First, provided I sleep with my husband, provided his semen flows to the depths of my womb, should I see ten men at the same time I consort with him, nothing will ever be able to prove to him that the child I bear does not belong to him; it is quite as likely the child is his as not, and in a case of uncertainty he cannot justifiably disclaim his part in bringing about something which may perhaps have been all of his doing. Immediately it can be his, it is his; any man who vexes himself with suspicions upon this head seeks vexations, even were his wife a vestal he would plague himself with worries, for it is impossible to be sure of a woman, and she who has behaved well for years may someday interrupt her good behavior. Hence, if this husband is suspicious, he will be so in any case: never, then, will he be convinced the child he embraces is really his own. Now, if he can be suspicious in any case, there can be no disadvantage in sometimes justifying his suspicions: with what regards his state of happiness or unhappiness, it will all be one; therefore, ’tis just as well things be thus. Well, suppose him in complete error: picture him caressing the fruit of his wife’s libertinage: where is the crime in that? Are not our goods held in common? In which case, what ill do I cause by introducing into the ménage a child to whom must be accorded a share of these goods? ’Twill be my share the child will have; he’ll steal nothing from my tender mate: I consider as a levy upon my dowry this portion to which the child will be heir; hence, neither it nor I take anything from my husband. Had this child been his, by what title would it have been a claimant to a part of my chattels and monies? Is it not by reason of the fact the child would have been my offspring? Very well, the child is going to inherit this part, rightfully the child’s by virtue of the same intimate alliance. It is because this child belongs to me that I owe it a share of my wealth.
With what are you to reproach me? The child is provided for. “But you deceive your husband; thus to be false is atrocious.” “No, it’s tit for tat,” say I, “and there’s an end to it: I was the dupe in the first place of the attachments he forced upon me: I take my revenge: what could be more simple?” “But your husband’s honor has suffered a real outrage.” “What ludicrous notion is this! My libertinage in no wise affects my husband; mine are personal faults. This alleged dishonor signified something a century ago; we’re rid of our illusions today, and my husband is no more sullied by my debauches than I might be by his. I might fuck with the whole wide world without wounding him in the slightest. This so-called hurt is therefore a mere fable whose authentic existence is impossible. Of the two things, one: either my husband is a brutal, a jealous man, or he is a delicate one; in the former hypothesis, the best course for me is to avenge myself for his conduct; in the latter, I should be unable to aggrieve him; the fact I am tasting pleasures will make him happy if he is honest; no man of refinement fails to relish the spectacle of the happiness of the person he adores.” “But, were you to love him, would you wish him to do the same?” “Ah, woe unto the wife who decides to be jealous of her husband! Let her be content with what he gives her, if she loves him; but let her make no attempt to constrain him; not only will she have no success, but she will soon make herself detested. So long as I am reasonable, I shall never be afflicted by my husband’s debauches; let him be thus with me, and peace will reign in the house.”
Let us recapitulate: Whatever be adultery’s issue, were it even to introduce into the home children who do not belong to the husband, because they are the wife’s they have certain rights to a portion of that wife’s dowry; if the husband has intelligence of the thing, he must consider them as he would children his wife might have had by an earlier marriage; if he knows nothing, he’ll not be the worse for it, for one cannot be distressed by what one is unaware of; if the adultery is followed by no consequences and if it remain unknown to the husband, no jurist can prove, in this case, the existence of crime: here, adultery appears as an act of perfect indifference to the husband, who knows nothing of it, and perfectly splendid for the wife, whom it delights; if the husband discovers the adultery, ’tis no longer the adultery which is an evil, for it was not such a moment ago, and it could not have altered its nature: if evil there be, it is in the husband’s discovery of it: well, that fault belongs only to him: it has nothing to do with his wife.
Those who in former times punished the adulterer were hence mere hangmen, tyrannical and jealous, who, viewing everything subjectively, unjustly imagined that in order to be criminal it was only necessary to offend them, as if a personal injury were always to be considered a crime, and as if one might justly describe as a crime an act which, far from outraging Nature or society, clearly serves the one and the other. There are, however, cases when adultery, easy to prove, becomes more embarrassing for the woman without for that reason being any more criminal; witness, for example, the case wherein the husband is found either impotent or subject to inclinations disfavorable to engendering. As she is susceptible of pleasure, and as her husband never is, her deportment doubtless then becomes more open; but ought she be disquieted on that account? Surely not. The one precaution she must take is to produce no children, or to have an abortion if these precautions should happen to fail her. If it is thanks to her husband’s unseemly penchants that she is compelled to compensate herself for his neglect, she has first of all to satisfy him, without repugnance and according to his tastes, of whatever character they may chance to be; next, let her make it known to him that such complacencies entitle her to a counterpart; let her demand an entire liberty in return for the one she accords; thereupon, the husband refuses or else he consents: if he consents, as has mine, one puts oneself at his disposal and redoubles one’s ministrations and condescensions to his caprices; if he refuses, then one perfects one’s concealments and one fucks peacefully in their shadow. Is he impotent? Why, then one parts company; but, whatever may be the case, one gives oneself: one fucks, my lamb, the particular situation notwithstanding, because we are born to fuck, because by fucking we obey and fulfill Nature’s ordinations, and because all man-made laws which would contravene Nature’s are made for naught but our contempt.
A silly gull is the woman whom ties as absurd as those of wedlock inhibit from surrendering to her penchants, who dreads either pregnancy or the injury to her husband, or the yet more vain tarnishing of her reputation! You have just seen, Eugénie, yes, you have just sensed what a dupe she is when basely she immolates both her happiness and all life’s joys to the most preposterous prejudices. Oh! let her fuck with impunity! Will a little false glory, a few frivolous religious anticipations balance the weight of her sacrifices? No; no, virtue, vice, all are confounded in the grave. A few years hence, will the public any more exalt the ones than it condemns the others? Why, no, once again, I say no, and the wretch who has lived a stranger to joy, dies, alas, unrewarded.
EUGÉNIE—How thoroughly you persuade me, my angel, what a straight way you make with my prejudices, what short work you make of all the false principles my mother planted in me! Oh, I would be married tomorrow in order immediately to put your maxims into use. How seductive they are, how true, and how much I love them! Only one thing troubles me, dear one, in what you have just said to me, and as I understand it not at all, I beg you to explain: your husband, you declare, does not, when he takes his pleasure with you, strike an attitude such as would produce children: what then, pray tell, does he do?
MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE—My husband was already advanced in years when I married him. On our wedding night he gave me notice of his fancies, the while assuring me that, for his part, never would he interfere with mine; I swore to obey him and we have always, since then, he and I, lived in the most delicious independence and mutual understanding. My husband’s whim is to have himself sucked, and here is the most unusual practice joined as a corollary to that one: while, as I bend over him, my buttocks squarely over his face and cheerily pumping the fuck from his balls, I must shit in his mouth! . . . He swallows it down! . . .
EUGÉNIE—Now there’s a most extraordinary notion!
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DOLMANCÉ—None may be qualified thus, my dear: all are a part of Nature; when she created men, she was pleased to vary their tastes as she made different their countenances, and we ought no more be astonished at the diversity she has put in our features than at that she has placed in our affections. The fancy your friend has just mentioned could not be more à la mode; an infinite number of men, and principally those of a certain age, are prodigiously addicted to it; would you refuse your co-operation, Eugénie, were someone to require it of you?
EUGÉNIE, turning red—In accordance with the maxims wherewith I am being inculcated here, can I refuse anything? I only ask to be forgiven my surprise; this is the first time I have heard of all these lubricities: I must first of all visualize them; but between the solution of the problem and the execution of the act, I believe my tutors can rest assured there will never be but the distance they themselves impose. However all that may be, my dear, you won your liberty by acquiescing to this duty?
MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE—The most entire liberty, Eugénie. On my side, I did everything I wished without his raising any obstacles, but I took no lover: I was too fond of pleasure for that. Unlucky woman, she who is attached; she needs but take a lover to be lost, while ten scenes of libertinage, repeated every day, if she wishes, vanish into the night of silence instantly they are consummated. I was wealthy: I had young men in my pay, they fucked me incognito, I surrounded myself with charming valets, assured of tasting the sweetest pleasures with me upon condition of discretion, certain they would be thrown out-of-doors if they so much as opened their mouths. You have no idea, dear heart, of the torrent of delights into which, in this manner, I did plunge. Such is the conduct I will always urge upon every woman who would imitate me. During my twelve married years I have been fucked by upward of ten or twelve thousand individuals . . . and in the company I keep I am thought well-behaved! Another would have had lovers; by the time she exchanged the first for the second she would have been doomed.
EUGÉNIE—This seems the safest way of proceeding; most decidedly, it shall be mine; I must, like yourself, marry a rich man, and above all one with fancies. . . . But, my dear, your husband is strictly bound by his tastes? Does he never ask anything else of you?
MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE—Never in a dozen years has he been untrue to himself a single day, save when I am on an outing. A very pretty girl he very much wanted me to take into the house then substitutes for me, and things proceed exceeding well.
EUGÉNIE—But he doesn’t stop there, surely? There are other objects, outside the house, competing to diversify his pleasures?
DOLMANCÉ—Be certain there are, Eugénie; Madame’s husband is one of the greatest libertines of the day; he spends above one hundred thousand crowns a year upon the obscene tastes your friend described to you but a moment ago.
MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE—To tell the truth, I suspect the figure may be higher; but what are his excesses to me, since their multiplicity authorizes and camouflages my own?
EUGÉNIE—I beseech you, let us follow in detail the manners by which a young person, married or not, may preserve herself from pregnancy, for I confess I am made most timorous by dread of it, whether it be the work of the husband I must take, or the effect of a career of libertinage. You have just indicated one means while speaking of your husband’s tastes; but this fashion of taking one’s pleasure, which may be highly agreeable to the man, does not seem as pleasurable for the woman, and it is our dalliances, exempt from the risks I fear, that I desire you to discuss.
MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE—A girl risks having a child only in proportion to the frequency with which she permits the man to invade her cunt. Let her scrupulously avoid this manner of tasting delight; in its stead, let her offer indiscriminately her hand, her mouth, her breasts, or her ass. This last thoroughfare will yield her considerable pleasure, far more, indeed, than any other; by means of the others she will give pleasure.
In the first instance, that is to say, the one which brings the hand into play, one proceeds in the fashion you observed a short while ago, Eugénie; one shakes one’s friend’s member as if one were pumping it; after a little agitation, the sperm is emitted; meanwhile, the man kisses, caresses you, and with this liquid wets that part of your body whereof he is fondest. If one wishes to have it distributed over the breasts, one stretches upon the bed, the virile member is fitted between the two tits, they are compressed, and after a few passes the man discharges so as to flood you sometimes up to the height of your face. This manner is the least voluptuous of all and can only suit those women whose breasts, from repeated usage, have acquired that flexibility, that looseness needed to grip the man’s member tightly when clamped between them. Pleasure incepted at the mouth is infinitely more agreeable, quite as much for the man as for the woman. The best way to go about it is for the woman to lie prone, contrariwise to her fucker and upon his body: he pops his prick into your mouth and, his head being lodged between your thighs, he repays in kind what you do for him, by introducing his tongue into your cunt or by playing it over your clitoris; when employing this attitude one must show spirit, catch hold of the buttocks, and the partners should finger and tickle each other’s asshole, a measure always necessary to complete voluptuousness. Spirited lovers, those full of imagination, therewith swallow the fuck which squirts into their mouths, and thus delicately they enjoy the exquisite pleasure of mutually causing this precious liquid, mechanically diverted from its customary destination, to pass into their entrails.
DOLMANCÉ—Eugénie, ’tis a delicious method. I recommend to you its execution. Thus to cheat propagation of its rights and to contradict what fools call the laws of Nature, is truly most charming. The thighs, the armpits also sometimes provide asylum to the man’s member and offer him retreats where his seed may be spilled without risk of pregnancy.
MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE—Some women insert sponges into the vagina’s interior; these, intercepting the sperm, prevent it from springing into the vessel where generation occurs. Others oblige their fuckers to make use of a little sack of Venetian skin, in the vulgate called a condom, which the semen fills and where it is prevented from flowing farther. But of all the possibilities, that presented by the ass is without any doubt the most delicious. Dolmancé, to you I reserve the dissertations thereupon. Who better than you might be able to describe a taste in whose defense, were it to require any defense, you would lay down your life?
DOLMANCÉ—I acknowledge my weakness. I admit as well that in all the world there is no mode of pleasure-taking preferable to this; I worship it in either sex; but I’ll confess a young lad’s ass gives me yet more pleasure than a girl’s. Buggers is the appellation designating those who are this fancy’s adepts; now, Eugénie, when one goes so far as to be a bugger, one must not stop halfway. To fuck women in the rear is but the first part of buggery; ’tis with men Nature wishes men to practice this oddity, and it is especially for men she has given us an inclination. Absurd to say the mania offends Nature; can it be so, when ’tis she who puts it into our head? can she dictate what degrades her? No, Eugénie, not at all; this is as good a place to serve her as any other, and perhaps it is there she is most devoutly worshiped. Propagation owes its existence to her forbearance. How could she have prescribed as law an act which challenges her omnipotence, since propagation is but a consequence of her primary intentions, and since new constructions, wrought by her hand, were our species to be destroyed absolutely, would become again primordial intentions whose accomplishment would be far more flattering to her pride and to her power?
MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE—Do you know, Dolmancé, that by means of this system you are going to be led to prove that totally to extinguish the human race would be nothing but to render Nature a service?
DOLMANCÉ—Who doubts of it, Madame?
MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE—My God! wars, plagues, famines, murders would no longer be but accidents, necessary to Nature’s laws, and man, whether instrumental to or the object of these effects, would hence no longe
r be more a criminal in the one case than he would be a victim in the other?
DOLMANCÉ—Victim he is, without doubt, when he bends before the blows of ill fortune; but criminal, never. We shall have more to say about all these things; for the moment, in the lovely Eugénie’s behalf, let’s analyze sodomistic pleasures, which presently are the subject of our discussion. In this mode of pleasure-seeking, the posture most commonly adopted by the woman is for her to lie belly down upon the edge of the bed, the buttocks well spread, the head as low as possible; after having mused for an instant upon the splendid prospect of a ready and beckoning ass, after having patted it, slapped it a bit, handled it, sometimes after having beaten or whipped it, pinched and bitten it, the rake moistens with his mouth the pretty little hole he is about to perforate, and prepares his entry with the tip of his tongue; in similar wise, he wets his engine with saliva, or with pomade, and gently presents it to the aperture he intends to pierce; he guides it with one hand, with the other he lays wide open the cheeks of his delight; immediately he feels his member penetrate, he must thrust energetically, taking all due care not to give ground; then it is, occasionally, the woman suffers, if she is new, or young; but, totally heedless of the pangs which are soon to change into pleasures, the fucker must be lively and drive his engine ahead, inch by inch, gradually, but with determination, till at last he is arrived at his objective, till, that is to say, his device’s hairs precisely rub the anal rim of the embuggered party. Then may he give free rein to himself; all the thorns are plucked from out his path, there remain roses only there. To complete the metamorphosis into pleasures of what distresses his object still experiences, if it be a boy, let him seize his prick and frig it; let him twiddle her clitoris, if ’tis a girl; the titillations of the pleasure he will cause to be born will in turn work a prodigious contraction in the patient’s anus, and will double the delight of the agent who, overwhelmed with comfort, will soon dart, to the very depths of the ass of his delight, a sperm quite as abundant as thick, thus determined by so many lubricious details. There are some who do not care to have the patient take pleasure in the operation; an attitude we will account for in good time.