A very delicious repast it was that we were served, a very picturesque one; with your leave I shall describe it in some detail.
In the middle of a circular room stood a round table set for six; two places were occupied by the cardinals, Olympia, Raimonde, Elise, and I occupied the four others. A yard or so behind our chairs was the lowest in a series of four tiered benches ringing the table concentrically, forming a kind of amphitheater. There, fifty of Rome’s choicest courtesans, hidden beneath masses of flowers, allowed of themselves only their behinds to be seen, in such a way that those clusters of asses peeping out from the lilacs, the pinks, the foxgloves seemed scattered about haphazardly, and provided, under the same aspect, the image of everything of the supremely delicious that Nature and lasciviousness can offer. Twenty Cupids represented by pretty bardashes formed a dome overhead, and the room was lit by the tapers those little gods held in their hands. At the touch of a lever an ingenious device removed one course and brought the next on: the rim of the table, where the company’s plates and silverware lay, remained stationary, but the center of the table sank away and rose again with six little golden gondolas containing exquisite and most delicate viands. Six young boys, provocatively garbed as so many Ganymedes, waited upon us and poured out the rare wines. Our libertines, upon whose instructions we had dressed for the meal, expressed their wish that we unclothe ourselves again, but gradually, as the Babylonian whore used to do. Thus when the hors-d’oeuvres were brought on it was the kerchief that was put aside, the bodice came unlaced when the omelettes arrived, and so on until the fruit when the last stitch was discarded; whereupon the libertinage and nastiness increased. Dessert was served in fifteen miniature boats of green and gold porcelain. Twelve little girls of six and seven, adorned only by garlands of myrtle and roses, filled our glasses with foreign wines and liqueurs. Heads are gaily awhirl, to our libertines’ spirits Bacchus restores all the energy necessary to tense the erector nerve, the disorder and uproar are at their height.
“Genial poet,” said the master of the house to Cardinal de Bernis, “two bits of enchanting doggerel are going about Rome these days, wits attribute them to you: our guests are persons that this form of literature is not lost upon, pray favor us with a recitation.”
“They are mere paraphrases,” replied Bernis, “and I am rather surprised at their publicity, for I have shown them to nobody but the Pope.”
“Little wonder then if they are the talk of the town. But come, Cardinal, we are eager to hear them from the author.”
“Certainly,” said Bernis, “I have nothing to conceal from philosophers like those present. One is an adaptation of the famous sonnet of Des Barreaux,8 the other of the Ode to Priapus. I shall begin with the first.9
Sot Dieu! tes jugements sont pleins d’atrocité,
Ton unique plaisir consiste à l’injustice:
Mais j’ai tant fait de mal, que ta divinité
Doit, par orgueil au moins, m’arrêter dans la lice.
Foutu Dieu! la grandeur de mon impiété
Ne laisse en ton pouvoir que le choix du supplice,
Et je nargue les fruits de ta férocité.
Si ta vaine colère attend que je périsse,
Contente, en m’écrasant, ton désir monstrueux,
Sans craindre que des pleurs s’écoulent de mes yeux,
Tonne done! je m’en fouts; rends-moi guerre pour guerre:
Je nargue, en périssant, ta personne et ta loi.
En tel lieu de mon coeur que frappe ton tonnerre,
Il ne le trouvera que plein d’horreur pour toi.
These lines having been warmly applauded, Bernis delivered his Ode.
Foutre des Saints et de la Vierge,
Foutre des Anges et de Dieu!
Sur eux tous je branle ma verge,
Lorsque je veux la mettre en feu …
C’est toi que j’invoque à mon aide,
Toi qui, dans les culs, d’un vit raide,
Lanças le foutre à gros bouillons!
Du Chaufour, soutiens mon haleine,
Et, pour un instant, à ma veine
Prête l’ardeur de tes couillons.10
Que tout bande, que tout s’embrase;
Accourez, putains et gitons:
Pour exciter ma vive extase,
Montrez-moi vos culs frais et ronds,
Offrez vos fesses arrondies,
Vos cuisses fermes et bondies,
Vos engins roides et charnus,
Vos anus tout remplis de crottes;
Mais, surtout, déguisez les mottes:
Je n’aime à foutre que des culs.
Fixez-vous, charmantes images,
Reproduisez-vous sous mes yeux;
Soyez l’objet de mes hommages,
Mes législateurs et mes Dieux!
Qu’à Giton l’on élève un temple
Où jour et nuit l’on vous contemple,
En adoptant vos douces moeurs.
La merde y servira d’offrandes,
Les gringuenaudes de guirlandes,
Les vits de sacrificateurs.
Homme, baleine, dromadaire,
Tout, jusqu’à l’infâme Jésus,
Dans les cieux, sous l’eau, sur la terre,
Tout nous dit que l’on fout des culs;
Raisonnable ou non, tout s’en mêle,
En tous lieux le cul nous appelle,
Le cul met tous les vits en rut,
Le cul, du bonheur est la voie,
Dans le cul gît toute la joie,
Mais, hors du cul, point de salut.
Dévots, que l’enfer vous retienne:
Pour vous seuls sont faites ses lois;
Mais leur faible et frivole chaîne
N’a sur nos esprits aucun poids.
Aux rives du Jourdain paisible,
Du fils de Dieu la voix horrible
Tâche en vain de parler au coeur:
Un cul paraît,11 passe-t-il outre?
Non, je vois bander mon jean-foutre.
Et Dieu n’est plus qu’un enculeur.
Au giron de la sainte Église,
Sur l’autel même où Dieu se fait,
Tous les matins je sodomise
D’un garçon le cul rondelet.
Mes chers amis, que l’on se trompe
Si de la catholique pompe
On peut me soupçonner jaloux.
Abbés, prélats, vivez au large:
Quand j’encule et que je décharge,
J’ai bien plus de plaisirs que vous.
D’enculeurs l’histoire fourmille,
On en rencontre à tout moment.
Borgia, de sa propre fille,
Lime à plaisir le cul charmant,
Dieu le Père encule Marie;
Le Saint-Esprit fout Zacharie:
Ils ne foutent tous qu’à l’envers.
Et c’est sur un trône de fesses
Qu’avec ses superbes promesses,
Dieu se moque de l’univers.
Saint Xavier aussi, ce grand sage
Dont on vante l’esprit divin,
Saint Xavier vomit peste et rage
Contre le sexe féminin.
Mais le grave et charmant apôtre
S’en dédommagea comme un autre.
Interprétons mieux ses leçons:
Si, de colère, un con l’irrite,
C’est que le cul d’un jésuite
Vaut à ses yeux cent mille cons.
Près de là, voyez Saint Antoine
Dans le cul de son cher pourceau,
En dictant les règles du moine,12
Introduire un vit assez beau.
A nul danger il ne succombe;
L’éclair brille, la foudre tombe,
Son vit est toujours droit et long.
Et le coquin, dans Dieu le Père
Mettrait, je crois, sa verge altière
Venant de foutre son cochon.
Cependant Jésus dans l’Olympe,
Sodomisant son cher papa,
Veut que saint Eustache le grimpe,
En baisant le cul d’Agrippa.13
Et le jean-foutre, à Madeleine,
Pendant ce temps, donne la peine
De lui chatouiller les couillons.
Amis, jouons les mêmes farces:
N’ayant pas de saintes pour garces,
Enculons au moins des gitons.
O Lucifer! toi que j’adore,
Toi qui fait briller mon esprit;
Si chez toi l’on foutait encore,
Dans ton cul je mettrais mon vit.
Mais puisque, par un sort barbare,
L’on ne bande plus au Ténare,
Je veux y voler dans un cul.
Là, mon plus grand tourment, sans doute,
Sera de voir qu’un démon foute,
Et que mon cul n’est point foutu.
Accable-moi done d’infortunes,
Foutu Dieu qui me fais horreur;
Ce n’est qu’à des âmes communes
A qui tu peux foutre malheur:
Pour moi je nargue ton audace.
Que dans un cul je foutimasse,
Je me ris de ton vain effort;
J’en fais autant des lois de l’homme:
Le vrai sectateur de Sodome
Se fout et des Dieux et du sort.
The Cardinal was acclaimed by vivats and loud hurrahs. This ode was considered richer, far stronger than that of Piron, unanimously charged with cowardice for having inserted the gods of fable into his work when he-ought only to have ridiculed those of Christianity.
More electrified than ever, the company got up from table in a state of general and utter drunkenness to stagger off into another magnificent salon. There we found the fifty courtesans whose asses we had observed during the banquet, there too was the brotherhood of six little boy-servants, and the dozen dessert maidens. The delicate age of those little nymphs, their interesting faces wrought prodigiously upon our lechers, who leapt like very lions upon the two youngest. Failing to fuck them, their wrath mounted. At length they bound them, wheeled forth their infernal machine, and with needle-tipped martinets hammered and hacked away at the tender little prisoners; we frigged them, sucked them during this; they stiffened. Two other maids are laid hold of; the libertines succeed in sodomizing them by dint of art; but wishing to husband their forces, they abandon these victims and spring upon new ones: their lubricity feeds now upon little boys, now upon little girls; all of that infant generation passes through their hands, and it is only after having each depucelated seven or eight children of the one sex and the other that the flame of their lust sputters out, Albani’s in the ass of a ten-year-old boy, Bernis’ in the bowels of a six-year-old girl. Both ecclesiastics, dead drunk, tumble onto couches and are sound asleep in a trice…. We dress.
Fuddled from alcohol and fucking though I was, the idea of theft was ever clear in my head and my taste for it in no wise dampened: I remembered that first raid into Albani’s treasury had not entirely emptied it. So, telling Raimonde to distract Olympia, with Elise to help me I return for another assault upon the Cardinal’s secretary. I locate the key, we pillage everything in sight. This second capture added to the first brings my burglaries to a total of fifteen hundred thousand francs; and we leave, Olympia having noticed nothing. Fancy, good friends, how pleased my gentleman consort was when he saw me return home laden with such booty. Several days later, however, Olympia came knocking on my door.
“The Cardinal has been robbed of better than a million,” she informed me; “it was his niece’s dowry the thieves took. Not that he suspects you, Juliette, but he wonders whether the deed, perpetrated the same day the party was held at his villa, may not have been the doing of your two companions. Do you know anything of the matter?”
And here, as was my custom, I consulted my imagination for some infernal horror to cover the one by which I had soiled myself. I had indirectly learned that on the very eve of my visit to Villa Albani, another of his nieces, whom he had endeavored to seduce, had fled the Cardinal’s palace to escape the threat to her virtue. I remind Olympia of that niece’s abrupt departure, have her remark the coincidence, my insinuations are willingly listened to and swiftly communicated to the Cardinal who from weakness or from spite, perhaps simply to be revenged for a slight, straightway puts all the Papal State’s bloodhounds on his niece’s trail. The poor girl is overtaken on the confines of the Kingdom of Naples at the very moment she has sought refuge in a Cistercian convent; arrested in that institution and from there dragged back to Rome, she is thrown into a dungeon. Sbrigani recruits witnesses to testify against her, it now but remains to establish what she has done with the money; other witnesses, also suborned by us, give evidence that she handed all the fortune over to a certain Neapolitan who had left Rome at the same time as she, and who, they allege, is her paramour…. All these depositions fit so nicely one to the next, each is made to appear so plausible, the whole so conclusive that the trial ends on the seventh day with the poor creature’s sentence to death. She was decapitated on San Angelo Square, and I had the pleasure of watching the execution, seated beside Sbrigani who maintained three active fingers in my cunt during all those grisly and rousing proceedings.
“O Supreme Being!” I cried inwardly once the axe stood in the block and the severed head lay in the basket, “thus is innocence avenged by thee, thus dost thou make triumph the cause of those of thy children who serve thee best in their faithful practice upon earth of the goodliness whereof thine attributes are the perfect image. I rob the Cardinal, that niece of his he lusts after flees him to prevent a grave sin from being committed: my crime’s reward is spasms of joy, she perishes on the scaffold. Holy and Sublime Being! such are thy ways, such the fates whereunto thy loving hand guideth us mortals—aye, ’tis fitting, is it not, that we adore thee!”
Throughout these and the rest of my disorders the thought of the charming Duchess Grillo preyed ever upon my mind. No more than twenty years of age, for the past eighteen months bound in matrimony to a man of sixty whom she detested, Honorine Grillo was, carnally speaking, still as much a stranger to that old faun as the day her mother had withdrawn her from the Ursuline convent at Bologna to marry her to him. Not that the Duke had made no efforts to vanquish his wife’s resistance; but up until now they had been fruitless. Only twice had I called upon the Duchess, the first time on a visit of courtesy to present my letters of recommendation, the second for the sake of once again savoring the inconceivable pleasure I experienced while in her society. This third time I went fully determined to declare my passion to her, firmly resolved to satisfy it regardless of the obstacles her virtue might put in my way.
It was after one of those lubricious toilettes which are nothing if not apt to seduce and ensnare whatever stoutly armored heart that I presented myself at her residence. Luck smiled upon my schemes, I found the darling alone. After venturing the initial compliments I let my eyes speak; modesty bade my quarry avoid them. For amorous glances I then substituted encomiums and coquetry; catching one of the Duchess’ hands, “Delicious woman,” I exclaimed, “if there be a God in heaven and if he be just,’ then surely you are the happiest woman in all the world, as you are the most beautiful.”
“’Tis your indulgence leads you to say such things, but I am able to be fair to myself.”
“Oh, Madame, fairness would demand that the very gods relinquish their altars to you: she who is so wonderfully deserving of a universe’s homage ought to dwell nowhere save in a temple.”
And I seized her other hand, too, squeezed and kissed them both while speaking.
“Why do you flatter me?” asked Honorine, the color rising into her cheeks.
“Because I adore you.”
“But—but can women fall in love with women?”
“And why not! The greater their sensibility, the greater their capacity for worshiping the beautiful, whether it be in male or female form. Wise women shun relations with men, relations so fraught with danger … th
ose they may entertain with one another are so sweet—ah, my dearest Honorine, I must call you Honorine, why might I not be all at once your intimate friend … your lover … your mate?”
“Mad, reckless creature!” replied the Duchess, “do you actually suppose you could be all those things?”
“I am confident of it, yes,” I answered heatedly as I hugged her in my arms, “yes, and above all the last of them, that shall I be par excellence if you would have it so, my angel.”
And my fiery tongue glides into her mouth.
Honorine receives the kiss of love, receives it without offense, and when I essay a second, love itself returns it: the freshest, the prettiest little tongue slips forth to quiver between my burning lips. My boldness grows; drawing aside the veils screening the loveliest of bosoms, with impassioned caresses I assault those alabaster breasts, my joyous tongue lovingly teases their pink nipples, while my hands stray over the rest. Stirred, Honorine bends to my will; the keenest interest fills her big blue eyes, gradually they begin to sparkle, tears of pleasure gather there, and I … I, like unto a Bacchante, wild, drunk from lust … unable to stop, unable to go fast enough, I strive to communicate to her the ardor which devours me….
“What are you doing?” Honorine demands, but in a sigh. “Are you not forgetting your sex and mine?”
“Ah, dearest love,” I rejoin, “may we not sometimes outrage Nature if thereby we discover how to render her better homage? And how unhappy we must be, alack, if we refrained from seeking compensation for the wrongs we suffer at her hands.”
And ever more enterprising, I dare loosen the ribbons of a lawn petticoat and now have in my grasp almost all the charms whose possession I so passionately covet. Startled—electrified by my hoarse sighs and labored panting—Honorine ceases entirely to resist. I press her backward, she is now lying upon the couch, avidly I spread her thighs apart and she gives me to ruffle delightedly that fluffiest little bush, and to fondle the most sweetly swelling little mound you could ever hope to see; one of my arms encircles the reclining Duchess’ waist, with that hand I stroke one of her breasts, my mouth fastens upon the other; my fingers had already begun to probe for her clitoris, I was testing its sensitivity…. Great God! how it twitched and thrilled. Honorine came nigh to fainting under those deft pollutions of mine. Despite the struggles of her hard-pressed virtue, some moans announce its rout; at that signal I redouble my caresses.