the example; it is absolutely contrary to that universal agent’s inspirations and intentions to wed a man to one woman, as in Europe it is done, or a woman to several men, as in certain regions of Africa, or a man to several women, as in Asia and European Turkey; all these institutions are revolting, they hobble the desires, they dam the humours, they enfetter the impulses and emasculate the will, and from all these infamous conventions there results nought but woe, ill, sorrow, and blight. Oh, those of you who have the temerity to govern men, beware, I say, put no bonds upon any living creature! Leave him free to shift for himself, leave to him alone the task of seeking out that which suits him best, do that and you shall speedily observe the state of affairs ameliorated, for it can only improve. Thereupon every rational man will say: ‘Why, simply because I need now and then to spill a little seed, must I bind myself indissolubly to a person I’ll never love? Of what use can it be that this same need cause a hundred wretches whose names I don’t even know to become my thralls? Why must this need, in a woman the same save in one or two details, subject her to perpetual slavery and humiliation?’ Ye gods, that woebegone girl’s all afire with urges, the need to slake twenty thirsts consumes her, and you, what are you going to do to relieve her? you’re going to tie her fate to a single man’s … and that man? are you so sure his taste in pleasures will correspond so faultlessly to hers? could it not turn out, as sometimes does happen, that he lies with her three times, four times in the course of his life, or that his employment of her consists merely in submitting her to pleasures in which the young thing cannot possibly share? What arrant injustice on both sides, and how well it is avoided by abrogating your senseless marriages, by leaving the two sexes at liberty to consult their wishes and to look for and find exactly what they require one of the other. What good does society glean from marriages? Far from fortifying attachments, it dissolves them: it manufactures not friends, but foes; which, in your judgment, seems to be the more firmly united: one great family—as might become every nation on earth—or five or six million little families whose interests, inevitably personal, inevitably clash, create divisions, and forever jar with the general interest? What’s this idle talk about liberty, equality, fraternity, what’s this unity and brotherhood among men so long as everyone, brothers, fathers, mothers, wives go on struggling against one another? Unity means universality; do I hear you object that this universality will weaken ties, that there’ll be no more of them owing to the universal bond? Well, what does it matter? Is it not far preferable to have none than to retain this sort, whose only purpose can be to stir up trouble and spread disaffection? We glance at history. What of the leagues, the factions, the numerous parties which have reft France owing to the prevailing practice of allying oneself to one’s family and with it battling against every other family; do you, I ask, do you suppose we would have had all that had there been but one family in France? Would this grand family have broken up into men-at-arms, troops fighting tooth and nail, some for a tyrant, others for the opposing party? There’d have been no Orléanais at the Burgundians’ throats, no Guises pitted against Bourbons, none of all those horrors which tore France asunder and whose one source was the pride and ambition of individual families. Those passions evaporate with the equality I propose; they wither into oblivion once the absurdities known as marital ties are destroyed; what remains? a homogeneous, tranquil State, with one attitude, one objective, one desire: to live happily together, and together to defend the fatherland. The machine cannot possibly avoid breaking down before long if the customs and usages in force today are maintained. Wealth and property concentrating in the hands of a few, this few becoming fewer through constant intermarriage, within a hundred years’ time the State will necessarily be divided into two factions, one so powerful and so rich that it will topple and crush the other: and the country will be laid waste.6