Juliette

THE MARQUIS DE SADE

TRANSLATED BY AUSTRYN WAINHOUSE

COMPLETE AMERICAN EDITION


Part Four

We removed to another apartment. A magnificent repast of exotic fruits, of 
pastries, of milk and of warm beverages was presented by a swarm of half-naked 
boys who, as they brought around the plates, cut a thousand merry capers, 
performed a thousand little naughtinesses one more libertine than the other. My 
two men and I breakfasted heartily. As for Minski, he was served solider stuff: 
eight or ten virgins-blood sausages and two testicle pasties took the edge off his 
hunger, eighteen magnums of Greek wine accompanied those victuals into his 
enormous belly. He picked baseless quarrels with a dozen of his little pages, 
lashed six of them to ribbons, pounded the other six senseless with his fists. 
When one boy resisted him, the dastard broke both his arms like matchsticks, and
that just as calmly as making the simplest gesture; he stabbed two more, and we 
began our tour of inspection.

The first room we came to was large, billeted in it were ten-score women, aged
twenty to thirty-five. Upon our entering, and this was the time-honored custom, 
two executioners laid hold of a victim and hanged her naked before our eyes. 
Minski went up to the dangling creature, felt her buttocks, bit them; in the 
meantime all the other women drew smartly up in six rows. We walked up and 
down the ranks to have a nearer view of the women constituting them. These 
women were dressed in such a manner that none of their charms were concealed:
a simple drape of tulle left their breasts and buttocks exposed, but their cunts 
were not visible at all, Minski preferring to be spared the sight of a shrine in which
he was little given to performing his devotionals.

Leading off this room was another, not quite so spacious and containing 
twenty-five beds; this was the infirmary for women who had been injured by the 
ogre’s intemperances or who fell ill.

“Should the indisposition become serious,” Minski said to me as he opened one
of the windows, “I transfer them to the outdoor ward.”

Fancy our surprise when, peering into the courtyard below, we discovered it 
crowded with bears, lions, leopards, and tigers.

“Indeed,” said I, “such leeches must very shortly relieve anybody of what ails 
him.”

“Oh yes. Down there they’re cured in the twinkling of an eye. It is rapid, it is 
tidy, it avoids contamination of the air. A sickly woman, one wasted by disease 
can be of no use to lewdness; better to be rid of her at once, I believe. And one 
saves money; for you will agree, Juliette, defective females are not worth what it 
costs to keep them alive.”

In all the other seraglios it was the same hanging, the same inspection of the 
ranks.

Minski visits a sickroom, six patients look to him a little worse than the rest, he
snatches them bodily from their beds and heaves them one after the other into 
the menagerie where they are devoured in a matter of minutes.

“That,” Minski whispers to me while we watch the terrible feast, “is one of my 
favorite diversions. Exciting, isn’t it?”

“Incredibly, my dear,” I answer the giant, staring delightedly at the spectacle, 
guiding his hand toward my cunt; “probe about in there and verify whether or not
I share your sentiments.”

And I discharged. Inferring that I might be pleased to witness the doctoring of 
a second batch of sufferers, Minski rounded up a number of girls who had nothing
more wrong with them than a few virtually healed scratches and bruises. They 
trembled as they were led up to the window. To prolong and heighten our 
amusement we had them gaze awhile at the savage beasts for which they were 
about to become fodder; Minski’s nails raked their buttocks, I pinched their 
breasts, tweaked their nipples. Then out they were tossed. The giant and I frigged
each other during the massacre; the spasms which jarred me made me fairly 
scream my joy.

We rambled through the other apartments where all manner of horrifying 
scenes were enacted; Zephyr expired in the course of one of the most ferocious 
of them.

“Well, good friend,” I commented, when I had sated my passions, “you can 
hardly deny that the conduct you permit yourself here, and which in my weakness
I have copied, is abominably unjust.”

“Come sit down” that libertine invited me, “and listen to what I have to say.

“Before deciding, simply because of the veneer of injustice you see there, that 
the action I commit is blameworthy, we had better, I think, come to some sort of 
understanding upon what we mean by just and unjust. If now you meditate a little
upon the ideas lying behind these terms, you will recognize that they are most 
profoundly relative, and profoundly lacking in anything intrinsically real. Similar to
concepts of virtue and vice, they are purely local and geographical; that which is 
vicious in Paris turns up, as we know, a virtue in Peking, and it is quite the same 
thing here: that which is just in Isfahan they call unjust in Copenhagen. Amidst 
these manifold variations do we discover anything constant? Only this: each 
country’s peculiar legal code, each individual’s peculiar interests, provide the sole 
bases of justice. But these national, these regional laws depend upon the 
preferences of the government locally in power, and these interests depend upon 
the physiology of the individual who holds them; thus, self-interest, you see it 
very clearly, is the single rule for defining just and unjust; and thus, in the light of
a certain law, it will be very just in a certain country to behead a man for a deed 
which would win him laurels elsewhere, quite as a certain individual interest will 
reckon just a deed which, nonetheless, the person whom it harms will esteem 
very iniquitous. Some examples may be cited.

“In Paris the law punishes thieves; it rewards them in Sparta: robbery is 
legitimate in Greece and highly illegal in France, and justice consequently as 
illusory as virtue. A man breaks his enemy’s back; he will tell you he has done the
right and just thing, now ask his victim for his view of the matter. Themis is 
therefore an altogether make-believe goddess, whose scales ever show in favor of
him who tips them harder, and over whose sightless eyes they need hardly have 
bothered to place a blindfold.”

“Minski,” I remarked, “I have often heard it said, however, that there is a kind 
of natural justice man has always and everywhere adhered to, or which he has 
never violated without ruing it afterward.”

“Sheer nonsense,” said the Muscovite, “that fabled natural justice is simply the 
fruit of man’s weakness, his ignorance, or his folly whenever it is not to his 
advantage to propagate the lie. If he is of little strength he will always, 
automatically, belong to the natural-justice camp, and will always discover 
injustice in the hurt inflicted by the mighty upon members of his class; let him 
acquire some power himself, then his opinion and his ideas touching justice 
change instantaneously: henceforth nothing but what flatters him will be just, 
nothing equitable but what serves his passions; analyze it carefully, this famous 
natural justice always reveals itself based upon his interests; take Nature for your
guide when you shape your laws, only in this way will you avoid error. Well, is 
there any limit to the injustices we see her commit all the time? Is there anything 
so unjust as the hailstorm that capricious power flings to ruin the poor peasant, 
although—explain it as you will—not a grape in his rich neighbor’s vineyards is 
spoiled? and the wars, of her fomenting in whose course the whole of a land is 
laid waste for the sole benefit of some tyrant, and the fortunes she permits the 
villain to amass while the honest man founders all his life in hardship and 
privation? Say, those diseases wherewith she slaughters the populations of entire 
provinces, those repeated, innumerable triumphs she accords brazen vice while 
not a day passes but she grinds deserving virtue beneath her heel; this protection
she forever grants to the powerful man, seconding him to the detriment of the 
helpless—I ask you, is all that just? and may we suppose we are guilty when we 
imitate her?

“Hence—no other conclusion is warranted—there is not the slightest wrong of 
any sort in violating all the imaginary principles of human justice as we go about 
composing our own, tailored to fit our personal needs, and which will always be 
the best of all justices because expressly constructed for the service of our 
passions and our interests: in this world only they are sacred; and if true wrong 
there be, it is whenever we award a preference to hallucinations, neglecting 
sentiments given us by Nature, who is truly outraged by any sacrifice we are 
weak enough to make of them. Despite the allegations of your demi-philosopher 
Montesquieu, justice is not eternal, it is not immutable, it is not in all lands and in 
all ages the same; those are falsehoods, and the truth is the reverse: justice 
depends purely upon the human conventions, the character, the temperament, 
the national moral codes of a country. ‘If that were so’ the same author 
continues,(1) if justice were but the consequence of human conventions, ‘of 
characters, temperaments, etc., it would be a dreadful truth such as one would 
have to dissimulate from oneself….’ And why hide such essential truths from 
oneself? Is there a single one man should flee from? ‘It would be dangerous,’ the 
same Montesquieu continues, ‘because it would put man ever in fear of man and 
bring to an end all our security of property, of honor, and of life itself.’ But where 
is the necessity to adopt this mean little prejudice, to shut one’s eyes to truths so 
general, so vital? Is he of any help to us, who seeing us enter a forest where he 
has himself been attacked by bandits, does not alert us of the perils that perhaps 
lurk there? Yes, yes, let us have the courage to tell men that justice is a myth, 
and that each individual never actually heeds any but his own; let us say so 
fearlessly. Declaring it to them, and giving them thus to appreciate all the dangers
of human existence, our warning enables them to ready a defense and in their 
turn to forge themselves the weapon of injustice, since only by becoming as 
unjust, as vicious as everybody else can they hope to elude the traps set by 
others. ‘Justice,’ Montesquieu rattles on, is a seeming and right relationship 
existing really between two things, independently of the view any person may 
take of them.’

“Where have you encountered a greater piece of sophistry? Never has justice 
been a seeming and right relationship really existing between two things. Justice 
has no real existence, it is the deity of every passion: this passion finds justice in 
this act, that passion finds justice in that act, and although those acts may be 
contradictory and usually are, those passions find them just nonetheless. So let 
us abandon our belief in this fiction, it no more exists than does the God of whom 
fools believe it the image: there is no God in this world, neither is there virtue, 
neither is there justice; there is nothing good, useful, or necessary but our 
passions, nothing merits to be respected but their effects.

“Nor is that all; I go farther, and regard unjust acts as indispensable to the 
maintenance of universal harmony, necessarily disturbed by an equitable order in 
things. This fact once realized, for what reason would I abstain from all the 
iniquities my brain conceives since it is proven that they are useful to the general 
plan? Is it my fault if it be my capacities Nature is pleased to enlist for preserving 
her law and order in this world? Of course not, and if only through atrocities, 
execrations, and horrors this end may be attained, why, let’s perpetrate them 
cheerfully and serenely, in the knowledge that our delights answer Nature’s aims.”

We continued our tour of the apartments and put into practice the theories 
which the giant had just developed for me. Our unspeakable doings finally 
reduced me to such a point of exhaustion that I was obliged to beg quarter, and 
announced that the one desire I had left was to repose myself for the rest of the 
day.

“Just as you like,” said he, “I can perfectly well postpone until tomorrow 
showing you the two rooms you have yet to see, and which contain features and 
equipment that will probably astonish you.”

Sbrigani and I retired to our bedchamber; when alone with my one remaining 
traveling companion, “Good friend,” said I, “we found entry into the palace of vice
and horror, if this piece of excellent fortune is not to be spoiled we must now find 
a way out of it. My confidence in the ogre is not so entire as to recommend our 
remaining any longer under his roof. With me I have reliable means for being rid 
of this personage, after whose death we could very easily seize his treasure and 
be off. However, our host is too great a menace to humanity, my principles 
approve too warmly of such a character and of such depravations for me to wrest 
him away from the world. It would be to borrow the role of the law, it would be to
serve society, to banish this scoundrel out of it, and I am not so fond of virtue as 
to render it such an enormous service. So I propose to let this man live rather 
than throw crime into mourning: eh, a Friend of Crime deprive Crime of a 
sectator? Perish the thought! We must rob him, that is all; but it is important, he 
is richer than we and equality has always been the cornerstone of my doctrine. 
Rob him, then fly; else he will not fail to kill us, for pleasure’s sake or perhaps to 
rob us himself. With some stramonium we shall drug him, while he sleeps steal 
his money, pick the two prettiest wenches out of his harems, and escape.”

Sbrigani was not immediately won over to my scheme: stramonium, he 
pointed out, might not have effect upon a body of such prodigious size, a 
concentrated dose of strong poison looked by far the more advisable thing to him;
specious as my considerations were, they must cede before those of our safety 
and, according to my husband, that would be uncertain so long as the ogre 
remained alive. But unshakable in my resolve to take all possible care never to be
the undoing of anyone as wicked as I, I held firm. At last we decided that after 
administering the soporific to the ogre while breakfasting with him, we would 
proclaim to his hirelings the success of a plot against his life, thus forestalling any 
objections they might raise to our appropriation of his wealth, and that once we 
had emptied his coffers we would quit the place forthwith.

It all came out remarkably well. Swallowing the chocolate into which we had 
slipped the stramonium, Minski sank a few minutes later into a torpor so deep 
that we had no trouble persuading the household that its overlord was dead. His 
steward was the first to seek to induce us to reign in his stead; we feigned 
consent, and having had the treasure chests opened, we loaded the most valuable
of their contents upon ten men. Proceeding next to the harem of women, we 
chose two French girls, Elise and Raimonde, respectively seventeen years of age 
and eighteen, and then set forth after assuring the major-domo that we would 
shortly return to lead him and the others away; that we were indeed prepared to 
succeed to the place left vacant by his deceased master, but felt that such 
splendid possessions would be put to better showing in some one of the cities of 
the plain, where we ought all to remove rather than continue to dwell like bears in
this dreadful den. Enchanted, the major-domo facilitated everything, concurred in 
everything, and for his cooperation was doubtless richly rewarded by the giant 
when upon awakening he learned of his losses and of our flight.

Our loot loaded into our carriages, our women and ourselves installed inside, 
we dismissed the ten porters, after paying them for their trouble and advising 
them to head in any direction except back to the inferno where only calamity 
would be awaiting them. They did not dispute the wisdom of our counsel, we bade
them farewell and departed. That same evening we reached the outskirts of 
Florence. When we procured lodgings we turned to taking stock of our treasures 
and to appraising our two women: they were lovely creatures.

Seventeen-year-old Elise combined all Venus’ graces with the seductive charms
of the goddess of flowers. Raimonde, a year older, had one of those inspiring 
faces you cannot look upon without emotion; both of them recently acquired by 
Minski, neither had yet been touched, and it need hardly be stressed that this 
circumstance was among the principal ones which had led me to select them. 
They helped us tally our booty, it included six million in gold and silver coin, 
another four in gems, plate, ingots and Italian banknotes. Ah, how my eyes 
feasted upon this hoard, and how sweet it is to count riches when we owe it to a 
crime! These tasks dispatched, we retired, and in the arms of my two new 
conquests I spent the most delicious night I had enjoyed in a long time.

Allow me now to speak for a moment, my friends, of the superb city we came 
to the following morning. Listening to these details will have a refreshing influence
upon your imaginations, berayed as they are by this lengthy series of obscene 
anecdotes: such a digression, I should think, can only render more piquant that 
which the truth you have demanded of me shall perhaps shortly oblige me to 
relate.

Constructed by Sulla’s troops, embellished by the triumvirs, destroyed by 
Attila, then rebuilt by Charlemagne; enlarged at the expense of the ancient city of
Fiesole, its neighbor, of which today only ruins are left; for many decades torn by 
internecine strife; subjugated by the Medicis who having ruled it for two hundred 
years finally let it pass to the House of Lorraine, Florence is now governed as is 
the whole of Tuscany whereof it is the chief town, by Leopold, Archduke and 
brother of the Queen of France,(2) a despotic, haughty, and ungracious prince, 
like the rest of his family very crapulous and libertine, as my subsequent 
narrations shall soon convince you.

Soon after arriving in this city I was able to conclude that the Florentines still 
think back nostalgically upon their native-born princes and resent being under the
control of foreigners. Nobody is taken in by Leopold’s seeming simplicity; the 
popular costume he affects does not conceal his Germanic arrogance, and those 
who know anything of the spirit and temper of the Austrian dynasty understand 
why its members have far less difficulty pretending to virtues than acquiring 
them.

Florence, lying at the foot of the Apennine range, is split by the River Arno; 
this central part of Tuscany’s capital is somewhat similar to the heart of Paris, 
traversed by the Seine; but there the comparison between the two cities must 
end, for Florence has many fewer inhabitants and in extent is a great deal smaller
than the other. The reddish-brown stone of which its larger buildings are 
constructed gives it a disagreeable, forlorn air. Had I a liking for churches I would 
probably have some glowing descriptions to offer you, but my aversion for 
everything associated with religion is so compelling that I could not take it upon 
myself to enter a single one of those temples. It was otherwise with the superb 
ducal palace gallery, I went to visit it the day after we arrived. Impossible to 
render for you my enthusiasm at being amidst all those masterpieces. I adore the
arts, they excite me; everything that imitates glorious Nature must be cherished 
too…. No encouragement is too great for those who love and copy her. There is 
but one way to make her bare her secrets, through incessant, unwearying study 
of her; only by probing into her furthermost recesses may one finally destroy the 
last of one’s misconceptions. I adore a talented woman; a pretty face will seduce 
me, but the spell talents weave captivates more durably; and I think that the one 
is more flattering than the other to amour-propre.

My guide, as you may readily suppose, did not fail to show me the room in that
celebrated museum

where Cosimo Medici was surprised at one of his little infamies. The famous 
Vasari was busy painting the ceiling of the apartment when Cosimo appeared 
there with his daughter, of whom he was inordinately fond: never pausing to think
that the painter might be at work on the scaffolding overhead, that incestuous 
prince proceeded to caress the object of his ardors. Cosimo espies the couch 
nearby, the couple repair to it, the act is consummated within the view of the 
artist who, just as soon as he could, hurried from Florence, believing that violence
would surely be used to prevent intelligence of such a liaison from getting abroad,
and that witnessing what he had could well mean an early doom. Vasari’s were 
not idle fears at a period and in a town where the teachings of Machiavelli found 
no end of disciples: it was wise of him not to expose himself to the cruel effects of
those doctrines.

A little farther on my attention was drawn to an altar of solid gold and studded 
with precious stones—one of those objects I invariably covet at first sight. This 
immensely rich and wondrously wrought bit of furniture, it was explained to me, 
was an ex-voto which Grand Duke Ferdinand II, who died in 1630, offered to St. 
Charles Borromeo for the recovery of his health. The gift had been packed off and
was on the road when Ferdinand died; the heirs, reasonable people, decided that 
since the saint had not answered the prayer, they were exempted from the 
payment and recalled the treasure. For how many extravagances is not 
superstition accountable, and with what confidence we can affirm that of all the 
multitude of human follies this one doubtless has the most degrading effects upon
the spirit and the mind.

From there we went to look at Titian’s renowned “Venus,” and I confess that 
before this sublime work my emotions were stirred as they had not been by 
Ferdinand’s ex-voto: the beauties of Nature are uplifting to the soul, religious 
absurdities make it recoil in disgust.

The “Venus” is a delicious blonde, with lovely eyes, but features a shade too 
sharply drawn for a blonde whose charms, as composed by Nature, are usually, 
like her character, of a dreamy softness. The subject appears upon a white couch,
one of her hands toys with flowers, the other has strayed coyly to cover her 
pretty little bush; voluptuous is her attitude, and unwearyingly one pores over the
beauties of this sublime picture’s details. Sbrigani remarked that this Venus 
seemed to him to bear a striking resemblance to our Raimonde; I agreed. The 
pretty creature blushed innocently when we reported our findings to her; from the
fiery kiss I laid upon her lips she could measure my approval of my husband’s 
comparison.

In the next room, known as the Chamber of the Idols, we found a great store 
of works by Titian, Paolo Veronese, and Guido. And in that room we saw 
something very curious indeed: a sepulcher overflowing with cadavers severally 
exhibiting all the various stages of decay, from the moment of death’s advent to 
the total material decomposition of the individual. This somber work is executed 
in wax colored so subtly and modeled so cunningly that the thing itself could be 
neither more expressive of Nature nor more authentic. So powerful is the 
impression produced by this masterpiece that as you gaze at it your other senses 
are played upon, moans seem audible, you wrinkle your nose quite as if you could
detect the evil odors of mortality…. These scenes of the plague appealed to my 
cruel imagination; and, I mused, how many persons had undergone these awful 
metamorphoses thanks to my wickedness? But I rove. Let me say only that 
Nature probably impelled me to those crimes since even the mere recollection of 
them still thrills me to the core.

Nearby it is another miniature representing, in the same style, another 
common grave teeming with plague victims, and here the most interesting figure 
is a naked man who, as he drops the corpse he is carrying in among the rest, is 
himself overcome by the stench or overwhelmed by the sight, reels back, and 
dies: the treatment of this group is terrifyingly realistic.

We now came to gayer objects. The Tribunal Chamber, as it is called, contained
the celebrated “Medici Venus”: and upon beholding that stunning piece a rush of 
emotion assailed me as surely must happen to any sensitive spectator. A Greek, 
they say, was smitten by passion for a statue…. It is understandable; I could well 
have duplicated his distracted behavior, I trow: a survey of this work’s wondrous 
features leads one to believe tradition says true in reporting that the sculptor 
resorted to no fewer than five hundred models before completing it; the 
proportions of this sublime effigy, the beauty of the face, the heavenly contours of
each limb, the graceful curves of the breasts, of the buttocks, are touches 
attesting a human genius rivaling Nature’s own, and I doubt whether three times 
as many models chosen from all the world boasts of the most beautiful could 
today furnish a creature that would benefit from comparison with this one. It is 
generally agreed that this statue shows us the Venus of Greek seafarers; I need 
not describe it at greater length, it has been copied often enough; but though a 
reproduction of it is within anyone’s means to buy, nobody will ever appreciate it 
quite as I did…. This marvelous piece was once broken by some vandals, led by 
their execrable piety to this act of madness. The boors, fools! they worshiped the 
author of Nature and thought to please her by shattering her noblest work. 
Touching the sculptor’s identity there is disagreement; common opinion ascribes 
the work to Praxiteles, others say Cleomenes made it: whoever the artist may 
have been, his creation is magnificent, it is admired, it inspires the imagination, 
contemplating it is one of the sweetest pleasures that can be derived from the 
sight of man-made things.

My eyes fell next upon “The Hermaphrodite.” As you know, the Romans, who 
all had a special fondness for these monsters, welcomed them into their 
saturnalian assemblies; the one represented here was probably among those 
whose lubricious reputation was outstandingly notorious and hence deserved 
commemoration; but its legs are crossed, which is a pity, for the sculptor should 
have displayed what characterized its double sex and singular amenities: it is 
shown reclining upon a bed, exposing the most tempting ass in all the world … a 
voluptuous ass which Sbrigani coveted, telling me he had once bum-fucked a 
similar creature and had never been able to forget the delight it had given him.

Close by is the group, Caligula and his sister; ah, those proud masters of the 
world, far from concealing their vices, hired artists to immortalize them. In the 
same room you will also find the famous Priapus upon which young girls were 
obliged, as one of the requirements of their faith, to rub the lips of their vaginas. 
This deity’s member is reproduced with such stout proportions that introduction 
must surely have been impossible, or exceedingly difficult, if that too was 
perchance enjoined by the rites.

We were shown chastity belts. “Examine those devices well,” I recommended 
to my two sweethearts, “you shall be strapped into the like the day I have any 
doubts of your fidelity.” To which the mild-tempered Elise delicately replied that 
her devotion to me would always suffice to restrain her within the bounds of the 
strictest temperance.

Next we saw a splendid collection of daggers, some of them were poisoned; 
nowhere has murder been refined as amongst the Italians, it is therefore quite 
the ordinary thing to find in their homes all sorts of instruments for murdering, in 
the crudest and most traitorous manner.

The air at Florence is very unwholesome, autumn may be positively fatal there:
during that season, leave a bit of bread steep in the Apennine miasmas, it will 
molder invisibly and sicken anybody who tastes it; sudden deaths, apoplexies 
become very frequent at that time of year. But as we were then in early spring I 
considered we could remain through the summer without risk. We bedded only 
two nights at our inn; the third day I rented a fine house overlooking the Arno: I 
took it in Sbrigani’s name, for I was still masquerading as his wife and my two 
followers were become his sisters. Established there upon the same footing as at 
Turin and in the other Italian cities where I had made residence, no sooner had 
intelligence of us got abroad than the propositions began to arrive. But upon the 
advice of a friend of Sbrigani, who esteemed that moderation and no improper 
eagerness to leap at offers would perhaps win us admission to the Grand Duke’s 
secret revels, we refused all bids for a fortnight.

The prince’s emissaries appeared in due course. Leopold wished to have the 
services of the three of us at a forgathering which would also include the 
everyday objects of his private debauches, and our unreserved cooperation would
be worth a thousand sequins to each of us.

“Leopold’s tastes are despotic and cruel, like those of all sovereigns,” his 
representative explained to us, “however, you have nothing to fear, you shall be 
merely to serve his lusts, others will be his prey.”

“We shall be at the Grand Duke’s orders,” I answered, “but, my good sir, for a 
thousand sequins … hardly. No, my sisters-in-law and I are only to be had for 
thrice that sum; come back if those terms are acceptable.”

Libertine Leopold, who had already cast eyes upon us, was not the man to 
forego such delights because of a trifling two thousand sequins more. Miserly 
toward his wife, toward the poor, toward his subjects, Austria’s fairest son spent 
generously upon his pleasures. And so we were called for the following morning 
and conducted to Pratolino, in the Apennines and on the road by which we had 
gained Florence.

That villa, shaded, solitary, and voluptuous, lacked none of the features 
characteristic of a retreat for debauchery. The Grand Duke was finishing dinner 
when we arrived; with him he had only his chaplain, the agent and confidant of 
his lubricities.

“Dear friends,” the lord of Tuscany declared, “step this way if you please, we 
are awaited by those young persons my lust is to feed upon today.”

“One moment, Leopold,” said I, that elevated tone of self-respect in my voice 
for which I have always been noted, “my sisters and I shall submit ourselves to 
your caprices, we shall satisfy your desires; but if, as people of your sort so 
frequently are, you too are given to dangerous fantasies, then say so now, for we 
do not intend to enter the arena unless we are sure we shall emerge from it safe 
and sound.”

“The victims have already been appointed, they are there,” the Grand Duke 
replied to me, “you are to be the priestesses in this affair, nothing more; and we, 
the Abbot and I, the sacrificers.”

“You heard the gentleman,” I said to my companions, “in we go. Faithless 
knaves though they are, sovereigns may sometimes be trusted, above all when 
you have reliable means for vengeance about you,” and casting back my sleeve I 
afforded Leopold a glimpse of the haft of the poniard I had been carrying ever 
since the day I entered Italy.

“What,” cried he, laying a hand upon my shoulder, “you would attempt the life 
of a sovereign?”

“If provoked, of course,” I rejoined. “I’ll start no trouble, but if you were to 
forget whom you were dealing with, this knife”—and I now drew it all the way into
view—“will make you remember that your mistake was to behave inconsiderately 
toward a Frenchwoman.

“As regards your royal sacrosanctity, in my country we sneer at such rubbish. 
You don’t suppose, do you, that the heaven that made you made your existence 
one whit more inviolable than that of the meanest individual in your realm? My 
respect for you is no greater than for him; a zealous egalitarian, I have never 
considered one living creature any better than any other, and as I have no belief 
in moral virtues, neither do I consider that they are differentiated by any moral 
worth.”

“But I am a king.”

“Poor fellow! As if I were to be impressed by that title! Why, Leopold, you 
cannot guess how little it means to me. How did you get to where you are? By 
luck. What did you to do to merit your rank? That first of kings who earned it 
through his courage or his cunning, he could perhaps claim to some esteem; but 
he who has it through mere inheritance, may he hope for more than 
compassion?”

“Regicide is a crime—”

“Disabuse yourself, my friend: it is no worse than killing a cobbler, and you do 
as much evil, or as little, when you squash a beetle or murder a butterfly, Nature 
having fashioned those insects also. You may believe it, Leopold, the manufacture
of your person cost our common mother no more effort than creating a monkey, 
and yours would be a serious error if you let yourself imagine that she cares for 
this one of her children any more than for that.”

“I find this woman’s outspokenness quite engaging,” Leopold said to his 
chaplain.

“And so do I, Sire,” declared the man of God; “but I fear that such pride will 
prevent her from showing your Worship’s pleasures all the subordination they 
require.”

“Fear nothing of the sort, my good Abbot,” said I; “proud and frank in social 
conversations, meek and mild in intimate ones: such is the part of a pretty French
courtesan, ’twill be mine. But if in the boudoir I look a slave, remind yourself that 
it is only before your passions I bend a knee, not before your kingliness. I respect
passions, Leopold, I have them as well as you, but I stubbornly refuse to bow 
before rank: be a man, you’ll obtain everything from me; nothing, I warn you, as 
a prince; let us begin.”

It was a voluptuous salon Leopold bade us enter, and there awaiting us were 
the creatures he had alluded to and with whom we were about to disport; who 
ever would have believed it? they were a quartet of girls aged fifteen or sixteen, 
and all four pregnant to the bursting point.

“What the devil do you plan to do with these articles?” I inquired of the Grand 
Duke.

“You shall see before very long,” he replied. “I am the father of the infants 
they are ready to whelp, and I sired them solely for the sake of the delicious 
pleasure I shall have in destroying them. I know of no greater satisfaction than 
causing a woman I have ingravidated to miscarry, and as my seminal product is 
uncommonly abundant, I impregnate at least one a day to insure the wherewithal
for my daily destructions.”

“Ah ha,” said I to the Austrian, “your passion is odd, it intrigues me, I shall 
take a willing hand in this operation; and how do you proceed with it?”

“Have a little patience, young lady, you shall be witness to every detail,” said 
Leopold who until now had communicated with me in a whisper. “We begin by 
announcing the fate in store for them.”

Whereupon he approached the four girls and notified them of his intentions. I 
need hardly tell you, my friends, that upon hearing this perfidious declaration 
they were all without exception plunged into the depths of distress; two fainted, 
the other two set to squealing like pigs being led to slaughter. But unfeeling 
Leopold only commanded his agent to strip off their clothes.

“Fair ladies,” the Grand Duke then said to us, “will you kindly imitate these 
demoiselles, and undress yourselves too? I never enjoy a woman except when 
she is naked; and, indeed, I suspect your bodies are pretty enough to merit being
observed unveiled.”

A moment later Leopold was surrounded by seven naked women.

We were favored by that libertine’s preliminary homage. He scrutinizes us 
separately, he compares us, has us stand apart, brings us close together, and 
terminates this prelude by cunt-sucking the three of us while having the pregnant 
girls frig him one after the other. Leopold liked fuck, and busied himself upon us 
until we had loosed three of four discharges apiece into his mouth. While he 
frigged us, the Abbot socratized us, so that, excited before and behind, we bore 
the prince unstinting libations. An hour of this and then the inconstant lecher 
repaired to another shrine and had his holy cohort tongue us successively, while 
he himself licked our assholes. And the pregnant girls frigged him still.

“I am growing very hot,” he told us, “it is time we turn to more serious 
matters. You see there, in that brazier, four branding irons,” he continued, “they 
are hot too; upon each is inscribed the sentence of one of our laden women. I 
shall blindfold them, each shall choose her own iron.”

The game commences; as soon as the victim selects her iron Leopold plucks it 
from the live coals and claps the fiery red tip to her belly. These were the legends 
left imprinted in the girls’ flesh: to the youngest, who seemed scarcely over 
fourteen, the hand of fate awarded the brand worded thus: She will miscarry 
under the lash. The next, perhaps a few months older, received the label: A 
beverage shall be the cause of her miscarriage. The third was fifteen, this was her
sentence: Her fruit shall be trampled from her belly. Upon the last, who was 
sixteen, was seared this dread decree: Her child will be torn from her womb.

The ceremony over, the blindfolds were removed and the four wretches, 
looking around one at the other, were able to read their various condemnations 
aloud. Leopold then had them all stand in a row at the end of a couch and close to
it; he laid me upon that couch and encunted me energetically, while doing so 
peering fixedly at those four bloated bellies, each bearing the formula whereby it 
was to be deflated. Elise flogged his Worship in the meantime and the Abbot, his 
member grooved between Raimonde’s breasts, frigged himself full height.

“Leopold,” said I as we fucked, “I beseech you, keep a careful grip on yourself, 
for if I were to have the misfortune of becoming pregnant by you it is possible 
that I too would give birth prematurely.”

“If your case were submitted to my arbitration, you most certainly would,” said
the Grand Duke, from whose eyes I received glances, and from whose loins 
blows, that were motivated by nothing resembling gallantry, “but take some 
comfort from the fact I discharge with difficulty.”

And thereupon he left me to depucelate Elise, who had been a quarter of an 
hour thrashing him, and who was soon deserted in favor of Raimonde; she had 
been ministering to the Abbot, I replaced her and after he was done with me he 
turned to Elise. Wondrous stiff and angry were the members of those two 
libertines.

“Aren’t we to have some buggery?” the Abbot wished to know, who for some 
time now had been caressing and fondling my behind in the way of a man who 
was eager to fuck it.

“Not yet,” Leopold answered, “we must first dispatch a victim.”

The little girl doomed to have the fruit lashed loose from her womb was seized 
by the sovereign who, plying first an ordinary bundle of withes, then a martinet 
whereunto steel tips lent added bite, toiled thirty minutes over her behind, 
belaboring her so violently that the flesh came away like chips flying before a 
woodsman’s axe. The victim was then stood up, her feet fastened to the floor and
her upraised arms secured to cords overhead, and the Duke, manipulating a bull’s
pizzle now, delivered such prodigiously powerful thwacks to her belly that the 
embryo was soon dislodged. The girl shrieks; the head of the baby emerges, and 
Leopold, gripping it fast, wrenches it the rest of the way forth, tosses it 
unceremoniously into the brazier, and dismisses the mother.

“Pray ass-fuck, my Lord,” said the respectful chaplain; “your prick’s purpling 
veins, the foam wherewith your royal lips are besmeared, the fire darting from 
your eyes, everything indicates the imperious need you have of an ass. Fear not 
to spill your fuck, Sire, we are here to raise your fallen prick again, and we shall 
dispatch the others.”

“No,” insisted the Grand Duke, who when not absorbed in other business had 
been kissing and mauling me throughout these lubricities, “no, I discharged 
overmuch yesterday and cannot vouch for better than a single spasm today; 
before spending my strength I must attend to all the midwifery.”

And he laid hands on the second girl. A beverage shall be the cause of her 
miscarriage—the fatal goblet is produced, the little girl condemned to quaff its 
contents screws up her face, twists her head away; but the ferocious ecclesiastic 
is there, with one hand he holds her fast by the hair, with the other he pries her 
mouth open with a rasp; mine is the task of decanting the potion into her gullet, 
and the Duke, frigged by Elise, meanwhile handles my buttocks and the victim’s 
as well…. What potent elixir was this! Great gods, I had never seen the like of the 
results it obtained. The stuff was no sooner down the child’s throat than she 
pronounces the most blood-curdling screams, flails her arms, writhes on the floor,
and the next moment, there’s her babe. This time it is the Abbot who performs 
the delivery. Leopold, frolicking so lewdly with Elise and me while Raimonde 
pumped him, was in no state to accomplish the delicate operation: I thought he 
was readying an ejaculation, but he avoided it, withdrawing in time.

The third girl is stretched out flat on her back and secured to the floor: her 
fruit was to perish from being trod upon. Braced by Elise and me while Raimonde,
on her knees and astride the victim, frigs his device between her compressed 
breasts, the libertine dances a jig upon the wretch’s belly, and out pops her 
infant. It too is tossed into the brazier, the father not even taking the trouble to 
ascertain his scion’s sex; and more dead than alive, the mother is ejected from 
the room. If the last of the four was the loveliest she was also the most unlucky. 
Her child was to be torn from her womb; imagine what her sufferings were to be!

“This one won’t survive the experience,” Leopold informed us, “my discharge 
shall be owing to her unspeakable agony. It could not be otherwise, since of the 
four she, when I fucked her, gave me the most pleasure: the little whore 
conceived the same day I blasted her maidenhead.”

She is affixed to a diagonal cross of heavy timbers, at their intersection is a 
block of wood upon which her buttocks rest; her arms and legs are tied down and
then covered over, so that nothing is to be seen of her except the rotund, swollen 
mass caching the infant. The Abbot falls to work…. Leopold, his eyes riveted upon 
the operation, embuggers me; both his hands are busy frigging, to the right 
Elise’s ass, Raimonde’s cunt to the left; and while the perfidious chaplain cleaves 
open the victim’s belly and rips out the child, which is of fatal consequence to the 
young mother, Austria’s brightest star, the Medicis’ great successor, the celebrated
brother of France’s most illustrious whore, looses a torrent of fuck into my 
fundament, with another stream of foul vituperation, curses, and black 
blasphemies.

“Ladies,” said Duke Leopold as he wiped his prick, “the price of three thousand 
sequins you demanded and which I agreed to pay includes the cost of your silence
concerning our joint doings.”

“They shall be kept secret,” I replied, “but I pose one condition.”

“Condition? Condition? Thunder and Godsfuck, does it beseem you to speak 
thus?”

“Certainly … and insofar as I can bring about your downfall by divulging them, 
your crimes give me rights.”

“Behold!” stormed the Abbot, “see what happens when you behave liberally 
toward these jades: one should either never let them see a thing, or cut their 
throats once they’ve seen it. Your commiseration, good my Lord, is bound to be 
your ruin or your purse’s, I have told you so over and over again; and I ask you, 
Sire, can you deign bargain with such ordures?”

“Softly, Abbot,” said I, “save that kind of language for the penny-a-fuck 
mechanics you and your patron are doubtless accustomed to dealing with 
ordinarily; it is not appropriate when addressing women of our rank who, perhaps
as wealthy as you,” I pursued, turning to the Duke, “prostitute themselves less 
through greed or necessity than from taste. Let us close this discussion; his 
Worship needs our good will, we need his: some mutual services may redress the 
balance. Leopold, we will swear you the completest secrecy provided you for your 
part ensure us the completest impunity so long as we remain in Florence. Swear 
to us that no matter what we do in your duchy, we shall be made to answer for 
nothing.”

“I could avoid this extortion,” said Leopold, “and, without staining my hands 
with the Wood of these creatures, convince them that here, as in Paris, there are 
fortresses behind whose walls the garrulous learn how to hold their tongues; but I
dislike using such methods with women who appear to me quite as libertine as I: 
I grant you the dispensation you solicit—I extend it to you, Madame, to your 
sisters-in-law, and to your husband as well, but for the space of six months only: 
that period ended, begone from my lands, I command it.”

Having obtained all I was after, I saw no reason to reply, and after thanking 
Leopold and receiving our fees we bade him adieu and retired.

“We must turn this jubilee to account,” said Sbrigani once he had heard of our 
arrangement with the Grand Duke, “and before our time is up endeavor to add at 
least three millions to what we have already. It is truly a pity our carte blanche 
has been delivered for use in such a bedraggled, poverty-ridden part of the 
country; but never mind, we’ll accept whatever is offered and snatch anything 
that is not, and half a year should suffice to accumulate a tidy little fortune.”

Morals are very free, conduct very loose in Florence. The women go about 
costumed as men, men as girls. In few Italian cities does one detect so decided a 
penchant for betraying one’s own sex, and this mania the Florentines have no 
doubt derives from their pressing urge, indeed, from their need, to dishonor both.
Sodomy with them is a craze, and at one point in the past the city fathers 
successfully negotiated with the Vatican for a plenary indulgence covering every 
form of this vice from every possible angle. Incest and adultery are rampant there
too, no effort is made to conceal them: husbands cede their wives, brothers lie 
with their sisters, fathers with their daughters.

“It’s the climate,” say these good people, “the climate is to blame for our 
depravity, and the God who placed us in these surroundings cannot be surprised 
at the excesses for which He is Himself responsible.”

In this connection there used to be a most unusual law in Florence. On Shrove 
Tuesday no woman had the right to refuse her husband’s sodomistic advances; if 
nevertheless she took it into her head to deny him, and if he interpreted her 
refusal as a slight and grounds for complaint, ’twas very likely she would be a 
laughingstock all over the town. Oh, happy, happy nation this, that was wise 
enough to consecrate its passions in laws; there is proof of common sense, all the
extravagance belongs to those benighted societies which out of principles equally 
stupid and barbarous, instead of prudently wedding one to the other, through 
absurd legislation seek to thwart all a human being’s natural propensities.

However irregular though Florentine manners may be, streetwalkers are not 
permitted to drift loose through that city. The whores are restricted to a separate 
quarter of their own whence they may not venture commercially forth and where 
reign the most perfect order and calm. But these girls, seldom pretty, are for the 
most part ill-lodged; and the philosophical observer who visits the bawdyhouses 
will discover nothing of any particular interest unless it be the remarkable docility 
of these public playthings who, only too happy to attract you by means of their 
resignation, present no matter what part of the body upon simple demand and 
with unwearying patience even suffer each of them to be used in any manner 
libertine cruelty deems suitable. Sbrigani and I indulged in no end of beating, 
whipping, slapping, burning, mutilating, and maiming without ever hearing so 
much as a murmur of protest, and it is never thus in France. But if whoring does 
not much flourish in Florence, the libertinage there is excessive nonetheless, and 
the thick-walled, secluded dwellings of the rich harbor many an infamy: vast are 
the numbers of girls who are lured or furtively conveyed inside those strongholds 
of odious proceedings, there to lose their honor and not infrequently their lives.

Shortly before our arrival a wealthy notable of the town, having made off with 
a pair of little girls aged seven and eight, was accused by the children’s parents of
raping and then murdering them: the evidence against the gentleman was 
plentiful and damning: a few sequins to the plaintiffs and of the case nothing 
further was heard.

And at about the same time a famous procuress came under suspicion of 
kidnapping maidens from middle-class families and furnishing them to some 
Florentine noblemen. Questioned as to the names of her clients, she compromised
such a quantity of distinguished persons that there was no pursuing this inquest 
either, the dossiers had to be burned, and the woman forbidden to say any more.

Nearly all the ladies of condition, in Florence, have the habit of vending their 
charms in brothels; their temperament and their penury bring them to it. For the 
legal status of married women is singularly unfavorable in Florence, perhaps 
worse here than in any other European city, and there are few where their 
profligacy is more extensive or rampant. As for the cicisbeo, his function is merely
to provide her a screen; rarely does the cicisbeo enjoy any privileges with the 
woman he serves; appointed to his post as the husband’s friend, he accompanies 
the wife when she wishes to have him by her and obediently retreats when she 
orders him away. Those who fancy a cicisbeo is a paramour are greatly mistaken; 
he is simply the woman’s indulgent friend, or ally; may sometimes be the 
husband’s spy; but never does he lie with her; and of all possible roles, this is the
dreariest a man can assume in Italy. A wealthy foreigner has but to appear on the
doorstep, and husband, gallant, and everybody else speedily retire, leaving a 
clear field to him upon whose purse all hopes are founded, and I have often seen 
the complacent lord of the house quit it in consideration of a sequin or two when 
the stranger manifests the wish, however slight, to hold private parley with 
milady.

I have inserted this brief sketch of Florentine manners in order that you 
apprehend in what way, touching the thieveries, the debaucheries we were 
meditating, we were aided and in what way hampered by the traditional usages of
this people at whose expense we wanted and were free to amuse ourselves for six
months.

Sbrigani felt that our schemes were likely to meet with fairer success if we ran 
up our flag over an emporium of debauchery rather than over a casino; perfidious
greed insatiable! did we not have riches enough already without striking out anew
toward crime? No doubt; but once one is a traveler of crooked paths does one 
ever renounce them for straight?

So we circulated information advising the public at large that gentlemen would 
find at any hour of the night or day not only pretty wenches awaiting them in our 
establishment, but even women of the highest quality, and it was likewise made 
known that ladies could always obtain from us what they required in men and 
young girls, for their clandestine pleasures. Together with all that, we proposed 
the most agreeable surroundings, the most exquisite table; and the whole town 
rushed to us immediately. My companions and I were the mainstay of the house; 
but our clients had simply to make the request, they had simply to indicate the 
desire, and we put at their disposal everything delicious the district afforded. We 
charged exorbitant rates, but they were marvelous services we offered. Slise and 
Raimonde, trained in the matter, saw to the misplacement of countless 
pocketbooks and pieces of jewelry; their depradations gave rise to a certain 
number of complaints, all futile, the protection from which we benefited was an 
impervious defense, rendering vain all the denunciations of our activities.

Among the first we received was the Duke of Pienza. His passion was 
sufficiently out of the ordinary to warrant describing. Sixteen girls the Duke must 
have, they were arranged by two’s, each pair being distinguished by a different 
coiffure. These girls were naked, so was I where I reclined upon a sofa beside 
him; sixteen musicians, all youthful, handsome, and naked also, were seated to 
the right. Each couple was to enter the room in turn; prior to its appearance, the 
Duke told me what lascivious pose or lewd act he expected from the couple, the 
orchestra was admitted into the secret, and it was from the music, its key, its 
tempo, its volume, its melody, the couple was to try to guess its instructions. It 
guessed aright? the music would stop, the Duke would embugger the two clever 
girls. Did they fail to divine what was required of them—and each couple had ten 
minutes for solving the puzzle—then when the time had expired the dunces were 
flogged red and raw by our libertine who, as I dare say you very well imagine, 
derived quite as much pleasure from their mistakes as from their correct 
penetration of his wishes.

The game began: the funny fellow’s first wish was to have his prick sucked by 
both of the first two girls. In they came; faultlessly guided by a fugue, they 
guessed the secret, and were sodomized. The chore to which the second couple 
was appointed was the licking of my cunt, the girls’ efforts to interpret the music 
were unavailing, they were lashed. The third of the Duke’s secret wishes was to 
be lashed, and it was found out. The fourth, to frig the musicians’ sixteen pricks: 
the fourth couple was unlucky. The fifth, to shit in the middle or the room: the ten
minutes passed and the whip was brought into play. The sixth pair of girls realized
that they were to frig each other. The two composing the seventh couple 
altogether failed to grasp that they were to whip each other, and as a 
consequence were whipped by the Duke, vigorously. The music enabled the 
eighth couple to understand that the hero was to be embuggered with dildoes, 
and this was the moment he chose to inject his own discharge into my bum. And 
there was an end to it.

For some three months we had been leading this frivolous and profitable life 
when I accomplished a piece of outstanding baseness and thereby added a 
hundred thousand crowns to our treasury.

Of all the women who frequented my house with the utmost assiduity, the wife 
of the Spanish ambassador was she whose debauchery was probably the most 
noteworthy. Married women, maids, boys, castrates, she could find a use for 
anything, and though young and of angelic beauty, the whore’s rapacity, her 
foulness were such that she would insist I fetch her common laborers off the 
street, gravediggers and sweeps, pickpockets, flunkeys, ragpickers, and whatever
else I could lay my hands on that was lowbred, vile, and vulgar. When it was for 
women she longed then they must be sluts just risen stinking and sodden off a 
barracks-room floor, or worse yet if it might possibly be procured. Once 
encloseted with the rabble I collected for her, the rascal would be seven and eight 
hours frolicking in that leprous milieu, and then when she had had her fill of 
veneral pleasures would turn to those of the table, and close the day in mad riot 
amidst the most revolting debaucheries.

The ambassadress had a very pious husband, a very jealous one whom she 
gave to believe that when she went out it was to visit a friend who, like herself, 
was also one of my more reliable clients.

Seeing in all this certain promising possibilities, I one day take myself to the 
Embassy.

“Excellency,” I say to the representative of Spain, “so good and upright a man 
as you does not deserve to be cuckolded: the woman who bears your name is not
worthy of it. Your own honesty and rectitude cause you to doubt the truth of what
I advance? So be it; but I entreat you, for the sake of your dignity, of your honor, 
of your peace of mind, Excellency, investigate the matter.”

“Betrayed? I?” repeated the ambassador, “’tis unthinkable. I know my wife too 
well.”

“Say you so, my Lord? Begging your pardon, I am persuaded of the contrary, 
and wager you are far from having even the faintest glimmering of her appalling 
conduct. It needs to be seen to be believed. My object in coming here is to be of 
aid to you.”

Florella, troubled, wounded by the painful suspicions I have sowed in him, 
hesitates before the still more painful prospect of having them confirmed. And 
then, setting his chin purposefully, and showing himself more of a man than I 
would have thought, “Are you in a position, Madame, to prove these allegations?”

“Today, my Lord, if you so wish it,” I answer. “Here is my card, I shall be 
expecting you toward five o’clock this afternoon. You shall see the style in which 
your wife violates the trust you have in her, and the species of individuals she 
selects to that end.”

The ambassador promises to be there.

“I am flattered, Excellency, and satisfied; however,” I add, “I should like to 
point out to you that the favor I am doing you shall cost me dear. For ’tis I who 
furnish men to her, and she pays me handsomely for them—you shall punish her, 
I presume, and in any case I shall henceforth be deprived of her custom: I feel I 
am entitled to an indemnity.”

“True, that is only fair,” says Florella; “in what sum might it be?”

“Fifty thousand crowns?”

“This pocketbook contains that amount, I shall bring it with me and the money 
shall be yours when you have presented me with the necessary evidence.”

“Agreed, my Lord. I shall expect you at five.”

The several hours remaining until then were time enough to enable me to 
prepare further unhappiness for this ill-starred ménage. While causing the wife to 
fall into a trap, I was eager to snare the husband in it also; you shall soon learn 
by what crafty means I achieved this. After my little conference with the 
ambassador I went straight to call upon his wife.

“Madame,” said I, “you give yourself bother on account of your husband, 
thinking him of stern morality and irreproachable behavior you are ever 
apprehensive lest, finding you out, he upbraid you. I suggest that you come to my
house a little earlier than usual this afternoon, and it shall be revealed to you that
conjugal ties no more prevent him from enjoying himself than they do you. The 
spectacle will surely ease your conscience and doubtless induce you to put by the 
onerous precautions which gall your daily pleasures.”

“Do you know,” she replied, “I am less than entirely surprised by what you tell 
me, for I had an intuition he is not so sinless as he would appear; and I should be
delighted to learn that my guesses have not been mistaken—”

“You shall have them confirmed today. I have six pickpockets ready for you, 
and I have never clapped eyes on a prettier set of ruffians. Unless they are the 
three young boys your husband has ordered for tonight.”

“The monster!”

“He is a bugger.”

“Ah ha! So indeed! That explains why he is eternally fussing and fumbling 
about my ass and always whining to be let into it. And that explains his 
eccentricities also … his unaccountable absences, and the handsome valets he 
surrounds himself with…. Oh, Juliette, I simply must catch him out…. I must learn 
the truth—you will help me, will you not?”

“If you insist. But I am obliged to think of the future, Madame. Satisfying your 
curiosity, I lose a client and his trade is even more profitable to me than yours.”

“Never mind, I shall make your losses up to you. Set a figure, Juliette, I am 
willing to pay anything if it will secure me an end to my anxieties and my 
persecutions.”

“Then fifty thousand crowns does not strike you as too much?”

“You shall have the sum—the money is in this purse, I shall have it with me. So
go now, and count upon me to keep the appointment and the bargain.”

The two rendezvous arranged, I hasten off to organize the comedy. The wife, 
according to my reckonings, was as good as snared already: her native libertinage
would all unaided spell her downfall. As for the husband’s, however, that was by 
no means so simple to contrive. Art was called for here, seduction would be 
necessary: the man I was dealing with was a Spaniard, a pious Spaniard. But 
nothing daunted me. Once the two stages were set—the two scenes were to 
transpire in adjoining chambers, a crack in the partition separating them would 
permit the husband to observe his wife’s infidelities; through a second aperture 
the wife would see her husband’s antics—I waited patiently for my two dupes.

The husband arrived first.

“My Lord,” I declared, “it would seem to me that in the light of your wife’s 
behavior you ought no longer feel constrained to deny expression to your tastes 
nor to refuse yourself pleasures.”

Florella drew himself up. “Such things—”

“You dislike them and you are quite right: the dangers are manifold when you 
dally with women. But, Excellency, look here, these pretty children,” said I, 
drawing aside a curtain behind which I had stationed three delightful little boys, 
draped in garlands of roses and otherwise naked, “these heavenly little 
Ganymedes, you’ll surely not maintain that sorrows are to be anticipated from 
enjoying them? Really, my Lord, it surpasses my understanding—you who are so 
ill-used, will you worsen affairs by being harsh to yourself?”

And while I spoke the sweet little trio, acting upon my instructions, surrounded
the Spaniard, hugged and kissed him, teased him and, despite all he could do, 
plucked his wavering virility forth from its tent. Man is weak. The pious are 
weaker than most, especially when you offer them boys. Seldom sufficiently 
stressed, often not even realized, there exists a powerful analogy between 
believers in God and buggers.

“My Lord,” said I once things were well under way, “I am going to leave you to 
your own devices; I shall return as soon as your wife has begun her wanton 
capers. The sight of them ought to enable you to pursue your own in greater 
comfort.”

And I leave just in time to greet the ambassadress, then on the point of 
entering.

“Madame,” I whisper, conducting her to the hole in the wall, “you could not 
have come at a better moment. Behold in what way His Excellency passes his 
afternoons.”

And indeed the good man, without an inkling of the scurvy trick being played 
upon him and seduced by my speeches, was almost naked now and already 
absorbed in the ethereal preludes of sodomistic lubricity.

“The beast!” gasped the ambassadress, “the fiend! Let him dare criticize my 
conduct after what I have just seen—ah, I’ll have a thing or two to tell him! 
Juliette, it is dreadful, it is horrible—madre de Dios, where are my men? Send in 
my men, I’ll have my revenge, by heaven, I’ll have my revenge and more 
beside!”

And having started Doña Florella off on her lewd routine, I rejoined her 
husband.

“A thousand pardons if I disturb you, Excellency,” said I, “but the crucial 
instant is at hand and I should not like to have you miss it. Leave off your sweet 
sport a moment and come,” I urged him, steering Florella toward the second 
spyhole several feet away from the one through which he had been watched by 
his wife, “determine for yourself whether you are cornute or no.”

“Great God!” that gentleman exclaimed, “with six men, and veritable scum of 
the earth besides! Oh, the slut: Juliette, take it, here is your money, this sight I 
have witnessed—I am thunderstruck, I am undone, I … can no more—away with 
these children, I wish never to hear of pleasures again. That monster in the next 
room has shattered my existence, slain the soul in me … I am in despair.”

To me it was of no importance whether or not his lubricities reached their term,
his wife had seen them begin, that was all I required. The aspect of the adventure
my evil mind most appreciated was its sequel and it warmed the cockles of my 
very bad heart afterward to learn that the ambassadress had been stabbed to 
death, an event which gave rise to great commotion. A hundred diplomats, the 
emissaries of that many rival states, promptly published colorful versions of the 
story and Florella was hailed before Leopold’s magistrates: unable to endure the 
assaults of remorse, unable to face the ignominy about to fall on his head, the 
Spaniard shot himself. But I had contributed nothing to this second death, I was 
scarcely better than its indirect cause. The thought left me frightfully downcast; 
let me now tell you what I undertook several days later in order to pick up my 
spirits and at the same time promote my fortune.

It is common knowledge that the Italians make wide use of poisons: their 
atrociousness of character finds therein a suitable vehicle of expression, and a 
convenient means for taking the revenge and serving the lust wherefor they have 
also acquired a name in the world. Sbrigani and I having exhausted the supply 
acquired long before from Madame Durand, I had lately entered into the 
fabrication of those venoms for which she had given me the recipes: I sold these 
products in quantity, scores of people consulted me for their needs, and this 
branch of commerce developed into an immense source of revenue.

A rather well-favored young man, by whom I had been fucked to perfection 
and who was a daily visitor to my house, besought me to provide him something 
for his mother: he could no longer abide her interference in his pleasures and the 
sooner she was out of the way, the sooner he would gain a considerable 
inheritance. Such were the solid reasons why he was resolved to be rid of that 
Argus forthwith, and as he was a person of staunch principles, he was able 
without scruple or hesitation to concert a deed which common sense dictated. 
And so he asked me for a violent toxin whose effect would be rapid. Instead, I 
sold him a slow one, and the day following the transaction I paid the mother a 
call. The poison, as I rightly assumed, must already have been administered, for 
my young man had been nothing if not eager to get down to business. But as its 
action would not be felt for another few days, no symptom was yet manifest. I 
disclosed her son’s fell designs to the woman, describing them as intentions.

“Madame,” I declared, “your plight is unenviable, it is grave, and without my 
aid you are lost; but your son is not alone in this despicable plot against your life, 
his two sisters are involved also, and ’twas one of them who applied to me for the
poison necessary to cut the thread of your days.”

“What are these ghastly things you tell me?”

“There are terrible truths to bare in this world, and ungrateful, nay, distressing 
is the mission of those who from love of mankind are forced to reveal them. You 
must seek vengeance, Madame, and do so without delay. I have brought you that 
very drug your monstrous children mean to give you; use it upon them, be quick:
they merit nothing less, an eye for an eye, Madame, retaliation in kind is the best 
justice of all. And hold your tongue, for you cannot without dishonor to yourself 
let it be known that your own flesh and blood have plotted your murder; avenge 
yourself in silence, you shall obtain satisfaction and avoid any stain. No, no, be 
assured of it, there is no wrong in turning against your would-be attackers the 
sword they are about to lift against you. To the contrary, smite down the wicked 
and you earn the praise of every good man.”

And it was to the most vindictive woman in Florence I was speaking; of this I 
was aware. She takes my powders, she pays me gold. The very next day she 
mixes them into her children’s food, and as that particular poison was exceedingly
strong, the brother and two sisters perished very shortly; and their mother 
followed them to the grave inside a week. All their funeral processions passed 
down the road before my house.

“Sbrigani,” I said as the sounds of lamentation reached my ears and drew me 
to the window, “I behold a gladdening scene below; fuck me, dear friend, even as
I gaze at what I have wrought. Hurry, Sbrigani, deliver me quickly of the hot 
sperm that has been a whole week simmering in my womb; I must absolutely 
discharge at the sight of my crimes.”

Do you ask me why I included the woman’s two daughters in this hecatomb? 
Then I shall answer you. They were of unsurpassed loveliness; for two long 
months

I had tried everything under the sun to seduce them, and they had not 
succumbed: was more needed to kindle my wrath? And is virtue not always 
reprehensible in the eyes of crime and infamy?

No need to tell you, my friends, that in the thick of these perfidious villainies 
my personal lubricity hardly lay dormant. Having but to choose from among the 
superb men and the sublime women I procured for others, you may be sure that I
sorted out the best for my own purposes before relegating the rest to my 
customers; but Italians stiffen poorly, neither big nor for long, and their health, 
always dubious, drove me into an exclusive sapphism. Countess Donis was in 
those days the richest, the most beautiful, the most elegant, and the most 
dissolute Lesbian Florence could boast; it was commonly supposed I was her kept 
companion, and the opinion was not without some basis in fact.

Madame Donis was a widow of thirty-five, delightfully shaped, with a charming 
face, a clever mind, much wit, and many talents. Libertinage and interest were 
the sinews of my twofold attachment to her, together we indulged in the 
strangest, the most reckless, the most outlandish of impudicities. I had taught the
Countess the art of whetting her pleasures upon the stone of cruel refinements, 
and the whore, deriving untold benefit from my experience and instruction, was 
already almost a match for me in wickedness.

“Oh, my friend,” she said to me one day, “how many and various are the 
desires aroused by the thought of a crime! I liken it to a spark which swiftly sets 
alight everything combustible at hand, whose ravages increase in proportion to 
the fuel it finds, and which ends up producing a blaze in us such as is not to be 
extinguished save by rivers of fuck. But, Juliette, some theory must exist 
governing this as there is a theory governing everything else, and it too must 
possess its principles, its rules…. I am eager to become familiar with them; teach 
me, my angel, you know what my dispositions, my penchants are, teach me how 
to regulate all this.”

“Adorable woman,” I replied, “I am too devoted to my pupil to leave her only 
halfway educated. Lend me a little attention and I shall disclose to you the 
precepts which have led me to where you see me today.

“They are these, beloved Countess. Whenever you have the urge to commit a 
crime, what are the general precautions to be observed, barring of course those 
particular ones which the nature of events alone must prescribe?

“Firstly, combine your scheme several days ahead of time, thoroughly revolve 
and ponder all its consequences, some will contain advantages for you, spy them 
out, look with similar care for those likely to betray you, and weigh them as coolly
as if it were inevitable that you be found out. If it be a murder you concert, 
remember that in all the world no individual is so completely isolated that some 
acquaintance or friend or relative of his, however remote, may not bring you to 
eventual harm. These persons, whoever they are, will sooner or later come 
looking for your victim and, not finding him, finally come looking for you: hence, 
before you act prepare your welcome for them, your manner of replying to their 
questions and of imposing silence upon them if they are not satisfied with your 
answers. Once ready to strike, do the thing alone if you possibly can; if you are 
forced to employ a confederate, see to it that he has so much to gain from your 
crime, compromise him so vitally, bind him so fast to the deed that he cannot 
possibly turn against you later. Self-interest is the prime mover of human beings; 
thus, let there be no doubt of it, if you neglect these precautions and the 
accomplice finds a greater advantage in playing you false than in keeping faith 
with you, then be sure of it, my dear, betray you he shall, above all if he is weak 
and believes avowing may be a means to clearing his conscience.

“If you are going to derive some profit from your crime, carefully hide this 
motive you have for committing it; when you are in company never give the 
faintest sign that it is among your preoccupations, a slip of the tongue, a stray 
remark dropped beforehand will be recalled afterward, and these words will 
always testify against you and very frequently, in the absence of better evidence, 
serve as proof. If the committed crime doubles your fortune, defer until much 
later the purchase of a new coach or necklace, the changes in your 
circumstances, outwardly displayed will arouse curiosity, incite comment, and 
bring the police around to your door.

“The deed once done, you will be best advised, especially as a beginner, to 
avoid company for awhile, since the visage is the mirror of the soul and despite us
the muscles that shape our facial expression will inevitably, try as we will to 
prevent it, reflect our inmost feelings. For the same reason, see to it you 
introduce no subject of conversation which has the slightest bearing upon the 
deed; for if it is the first time you have committed it, you are apt, as you discuss 
it, to wax rather too eloquent, to say that trifle too much which will incriminate 
you, and if to the contrary it is one of your habitual crimes, a crime that affords 
you pleasure, your physiognomy will announce to others the agreeable impression
made upon you by anything touching the deed. In general, through practice strive
to acquire enough control over your expression and reactions as finally to be 
master of them, and to be rid of the habit of displaying your secret emotions upon
your face; calm and imperturbability and impassiveness should reign there, and 
train yourself to appear utterly unmoved even when gripped by the most powerful
feelings. Well, none of this is attained save through total habituation to vice, and 
a toughening of the soul in the last degree; both of these being of the highest 
necessity to you, I must keenly recommend them.

“Were you not immune to remorse, and you will never acquire that immunity 
except through the habit of crime, were you not, I say, perfectly forearmed 
against all misgivings, all qualms, ’twould be useless for you to endeavor to win 
control over your countenance, it would fall on every occasion and betray you at 
every turn. Therefore, having done a piece of wickedness, do not rest on your 
laurels, Madame: you will be the unhappiest of women if you make only one sally 
into crime and call a halt there. Either stay quietly at home, or, having ventured 
to the brink of evil, leap boldly over the precipice. Only the accumulated weight of
a multitude of misdeeds will stifle your capacity for remorse, will engender the 
sweet habituation which dulls it so wonderfully, and will provide you the mask you
need in order to deceive others. And do not suppose you have anything to gain 
from attenuating the character of the crime you meditate, its greater or lesser 
atrocious-ness is irrelevant: it is not because of its atrocity a deed is punished, 
but because its author is detected, and the more violent the crime the more 
precautions he is required to take. Thus it is virtually impossible to realize a major
crime without observing care for one’s safety, whereas this is too easily left 
unheeded when the crime is petty, and that is why it is found out. A crime’s 
atrocity is of concern only to you, and can it concern you once your conscience is 
impervious to it? its discovery, however, is to your detriment, and should be 
scrupulously prevented.

“Employ hypocrisy, it is indispensable in this world where accepted usage is 
hardly to practice what you preach: crimes are rarely imputed to those who 
manifest a general indifference toward everything that happens. Not everyone is 
so unhappy nor so clumsy as Tartuffe. Nor furthermore is it, like Tartuffe, to the 
point of enthusiasm for virtues one should carry one’s hypocrisy, you need go no 
farther than indifference to crime: you do not worship virtue, but neither are you 
fond of vice, and this kind of hypocrisy is never detected, because it leaves the 
pride of others in peace, which the sort of hypocrisy that distinguishes Molière’s 
hero necessarily offends.

“Be just as careful to avoid witnesses as you would be in the choice of 
accomplices, and whenever possible dispense with both. It is always the one or 
the other and often the two together who lead the criminal to the scaffold.(3) 
Well-laid plans and sound technique spare you from having to do with people of 
that sort. Never say my son, my valet, my wife will never betray me, for if such 
persons want to, they can do you unlimited harm even if they do not denounce 
you to the law whose guardians may also be bought.

“Above all never have recourse to religion: you are lost if you put yourself back
under its sway, it will torment you, it will fill your heart with quakings and your 
head with illusions and you will end up becoming your own delator and worst 
enemy. All these things weighed and arranged in due order, and this methodically,
objectively, rationally (for I am willing enough to have you conceive the crime in 
the throes of passion, indeed, I even urge you to, but I insist that, conjured up in 
frenzy, it be prepared in calm), now cast a clear eye upon yourself, see who you 
are, gauge your faculties, evaluate your forces, your assets, your influence, your 
station; determine the extent of your vulnerability before the law, the worth of 
the defenses you can interpose between yourself and its attacks. And if after this 
survey you find yourself on safe ground, go ahead; but once the die is cast, act 
forthwith. The best laid plans may miscarry, know it in advance; if you have done 
everything prudence demands, and if still you are found out, face the situation 
bravely. For what indeed is the worst that can befall you now? A very mild and a 
very quick death. And better that it should be on a gallows than in your bed; 
truly, the sufferings are nothing by comparison, and it is all much sooner over 
with; disgrace? But what does disgrace matter? you’ll not feel it, the dead feel 
nothing, and as for what may be felt by your family, can this alarm you, a 
philosophic individual, who worries precious little about families? Do you dread 
hearing yourself reproached, supposing now that they let you live and are content
to castigate you? What? you shudder at the thought of a few idle invectives and a 
tarnished name? Fie! you tremble before less than a spook. Honor? What is 
honor? A meaningless word, of itself nothing, which for its existence depends 
upon the opinion of others and which, so defined, should neither flatter us when it
is accorded nor be regretted when it is lost. Let Epicurus’ attitude be our own: 
bestowed upon us from the outside, so much the better if fame and honor be 
ours, so much the worse if not, in this there is nought we can do save know how 
to get on without them when we cannot acquire them. And be ever mindful that 
there is no crime on earth, however modest, which does not bring its perpetrator 
more pleasure than dishonor or disgrace can bring him pain. Am I any the less 
alive for being socially blemished? What care I for a little mud spattered upon me 
if beneath it I preserve my comfort and my faculties intact! ’Tis therein I find my 
happiness, and not in an opinion I cannot create nor amend nor retain, and which
is meaningless and vain, since it is an everyday spectacle to see people stripped 
of every vestige of honor and fame nevertheless achieve an existence, a 
consideration which feeble simpletons never attain after a lifetime of dogged 
virtuousness.

“Such, my dear Countess, are the views I would express to a vulgar auditor. 
But you—your rank, your person, your wealth, your credit, in what an enviable 
position they place you, how they shelter you from interference and ensure your 
impunity: you are beyond the reach of the law thanks to your birth, of religion 
thanks to your enlightenment, of remorse thanks to your intelligence. No, no, 
there is not a single extravagance you should refrain from, not one form of wild 
conduct you should not blindly indulge in.

“However, I cannot repeat it too often: avoid scandal, it brings on trouble every
time and never increases pleasure one jot; and this too I shall tell you again and 
again: select your accomplices judiciously, since at this early stage you must have
them. You are rich, fee them well; bound by your munificence, they shall not 
desert your cause; and if they dared, ’twould be to what peril for them? would 
you not have them arrested and punished long before punishment could overtake 
you? That same bond which to others is a deterrent as formidable as any forged 
of steel, is, do you see, a twine of flowers lying light upon you.

“This has been, I know, something of a sermon; let me now indicate to you, 
my lovely friend, the secret of how to discover which kind of crime is likely to fit 
your temperament best, for you can do nothing properly unless you enjoy it. A 
woman organized as you are cannot but be subject to incessant criminal 
impulsions; before divulging my secret, however, allow me to explain to you how I
come to this conclusion about your temperament.

“Your power of feeling is extreme, but you have directed the effects of your 
sensibility in such a way that it can no longer move you to anything except vice. 
All external objects possessing some unusual feature or other provoke a 
prodigious irritation in the electrical particles of your neural humour, and the 
impact delivered to the nervous system is instantly communicated to the nerves 
in the vicinity of the pleasure zone; you become immediately conscious of an itch 
there, this prickly titillating sensation is agreeable to you, you welcome it, you 
cultivate it, you renew it; your imagination sets to contriving ways to intensify it, 
means to amplify it … the irritation grows ever keener, and thus, if you wish, do 
you multiply your enjoyments ad infinitum. Your sole aim and study is to extend, 
to aggravate your sensations—need I say more? Perhaps. One who has 
vanquished every obstacle, as you have done, and freed herself from every 
restraint must perforce go far: only the most stimulating and gravest excess, the 
most odious, the most contrary to every law human and divine, is now capable of 
igniting your imagination. And so I must advise you to keep yourself a little in 
hand since, alas, the opportunities for crime are not always present each time we 
have the need to commit it, and Nature, having given us souls of fire, ought at 
least to furnish us somewhat more fuel. Is it not true, my beauty, that you have 
already and, it may well be, often found your desires far in advance of your 
means?”

“Oh yes, yes,” sighed the ravishing Countess.

“Just as I thought. It is a frightful situation, many, many are the times I have 
been in it too, it is the bane of my existence; but let me impart my secret.(4)

“Go a whole fortnight without lewd occupations, divert yourself, amuse yourself
at other things; for the space of those two weeks rigorously bar every libertine 
thought from your mind. At the close of the final day retire alone to your bed, 
calmly and in silence; lying there, summon up all those images and ideas you 
banished during the fasting period just elapsed, and indolently, languidly, 
nonchalantly fall to performing that wanton little pollution by which nobody so 
cunningly arouses herself or others as do you. Next, un-pent your fancy, let it 
freely dwell upon aberrations of different sorts and of ascending magnitude; linger
over the details of each, pass them all one by one in review; assure yourself that 
you are absolute sovereign in a world groveling at your feet, that yours is the 
supreme and unchallengeable right to change, mutilate, destroy, annihilate any 
and all the living beings you like. Fear of reprisals, hindrances you have none: 
choose what pleases you, but leave nothing out, make no exceptions; show 
consideration to no one whomsoever, sever every hobbling tie, abolish every 
check, let nothing stand in your way; leave everything to your imagination, let it 
pursue its bent and content yourself to follow in its train, above all avoiding any 
precipitate gesture: let it be your head and not your temperament that commands
your fingers. Without your noticing it, from among all the various scenes you 
visualize one will claim your attention more energetically than the others and will 
so forcefully rivet itself in your mind that you’ll be unable to dislodge it or 
supplant it by another. The idea, acquired by the means I am outlining, will 
dominate you, captivate you; delirium will invade your senses, and thinking 
yourself actually at work, you will discharge like a Messalina. Once this is 
accomplished, light your bedside lamp and write out a full description of the 
abomination which has just inflamed you, omitting nothing that could serve to 
aggravate its details; and then go to sleep thinking about them. Reread your 
notes the next day and, as you recommence your operation, add everything your 
imagination, doubtless a bit weary by now of an idea which has already cost you 
fuck, may suggest that could heighten its power to exacerbate. Now turn to the 
definitive shaping of this idea into a scheme and as you put the final touches on 
it, once again incorporate all fresh episodes, novelties, and ramifications that 
occur to you. After that, execute it, and you will find that this is the species of 
viciousness which suits you best and which you will carry out with the greatest 
delight. My formula, I am aware, has its wicked side but it is infallible, and I 
would not recommend it to you if I had not tested it successfully.

“Lovely and delicious friend,” I went on, remarking the warm impression my 
lessons were making upon her, “permit me to append yet a few more 
observations to the advice I have just offered you; my single interest is in your 
happiness, my desire is to labor in its behalf.

“When once one has decided to commit a crime of amusement, it is of utmost 
importance, firstly, that it be given all the scope whereof it is susceptible; 
secondly, that it be of such force as to be forever beyond reparation. This latter 
characteristic is all the more important in that it eliminates any room for remorse;
for when one feels remorseful, that feeling is almost always accompanied by the 
consoling thought that one can somehow palliate or by means of reparations 
efface the evil one has done. This idea sends remorse off to sleep, but only to 
sleep; at the very first mishap, the slightest illness, or simply when the passions 
are stilled, remorse reawakes and drives you to despair; if however the act 
committed is of a kind that leaves you without a shadow of a hope of repairing it, 
your reason annihilates remorse. What is the use of crying over spilt milk? The 
proverb is logical; by frequently repeating it to yourself you will shortly obliterate 
your capacity for remorse altogether, and you may then venture into any situation
without subsequently being annoyed by its pangs. Adding to this an intense 
criminal activity, you will achieve a flawless inward serenity. On the one hand, the 
impossibility of reparation, on the other, that of making out which of your crimes 
you ought to repent most, and the conscience, first dizzied, then rendered 
incoherent, is finally reduced to utter silence; thus we see that conscience is 
distinct from all other maladies of the soul, it dwindles away to nothingness as 
more is added to it.

“These elementary principles of mine well assimilated, you are ready to 
undertake anything and should stop at nothing. Admittedly, you will not be able to
procure yourself this peaceful situation save at the expense of others; but you will
procure it. And of what account are others when it is a question of oneself! If from
immolating three million human victims you stand to gain no livelier pleasure than
that to be had from eating a good dinner, slender though this pleasure may 
appear in the light of its price, you ought to treat yourself to it without an 
instant’s hesitation; for if you sacrifice that good dinner, the necessary result is a 
privation for you, whereas no privation results from the disappearance of the 
three million insignificant creatures you must do away with to obtain the dinner, 
because between it and you there exists a relationship, however tenuous, 
whereas none exists between you and the three million victims. Well now, put 
case that the pleasure you expect from destroying them ceases to be tepid and 
becomes one of the most voluptuous sensations your soul can experience; how 
now, I ask you, how can there be any thinkable alternative to committing the 
crime at once?(5)

“Everything hinges upon the total annihilation of that absurd notion of 
fraternity whose existence they inculcate in us in the course of our upbringing. 
Completely demolish this fictitious link, remove yourself completely from its 
influence, convince yourself that between your self and some other self no 
connection whatever exists, and you will observe your pleasures expand while 
simultaneously your faculty of remorse withers. That one of your fellow creatures 
is subject to a dolorous sensation is of no importance provided the result is not a 
dolorous sensation for you. This then would be a case in which three million 
victims sent to their doom must be a matter of indifference to you; you ought not 
hence to oppose their destruction even if you are able to prevent it, since from 
their loss Nature gains; but it is exceedingly important that this destruction occur 
if it affords you delight, because between it and your pleasure there is no 
proportion: everything must be to the advantage of the sensation you taste. You 
ought hence to concert this destruction resolutely and without remorse if you can 
achieve it with prudence; not that prudence is a virtue in itself, but the 
advantages you derive from it give it a value; and not that prudence is always 
necessary, for it often has a chilling effect upon pleasures. But it must 
nonetheless be employed in certain cases because it ensures impunity, and the 
certitude that you will get away scot-free enormously enhances the charms of 
crime; however, what with your wealth, the consideration and the credit you 
enjoy, your position is already strong and you need be less concerned for security 
than another. And so you may fling caution more or less to the winds, and banish 
prudence when it looks to you likely to blunt your pleasures.”

Filled with enthusiasm by my discourse, the Countess’ thousand kisses 
expressed her gratitude.

“I am eager to try out your secret,” said she; “let’s not meet again until two 
weeks have passed. I swear to see no one during that interval, when it is over we
shall spend a night together: I shall tell you my ideas and we shall work jointly at 
their realization.”

As she had promised, the Countess sent me word a fortnight later; we sat 
down to an exquisite supper. After we had raised our spirits with dainties of all 
kinds and delicious wines, the servants were dismissed, the doors locked, and we 
shut ourselves up in a little chamber which much art and expense had turned into
a veritable laboratory for lubricious research.

Throwing herself straight into my arms, “Oh, Juliette,” the Countess said, “I 
need such tenebrous surroundings as these if I am to gather courage to confess 
what your perfidious prescriptions have brought me to. Perhaps never was a more
atrocious crime conceived, it is appalling, words fail me … but my cunt seeps 
while I plot it … I discharge as I visualize myself performing it. … Oh, my love, 
however shall I be able to reveal this horror to you! Whither are we borne by a 
disordered imagination! To what infernal lengths is not a weak and helpless mortal
dragged by satiety, by the abandonment of principles, by the atrophy of 
conscience, by the taste for vice, by the immoderate use of lust…. Juliette, I have 
a mother and a daughter, you know that.”

“Of course.”

“The one, that woman who carried me in her womb, today scarcely fifty years 
of age, is yet in possession of all beauty’s traits. She adores me. Aglaia, my 
daughter, sixteen years old—Aglaia whom I idolize, with whom I have been 
frigging myself daily for the past two years, just as my mother did with me—well, 
Juliette, these two creatures….”

“Go on.”

“These two women whom I ought so to cherish, who ought to be so precious to
me—I wish to steep my hands in their blood. I wish to bathe in it, Juliette; you 
and I, that is what I wish, you and I, lying together in a bathtub, each frigging the
other, I want the blood of those two whores to drench us, I want it to cascade 
over us, I want us both to be covered by it, I want us to swim in it … these two 
women I worshiped before I met you and whom I loathe today, I want them to 
die while we watch, and in that manner…. I want us to take fire from their dying 
breaths; I want them to be thrown dead into that same bathtub, upon their 
corpses and in their blood, I want it to be there our pleasures culminate.”

Countess Donis, who while making this avowal had been frigging herself 
uninterruptedly, now fainted as she discharged. Being myself singularly aroused 
by what I had just heard, I had no easy time reviving her; she embraced me 
anew upon opening her eyes.

“Juliette,” she said, “the things I told you are frightful, but from the state they 
have put me in you can appreciate their prodigious effect upon my senses…. Do I 
repent having spoken? Far from it, I shall carry out the whole of what I have 
conceived, and promptly: we must busy ourselves at this infamy tomorrow.”

“Sweet friend, delicious friend,” I said to this engaging person, “you are not 
afraid, heaven forbid! of finding a censor in me. Far be it from me to carp at your 
project, but I ask that it be explored to the limit and enriched by a few episodes. 
It strikes me that some spices could be included in the dish. In what manner do 
you mean to have your victims wet us with their blood? Is it not essential to your 
complete enjoyment that nothing short of the most excruciating tortures cause it 
to flow?”

“Ah,” was the Countess’ vibrant reply, “you think that my perversity has not 
already invented them, arranged them? I wish these tortures to be equally 
prolonged, gruesome, and violent, I wish to feast ten whole hours upon their 
hideousness and upon the victims’ groans and curses, I wish to have us discharge
twenty times while first the one, then the other is adying, glutting ourselves on 
their screams, drinking ourselves drunk on their tears. Ah, Juliette,” the inspired 
woman pursued, masturbating me with the same ardor she employed for defiling 
herself, “all this to which my heart gives vent is nought but the fruit of your 
advice and instructions. This cruel but saving truth entitles me to your indulgence.
So hark to what I have still to say: having gone so far as to disclose these 
dangerous desires I harbor I cannot now beg off, but must complete my 
confession and at the same time solicit your aid in an affair of great importance to
me. Aglaia is the child of my husband, that is my reason for hating her; my 
sentiments for her father were no less hostile, and had Nature not heeded my 
prayers I would have resorted to art and forced her to fulfill them … you catch my
drift. I have another daughter, a man I worship is her father. Fontange, so is she 
called, the darling issue of my passion and its token, she is now in her thirteenth 
year; she is being raised at Chaillot, near Paris. My desire is that she have a 
brilliant future, this requires means and means she shall not lack. Here, Juliette,” 
continued Madame Donis, handing me a bulging pocketbook, “my legitimate heirs 
will be deprived of these five hundred thousand francs; invest the sum in my 
Fontange’s name when you return to France, I wish also to entrust her to you, 
you will look after her, you will find a suitable match for her, you will see to her 
welfare and happiness. But your interest in the child must appear to stem from 
benevolence. Otherwise all would soon be brought to light: my family would 
assert claims to this gift, and lawyers would contrive to get it away from my 
daughter. I place my confidence in you, dear Juliette: swear that you will be a 
loyal friend to me and keep secret both my good and my evil deeds. This 
pocketbook contains an added fifty thousand francs which I beg you to have the 
kindness to accept for yourself. So then, swear to serve as the executioner of the 
two persons I have marked for death and at the same time as the protectress of 
the charming creature I place in your care—speak. Oh, Juliette, I am prepared to 
have faith in you—have you not told me a hundred times over that there is honor 
amongst rakes? will you give this maxim the lie? No, surely not … my love, I am 
waiting for your reply.”

Although infinitely less likely to keep a promise to cooperate in an act of 
generosity than in a crime, each of the propositions the Countess made me had 
its interesting side, and I agreed to both.

“Dear friend,” I said to Madame Donis after sealing our pact with a kiss, “it 
shall be as you will it: be certain that before a year is out your beloved Fontange 
shall be the beneficiary of your generosity and of my devoted attentions. But for 
the present, my dearest, pray let us concentrate our thoughts upon executing 
your abominable designs. Virtue fairly turns my stomach when my soul is oriented
toward crime—”

“Ah, Juliette,” said Madame Donis, plucking at my sleeve, “you perhaps 
disapprove my laudable action?”

“Why no, surely not,” I hastily replied, and I had my reasons for reassuring the
lady, “no, of course not, I disapprove of nothing at all but simply feel that there is 
a proper time and place for each of these so dissimilar subjects.”

“Very well then, we shall give all our thought to the one which has just had 
such potent effects upon me. There is the question of details: let us compare our 
ideas. I have a few in mind, but tell me yours first: I want to see if our 
imaginations are in tune.”

“To begin with,” I replied, “the scene must transpire not here in town but in a 
rural setting, cruel pleasures are most successful in the silence and peacefulness 
only the countryside can provide. And then let me ask you, is Aglaia a virgin?”

“Most assuredly.”

“Her maidenhead should then be lost upon the altars of murder; her two 
mothers must present her to the sacrificer, and—”

“And her sufferings must be ghastly!” the Countess interjected.

“By all means, but rather than settle their specific kind beforehand it is 
probably better that we wait and see what actual circumstances suggest. Arising 
spontaneously from the context, they will be a thousand times more voluptuous.”

The rest of the night was given over to the most frenzied Lesbian exercises. 
We kissed each other, sucked each other, devoured each other; each fitted with a 
dildo, we fenced fiercely, mercilessly, and for hours. And having completed our 
arrangements to remove for several days to Prato, where the Countess had a 
superb estate, we deferred the execution of our delicious scheme until the 
following week.

Madame Donis adroitly announced to her mother and daughter that they were 
all embarking upon a six-month journey, thereby preparing the ground for the sad
report that the two dear ones her fury was to destroy had been taken away by 
some illness in the course of their travels. For my part I was to bring Sbrigani and
two thoroughly reliable valets. Thus upon the appointed day were met at Prato a 
total of eight persons: the Countess and I, my husband and my two hirelings, 
Madame Donis’ mother, her daughter and, lastly, an elderly nursemaid who had 
been many years in the service of her disorders.

Hitherto I had seen Aglaia upon but one or two brief occasions, only now was I 
able to examine her closely. She proved a perfectly enchanting young thing, as 
pretty as a picture, gracefully made, with a skin incredibly smooth and soft and 
fair, big blue eyes which seemed to be only waiting to come alive, faultless teeth, 
golden tresses. But to all that direction was lacking, it drifted aimlessly: the 
Graces had set only a caressing hand to Aglaia, she yet required molding. The 
impression made upon me by that heavenly girl is something beyond my power to
describe, it was an age since anyone had stirred me so profoundly.

And as I gazed at her a thought entered my head.

“Why not change the victim,” I said to myself, “is not the commission the 
Countess has entrusted to me her death warrant? If I sincerely desire to steal this
money—and the urge is undeniably upon me—then must I not straightway do her 
to death who assigned it to my safekeeping? My purpose in coming here is to 
commit crimes, that which ends the daughter’s days satisfies only my libertinage, 
whereas another which lays her mother low will stimulate my passions just as well
and will amply content my greed into the bargain: the five hundred thousand 
francs will be mine, and I will be dispensed from any obligation to account for 
them, mine also shall be two pretty girls to use as I please and, finally, I shall 
have murdered their mother who nicely twiddled my clitoris for a time, and of 
whom I have now had enough. As for the grandmother, bah, we can kill her too, 
there’ll be nothing to it; but this charming and virtually unknown creature I 
behold before me, ’twould be a pity not to spare her until familiarity has had a 
chance to breed contempt.”

I communicated these ideas to my husband, he applauded them and 
recommended that I send immediate word to my women, instructing them to 
pack up our belongings and to proceed with all dispatch to Rome and to await us 
there, for that was the city we had chosen for our next stay after our allotted 
term in Florence expired. Attached to me as Elise and Raimonde were, I could 
expect them to comply punctually and conscientiously with my orders, and was 
not disappointed. The very same day I convinced Madame Donis that to ensure 
the safe and satisfactory accomplishment of the task at hand it was indispensable 
to clear the house of every servant and to have all she owned of gold and gems 
sent down to the country so that she not be entirely without resources in the 
event plans went somehow astray. Acclaiming the wisdom of these precautions, 
Madame Donis, in blissful ignorance of those I was taking at the same time, 
arranged to have all her acquaintances in Florence informed that she had gone off
to Sicily and would be absent until late in the fall; and keeping by her only the old
nurse I mentioned a moment ago, the improvident creature put herself entirely in
our power: even had she deliberately tried she could not have tumbled more 
unerringly into all the traps we were laying for her. Everything was settled the 
next day, and the Countess, ours, had received by courier six hundred thousand 
francs in effects, two million in bank notes, and three thousand sequins in cash; 
her whole defense consisted in one aged woman, whereas my forces included, 
apart from Sbrigani, a pair of strapping valets.

These dispositions completed and as I was enormously relishing my idea of 
having the daughter commit the very crime whereof her mother wished to make 
her the victim, I induced the Countess to postpone all action until the following 
Friday, which, said I, would allow us three or four days to entrench ourselves in 
the appropriate calm.

“Between now and then,” I suggested to her, “let us employ ruse, constraint 
only if need be. Since we are on the eve of losing this delightful Aglaia you have 
only now introduced to me and to whom I shall have to bid adieu so soon, let me 
at least pass these few remaining nights with the child.”

All I said, all I asked, all I proposed was law to the Countess, such was her 
infatuation with me that nothing could have opened her eyes. And such are the 
mistakes which they who are in the midst of meditating wickedness are only too 
prone to make: dazzled by their passions, they are completely blind to everything
else and, thoroughly persuaded that their accomplices are going to derive as 
much benefit or pleasure as they from the deeds in question, they are oblivious of
anything that might dim others’ enthusiasm for the project they dote upon. 
Madame Donis consented to everything; Aglaia was ordered to give me a warm 
reception in her bed, and I repaired thither that same evening. Oh, my friends, 
what an array of charms! Suspect me neither of poetic license nor unreasoning 
bias, for truly I do not exaggerate when I declare to you that Aglaia would all 
alone have sufficed to him who in his search for a model ransacked all Greece and
even in the one hundred loveliest women of that land failed to find the beauties 
he needed for the composition of the sublime Venus I admired in the Grand 
Duke’s gallery. Never, no, never had I seen forms so deliriously rounded, an 
ensemble so voluptuous, nor details so compelling; nothing so narrow as her 
sweet little cunt, nothing so chubby as her dear little ass, nothing so pert, so 
fresh, so winningly shaped as her breasts; and fully aware of what it is I am 
saying, and stating it as a cold fact, I do now assure you that Aglaia was the 
divinest creature with whom up until that time I had ever had anything carnal to 
do. No sooner had I brought these marvels to light than I devoured them with 
caresses, and in my swift passage from one to the next, each time it seemed to 
me that I ought to have paused longer over what I had just relinquished for 
something equally wonderful. The pretty little minx had as lascivious a 
temperament as you could wish for, and was soon sighing her heart away. Her 
mother’s pupil, she frigged me like Sappho; but my studied languors, my 
voluptuous distress, my ecstatic sufferings, my twitchings, my nervous tremors, 
my spasms, my screams, my foul tirades, all these attributes of far-reaching 
corruption, all these symptoms of the havoc wrought by Nature in a body and a 
soul, my grimaces, my sugared, my sickly smiles and kisses, my sneaking 
gestures and insinuating remarks, my hoarse, lewd whisperings, all these amazed
and then alarmed her gentle innocence, and she ended up avowing to me that her
mother’s style of enjoyment was a great deal less refined, at any rate milder, than
mine. Finally, after hours of matchless voluptuousness, after having discharged in 
every imaginable manner, five or six times in each, after having kissed, sucked 
each other everywhere, after having exchanged nips, bites, pinches, tonguings, 
whippings, after having done, in short, everything that can possibly be invented of
the utterly crapulous, the utterly unbridled, the utterly obscene, and the simply 
inconceivable, to this delightful girl I spoke more or less as follows.

“Dear girl,” I began, “I do not know where you stand as regards principles, nor
whether the Countess, when she started to initiate you into the mysteries of 
pleasure, concerned herself also for the cultivation of your soul; but whatever the 
case may be, that which I have to reveal to you is too important to be withheld 
another minute from your knowledge. Your mother, that most traitorous, that 
most unworthy, that most criminal of women, has plotted against your 
life—exactly, do not interrupt me—: tomorrow, Aglaia, you are to be her victim 
unless you parry the blow: by which I mean you have no choice but to strike it 
first.”

“Good heaven, what fearful thing do you tell me?” said Aglaia, trembling in my 
arms.

“The truth, my dove, it is atrocious, but I could not hide it from you.”

“I wonder if this could be the reason for the odd change in her attitude toward 
me of late … for her chilliness, for that treatment—”

“To what treatment do you refer?”

Aglaia then disclosed to me that her mother, become cruel in her pleasure, had
been tormenting her, slapping her, beating her, and taken to saying the harshest 
things to her. Curious to know the precise degree of disorder and license that 
characterized Madame Donis’ lewd commerce with her daughter. I discovered that
she required of the child one of those libidinous excesses whose violence brings 
disgust in its wake. After having gone down the list of libertine practices, this 
indecent mother had now come to the point where she had no pleasure from her 
daughter save in the form of a mouthful of her shit, which she would swallow.

“Dear love,” I said to the maiden, “you would have been wiser to have been 
somewhat more sparing of the favors you granted your mother; too little reserve 
on your part, an overly accommodating spirit have resulted in satiety on hers. But
the past cannot be altered, you must ready yourself for what is to come. The fatal
hour is at hand.”

“But how am I to escape?”

“Of escape there can be no question. You cannot wait until the attack is 
delivered and then hope to dodge it; my advice to you is to take the offensive 
yourself.”

And here I began truly to enjoy the little piece of mischief I was up to; I had 
arrived at Prato with no fairer prospect than aiding a scoundrel to satisfy one of 
her passions; and now I was suborning an essentially mild-tempered and virtuous
girl, I was urging her on to matricide, and however the deed might be justifiable, 
was it not a crime withal? While as for the trick I was playing upon my friend, it 
positively filled me with glee.

Impressionable, delicate, sensitive, Aglaia was sorely shaken by my revelation 
and reduced to tears by this awful deed I proposed that she do.

“My child,” said I, stroking her hair as she sobbed upon my breast, “this is no 
time for tears, ’tis courage and determination we require. Owing to her fell 
designs, Madame Donis has forfeited title to any of the consideration which might 
be shown a mother, and become an ordinary woman to be done quickly and 
remorselessly away with: to deprive of life those who threaten our own is the 
summit of human virtue. You do not suppose gratitude can bind you to an 
abominable woman who only gave you life in order to place it in jeopardy? Come, 
sweet Aglaia, don’t be mistaken, if you owe anything to such a monster it is 
vengeance; can you passively turn the other cheek to be insulted and hope to 
retain your self-respect? And supposing you were to survive this present attempt, 
what security remains to you? You will be your mother’s victim tomorrow if she 
fails to kill you today. Rash child, thoughtless child, open your eyes: can you be 
ashamed to shed such criminal blood? Can you yet cling to the illusion that 
between this villain and thee there still subsists any relation save that of the 
hunter to his quarry?”

“You were her friend?”

“Could I continue to be once I learned that she was bent on destroying all I 
love in this world?”

“Your tastes and passions resemble hers.”

“Perhaps; but, unlike her, I do not venerate crime; unlike her, I am not a 
she-wolf thirsting for blood, I abhor cruelty; I love my fellow man, and murder is 
an infamy that revolts me. An end to such comparisons, Aglaia, an end to them, 
they are pointless, they dishonor me, and they are causing us to lose precious 
moments. The time for words is over, that for deeds is upon us.”

“What! You would have me, Aglaia, thrust a dagger into my mother’s heart?”

“A mother, say you? Can you call by that name the one who labors at the 
destruction of her child? Why no, having become your mortal enemy, this woman 
must be considered a mad beast fit only for extermination.”

And taking Aglaia in my arms again, I strove to bury her misgivings beneath an
avalanche of libertine attentions: and sure enough, she forgot her qualms by and 
by and, quite won over, promised everything.(6) Guided by my pernicious 
reasonings, the heavenly little slut reached the stage where it dawned upon her 
that revenge might hold a few thrills in store for her; in a word, I maneuvered her
into discharging over the thought of assassinating her mother. After that, we rose 
from bed.

“My friend,” I said to Sbrigani, “we have now but to lay hands on the victims; 
call in your men and have them clap the ladies in irons.”

The grandmother is seized first and dragged down into the cellars of the 
château, where she is very shortly joined by the Countess. Understanding nothing
of these untoward proceedings, she appears stunned by surprise. Aglaia is there.

“Monster!” I say to Madame Donis, “justice cries out that you be made the 
victim of your own wickedness.”

“What’s this? Perfidious wretch, was not this plot as much your handiwork as 
mine?”

“Ha, I put on a show of vice and so lured you into divulging your secret; but 
now, having you in my power, I have no further need to feign.”

When night falls I have these two prisoners brought up to the salon Madame 
Donis had converted into the theater for her horrors. Aglaia, stiffened in her 
purpose, steeled to anything by my mingled scoldings and cajoleries, is amused 
by the spectacle; she is quite as unmelted by the plight in which she beholds her 
grandmother as by the fate that has overtaken her mother. I had been clever 
enough to inform her in advance that the Countess had contrived her evil plans at
the old lady’s instigation; and the tortures began.

They followed the course Madame Donis had charted, except that instead of 
being the agent the hapless creature was the patient. Reclining, her daughter and
I, in a large bathtub and frigging ourselves amain, upon us the blood of the two 
women poured, running from the thousand and one gashes inflicted by Sbrigani. 
Here I should say in Aglaia’s honor that her courage and determination wavered 
not once; progressing swiftly from pleasure to ecstasy, her delirium held at a 
frenzied pitch to the end of the operation, and it was not brief. Sbrigani devised 
all sorts of ingenious expedients to lengthen the ordeal, and the accomplished 
fellow crowned it, rather as you might have guessed, by bum-stuffing the victims,
who gave up the ghost under his belly.

“And that,” said I, after congratulating my barbarous husband when he was 
done, “makes us the masters of the place; let us sack it and beat a rapid retreat. 
Aglaia,” I went on, “you presently grasp the object of my crime: as your mother’s 
friend I had only a share of her wealth, all of it is mine now. The fires you kindled 
in my heart burn there yet; you know Elise and Raimonde? I mean to include you 
in my troupe. But along with certain pleasures this includes certain services, like 
the others you too shall be called upon to contribute to the commonwealth, you 
will have to lie, cheat, steal, seduce, commit every crime, as do we when our 
advantage enjoins it; to rallying to our colors the alternative is abandonment and 
poverty. Which shall it be?”

“Oh, my dear friend, I shall never quit your side,” the girl exclaimed, tears in 
her eyes; “it is not my situation that dictates my choice, it is not fear of hardship, 
but my heart, and my heart belongs entirely to you.”

The heat still in him, my husband was not an impassive spectator to this 
moving scene; his feverish eyes and prick led me to suspect that he was bent on 
fucking, and his words shortly confirmed it.

“God’s blood and balls!” he declared, “this dastardly thing I have done I heavily
regret now, and nothing short of raping the daughter will make up for the loss of 
the mother I have killed; turn her over to me, Juliette.”

And being rather too pressed to wait for my response, the libertine, his prick 
up solid and true, caught the lass and deflowered her at a stroke. Blood 
emanating from that youthful cunt has scarce stained those white thighs when the
Italian withdraws, turns the seamy side up, gives three lusty heaves and lo! he’s 
implanted his device in her ass.

“Juliette,” he inquired while he sawed away, “what’s to be done with this article
now? A moment ago we could perhaps have found a buyer for her first fruits, but 
they have been picked and there’s an end to the whore’s usefulness. It’s dull, I 
tell you, it lacks intrigue,” he continued, fucking apace, “it lacks character, 
Juliette, believe me; so let us reunite what Nature originally assembled and leave 
this family in peace; of the murder of this child something superb might be 
made—fuck my eyes, the mere thought causes me to discharge.”

And here, my friends, I confess it to you, my native ferocity swept all other 
considerations aside, Sbrigani’s pathetic appeal had stirred me as the rascal knew
it would, and a sudden spate of fuck rising in my cunt sealed Aglaia’s doom.

“You are going to go the way of your kin,” I said to her; “the idea of putting 
you to death stiffens us, and we are of that reprobate breed that has never bowed
to any law but its passions.”

Despite her shrill protests and entreaties she was delivered over to our valets, 
and while the rascals tupped her in the manners they fancied, Sbrigani toiled to 
brilliant effect over me. From pleasures our satellites soon turned to brutalities; 
grossly insulting the object they had latterly favored with their homages, they 
advanced in short order from expletives to threats, from threats to blows. And of 
succor Aglaia had none from me, nor comfort: she stretched her lovely arms 
imploringly toward me, wrung her pretty hands, called my name; I did not heed 
her. The luckless child seemed to remind me tacitly of our secret pleasures and to
conjure me to hark again to the sentiment which guided me then. I was deaf. 
Incredibly aroused by Sbrigani who was embuggering me the whole while, I felt 
things other than compassion for the child; I became at once her accuser and her 
executioner.

“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 lovelier, 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.”

“Adorable creature,” I answered Olympia, lovely to behold as she delivered her
impassioned speech, “endowed with such a mind … and with such aptitudes as 
you have shown me, you should someday go far; I seem to find, nevertheless, 
that you have yet some important ground to cover. You may perhaps accept all 
the aberrations of lubricity, but I do not believe you are acquainted with, or 
indeed have even dreamed of, all those which may derive from lubricity. Although 
several years younger than you, owing to the infinitely wilder career I have 
pursued I may have the advantage in experience. No, no, my dear Olympia, you 
have still to learn whither crimes of lust may lead; you are, I wager, still 
unprepared to accept the horrors these misdeeds may involve—”

“Horrors,” Borghese interrupted, the color mounting into her cheeks, “ah! I 
venture to affirm I am not in arrears upon an article which you appear to esteem 
so essential. I would have you know that I poisoned my first husband, the same 
fate awaits the second.”

“Delicious woman,” I murmured, hugging Olympia in my arms, “forgive me if I 
seemed to entertain doubts of your character; but, blessed friend, that crime you 
committed, this other you project, they are motivated crimes, in all likelihood 
justifiable, at any rate necessary; whereas those crimes I would require of you 
would be gratuitous. Eh! is not crime in itself delicious enough to be committed 
for no practical purpose? Must we have an excuse for committing it? A pretext? 
And the tart flavor crime secretes, is that not alone sufficient to quicken our 
passions? My angel, of all the sensations in the world I do not want there to be 
one you have not tasted; with such a brain as yours, you would be grief-stricken 
to find that some sort of pleasure exists which you had not procured yourself. Be 
persuaded there is nothing to do under the sun that has not been done already, 
nothing that is not done every day, and, above all else, nothing that can conflict 
with the laws of a Nature who never incites us to evil save when she has need 
that we do it.”

“Explain yourself, Juliette,” asked Olympia, considerably moved by my 
remarks.

“Surely,” I replied. “Tell me: what were the principal feelings in your soul as 
you set about ridding yourself of that first husband of yours?”

“The thirst for revenge; disgust, hate … and restlessness, a consuming desire 
to break my chains, to gain my freedom.”

“And the part played by lust?”

“By lust?”

“It was silent in you?”

“Why, I did not consult it, it did not speak—”

“Well, if in days to come you should commit similar crimes, do not neglect to 
interrogate it as you perform. Let lust provide the spark to the tinderbox of crime;
combine the one passion with the other, and you shall be staggered by the 
results.”

“Oh, Juliette,” the Princess whispered, gazing at me with widestarted eyes and 
as though electrified by my suggestion, “the ideas you put in my head…. Ah, I 
was but a child, little did I know, less yet did I make of my opportunity—I realize 
it now.”

I then represented to Madame Borghese all that a libertine spirit may extract 
from blending cruelty and lewdness, and developed for her, upon this great 
subject, all the theories you are so familiar with, my friends, and which you so 
superlatively put into practice. She had no trouble following my arguments and so
rightly grasped the conclusions that it was with a reeling brain the rascal swore to
me we would not take leave of each other before having jointly perpetrated a few 
of these voluptuous abominations.

“Oh, my love,” she said, and she was completely afire, “a thousand things astir
inside me are telling me how heavenly it must be to rob one of our fellow 
creatures of the treasure of his existence, the most precious in a human being’s 
possession. To sever, to shatter the ties attaching that person to life, and this 
solely with a view to procuring oneself a pleasant sensation, for the sole purpose 
of discharging a little more agreeably … oh yes! this shock delivered to the 
nervous system, resulting from the effect of pain undergone by others, oh yes, it 
makes perfect sense to me, Juliette, and I have no doubt at all that the joy 
engendered by this concatenation of phenomena must culminate in the very 
ecstasy of the gods.”

It was then, while she was in a very lather of agitation, that the musicians 
appeared.

Ten youths aged from sixteen to twenty composed the band which now filed in;
and they were incomparably pretty lads, swathed in filmy, transparent tunics 
draped in the Greek manner.

“These are the artists who have provided the concert,” the lewd creature said 
to me as she had them step up one by one; “first witness the pleasures I am 
going to taste with them, and afterward imitate me if you care to.”

Whereupon the two youngest of those winsome boys posted themselves, one 
by Olympia’s head, as she lay still sprawled upon the pillows, the other hard by 
her bush. The remaining eight split into two groups, four of them gathering 
behind the boy at Olympia’s head, four gathering behind the boy stationed near 
her pudendum; each of the two closest to her frigged his four companions’ 
members, he at her head tendered Olympia for sucking the four devices he was 
stroking and then when they spouted guided the spout so that it splashed upon 
her face. In the meantime, the one placed by her cunt turn by turn plunged into it
and snapped out again the four youthful pricks in his care, and saw to it that their
exhalations landed upon her clitoris; and thanks to these proceedings Olympia 
was very soon covered with fuck from groin to brow. Lost in a labyrinth of 
delicious transports, never a word did she utter but only a few sighs, a few 
ecstatic moans, and all her body rippled with exquisite quiverings. Once all the 
pricks are frigged empty, the two masturbators leap lightly upon her, one takes 
her in his arms, encunts her, exposes Olympia’s superb ass to his cohort, who 
deftly parts her buttocks and sodomizes her; while Olympia fucks, the other 
pricks slip one after the other into her mouth again, she resucks them, repumps 
them in turn, and finally, quite unhinged and shrieking, discharges like a maenad.

“So then,” said she, rising to her feet and standing triumphantly in a puddle of 
sperm, “are you satisfied with me?”

“Indeed,” I replied, I too soiled and drunk from the pleasure the Princess’ five 
serving girls had been affording me while I watched her performance, “indeed, 
my dear, you have done tolerably well, but better yet may be done, as I intend to 
show you now.”

So saying I turn to the girls and appoint them to the chore of reviving the 
musicians’ members. Once all ten are suitably erect, I take them in hand. They 
were supple, agile, responsive to the touch; I plant two of them in my cunt, 
another in my ass, I mouth one, two nestle under my armpits, one in my hair, I 
frig a pair, the tenth rubs against my eyes; but I forbid any discharging. There 
must, I explain, be ten permutations, each must successively visit all the shrines I
make available to their homage, only then may there be any outpouring of 
libations. Dreadfully excited by the preludes, those ten fair youths positively 
drowned me in fuck, and Madame Borghese, who had been observing me while 
enduring intense frigging from her five girls, allowed that my method of 
proceeding was more skillful than hers.

“And now,” said I, “we must think of these five nimble-fingered fricatrices 
here; they deserve a reward.”

Disposing them in various and voluptuous positions, upon the body of each we 
applied a brace of young fuckers. Contrary to all principles, we clapped the 
grosser pricks into asses, into cunts the smaller were stowed; we moved from 
group to group, proffering advice and encouragements. Olympia’s delight was to 
snatch a prick out from wherever it happened to be buried, to suck it a while, and
to restore it to place again; and sometimes when she came upon a vacant orifice, 
whether cunt or ass, she would thrust her tongue into it and spend a quarter of 
an hour licking and sucking away. And whenever she evicted a fucker, while she 
tongued his partner she would receive a fucking from him. More marked in my 
attentions than she, it was by means of smart slaps upon the buttocks and 
occasional kicks that I cheered on the combatants, or else I’d squeeze a testicle 
here, twiddle a clitoris there, or jab my thumb into an anus while whispering 
smutty instructions in an ear and biting it next. In fine, I omitted nothing apt to 
expedite the emission of fuck, and my interventions usually brought it forth in 
gushes. But those discharges occurred in my ass; for I would not for the world 
have let those sluts reap the fruit of my labors, certainly not, I never do anything 
save it be for my personal advantage and if the things I do are done well, that, 
my friends, is the reason why.

This scene concluded, I proposed another. Here, we would each sprawl flat 
upon one of the girls, our cunt covering her mouth, she would suck it while we 
sucked the cunt of another girl just ahead of us and presented our asses to the 
ten youths who, served by the remaining girl of the five, would embugger us now 
the one, now the other. All this was acceptable to Olympia, save that where she 
was concerned—and her amendment attested to a greater degree of libertinage 
than I would have given her credit for—she preferred to kiss an ass rather than a 
cunt; and the whore, of her own accord, without any prompting from me, but 
thereby demonstrating a perfect sympathy with my ideas, bit that ass fiercely 
enough to draw blood. Seeing this, I felt completely at my case, and catching hold
of the breasts belonging to her whose cunt I was lapping, I wrung and wrestled 
with them in a way that won a sudden shrill scream from her. That was the 
moment Olympia discharged.

“I’ve caught you, you rascal,” I said to her, “you are beginning to detect 
pleasure in the commotion created by pain inflicted upon others. It is a favorable 
sign: we ought soon to be moving on to better things.”

After having been embuggered ten times in succession we swung our cunts 
around to the adversary. A girl squatting above our foreheads simultaneously 
gave us her cunt and her bum to kiss; with both hands a second massaged our 
clitoris and asshole; in the meantime we were encunted; we discharged … we 
wallowed in a sea of delights. Oral pleasures came next; we sucked all those lads,
we got them all to discharge into our mouths; and while this was going forward 
each of us was having her clitoris sucked by one girl, her asshole pumped by 
another. Exhausted, Olympia suggested that we restore our forces; we repaired to
a gorgeously lighted, luxuriously furnished dining room. A superb collation was 
awaiting us in a huge basket of flowers, this basket lay nested in the boughs of an
orange tree laden with fruit; when I reached for an orange I discovered it was of 
ice. Such surprises were held in all the rest, everything showed the mark of the 
most refined taste and the most elegant sumptuousness. We were served by the 
girls; from where they were concealed behind a decoration the youths charmed us
now by the sounds of their melodious instruments.

Intoxicated after our feats of lubricity, Olympia and I were shortly drunk from 
wines and liqueurs also.

“Now then,” I asked of my companion, whose head was reeling like mine, 
“what would you say to ending with an infamy?”

“Simply name it, I am ready for anything.”

“Let us immolate one of these girls.”

“This one,” Olympia answered, catching the prettiest of the five by the wrist.

“Gracious! You consent?”

“Why, of course. For what reason should I refrain from imitating you? Do you 
think I am to be daunted at the prospect of a murder? Ha, you shall see whether I
am fit to be your pupil.”

And, our victim in tow, we returned to the circular room where our orgies had 
taken place. All servants are dismissed, all doors barred, we three are alone.

“How shall we torment the jade?” I wanted to know. “Instruments seem to be 
lacking here.”

While speaking I was examining the body of that truly superb young thing; I 
studied it by the light of two candles which ever and anon I would snuff out upon 
her buttocks, upon her thighs, upon her breasts. Olympia picked up a candlestick 
too; thus did we amuse ourselves for the space of an hour or so. After burning 
her we pinched her, tweezed her, prodded her, and clawed her a little with our 
fingernails. Both of us completely tipsy, without quite realizing what we were 
doing or saying, we vomited, belched, farted, and pissed—all that 
confusedly—and we tortured our victim amain. The wretched creature screamed 
away, but neither her cries nor our wild laughter were heard by any living soul, 
the precautions having been well made against it. My suggestion was that we 
hang the girl by the breasts and stab her to a slow death with hairpins. Olympia, 
whose progress was keeping pace with her lessons, agreed to everything. The 
unlucky girl’s agonies extended over another two hours during which we drank 
ourselves into a further stupor on rum and her tears. Next, my companion and I, 
both spent after the fatigues of lust and of cruelties, numb from our 
intemperances, sank upon the cushions underfoot and slept for five hours, the 
victim dangling between us. The sun was already well up in the sky when we 
awoke; I helped Olympia bury the corpse beneath some bushes, and as I took my
leave of her we both declared our earnest wish to pursue a collaboration which 
had begun so auspiciously.

Having neglected to tell Sbrigani I would be away overnight in the country, he 
and my women had been troubled by my absence and great was their relief to 
see me return; I assured them I was well but weary, and went straight to my bed.
The following day Sbrigani, who thought of nothing but money, asked what profit 
I supposed might be gleaned from this intrigue.

“It has already been worth a host of pleasures,” I sighed.

“It could be worth better still,” replied my serious-minded gentleman squire. “I
have glanced into the matter; my informants tell me Borghese is the Pope’s 
familiar. We must have her introduce you to the Holy Father, we must prepare 
ourselves access to the Church treasures, we must drive out of Rome with an 
additional seven or eight millions in our baggage. You know, Juliette, I am 
wondering whether it was not a mistake to have adopted such an aristocratic style
here, I fear lest it disserve our aims.”

“Not at all,” I assured Sbrigani; “the lofty tone, a dazzling panoply, and these 
titles are so many supplementary means to excite lewd covetings; their ambition 
will be flattered to have dealings with a woman of quality, I shall be able to triple 
my fees.”

“Ah,” Sbrigani rejoined, “’tis not a few hundred thousand francs more or less 
that is at stake here. I have my eyes on higher objectives: Pius VI possesses 
tremendous riches. We must steal some of them.”

“To do so, entry into his apartments must be gained, and is there any way to 
achieve this unless I be summoned there upon some libertine mission?”

“Certainly not; but instead of waiting idly for an opportunity we must take the 
initiative, we must create the occasion as soon as we can, we must get into the 
Vatican and fleece that beggar.”

As we were in the midst of this conversation a page in the service of Cardinal 
de Bernis brought me a message from his master. It was an invitation to supper 
at Villa Albani, several hours’ ride from Rome, and the prelate of that same name 
was, with Bernis, expecting me in his charming retreat.

“Juliette,” Sbrigani exhorted me, “make the most of your outing: bear it ever in
mind that larcenies, fraud, imposture, those are the sole aims of our travels; to 
enrich ourselves, there’s our sole purpose, that’s our duty, and if we failed of it 
’twould be unpardonable. To it all pleasures are secondary and likely to entice you
into detours; the only road we must follow is the great highway that leads to 
fortune.”

Though no less ambitious than Sbrigani, quite as greedy for gold as he, my 
views concerning motives were not entirely similar to his. With me the proclivity 
for crime was the primary and compelling thing, and if I longed to steal it was far 
more for the sake of the pleasure which the act itself procured me than for 
lavishing money upon delights.

I arrived at the rendezvous decked out in all that art could add to the charms 
Nature had conferred upon me; my appearance, permit me to say, was lovely in 
the extreme.

Rather than interrupt my story, let me refrain from describing that enchanting 
campagna which attracts visitors from all over Europe. Those antiquities, perhaps 
the most precious relics that survive of classical Rome, those terraced gardens, 
the most exquisite, the best laid out, and best maintained in Italy—I should like to
talk to yo

u about them at length; but more eager to relate facts than to trace details, I 
shall move directly on to events, confident that you will not be displeased by my 
narrative, even unadorned.

Walking into Cardinal Albani’s summer residence, great was my surprise to find
Princess Borghese present there. By a window she and Bernis stood engaged in 
conversation; they broke it off upon seeing me enter, and came up to me.

“What a heavenly creature,” Olympia declared. “Cardinal,” she went on, 
addressing the aged Albani who had been staring fixedly at me ever since I 
descended from my carriage, “are you not of the opinion that we have no more 
beautiful woman in Rome?”

Both prelates affirmed that they believed this to be the case.

And we quit the drawing room.

The Italians customarily place their living quarters in the uppermost stories of 
their houses; at this distance above the ground, they rightly suppose, the air is 
necessarily purer, less heavy, and in better circulation. Those upper apartments of
the Villa Albani were beyond words elegant; gauze curtains admitted the breeze 
while keeping out insects which might trouble the voluptuous projects for which it 
was very plain to me, as I glanced about, that the stage had been elaborately set.

The moment we were installed, Olympia approached me and spoke in this 
strain. “Juliette, you were recommended to these two cardinals in attestations 
from the Duke of Tuscany similar to the letter you brought me from that prince, 
my ecclesiastical friends have been exceedingly eager to become acquainted with 
you … with your person, with your behavior, with your attitudes of mind. My 
relations with these gentlemen being of the closest and most cordial sort, and 
knowing them quite as thoroughly and in the same way we, you and I, know each
other, I have felt under no obligation to hide any of the truth from their curiosity: 
gratifying it, my accounts have, I believe, prepared a warm welcome for you. 
They desire you; I entreat you to accept their advances: these two dignitaries 
enjoy enormous favor with the Pope. ’Tis through their mediation preferments, 
advancements, graces of every variety are to be had; nay, nothing can be 
obtained in Rome save through them. However easy your circumstances, seven or
eight thousand sequins now and then can do you no harm: one may often enough
command the means to pay the butcher and the baker, but never has one too 
much to spend upon one’s frivolities, and especially when they are of the order of 
those we are addicted to. I offer you my own example, many a time have I 
received money from them, I still do. Ah, women are made to be fucked, made 
also to be supported, and just as we should never turn up our noses at gifts, 
neither should we shun occasions for entitling ourselves to rewards. Bernis and 
his colleague, moreover, have in common a peculiar eccentricity, that of enjoying 
no pleasure unless it is paid for; I am certain you will appreciate this singularity. 
As well, I urge you to manifest the extremest indulgence toward them, nothing 
short of that is required with such libertines; only by dint of great art and 
complicated ministrations may their desires be reanimated; reserve would be 
misplaced here, make free, unrestrictedly, with everything; I shall show you how 
it is done; they must be relieved of their fuck, cost what it may, we can neglect 
nothing to achieve that end. All your wits and parts may therefore be put heavily 
to contribution; I felt you should be forewarned.”

This speech would have surprised me less had I been more familiar with 
Roman manners. At any rate, if I was a little startled, I was by no means 
affrighted, not after the thousand and one trials I had faced intrepidly and come 
victoriously through in the past. Bernis, seeing that the Princess was done 
speaking her prologue, came forth now and addressed me in his turn.

“We know that you are charming,” said he, “intelligent and untainted by 
prejudices: Leopold’s written testimonial is very complete, it is upheld by the 
report we have had from Olympia, who was not reticent either. Upon the basis of 
this information we allow ourselves to presume, Albani and I, that you’ll not play 
the prude with us, and to demonstrate your good will we would have you show 
yourself as much a rascal as in actual fact you are, because a woman is only truly 
amiable, I believe one may say, to the extent she is a whore. And so you will 
surely concur in our view that she must be foolish indeed if when Nature gives her
a taste for pleasures, she does not seek as many admirers for her charms as she 
may contrive to encounter men on earth.”

“Gifted singer of the Vaucluse,” I replied, indicating to him that I was 
acquainted with his charming poetry, “you who penned your attack upon 
libertinage with such energy and ingenuity that the reader of your lines comes 
away worshiping what you condemn,(7) one would need many more virtues than 
I can claim in order to resist a man of your breed.”

And squeezing his hand affectionately, “Ah, believe me,” I told him, “I am 
yours for life, and be equally certain that you will always find in me a student 
worthy of the great teacher who so generously deigns to undertake her.”

The conversation became general and was soon enlivened by philosophy. 
Albani showed us a letter from Bologna, in which he was advised of the death of 
one of his intimates who, though occupying a position of foremost importance in 
the Church, having always lived in libertinage, had held out against conversion, 
even on his deathbed.

“You knew the fellow,” said he to Bernis, “preaching had no effect upon him 
whatever: keeping his head and his wits up until the very end, he breathed his 
last while in the arms of that niece he adored, declaring to her that the one thing 
he regretted in the necessity of denying the existence of heaven was that it 
barred him from the hope of being someday reunited to her.”

“It seems to me,” said Cardinal de Bernis, “that these deaths are beginning to 
become rather frequent: the author of Alzire and D’Alembert have made them 
fashionable.”

“Assuredly,” Albani went on, “it is a sign of grave weakness to change one’s 
mind as one dies. Have we not time enough to come to a few conclusions during 
the course of a long life? Our vigorous and lucid years should be employed 
choosing this or that belief, according to it should we live out our span and in it 
finally die. Still to be perplexed, to be in the grips of uncertainty as we enter our 
decline is to be heading for a frightful death. You will perhaps maintain that, 
deranging the organism, the ultimate crisis also unsteadies one’s doctrines. Yes, if
these doctrines be either newly or timidly embraced, never when they are early 
adopted and determinedly adhered to, when they are the fruit of labor, of study, 
of deep meditation, because as such they form a habit and we carry our habits 
with us to the grave.”

“Precisely,” said I, glad to have the opportunity of making my way of thinking 
known to the celebrated libertines in whose company I was, “and if the happy 
stoicism, which is my creed as it is yours, deprives us of some pleasures, it spares
us a good many pains in life and instructs us in how suitably to die. I know not 
whether it is because I am but twenty-five,” I continued, “and therefore prone to 
behold as far off the moment when I shall be restored to the dust whereof I was 
made, or whether I derive my comfort and courage from my principles, but it is 
without the least terror that I contemplate the inevitable disjunction of the 
molecules now grouped into my existence. Quite convinced that I shall be no 
worse off after my life than I was before being born, I expect I shall surrender my
body to the earth just as calmly, just as impassively as when out of the earth I 
received it.”

“And what lies at the source of this tranquillity? The profound contempt you 
have always had for religious nonsense,” Bernis declared; “had you relapsed but 
once, that would probably have sufficed to undo you forever. Whence the rule: 
one cannot become an unbeliever too early.”

“But is that so easy as one may think?” Olympia wondered.

“It is far less difficult than some suppose,” Albani replied; “but you must cut 
the tree at the root. If you confine yourself to lopping off branches, fresh shoots 
will always reappear. ’Tis during youth you must undertake the energetic 
eradication of prejudices inculcated in childhood. And the most deeply entrenched 
of them all is that which must be the most fiercely combated, I allude to that 
futile and chimerical god, and to curing yourself definitively of belief in his 
existence.”

“No, Albani, I do not feel that this operation need be numbered among those 
demanding any outstanding effort from a young individual provided he be 
normally constituted, for the deific fallacy cannot subsist fifteen minutes in a sane
mind. I ask you, indeed, who is it fails to see that a god, this bundle of 
contradictions, of quirks and oddities, of incompatible attributes, while he may 
heat the imagination, must appear ludicrous to the intellect? Those who scoff at 
the idea of a god may be reduced to silence, so it is thought, by telling them that 
from the very beginning of history and everywhere all men have acknowledged 
some sort of divinity; that none of the world’s countless peoples is without its 
belief in an invisible and mighty being which it worships and venerates; that, 
finally, no nation, even the most primitive, does not entertain the certitude of the 
existence of some power superior to human nature. Firstly, I deny that fact; but 
even were it so, can general conviction transform error into truth? There was a 
time when all men believed the sun revolved about the earth, while the latter 
remained stationary: did this unanimity of belief transform the false notion into a 
reality? There was a time when nobody was willing to believe the world was 
round, those who had the temerity to maintain it were persecuted. How wide has 
been belief in witches, in ghosts, in goblins, in apparitions; has the extent of 
these opinions made realities of those illusions? Of course not; but even the most 
reasonable and sensible people somehow feel obliged to believe in a universal 
spirit, without noticing, without bothering to realize, that all the evidence refutes 
the excellent qualities ascribed to this god. Here is a kindly father; large is his 
family, and from first to last all its members, I discover, are unhappy. In the 
kingdom of this so very wise and so very just sovereign I see crime at the 
pinnacle and virtue in irons. You cite the blessings that accrue to him who 
subscribes to this system; among them I perceive a host of ills of all sorts which 
you stubbornly shut your eyes to. Forced to admit that your so exceedingly good 
god, in perpetual self-contradiction, with the same hand distributes good and evil,
to justify this you are driven to refer me to the fabulous regions of an afterlife. 
Better, I retort, better to invent yourself some other god than the god of 
theology; for yours is as confused as he is preposterous, as absurd as he is 
derisory. A good god who does evil or tolerates that it be done, a god of sublime 
equity under whose aegis innocence is always oppressed, a perfect god who 
produces imperfect works only: ah! agree that the existence of such a god is 
more pernicious than useful to mankind, and that the best for all concerned would
be to annihilate him forever.”

“Charlatan,” I cried, “you disparage the drugs you trade in: what would 
become of your power and that of your Sacred College if everybody was as 
philosophical as you?”

“I am only too well aware,” said Bernis, “that error is necessary to us; men 
must be imposed upon, to that end we are obliged to deceive them. But from this 
it does not follow that we ought to deceive ourselves. Before what eyes are we to 
unmask the idol if not before those of our friends or of philosophers who think like
us?”

“In that case,” said Olympia, “I should be most grateful if you would enlighten 
my ideas upon a point of morality essential to my peace of mind. They have 
droned their doctrine in my ears a thousand times, their definition has never 
satisfied me: it is of human freedom I am speaking; Bernis, what are your views 
upon this question? ’Tis your sage commentary I desire.”

“I shall deliver it,” said the illustrious lover of the Marquise de Pompadour, “but
I request your whole attention, the matter is a rather abstract one for a woman.

“The faculty of comparing different manners of acting and of deciding which 
appears best to us, this is what is called freedom. Now, does man have or does he
not have this faculty of decision? I am prepared to state that he does not and 
could not possibly have it. All our ideas owe their origin to physical and material 
causes which operate upon us independently of our will, because these causes 
result from our intimate organization and from the impact external objects have 
upon us; motives are in turn the results of these causes, and as a consequence 
our will is not free. Prey to conflicting motives, we waver, but in the moment 
when the decision is taken it is not we who determine it; it is enjoined upon us, it 
is necessitated by the various dispositions of our organs; they always dictate the 
direction, we always follow their guidance, the choice between this or that 
alternative is never exercised by us: constantly impelled by necessity, the 
constant slaves of necessity, that very instant when we believe we gave the 
clearest demonstration of our freedom is the very one in which we were subject 
to the most invincible constraint. Irresolution, uncertainty allow us to believe we 
are free, but this fancied freedom is nothing but the moment when the scales, 
evenly weighted, hover in equilibrium. The decision is arrived at once one of the 
two sides tips, and it is not we who intrude our weight to upset the balance, it is 
the physical objects outside us which act upon us, which reveal us at the mercy of
our surroundings, the toy of natural influences, as is the case with animals, with 
plants. Everything resides in the action of the neural fluid and the difference 
between a scoundrel and an honest man consists in nought but the greater or 
lesser activity of the animal spirits that compose this fluid.

“‘I feel,’ says Fénelon, ‘that I am free, that I am under the absolute guidance 
of my own counsels.’ This gratuitous assertion cannot be proven. What assurance 
has the Archbishop of Cambrai that when he decides to embrace the pleasant 
doctrine of Madame Guyon he is free to elect the opposite course? At the very 
most he could prove to me that he hesitated, but, having acted as he did, I defy 
him to convince me he was free to act otherwise. ‘I modify myself with God’ the 
same author continues, ‘I am the real cause of my own willing.’ But, in saying 
this, Fénelon did not pause to realize that he was rendering his omnipotent god 
the real cause of all crimes; neither did he pause to realize that nothing so surely 
makes an end to the omnipotence of god as the freedom of man, for this 
omnipotence you imagine god to possess, and which for the sake of the 
discussion I temporarily grant you, is truly omnipotence only because god 
ordained everything from the very beginning, and it follows from this immutable 
and definitive ordination that man must be nothing but a passive onlooker, 
powerless to affect an unalterable fait accompli and therefore unfree. If he were 
free, he could, whenever he so willed, alter and thus destroy this original order, 
and in so doing show himself a match for god. Here is a problem to which such a 
partisan of the divinity as Fénelon ought to have devoted maturer reflection.

“Newton skipped gingerly around this formidable difficulty, he dared neither 
explore it nor even venture too close to it; Fénelon, more forthright although far 
less learned, adds: ‘When I will something, it is in my power not to will it; when I 
will it not, it is in my power to will it.’

“No. If, Sir, you did not do it when you willed it, that is because it was not in 
your power to do it and all the physical causes which inflect the scales had tipped 
them, this time, to the side of not doing the thing in question, and the choice was 
made before you arrived at a decision. Therefore, Sir, you were not free, and you 
never are. When you slip into that one of the two alternatives you adopt, it is 
because you could not possibly have adopted the other. It is your uncertainty that
blinded you, you supposed it was in your power to choose because you felt it in 
your power to hesitate. But this uncertainty, the physical effect of two foreign 
objects which present themselves simultaneously, and the freedom to choose 
between these two objects, here are two very different matters.”

“That is enough to convince me,” Olympia rejoiced; “the idea of having been 
able not to commit the crimes I indulged in used sometimes to harry my 
conscience. My unfreedom proven, I am at peace with myself and shall continue 
without misgivings.”

“I urge you to do so,” said Albani; “remorse of any kind is utterly futile. Always
coming after the fact, it never prevents it, and the passions invariably outshout all
scruples when the moment for repeating the evil arrives.”

“Very well then, let us now turn to perpetrating some of this delicious evil in 
order to keep the habit bright and in order to dull our regrets over the evil we 
have done in the past,” said Olympia.

“By all means,” replied Cardinal de Bernis, “but this projected evil, in order 
that it delight us the more, let us perpetrate it thoughtfully and on a broad scale. 
Lovely Juliette,” pursued the ambassador of France, “we understand that you 
have two pretty girls in your house, who must certainly be as complaisant as you;
their beauty has been much bruited about in Rome; we feel, my colleague and I, 
that they should participate in this evening’s libidinous revels and invite you to 
send for them.”

Owing to the terms I was on with Olympia, whose glances pressed me to 
accept this proposition, I decided I could not very well refuse it and promptly sent
a servant to fetch Elise and Raimonde; the conversation now took a different turn.

“Juliette,” Bernis said to me, “from the eagerness we have just manifested to 
become acquainted with the two notoriously attractive creatures you possess, do 
not rush to the mistaken conclusion that my confrere and I are especially partial 
to a sex whose femininity we excuse solely upon the condition it behave in manly 
fashion with us. It is indeed essential we declare to you upon this subject that it 
were better we refrain from devising any scheme for amusement rather than have
it come to nought as a result of your failure, or your companions’, to favor us by 
an absolute resignation to the fantasies this statement implies.”

“Truth to tell,” Olympia put in, “these explanatory remarks are superfluous with
Juliette, from the feats I have seen her perform in this genre I may give you 
every assurance that she will not disappoint you; and I have no doubt that her 
two familiars must, if only from the fact they are her protégées, be quite as 
philosophical as she.”

“Good friends,” said I, striving to put everyone at ease, “my reputation for 
lewdness is sufficiently well established to leave no room for doubt upon my 
manner of conducting myself at such forgatherings. My lubricity, always modeled 
after the caprice of the men, is always set alight by the fire of their passions. I am
truly heated by their desires alone, my keenest pleasure comes only from 
satisfying all their whims. If what they ask of me is commonplace, my enjoyment 
is mediocre; let them require the unusual, the rarified, of me, and through 
sympathy I immediately sense the most violent desire to content them, and never
have I known, no, nor conceived of any restriction in acts of libertinage, since the 
more they outrage polite usage and exceed the bounds of modesty and decency, 
the greater their contribution to my felicity.”

“And all that is quite as it should be,” Bernis replied, congratulating me, “and it
is greatly to your credit; the prudishness that leads a woman to recalcitrance 
necessarily invalidates her claim to the consideration of her associates, and to the
esteem of reasonable men.”

“Such refusals are absurd,” advanced Albani, a confirmed sectator of all 
lubricity’s more fanciful practices, “they prove nothing in a woman but stupidity or
frigidity, and I do declare to you that to those who feel that a female can only 
make up for her sex by the most accommodating behavior, a frigid or stupid 
woman is beyond words contemptible; this is my opinion.”

“Well,” said I, “what woman could be such an idiot as to imagine a man does 
more wrong lodging his prick in her behind than sticking it in her cunt? Is not a 
woman a woman everywhere, and is it not extravagant for her to wish to reserve 
one part of her body to modesty while consenting to make free of the others? To 
say this mania can ever outrage Nature, the contention is perfectly ridiculous; 
would Nature instill in us such a taste for it if it were offensive to her? Why of 
course not, we may boldly assert, to the contrary, that she cherishes it, that it is 
favorable to her; that human laws, forever dictated by egoism, upon this subject 
lack all common sense, and that Nature’s, far simpler, far more expressive; must 
necessarily inspire in us all the tastes that are inimical to a reproduction which, 
when men undertake it, challenges her right to create the species ever anew, 
displaces her from her prime function, and reduces her to an inactivity that jars 
with her energy.”

“There is a very pretty thought you have just set forth,” said Bernis; “to this 
theoretical erudition I should now like us to join a little practice. Let me therefore 
invite you, lovely Juliette, to give us a glimpse of that throne of voluptuousness 
which, as has been intimated to you already, will be the unique object of our 
caresses and of our pleasures. With Olympia’s we have been long and 
exhaustively acquainted; yours will suffice for the time being, will you kindly make
it available.”

The two cardinals having drawn near I promptly unveiled the shrine at which 
they would worship. My skirts lifted waist-high, their examination began, and it 
was accompanied, you may be sure, by the most elaborate and the most 
lubricious details. Albani carried strictness of sodomite manners to the point of 
disguising meticulously everything in the vicinity which I in my bent-forward 
position could not help but bring into view: your authentic sodomist will always 
come unerect at the sight of a cunt. Following the touches there were the kisses, 
the twittering of tongues. And as with libertines of this feather barbarity is the 
usual sequel to lubricious impulses, suckings gave way to slaps, then to pinches, 
after that to bitings, to the vigorous, abrupt, and dry introduction of several 
fingers into my anus, finally to proposals of a whipping which would probably have
been inflicted in short order had my companions not appeared at that juncture. As
the adventure I am relating now begins to take on an indisputably serious 
character, from here on I shall describe it in the cynically frank style which best 
becomes the subject.

Enchanted by the two delicious creatures I offered to their lewdness, the 
cardinals soon demanded to make searching investigation of the hindward 
beauties promised by such a pair of arresting lasses as my Elise and Raimonde. 
Olympia herself fluttered about them no less ardently than the men. It was then I
drew Albani aside, and this is the gist of what I said to him:

“Saintly man,” I began, “you do not, I am certain, imagine that my pretty 
friends and I have come here to satisfy all your brutal whims simply out of piety. 
You must not be misled by the figure I cut at Rome; it is the fruit of my 
prostitutions, they alone get me my livelihood: I do not give myself except for 
money, and the price I ask is not trifling.”

“Bernis and I have always held a similar attitude,” the Cardinal told me.

“Then we should get on,” said I; “indicate to me, if you please, the 
recompense my friends and I may expect in return for our services. Not until this 
matter is settled shall they be rendered.”

Albani enters into whispered conference with his fellow churchman, then both 
turn back to me and protest I shall be dealt with in a manner that will leave me 
no cause for complaint.

“Too vague, these assurances,” I retort. “We each of us live from our calling, 
you know: that of eating little flour and water symbols earns you five or six 
hundred thousand pounds a year; consider it fitting that from mine, infinitely 
more agreeable to society, and with merit on its side, I extract as much. You are 
shortly going to reveal a quantity of turpitudes to me; their witness, I shall 
possess your secret and could compromise you by letting it out. You will retaliate 
by denouncing my conduct? But I too have enough gold to be listened to, and you
will be ruined when my lawyers unmask you. For six thousand sequins apiece and 
your agreement to procure an audience with the Pope for me, the whole affair is 
arranged, the discussion ended, and nothing but pleasures will result for you from
all our future relations. Few are the women who can equal me for lewdness, for 
easiness, for wickedness, and what my uncommonly irregular imagination will add
to your joys may very possibly render them quite as incisive, complete, and 
blissful as any mortal can hope for.”

“Fair child,” Bernis answered me, “you do not sell yourself cheap; but there is 
no refusing the wishes of one so endearing, you shall have your interview with His
Holiness. The desire you express has already been conceived by him, and since 
hiding anything from you is farthest from our intentions, know that he has 
ordered the organizing of this preliminary party, wanting, before making your 
direct acquaintance, to have a report upon you from us.”

“Excellent,” said I, “out with the money and I am at your disposition.”

“What, must you have it at once?”

“Right away.”

“But if we were to pay you first and then you were to take it into your head 
to—”

“Ah,” I interrupted, raising my hand, “I see you have had little experience with 
women of my nationality. Frank as the country whose name they bear, 
Frenchwomen wish to be sure of where they stand before concluding a bargain; 
but they are incapable of breaking it once they have pocketed the money.”

At this Albani, upon a gesture from his confrere, ushered me into a small room,
unlocked a secretary, and out of it drew banknotes in the sum I had stipulated. 
One glance at that secretary and the hoard it contained was quite enough to 
seduce me.

Good, said I to myself the moment I had struck upon the ruse whereby I was 
to appropriate that treasure, it is all the more certain to succeed considering that 
the multitude of abominations these rascals are going to enact with me will 
prevent them from daring to prosecute me afterward.

Before the Cardinal has time to shut up his secretary, I, taking swift advantage
of the moment, sink to the floor in a swoon so artfully feigned that an alarmed 
Albani rushes out in search of aid. Quickly I scramble to my feet, pounce upon the
banknotes, the pocketbooks, and in one swoop make away with a million. I close 
the secretary. Thanks to the hurly-burly, I assure myself, he’ll not remember 
whether he locked the lid or not and, finding it this way, will be less apt to suspect
me.

All this accomplished in less time than it takes to tell, I resume my position on 
the floor; in comes Albani, Olympia and Bernis on his heels. As they enter I open 
my eyes, fearing lest in the course of efforts to revive me they discover what is 
not very securely cached beneath my skirts.

“Oh, it’s nothing, nothing, I shall be quite all right,” say I, fending them off, 
“my extreme sensitivity renders me subject to nervous cramps every now and 
then, I am much better now and altogether at your orders.”

Just as I had foreseen, Albani, noticing that his secretary was closed, fancied 
he had left it so and, rather than suspecting anything amiss, was only too happy 
to lead me into a delicious salon where the projected orgies were to transpire.

There we found eight new personages whose roles were of considerable 
importance in the mysteries about to be celebrated. These eight individuals 
included four boys, fifteen years of age and perfect Cupids all; and four fuckers, 
between eighteen and twenty, and each with a positively monstrous member. 
Thus were we twelve assembled there for the amusement of the two lecherous 
collegians, for Olympia’s participation in these scenes was far more in the capacity
of a victim than a sacrificer: libertinage, greed, ambition put her in the service of 
these masters, and there her employment was identical to ours.

“So now,” said Bernis, “we start. Juliette, and you, Elise and Raimonde, by 
paying the merry price you ask for your hire we buy the right to address you as 
one does whores; serve us with corresponding obedience.”

“That is only fair,” I observed; “do you wish to see us naked?”

“Yes.”

“Then will you let us have the use of a dressing room where my companions 
and I may leave our clothes….”

We are shown to one; when we are alone, I divide up my bulky loot into three 
parcels, we each stow one into our pockets, remove our garments, and reappear 
nude in the circle where the cardinals are awaiting us.

“Now heed me,” said Bernis. “I shall exercise the master of ceremonies’ 
functions, Cardinal Albani has consented to this; everyone will hence comply with 
my instructions. Your asses, Mesdames, cursorily glanced at a short while ago, 
must be more narrowly studied; kindly step forward one by one and offer those 
articles to our criticism, the boys will then do likewise, and after having been 
viewed, each subject will repair directly to some one of the fuckers and proceed 
to dispose him for pleasure, in such wise that the review once concluded, we may 
find each of the four fuckers in the hands of a boy and a woman, and in full 
bloom.”

The inaugural scene is executed: we passed from the first to the second of 
those libertines. Our hindward parts were kissed and palpated, nibbled and 
gnawed, pinched and scratched, then we hastily took up our posts by the fuckers,
seeing to it that we were a woman and a boy in attendance upon each.

“And now,” said the master of ceremonies, “we must have a small boy kneel 
between our thighs and suck our pricks; a big boy will give each of us his to 
suckle; to excite him, he will have a woman’s ass ahead of him, and will tongue 
it; ready to hand we shall have, to the right, a fucker’s prick to dandle, to the left,
the buttocks of a small boy, and the two other women, stationed close to us and 
slightly beneath, will tickle our testicles and our assholes.

“For the third scene,” Bernis informed us, “we shall remain lying down as we 
are at present; ’twill be the women who shall pump us, two small boys kneeling 
astride our chests will give us their assholes to suck, they will kiss, above them, 
the asses of the two women who, themselves, will frig the pricks of the small 
boys. As for the four fuckers, we shall frig them, having our four hands free.

“Thus shall we be marshaled in the forthcoming scene,” continued the 
charming cardinal; “the two women who have not just been sucking us will, 
kneeling at the edge of these sofas, receive our pricks into their mouths; the two 
other women, I mean those who sucked us a moment ago, will act as our pimps: 
they will ready the four fuckers to embugger us one after the other, they will 
socratize those fuckers, they will tongue them, they will lick them anally, in fine, 
they will exert themselves unstintingly to bring those four members up high and 
hard, and when once they see the weapons burnished and fit to perforate us, they
will with their mouths and tongues moisten our vents and carefully pilot the ship 
into port; the four small boys will present their posterior charms to our lips, lying 
before us, belly down.”

The four fuckers were stout, mettlesome lads: they responded splendidly to 
our efforts. The two ancient, purple breaches were each sodomized eight times in 
a row, solidly and impetuously; but for toughness those two rogues outdid the 
devil and endured this last-mentioned scene as phlegmatically as they had the 
preceding ones; we were rewarded by not even a shadow of an erection.

“Ah ha,” Bernis declared, “’tis all too plain we require more potent stimulants; 
ours, you apprehend, is a state of advanced decrepitude. Voracious is the appetite
of a satiety nothing satisfies, the malady is like those consuming thirsts which the
coolest well-water only increases. Albani is in the same case as I: look there and 
see whether these accumulated efforts have hoisted his prick even a single notch.
Let us not be disheartened, however, we may try other things and indeed we 
must, a stern Nature commands it. You are a dozen; divide. Let each squad be 
composed of a pair of fuckers, two small boys, two women: the first will work 
upon my old friend, the second upon me. Ranged about us, everybody in his turn 
shall be frigged by us, shall suck us successively, and one by one shit into our 
mouths.”

This disgusting operation saw the pricks of our decayed adversaries unwrinkle 
a little and upon the basis of these unmistakable albeit faint signs, they judged 
themselves ready to essay more serious attacks.

“The sixth scene will be along these lines,” said the director; “Albani, whose 
faculties appear to be about as aroused as mine, shall sodomize Elise, I am going 
to embugger Juliette; the four fuckers, prepared by Olympia and Raimonde, will 
doctor our asses; the small boys, lying atop us, will present to our kisses, some 
their pricks, some their buttocks.”

The groups form; but our champions, deceived by their desires, deliver too 
light an assault upon the tabernacle, falter at its gate, and limp away in defeat 
and chagrin.

“Bah, I expected as much,” Albani grumbled, “I shall never understand why 
you persist in wanting to have us embugger women! With a boy I’d have 
sustained no such affront.”

“Very well then, we shall change,” said the ambassador, “what is there to 
prevent us?”

But no happier is the issue of this fresh onslaught; our cardinals are fucked, to 
be sure, but fuck they cannot; friggings, suckings are to no avail, their antiquated
tools shrivel instead of deploying, and Bernis announces that, his colleague faring 
as poorly as he, they shall pursue the war in a different manner.

“Mesdames,” says that great man, “since kindly treatment gets us nowhere 
with you, harsher methods must be resorted to. Do you know the effects of 
fustigation? It might be that which is needed; we shall see.”

With these words he seizes me, while from a closet Albani brings forth an 
apparatus of such curious design as to deserve special description.

I was bound facing the wall and a short pace from it, my hands high above my 
head, my feet on the floor. Once pinioned, in front of me Bernis placed a kind of 
prayer-stool, but of steel, its upper rung a sword-blade, razor-sharp and its edge 
touching my belly. Needless to say, I drew back from that menacing glaive: that 
is, I thrust my flanks back toward Bernis; which was precisely what he wanted me
to do: never had I struck a prettier pose. Grasping a handful of withes, the lecher 
begins all of a sudden to thrash me with all his might, and so terrible are those 
blows that before ten of them have fallen the blood is streaming down my thighs. 
Albani advanced the infernal machine several inches nearer, gone was all 
possibility of swaying before the strokes to lessen their impact, and I must stand 
firm to the storm: however, I was able to weather it without undue difficulty, 
being, very fortunately, thoroughly inured to a ceremony which had often been 
my delight in the past. Those who followed me had not such a merry time of it. 
Elise, who replaced me in that cruel harness, gashed her belly and screamed the 
whole while her flagellation lasted. Raimonde suffered a great deal too. Olympia 
passed valiantly through the ordeal, she was fond of whipping; this vexation 
would only stimulate her. Bernis now turned his withes over to Albani, we all four 
had a second time to undergo the operation, and at last our rascals’ pricks came 
tottering up. Wary of women after that earlier skirmish, they chose small boys for 
their prey; while asodomizing they were flogged, and their attitudes were such 
that they were able to kiss the vulvas, assholes, and pricks artistically presented 
to their libertine attentions. And exacerbated Nature rescued their honor; they 
loosed almost simultaneous discharges. They are my buttocks Albani kisses 
during his crisis, and it is so violent, so furious is the blackguard’s joy, that upon 
my behind he leaves the imprint of the two solitary stumps still surviving in his 
foul mouth after half a dozen visitations of the pox. Raimonde’s ass, embraced by 
Bernis, came off little better; but ’twas with his fingernails and a penknife this 
roué had molested it, reducing it to tatters by the time his spasm supervened. A 
brief pause ensued, then the orgies were resumed.

In the opening scene of this second act we were each dispatched into the arms
of one fucker after another, who encunted us while the two debauchees peered at 
our asses and to encourage our performance barbarously pricked, pinched, and 
beat us in a thousand various ways. That done, the couples were rolled over, up 
came the four masculine asses; the four small boys sodomized them, and the 
cardinals ass-fucked those four small boys, but without discharging. From 
bum-stuffing the fuckers the little chaps moved aboard us women, the fuckers 
revenged themselves upon those catamites and next embuggered us while our 
cunts were licked by the small boys. After that, these idyllic little creatures were 
stood against the wall, attached, the steel chair was slid into position, and they 
were lashed to ribbons. At this point our two fauns were overtaken by the desire 
to spill some more seed. Like tigers sensing prey somewhere near, they stalk 
through our midst, casting savage glares to right and to left. They order the men 
to seize and to whip us, while they watch they sodomize one small boy apiece and
kiss the ass of another. Their fuck dribbles forth for the second time, and we 
remove to table.

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! thy judgments are full of atrocity, 
Thy only pleasure consists in injustice:
But I have done so much wrong, that thy divinity
must, out of pride at least,
stop me in the ice.
Damn Dihad! the greatness of my impiety
Leave in your power only the choice of torment,
And I taunt the fruits of your ferocity.
If your vain wrath waits for me to perish, 
Please, by crushing me, your monstrous desire, 
Without fear that weeping will flow from my eyes,
Thunder! I don't care; 
Give me back war for war:
I taunt, perishing, your person and your law.
In such a place of my heart that your thunder strikes,
He will find it full of horror for you.
These lines having been warmly applauded, 
Bernis delivered his Ode.
Fuck the Saints and the Virgin,
Fuck the Angels and God!
On them all I jerk my penis,
When I want to set it on fire...
It is you whom I invoke to my aid, 
You who, in the asses, with a stiff life,
Throw the fuck with big broths!
Du Chaufour, sustain my breath, 
And, for a moment, to my vein
Lend the ardor of your cowards.(10)
Let every band,
let everything go up in flames;
Run, whores and gitons:
To excite my lively ecstasy, 
Show me your fresh and round asses, 
Offer your rounded buttocks, 
Your firm and bouncy thighs, 
Your stiff and fleshy contraptions,
Your anus all filled with droppings;
But, above all, disguise the lumps:
I only like to fuck ass.
Fix yourselves, charming pictures,
Reproduce yourselves before my eyes;
Be the object of my tributes,
My legislators and my Gods!
Let a temple
be erected at Giton, 
Where day and night you are contemplated,
Adopting your sweet morals.
The will serve as offerings, 
The gringuenaudes of garlands,
The vits of priests.
Man, whale, dromedary, 
Everything, up to the infamous Jesus, 
In the heavens, under the water, on the earth,
Everything tells us that we fuck ass;
Reasonable or not, everything gets involved, 
In all places the ass calls us, 
The ass puts all the screws in rut, 
The ass, happiness is the way, 
In the ass lies all the joy, 
But, out of the ass,
no salvation.
Devotees, may hell hold you back:
For you alone are its laws;
But their weak and frivolous chain
has no weight on our minds.
On the banks of the peaceful Jordan, 
Of the son of God the horrible
voice Stain in vain to speak to the heart:
An ass appears,(11)
does it pass by?
No, I see my jeans bandaged.
And God is no more than an enculeur.
In the bosom of the Holy Church, 
On the very altar where God is made,
Every morning I sodomize
From a boy the plump ass.
My dear friends, let it be wrong
If of the Catholic pump
I can be suspected jealous.
Abbots, prelates, live offshore:
When I fuck and unload,
I have much more pleasure than you.
History swarms,
we meet them at any time.
Borgia, of his own daughter, 
Lime to pleasure the charming ass,
God the Father cuddles Mary;
The Holy Spirit fucks Zechariah:
They all screw upside down.
And it is on a throne of buttocks
that with his superb promises,
God mocks the universe.
Saint Xavier also, this great sage
Whose divine spirit is praised,
Saint Xavier vomits plague and rage
Against the female sex.
But the grave and charming apostle
compensated himself like any other.
Let's better interpret his lessons:
If, in anger, an idiot irritates him,
it is that the ass of a Jesuit
Worth in his eyes a hundred thousand cons. 
Near there, see Saint Anthony
In the ass of his dear swine, 
Dictating the rules of the monk,(12)
Introduce a fairly beautiful life.
To no danger he succumbs;
The lightning shines, the lightning falls,
His life is always straight and long.
And the rascal, in God the Father
would, I believe, put his rod high
coming from fucking his pig.
Yet Jesus in Olympus, sodomizing his dear father,
Wants St. Eustace to climb him, 
Fucking Agrippa's ass.(13) 
And the jean-fuck, to Madeleine, 
Meanwhile, gives the trouble
To tickle his broods.
Friends, let's play the same pranks:
Having no saints for bitch,
let's at least fuck gitons.
O Lucifer! thou whom I adore,
thou who makes my spirit shine;
If at your house we still fucked,
In your ass I would put my life.
But since, by a barbarous spell, 
One no longer bandages the Tenare,
I want to fly in an ass.
There, my greatest torment, no doubt, 
Will be to see that a demon fucks,
And that my ass is not screwed.
Accable me with misfortunes,
Damn God who abhors me;
It is only to common
souls To whom you can fuck:
For me I taunt your audacity.
That in an ass I,
I laugh at your vain effort;
I do the same with the laws of man:
The true follower of Sodom
does not care about the Gods and fate.

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 toilets 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 love 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 ... Those 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.

Nobody is more skilled than I at aiding pleasure to attain its crisis…. I sense 
my darling’s need of help: some pumping is required to make the honeyed sap 
flow. Few women, it should be said in passing, few women sufficiently well realize 
the need their cunt has to be sucked as their fuck builds to the discharging point; 
and nevertheless at such moments there is no diviner service one may render 
them. With what ardor I now fulfilled this task; kneeling between Honorine’s 
glorious thighs, I clutch her flanks and lift them to me, I drive my tongue into her 
cunt, I suck it, I pump it, and in the meantime my nuzzling promotes the erection
of her clitoris. What buttocks my hands knead! Never had Venus ones so lovely! I 
felt called upon to broaden this into a general conflagration; these crises, you 
know, cannot be too carefully tended, too lavishly ministered to. All restrictions 
must be barred; and if to the woman you frig Nature had given twenty avenues 
for receiving pleasure, you would have to attack them all with a view to increasing
the tumult in her a hundredfold.(14) So I go in quest of her pretty little anus in 
order that the titillations produced by a digit buried there may be added to those 
my mouth is causing her on the other side. So tiny, so strait, is this cunning little 
hole I have difficulty finding it, but there it is at last, one of my fingers pops into 
it…. Delicious episode! ah, never do you fail to have your effect upon a woman of 
sensibility. No sooner has this charming little vent been invaded than Honorine 
sighs … she smiles, is in raptures, this heavenly woman! She discharges, she is in 
the sweetest ecstasy imaginable, and ’tis to me her delirium is owing.

“Ah, my angel, my beloved angel, I adore you,” that dove says to me as she 
opens her eyes to the light, “you slew me with happiness. How ever can I repay 
you?”

“In kind, my dear, in kind,” I reply, snatching off my skirts. And taking hold of 
her hand, clapping it to my cunt: “Frig me, my love, frig me into a lather. Great 
heaven, what else is there to do but frig?”

However, like all well-bred women, Honorine was clumsy: she aroused desires 
in me and knew not how to cope with a single one of them. I was obliged to give 
her lessons.

Coming at length to the conclusion that she might do a better job with her 
tongue than her fingers, I have her get between my legs and she licks my cunt 
while I take my frigging personally in hand. Here Honorine performed creditably. 
Prodigiously excited by the delightful creature, I shot three discharges into her 
mouth…. Overcome now by a desire to see her entirely nude, I raise her up, rid 
her of all she is wearing…. Oh, God! this sudden splendor that met my gaze, ’twas
as though I were looking upon the star of daylight when in springtime it shines 
through a long winter’s mists. Ah, I may truly say that I had never seen so 
beautiful an ass, never. What radiant fairness! What gleaming exquisite skin, how 
soft! What breasts, what hips! And that waist; those incomparable buttocks! Ah, 
that ass. Sublime altar of love and of pleasure, not a day goes by, no, not a single
day passes but my imagination dwelling yearningly upon you, as it were 
stretching forth its arms toward you, offers you some fresh homage….

I could not resist the sight of that divine posterior. Manlike in my tastes as in 
my thinking, how bitterly I regretted that I was unable to burn some more real 
incense before my idol. I kissed it, opened it and gazed ecstatically therein, my 
tongue sounded it and while it thrilled in that celestial hole I refrigged lovely 
Honorine’s clitoris: thus did I wheedle a fresh discharge from her. But the more I 
aroused her, the greater was my distress at being powerless to arouse her farther
still.

“Oh, my dearest one,” said I, my heart heavy because of this regret, “be sure 
that when next we come together I shall have by me some instrument capable of 
dealing more telling blows than may a tongue: I would be your lover, your 
husband, I have told you so: I wish to have you as might a man.”

“Ah, do anything with me you want,” was the Duchess’ gentle reply to this, 
“multiply the proofs of your love, in return I shall give you back twice as many 
tokens of mine.”

Honorine wishes now to see me nude, her eyes rove over my body; but she is 
so newly come to pleasure that she ignores the art of giving it to me…. Ah, it 
mattered not to my flaming soul: she gazed upon me, she examined me: I was 
fucked by the rays of her glances, and extreme was my happiness. O lubricious 
women! if ever you are in the position I was in, you “will sympathize with me, you
will taste the despair wherein one is hurled by thwarted desires, and like me you 
will curse Nature for having inspired in you feelings which the buggeress cannot 
satisfy…. We fell to frolicking anew. Though not able to give each other all the 
relief we both needed, we nevertheless gave each other as much as we could, 
and upon separating promised to meet soon again.

Just two days after this scene Olympia called upon me; she had found out I 
had been to see the Duchess; she was jealous.

“Honorine is attractive, it cannot be denied,” said she, “neither will you deny 
that she is stupid; I defy her ever to give you as much pleasure as I. Moreover, 
Juliette, there is that husband of hers. He has a keen nose, you would be running 
a grave risk if he were to begin to scent this intrigue.”

“Dear friend,” said I to Princess Borghese, “allow me a fortnight, I ask no 
more: by then I shall have made my attitude toward Honorine quite clear to you. 
For the time being, I shall confess this, and be reassured by it: now and then I 
may divert myself with virtue but only crime has the place of privilege in my 
heart.”

“Then we shall speak no more of the matter,” said the Princess, embracing me 
warmly; “you have said enough to dispel my fears. I shall be there when you 
emerge from your illusion, and I doubt not but that it will be short-lived with 
Grillo.

“But let us change the subject,” she went on. “Were you not surprised the 
other day to see me play the whore as merrily as you?”

“No, truthfully, I was not,” said I. “Knowing the kind of mind you have, I could 
expect libertinage to be your one concern.”

“Ha, I have others as well, my dear. Those two cardinals rule the roost at the 
Vatican, and I have my reasons for humoring them; apart from that they pay me 
liberally, and I too am fond of money. Come now, Juliette, be honest with me, you
did rob Albani, didn’t you? Have no fear, I’ll not let your secret out nor reproach 
your deed, not I, for I too rather incline toward little knaveries of the sort, and 
who knows? I may have pilfered as much from those rascals as you: theft is 
delicious, my angel, it heats. It can even precipitate a discharge—this is usually 
the case with me. It is base to steal for your living, delightful to steal at the 
behest of passion.”

Such and so many were the things Olympia and I had done together that I 
considered I could depend upon her tact and discretion. It seems to me that one 
may safely confess a peccadillo to the person who acts as your collaborator in a 
major crime.

“That you come to know me better, this is one of my cherished aims,” I told 
Olympia; “your conjectures flatter me: yes, I committed that theft. More, I helped
send to her doom the innocent who was beheaded for my deed, and this 
compilation of little bits of mischief proved enough to cause me some voluptuous 
discharging.”

“Ah yes, by fuck, such words have a familiar ring to me. For it was hardly a 
year ago I did just about the same thing, and I am well acquainted with all the 
amenities which result from these breaches of good conduct.

“But my chief purpose in coming to see you is to announce that we shall 
shortly be supping with the Pope; Braschi would have us participate in his 
appalling excesses. Appalling, I repeat, for the Vicar of Christ is to an astounding 
degree depraved, impious, bloodthirsty; it must be seen to be believed. Near the 
place where these orgies will be celebrated is the treasury room of the State, I 
know how to unbar its door: there are millions there for the taking. And trust me, 
Juliette, taking them will not be difficult: His Holiness will not dare so much as 
object, not after the things we shall have been witness to. You will join me in this 
expedition?”

“Of course.”

“I may have confidence in you?”

“Can you doubt it when the question is one of a crime?”

“Grillo must never hear anything of this, Juliette.”

“Count somewhat more heavily upon my intelligence; and think not, dear 
Princess, that a passing fancy could cause me to compromise or neglect a 
passion: indulging a taste amuses me, but it is infamy I take seriously, it alone 
has access to my heart, it alone has the power to inflame me, only to it do I really
belong.”

“Ah, the properties of crime are unique,” Olympia affirmed, “nothing else has 
such an exciting effect upon me: compared to it love is so drab, so puny! Oh 
indeed, my friend,” she went on, “I have reached the point where if I am to be 
stirred even in the slightest, a crime must be of uncommon strength. Those which
vengeance led me to commit seem contemptible now that you have introduced 
me to those we perform for lewdness’ sake.”

“Quite so,” I agreed, “the most enjoyable crimes are the motiveless ones. The 
victim must be perfectly innocent: if we have sustained some harm from him it 
legitimates the harm we do him, and lost to our iniquity is the keen pleasure of 
exerting itself gratuitously. Evil must be done, bad one must be, this is the great 
and indispensable thing; and is it possible when your victim, no better than you, 
merits his fate? Ingratitude is to be recommended at all times and especially in 
this case,” I continued, “your ingratitude is a further affliction to the person you 
outrage: you force him to regret ever having given you pleasure, and this in itself 
can afford you an enormous one.”

“Yes, yes, I follow your meaning,” Olympia replied, “and I believe I have some 
rare joys of this kind awaiting me.

“My father lives, he is forever outdoing himself in kindness toward me, he 
heaps gifts upon me, adores me; twenty times over have I discharged at the 
thought of severing such a tie: I dislike indebtedness, it weighs disagreeably upon
my heart, stifles me—I long to be rid of this burden. Moreover, ’tis said parricide 
is a very black crime. You have no idea how it tempts me…. But listen to me now, 
Juliette, judge to what lengths my perfidious imagination goes. You must change 
your customary role. Were someone else to avow a similar desire, you would, I 
know, cheer him on, clear obstacles from his path; you would prove to him that 
when all has been considered, there is, strictly speaking, no wrong whatever in 
killing one’s father; and as you are exceedingly clever and eloquent, too, your 
arguments would soon convince him. I shall ask you to employ very different 
tactics here; we shall retire together into some quiet nook, you will frig me; while 
you do so you will have me appreciate the full horror of the crime in question; you
will represent the punishments that are meted out to parricides, you will harangue
me, exhort me, endeavor to scare me into abandoning my plan; the greater your 
efforts to deter, to convert me, the more fixed I shall become in the idea of the 
crime I am projecting, and unless I am mistaken, a voluptuous tension of 
prodigious violence ought to be engendered by this conflict—whence I shall 
emerge victorious.”

“To ensure the complete success of the scene you meditate,” I ventured to 
suggest, “third persons should figure in it; and it will be necessary not that I frig 
you throughout, but that I chastise you. There is nothing for it, I shall have to 
whip you.”

“Whip me? Why, of course, Juliette! You are right, infinitely right,” said 
Olympia; “your conceptions are more delicate than mine. But who shall these 
third persons be?”

“Raimonde and Elise; they will suck you, they will deliciously frig you during 
my discourse; and I shall beat you.”

“And after that we shall go straight to work?”

“Have you the instruments for it?”

“I do.”

“What kind?”

“Three or four sorts of poison; these are commodities of everyday use at 
Rome, as easily to be had as an ounce of salt or a piece of soap.”

“Those you have purchased are violent?”

“No, rather slow as a matter of fact. Mild but dependable.”

“That won’t do. If one is to enjoy the thing properly, the victim in such cases 
must suffer, his agonies must be hideous. While he is in their throes one frigs 
oneself, and how do you expect to discharge if his pain is not excruciating? Here,”
said I, taking from a drawer a small packet of one of Durand’s most potent 
confections, “have the author of your days swallow some of this: his miseries will 
last forty hours and they will be almost unbearable to see, his body will literally 
come to pieces before your eyes.”

“Oh, fuck! Quickly, Juliette, let us make haste, the mere sound of your words is
causing me to discharge.”

Elise and Raimonde enter; Olympia bends over them both, presenting me her 
superb buttocks, bare; I flog her with skill, caressingly at first, then fiercely, then 
savagely, and during this ritual address her in roughly these terms:

“For certain, the most dreadful crime in all the world is to take the life of the 
person who gave life to us,” I begin. “The object of his devotion and of his 
solicitude, do we not incur an immense debt to him, do we not owe him our 
eternal thanks? Can we have any more sacred duty than to protect and care for 
him? Criminal must be the very idea of harming a hair on his head, and that 
wretch who entertains it merits the very promptest and extremest punishment, 
and none can be too heavy nor too awful for a horror of this magnitude. Ages 
were to pass before our ancestors could even comprehend the thing, and ’twas 
only in fairly recent times they promulgated laws to repress the scoundrel who 
assassinates his father. The monster able to be this forgetful of all natural 
sentiments deserves to be put to yet uninvented tortures, and everything of the 
very crudest that can be imagined strikes me as retribution too mild for this 
atrocity. And no warning can be too solemn for him in whom barbarity, 
ingratitude, the repudiation of all duties, the renunciation of all principles are such
that he is capable even of dreaming of destroying that father whence he has 
received the blessing of existence. Ye furies of Tartarus, come howling out of your
dens, come hither your own selves and organize torments fitting to this revolting 
execration, and however unspeakable those you devise, they shall be less than 
what the offense demands.”

And while speaking I was plying the lash, I was tearing whole patches of skin 
off my whore who, her brain sotted by lust, crimes, and delights, was discharging 
and redischarging uninterruptedly under the deft hands polluting her.

“You make no mention of religion,” said she, “I should like to have you 
approach my crime from the theological side and thunder a little about the 
outrage to the divinity it is purported to constitute. I should like you to talk about 
God to me, to tell me how sorely I offend him; to delineate the inferno where 
demons will roast me after mortals have massacred my body.”

“Ha!” I then cried, “ha! abject sinner, have you any inkling of the enormity of 
the insult you are about to hurl at the Supreme Being in consummating this 
abomination? That mighty Lord, image of all virtues, that God who is our Father in
this world, must he not be dismayed and aghast at an offense which compromises
him so grievously? Oh, indeed, thoughtless one, be certain that the very worst of 
hell’s tortures are reserved for those who have damned themselves by this 
frightful crime you plot, and that apart from the remorse you shall be racked by in
this world, in the next you shall be rent by all the material woes wherewith a just 
God shall smite ye.”

“I would have more on this chapter,” said the libertine Princess; “gratify me 
now with an account both of the physical pains of the ordeal in store for me and 
of the shameful blot which must forever attach to the memory of me and remain 
ineffaceably upon my family.”

“Lost soul,” I thereupon exclaimed, “is it then as nought to you, this cloud of 
shame under which, as a consequence of your base crime, all your descendants 
will lie everlastingly? Behold your posterity which, for the brand marking its brow, 
dares not raise its head and cringes in the sight of all mankind; there in the 
depths of the grave into which your crimes are soon to send you, do you hear the 
later generations of your line curse the name of her who brought them into 
disgrace and ignominy? This so noble and distinguished name, do you see it 
sullied by your horrors? And the awful torments awaiting you, say, does your 
imagination visualize them? Do you feel the avenging iron suspend its tremendous
rebuke above you? And fall to detach this beautiful head from this impure body 
whose foul, odious lusts can bring you to the point of committing such a deed? It 
shall be horrible, this pain, which abates not till long after the head has been 
chopped off the shoulders; but even were that not so, consider that Nature, so 
profoundly outraged by you, would be no less than duty-bound to work the 
miracle that prolongs your sufferings beyond the very limits of eternity.”

Here the Princess was attacked by a new storm of pleasure, such was its wild 
violence that she fainted away…. She reminded me of the Florentine Countess 
Donis brewing the murder of her mother and daughter.

Ah, said I to myself, what extraordinary mentalities these Italian women have. 
Fortunate it was I came to this country; in no other could I have found monsters 
of my stripe.

“Ah, by God’s fuck, the pleasure I have had,” murmured Olympia, when she 
returned to her senses and rubbed brandy upon the wounds my lashing had left 
on her buttocks. “So then,” said she, smiling, “now that my calm is restored let us
glance a moment at the facts. Give me your sincere opinion, Juliette: is it really a 
crime to kill one’s father?”

“Why bless me, I think nothing of the sort.”

And in this connection citing in extenso what long ago Noirceuil had said to me 
at the time Saint-Fond was engaged in his patricidal projects, so completely did I 
set this charming woman’s mind at ease that if she had been anxious or in doubt 
heretofore, all her fears were banished now; and she decided action would be 
taken on the morrow. I aided her in preparing the several doses her father was to
absorb; and with a hundred times more daring than did ever Brinvilliers show, 
Olympia Borghese slew the man who had given her life, and joyously watched him
the whole long while he writhed in atrocious agony and finally disintegrated under
the effects of the fatal potion I had counseled her to employ.

The deed done, she returned.

“You frigged yourself, of course?”

“Of course, to utter shreds,” the rascal assured me, “I ended up bloody-cunted
at his bedside? Never were the Parcae deeper drenched in fuck and it yet seeps 
out of me even as I recall the dog’s pratings and his contortions. Oh, Juliette, let 
not the fire die out of me, I have come running to you, make the embers blaze up
again. Make me discharge, precious Juliette, incomparable Juliette. It is with fuck 
one must wash remorse for crime away—”

“Remorse! Bugger-fuck me, is it possible to feel remorse over what you have 
done?”

“No, surely not—but, don’t you see, I…. Ah, no matter, just frig me, Juliette, 
just frig me; I must exhaust myself, I must discharge….”

Never before had I seen her in such a lively state. Ah, my friends, ’tis so, and 
well ye know it, crime embellishes a woman as does nothing else. Olympia was 
pretty, no more than that. But the moment she had committed this crime she 
took on an angelic loveliness. How intense, I then realized, is the pleasure one 
receives from someone cleansed of all prejudices and soiled by every crime. 
When Grillo frigged me I had experienced an everyday sensation; but when I was 
in Olympia’s hands, my brain too would be irritated, I would be quite beside 
myself.

That same day, having just accomplished the worst of all crimes and her 
senses all aglow, the rascal invited me to go along with her to a house hard by 
the Corso where, if I cared to, I might join in an altogether unusual party. We 
arrive; an elderly woman greets us.

“Will you be having many guests this evening?” Olympia inquired of her.

“A great many, Princess,” the matron answered; “they come in droves on 
Sunday.”

“Then let us establish ourselves,” said Olympia.

We were shown to an attractive little room. Here were several low couches so 
placed that from them we had a clear view of the adjoining room and of the three
or four whores in it.

“What might this be?” I wondered, “and what curious pleasure are you 
preparing for me?”

“Keep a close eye on the scene nearby,” said Olympia. “In the space of the 
seven or eight hours we shall be here, whole legions of monks, of priests, of 
abbots, of youths are going to put themselves in the hands of those girls. The 
number of patients will be all the larger since it is I who pay the expenses, their 
amusement costs these gentlemen nothing. As soon as a whore has a prick in her
hand she will display it to us; if it does not suit us, they will be apprised of the 
fact by our silence; whereas if it pleases us, they will hear this little bell ring: the 
possessor of the desired prick will move directly into this room and will regale us 
to the limit of his abilities.”

“Delightful,” said I, “this arrangement is completely new to me, and I propose 
to make the most of it. Independently of the pleasure I may anticipate with the 
fellows who appeal to me, there will be the other, the piquant one, of observing 
how the rest disport with those sluts.”

“Exactly,” said Madame Borghese; “and while we ourselves discharge we shall 
be seeing them fuck.”

Olympia had only finished pronouncing these words when a tall seminarian 
appeared. He was a pretty young man of twenty or so, strongly made and virile; 
into the hands of one of the whores he deposits a member seven inches round 
behind the knob and twelve inches long over-all. So gorgeous a prize could not 
but interest us, and when ’twas offered we rang the bell loudly.

“Go into the next room,” says the whore upon hearing the signal, “this 
machine of yours will be more appreciated there than here.”

The great clod arrives pike aloft. Olympia catches it and crams it into my cunt.

“Fuck away, my dear, don’t wait for me,” says she, “I’ll be served before long.”

I fall to. My rascal has scarcely discharged when another divinity student, rung 
for by Olympia, walks in and stuffs her as copiously as I have just been.

He and his confrere are followed by two sbirri,(15) these by two Augustinian 
friars; a pair of Observant friars, doleful, morose creatures, come next, and are 
replaced by two very randan Capuchins; after them it was a stream of coachmen, 
scullions, sweeps, hairdressers, bumbailiffs, butchers, and lackeys. So vast was 
this crowd, and among it so many awesome members, that I was at last obliged 
to beg quarter. ’Twas, I think, after the one hundred ninetieth that I besought my 
companion to bring a halt to this deluge of fuck which had been pouring into me 
before and, as I trust you have already surmised, behind.

“God’s aching asshole,” I groaned, picking myself wearily up, “tell me, 
Princess, do you play often at this game?”

“Seven or eight times a month,” Olympia confessed; “I’m used to it, I never 
tire of it anymore.”

“I congratulate you; as for me, I am a dry wreck. I discharge too much and too
quickly, it’s my undoing.”

“Come, we shall bathe and sup together,” said Olympia, “and tomorrow you 
shall be as good as new.”

The Princess took me home with’ her, and after two hours in the bath we sat 
down at table, in no state to undertake anything beyond a sweet and lubricious 
conversation.

“Did you have any in the ass?” the Princess asked.

“Certainly,” I answered; “how on earth would you have had me withstand so 
many assaults in only one sector?”

“La,” said Olympia. “Cunt-fuck was all I had time to do. For I did not foresee 
you would wish to stop so soon; twenty-four hours is my usual stint at that 
house, and I do not swing round my ass to the fuckers until they have made a 
hash of my cunt. A hash, yes. Transformed it into an open wound.”

“Dear Olympia! Among libertine women I have never encountered your 
superior. Ah, none so well as we apprehend that ’tis by way of the various and 
ascending stages of secret excesses everything else is to be attained. I am a 
slave of those voluptuous episodes, each day I discover I have found some new 
habit as a result of them, charming habits which turn into so many little rituals, 
little homages one offers to one’s physical nature and which are wonderfully 
pleasing to one’s spiritual self.

“These divine flights of overindulgence, amongst which one must not neglect to
include immoderate eating and drinking, of prime necessity in that they inflame 
the nervous humours and consequently determine the voluptuous mood; these 
self-pamperings, I say, have a gradual degenerating effect and tend before long 
to render excesses indispensable. Now, it is in excess pleasure exists. What 
therefore are we better advised to do than maintain ourselves constantly in the 
state pleasure demands? But there are,” I continued, “scores and scores of little 
habits, dirty and furtive ones, loathsome and ugly ones, crapulous and brutal 
ones, which, perhaps, my gentle dove, you are still to make acquaintance of. I 
shall whisper them in your ear: they will prove to you that the celebrated La 
Mettrie was right when he said(16) that we humans must wallow in filth like swine
and ought like them to seek pleasure in the ultimate degrees of corruption. As 
regards all this I have had some very singular experiences, and I shall tell you 
about them. I wager it has never occurred to you, for example, that by numbing 
two or three of the faculties of sensation one may extract astonishing things from 
the others; whenever you like I shall demonstrate this remarkable truth. In the 
meantime accept my word for it, that generally speaking ’tis when we have 
achieved depravation, insensibility, that Nature begins to yield us the key to her 
secret workings, and that it cannot be pried away from her save through 
outrages.”

“Long have I been firmly persuaded of these maxims,” Olympia replied, “but, 
woe is me, I am now at a loss to know what outrages to inflict upon the sublime 
jade. I run this Court at my will. Pius VI was once my lover, our relations are still 
amicable and frequent. Through his protection and the influence it procures me I 
have acquired a total impunity, and I have ridden it too long and too far, 
everything has lost its savor for me, my dear, I am surfeited. Upon this parricide I
have just accomplished I founded exaggerated hopes; projecting it aroused my 
senses a thousand times more than carrying it out satisfied them: nothing 
measures up to the stature of my desires. But too much have I reasoned on my 
fancies, better would it have been by far had I never analyzed them at all; left 
inside their dark envelope of crime, their strangeness would doubtless affright 
me, but they would at least titillate me; whereas the light my philosophy sheds 
upon them renders them so comprehensible, so simple, that they have ceased 
altogether to have any effect upon me.”

“It is the downtrodden, the unlucky, the helpless,” said I, “one should 
whenever possible make the targets of one’s wickedness; the tears you wring 
from indigence have a pungency which very potently stimulates the nervous 
humours, etc.”

“Why, ’tis a happy coincidence,” said the Princess, suddenly brightening, “for 
the splendid little scheme I have lately had in mind is perfectly in the spirit of 
your suggestion: my intention is, on the same day, at the same hour, to send all 
the hospitals in Rome, all the city’s poorhouses, all the orphans’ homes, all the 
public schools up in smoke; and not only is this excellent plan agreeable to my 
lewd mischievousness, it will also profit my greed.

From an entirely trustworthy individual I have the offer of one hundred 
thousand crowns to be mine once the catastrophe has taken place: it will prepare 
the ground for a project of his own and from which he will gain a fortune in gold, 
and glory besides.”

“I marvel that you hesitate.”

“Oh, the vestiges of a prejudice…. This horror, do you realize, will cost the lives
of a good three hundred thousand human beings.”

“I dare say; but does it matter? You will discharge, Olympia, you will rescue 
your senses from the torpor where they are presently becalmed; yours shall be 
the delicious moments you are about to taste, as for the rest, eh, it is of no 
concern to you; is hesitation philosophically warranted? Why, my sweet, I had no 
idea matters stood so ill with you. When shall you wake up? When are you going 
to understand that all this world abounds in is nought but game meant for our 
pleasures; that every last one of these creatures you see waiting about is 
Nature’s gift to us, that ’tis only through dallying destructively with them, with the
greatest possible number of them, that we fulfill Nature’s expectations of us? 
Come, an end to this sulking in your tent, up, Olympia, great deeds call to you. 
Since you are in the midst of unburdening yourself, this is perhaps the proper 
moment to tell me whether you have not perpetrated some other crime than 
those you have avowed to me already: if I am to advise you well I must know you
thoroughly, so speak freely if there are any pertinent facts whereof I ought to 
have intelligence.”

“Very well then,” said Princess Borghese, “I am guilty of a child-murder; I feel 
the need to recount it to you. When twelve years of age I gave birth to a daughter
more beautiful than anything you can imagine. It was when she had grown to be 
ten that I became wild about her. My authority over her, her candor, her 
guilelessness, her innocence, all this furnished me the means to satisfy myself. 
We frigged each other. Two years of that and she began to pall on me. My 
penchants, reinforced by satiety, soon spelled out her fate; only the thought of 
her destruction moistened my cunt now. I had just buried my husband; of near 
relatives there were none left, nobody who could call me to account for my child. 
I publish the rumor she has been carried off by sickness and clap her into the 
tower of a castle I have by the seaside, and which more resembles a fortress than
an abode for decent and well-intentioned folk; I left her to languish six months in 
this reclusion, behind those stone walls and iron bars. Stripping people of their 
liberty amuses me, I like holding captives; I know that while they are incarcerated
my victims suffer: this perfidious idea excites me, I should love to be able to 
maintain entire nations in this cruel situation.(17)

“I arrive at my castle—with you may imagine what fell designs. In my 
entourage were two paid queans and a young maiden, my child’s playmate, her 
dearest friend. After a delicious dinner, thorough and artful masturbations brought
my rage to a pitch and readied me for my crime. Finally, I climb the stairs to the 
tower, alone, and spend a preliminary two hours in that raving, in that peculiar 
delirium, that divine incoherence whereinto lust plunges us drunkenly and which it
is so pleasant to hazard with a person who is never again to see the light of day. I
doubt, my love, whether I could well render to you the things I said, the things I 
did…. I behaved like one gone stark mad: this was my first open sacrifice of a 
victim. Hitherto I had acted covertly, employed stealth, and my opportunities to 
enjoy the effects of my crime had been meager; this however was outright 
assassination, a premeditated murder, a horror, an execrable infanticide—a prank 
after our own taste, save only that into it there was not incorporated that lewd 
ingredient you have since taught me to blend into such deeds. Here blind hatred 
had a greater share than lucid calculation, fury a greater share than 
voluptuousness. Incredibly animated, I was perhaps about to leap tiger-like upon 
my victim when a fiendish idea entered my crazed brain and made me pause…. 
This friend of my daughter’s … this creature she adored and whom I had used as I
had used her, I struck upon the idea of killing her first. Thus, I said to myself, thus
shall I have the further pleasure of enjoying my daughter’s reaction to the sight of
her dead companion. I rush out to arrange the confrontation.

“Then, returning to fetch my daughter, ‘Come,’ said I, ‘I am going to show you 
your very best friend.’

“‘Oh, Mother, where are you leading me? These dark tunnels…. And what is 
Marcelle doing in this dreadful place?’

“‘You shall see, Agnes.’

“I open a door. This new dungeon into which I drag my child is draped in black.
Marcelle’s head was hanging from the ceiling; propped upright, sitting in a 
negligent attitude upon a bench, her naked body was just beneath the head, six 
inches of emptiness separated the one from the other; one of her arms, lopped 
off at the shoulder, was wrapped like a girdle around her waist, and three daggers
were driven into her heart. Agnes stared at the spectacle, and shuddered. Her 
distress was extreme, but she did not give way before it; the color drained from 
her face, a gray wave of grief replaced it. Yet another moment did she gaze upon 
this horror; then, slowly turning her lovely eyes toward me, she asked: ‘Is it you 
who have done this?’

“‘I, all by myself.’

“‘What wrong did the poor girl ever do you?’

“‘None, to my knowledge. Thinkst thou one must have pretexts to commit a 
crime? Shall I need any when a little while from now I butcher thee?’

“Upon hearing those words Agnes fell into a swoon, and absorbed in thought 
there did I tarry between my two victims, one smitten already by the scythe of 
death, the other shortly to feel its edge.

“Oh, my friend,” continued the Princess, much moved by the story she was 
telling, “how puissant are these pleasures! They assail the frame as a tempest 
and huge waves try a ship at sea, and by those blows one is nigh to 
overwhelmed. These pleasures, ah … how fascinating are their details, how they 
intoxicate. But it cannot be described; it must be experienced. There, all alone 
with two victims, to do everything you fancy, anything; to act, to riot, to rant at 
your ease, without interference from anybody, without anybody hearing you; to 
know that twenty feet of earth ensure the security of your imagination’s 
disorders; to say to yourself, here is an object Nature surrenders into my hands 
to do with absolutely whatever I please, I can smash it, I can burn it, I can maim 
it, I can dismantle it, I can torment it, I can fondle and annihilate it as I like, it is 
mine, nothing can deprive me of it, nothing save it from its fate—ah, Juliette, 
what happiness, what joy. And in such conditions what do we not attempt….

“And then I left off my brooding and sprang upon Agnes. She was nude, 
unconscious, utterly defenseless…. So mighty was my trouble that my frantic 
wrath encompassed, it defined, all that was alive in me. Oh, Juliette, I satisfied 
myself; and after three hours of the most various tortures, the most hideous and 
merciless, I restored to the elements an inert mass which had received life in my 
womb only in order to become the toy of my rage and my viciousness.”

“And then you discharged,” I ventured.

“No,” Olympia replied. “No, in those days, I say, I had still to establish the 
connection between lewdness and crime; a veil obscured my vision, you were the 
one who snatched it away…. Before we met I used to act mechanically; but if 
today I were to institute such a scene, how much more intelligently I would 
proceed…. But alas, that delicious crime cannot be repeated. I have no daughter 
left.”

The villainy behind that regret, the debauches which had occupied us earlier in 
the day, the conversation we had just now had, the excesses we had indulged in 
at table, everything drove us headlong into each other’s embrace. But too 
overwrought, too libertine to suffice unto ourselves, we must have auxiliaries, and
Olympia summoned her women. Several more ecstatic hours were devoted to 
pleasure. Upon that god’s altars we immolated a young victim, she was as fair as 
the day. I requested Princess Borghese to treat her just as she had done her 
daughter; whence there resulted unspeakable horrors, and when we parted ’twas 
for the purpose of concerting others.

But prodigious as Madame Borghese’s libertinage might be, still it was not 
enough to make me forget the pure pleasures I was yet bent on tasting with 
sweet Honorine. Several days after our first adventure together I went to see her 
again. The Duchess greeted me more cordially than ever, we embraced 
delightedly and our conversation soon came around to the joys we had recently 
given each other: evoking them shortly moved us to engage anew in the activities
whence they had derived, as will regularly happen when a pair of women hold 
such parley. The weather that day was sultry; we two were alone in a lovely 
boudoir, stretched indolently side by side upon a broad divan; what earthly excuse
could we have had for delaying the sacrifice to a god whose altars were ready 
dressed and beckoning impatiently? Coy Honorine’s defenses were swiftly overrun
and a moment later, in quivering surrender, she offered me all her desire-swollen 
charms. How beautiful the creature was to behold … a thousand times daintier 
than Olympia, fresher, more youthful than she, artless, embellished by modesty’s 
graces, why was it she pleased me not so much withal? Indescribable allurements
of obscenity, lewdness’ fascination, divine amenities of debauchery, has Nature 
then invested in you some unique power to please abstractly? To sense your 
incredible sway, O crime, is to recognize your sovereign grandeur and to bow in 
acknowledgment before your absolute rights….

This time I had brought paraphernalia for aping the sex in whose qualities we 
were both naturally lacking. We girded on dildoes and fell to dallying now as lover 
and mistress, now as master and mate, now in the style of bardash and tribade, 
we coupled in every imaginable manner. But ever the novice, willing to follow but 
incapable of taking the lead, Honorine displayed modesty and timidity where 
debauchery and lusty zeal were to be desired; and when all was told, from her I 
obtained not a sixth of the pleasure Borghese would have given me in like 
circumstances. Had she been completely untried, the idea of corrupting her might
have become the food to imagination libertinage ordinarily nourishes; but such 
was not the case, for Honorine, though yet a prude and pathetically inept, had 
nonetheless lived a little in this world, and ’twas during one of those moments of 
mutual abandon when avowals add a further dimension to pleasure that the 
heavenly Duchess related the anecdote you are now to hear.

“Soon after my marriage to the Duke—I was sixteen years old at the time,” 
said she, “I contracted a close friendship with the Marquise Salvati, a woman 
twice my age, dreadfully dissolute, and who had always contrived to mask her 
scandalous conduct behind eminently virtuous appearances. Libertine, godless, 
eccentric in her tastes, pretty as an angel, Salvati enjoyed doing everything 
whence enjoyment can possibly be reaped; among her fondest practices was the 
seduction of newly-wed young women whom she would enlist to be her partners 
in her furtive revels. So it was the rascal took an interest in me. Her air of 
reserve, her hypocritical and cunning speech, her connections, a prior 
acquaintance with my mother, it was by these means she established relations 
with me, they very soon turned into a liaison of an intimate kind, for we were at 
the stage of reciprocal friggeries inside a week. The scene transpired in 
villeggiatura, at the country residence of Cardinal Orsini near Tivoli, where we 
met. Our husbands were with us. Mine was no great hindrance to me: elderly 
and, to judge from my experience with him up until then, cold, seeming to have 
married me for my wealth alone, I had little care for Grillo in the pursuit of my 
pleasures. The Marquise’s husband however, although very libertine, did not leave
her to spoil in such complete idleness; his demands upon her were both fatiguing 
and unusual, their fulfillment required that she lie the whole of every night in his 
bedchamber, which did not facilitate our secret little doings. We made up for our 
nighttime estrangement during the day, when we would wander off together in 
the splendid woodlands of Orsini’s vast estate, and those promenades were the 
occasions upon which the Marquise toiled over my mind and soul, interspersing 
her lessons with the sweetest pleasures of feminine debauchery.

“‘For passing life agreeably it is not a lover we need,’ she would urge, ‘from out
of our embraces he goes forth indiscreet or perfidious. The habit we fall into of 
being loved causes us to take on a new lover, and for a dozen unpleasant nights 
we find ourselves condemned before the public for a lifetime. Not that a spotless 
reputation is anything of great value,’ the Marquise hastened to add, ‘but when 
one can preserve it and double one’s pleasures besides, you will agree, I should 
fancy, that the means leading to such results can only be the best.’

“‘Why yes, indeed.’

“‘Then those are the means we shall adopt, my angel; three days from now we
return to town and once we are back I shall reveal to you the secret formula for 
happiness.’

“‘The situation is this,’ said Salvati the day after we had regained Rome. ‘We 
are four. You will, if you wish, make the fifth. At our orders we have a reliable and
resourceful woman of sixty years, the proprietress of a secluded house and very 
suitably appointed. We notify her, she straightway assembles in her house 
everything our lust can need, whether in male form or female, and of all this we 
make whatever use we wish and in completest security; what do you think of this 
arrangement?’

“It cannot be denied, Juliette,” Madame Grillo continued, “youthful and 
neglected by my husband, I was only too ready to listen to that temptress’ offers.
I assured her I would be with her on the very next excursion to that house, but 
insisted that she promise me I would encounter no men there.

“‘As you know, my husband has virtually no dealings with me at all,’ said I, 
‘which is a further reason he would be quick to remark damages I were to do his 
honor.’

“All I asked, the Marquise promised, and we set forth. Seeing myself being 
conveyed across the Tiber and into the farthermost districts of the city, I felt a 
certain alarm; but contained it; we arrived. Before us stood a large and 
well-appearing house, but solitary, wrapped in silence and shadow, quite as was 
required by the mysteries we were about to celebrate.

“We were to traverse several suites of rooms before seeing a soul; and then, in
a large antechamber, we were met by the mistress of the place. And now I was 
surprised by a sudden altering in the Marquise’s tone: that decency, that show of 
sweetness and virtue gave way to language at which the lowest prostitute would 
have blushed.

“‘What’s in the larder?’ she asked.

“‘Awaiting the young lady you have brought I have four charming creatures,’ 
the old woman told us, ‘for your instructions were that I prepare her women only.’

“‘And for me what have you got ready?’

“‘Two fine Swiss Guards, strapping lads capable of giving it to you hard straight
through till tomorrow.’

“‘This whore,’ said the Marquise, and it was to me she was referring, ‘would do 
better to join me in a meal of good beef instead of going off to fill up on 
gruel—but she’s free to feed as she chooses. Say now.’ Salvati went on, ‘our 
sisters, are they here yet?’

“‘Only one has appeared so far,’ replied the directress of the house. ‘Elmire.’

“These ladies, it was explained to me, adopted false names for the sake of 
additional secrecy, and thereupon it was decided mine would be Rose.

“‘What is Elmire about?’

“‘She is with the four girls I have assigned to milady.’

“At this I cast an embarrassed glance at the Marquise.

“‘Poor silly,’ she chided me, ‘this is no place for shyness, we are a community 
and when we indulge in similar activities we act in concert, each within view of 
the other. Those who frolic with women group together, those who use men 
congregate likewise.’

“‘But I have no idea who this person might be,’ I protested.

“‘Never fear, you’ll get to know her from frigging yourself in her company, 
there’s no better way to strike up acquaintance. Well now, which shall it be? Here 
in this room to the left are men, over there to the right, women; hurry up, make 
your choice and I’ll make the introductions.’

“I was much troubled; I was violently eager for some men. But did I dare 
expose myself to all the risks that could result from my rashness? On the other 
hand, a new acquaintance spelled possible danger—who might this unknown 
woman prove to be? Would she be discreet? Would not her presence fairly 
paralyze me? Such were my doubts and perplexity that I stood a while not 
knowing which way to turn.

“‘Make up your mind, little buggeress,’ said Salvati, catching me roughly by the
arm, ‘I have better things to do here than waste precious time.’

“‘Very well,’ said I, heaving a sigh, ‘I’ll go in with the women.’

“The directress rapped on the door.

“‘One moment,’ replied a muffled voice from within.

“A few minutes later the door was opened by a young girl and we entered.

“The Marquise’s companion, she whom we designated as Elmire, was yet a 
beautiful woman at forty-five and after anxiously scanning her face I decided we 
were perfect strangers. But great heaven, in what disorder I found her! Setting 
out to paint the effigy of license and impurity one would have had but to copy 
what was already drawn in this wild creature’s visage. She was sprawled stark 
naked upon an ottoman, her thighs flung apart; two girls lay about her, upon 
cushions, and in the same indecent attitude. Her face was flushed, her glittering 
eyes stared fixedly, her long tresses floated loose ove

r her degraded breast, spittle dribbled from her mouth. The two or three words
she mumbled suggested she might be drunk; and from the untidiness in the 
room, the litter of glasses and bottles, I concluded that such indeed she must be.

“‘Fuck,’ she grunted as she twitched beneath her own caresses, ‘I was on the 
verge of a squirt when you knocked, that’s why I made you wait; who’s this little 
whore?’

“‘A sister,’ Salvati replied, ‘a tribade of your own stripe here for some friggery.’

“‘She can make herself at home,’ said the seasoned Sappho, ‘fingers, mouths, 
dildoes, cunts, they are all here to be used. But first let me give her a wee kiss, 
come, there’s a pretty little darling.’

“And on the instant, I am being kissed, tongued, probed, it all happens in a 
trice.

“‘I leave her to you,’ the Marquise told her friend, ‘they’re waiting for me on 
the other side of the hall. Take good care of Rose, she has lots of things to learn.’ 
And the next instant she was gone.

“The door is no sooner shut behind her than the four girls spring upon me and 
in the twinkle of an eye have me as naked as themselves. I shall not describe 
what those women did to me, it would be too afflicting to my modesty; I need 
merely say that libertinage and impudence were carried to the extreme. The 
middle-aged lady amused herself with me, amused herself in front of me; when 
my turn came I did with her and with each of the four girls every last thing that 
entered my head: Elmire took pleasure surprising me, teasing me, goading me 
on, shocking me, employing the most inconceivable and lewdest artifices. One 
might truthfully say that her greatest charm consisted in presenting lust to me 
under its filthiest shapes and most peculiar colors in order to contaminate my 
mind and corrupt my heart. Day came at long last, the Marquise reappeared, we 
dressed and promptly returned each to her house in the fervent hope that nothing
would dissuade our husbands from continuing in the belief that their wives had 
spent the evening at a ball; and their Lordships never doubted but that this was 
the truth. Cheered by this first success, I allowed myself to be led a second time 
to that dreadful establishment; seduced by the pernicious Marquise, I very shortly
turned from women to men and my misbehavior was without equal or precedent. 
Remorse finally fastened upon my soul; virtue cried out to me and I returned 
gratefully into its fold; I vowed to live as befits an honest woman and as such 
would I still be living were it not for you, whose graces and talents and 
adorableness and beauty must cause all the frail oaths that shall ever be foolishly 
sworn to goodness to shatter into pieces upon the altars of Love.”

“Charming woman,” said I to the Duchess, “a virtuous vow, why, pronounced 
by you ’tis an extravagance for which Nature is bound to chasten you; ’tis not for 
honest living she created us, my dear, but for fucking; we outrage her by defying 
her purposes and when we refuse to fuck we are in open rebellion against her 
will. If that delicious house still exists I beseech you to return to it; never am I 
envious of my friends’ pleasures, I ask no more than permission to share or 
behold them.”

“No, the woman who ran that house sold it a year or so ago and has left 
Rome,” Honorine said, “but there are other means for obtaining pleasure.”

“And why not exploit them?”

“I feel less and less free, my husband is taking a constantly growing interest in
me, he is becoming jealous; I am even afraid he has begun to suspect there is 
something between you and me.”

“Such a man must be got rid of.”

“Got rid of!”

“Bah, put out of the way.”

“Why, you make me shudder!”

“You have no cause to shudder. Men are put out of the way and got properly 
rid of every day. The foremost of Nature’s laws is to disencumber ourselves of 
whatever displeases us; husband-murder is an imagined crime I myself have 
perpetrated without the slightest hesitation or regret; we must think of ourselves 
in this world, nobody else counts. Fundamentally and absolutely isolated from all 
other beings, just as we should approach only those which please us, so should 
we be equally careful to send on their way those which are distasteful to us. 
Between the existence of a person I find troublesome and my own interests there 
can be no common measure. What! I’d be such an enemy of my own well-being 
as to prolong the life of him who causes me suffering? I’d so violently contradict 
the commands of Nature as not to put an end to the life of him who deliberately 
ruins all the felicity of mine? Moral and political murders shall be tolerated, nay, 
justified, and personal murders disconsidered! It is not only unfair, it is 
preposterous. Honorine, such prejudices are grotesquely unbecoming, you should 
be above them. He who intends to be happy on earth must without any scruple 
fling aside everything, absolutely everything that stands in his path, he must 
embrace everything that serves or flatters his passions…. You lack the means? I 
can provide them.”

“What horrors do you speak!” cried the Duchess. “I do not love Signor Grillo, I 
shall not pretend the contrary; but I respect him; he is my youth’s protector; his 
jealousy is my safeguard, for otherwise, if unrestrained, I would rush headlong 
into the pitfalls toward which it is certain that libertinage would lead me—”

“Child, you talk nonsense!” I interrupted, “all sophistry and weakness. Are you 
trying to tell me that because somebody prevents you from seizing the joys of life
Nature holds out to you, you ought, instead of putting a halt to his interference, 
to double the weight of the shackles he loads upon you? Ah, Honorine, stand 
fearlessly up, break those humiliating chains. The handiwork of fashion and 
egotistical policy, what is there sacred about them, tell me? Scorn them, jeer at 
them, curse them, spit upon them if you like, they merit no better. In this world, a
pretty woman should have no god other than pleasure; no physical obligation 
other than to receive our homage in return for the delight she gives us; no virtue 
other than that of fucking; no moral duty other than to observe the imperious law
of her desires. First of all, you must get yourself a child, never mind who sires it 
on you, you need issue if you are to secure control over your husband’s fortune. 
That once accomplished, we feed the funny fellow a well-spiced cup of consommé 
and afterward the two of us, you and I, go for a gay wallow in the slime pit of the 
most atrocious, the most abominable pleasure—pleasure of the most atrocious, 
the most abominable sort because that is the most delectable sort which has been
made for your enjoyment and which you have been made to enjoy, atrocious and 
abominable pleasure whereof you cannot deprive yourself without someday being 
called to answer for it before the judgment seat of Reason and of Nature.”

That prudish spirit proved stubbornly unresponsive to my teachings; this was 
perhaps the only woman I had ever failed to corrupt. The moment came when I 
lost patience and abandoned my efforts; that was the moment I took the resolve 
to destroy her.

The question now was simply of disposing my guns to best advantage; I went 
to consult Borghese.

“I thought you were in love with the Duchess,” Olympia teased.

“What an idea, I in love! My heart has always been a stranger to puerile 
sentiments: I have amused myself with that woman, done everything humanly 
possible to guide her into crime, she refuses to be led, it’s a wretched fool I 
intend at present to send to her doom.”

“I perfectly understand. It should not be difficult.”

“No, it should not be, except that I want her husband to perish with her; I had 
projected his death, I wanted to put the dagger into his wife’s hand and have her 
wield it against him—must the idiot’s refusal cost me a victim?”

“Rascal!”

“Both of them have to be killed.”

“The idea pleases me,” said Borghese, “the act would amuse me as much as 
you; bring them to my country house and we shall see what we can do.”

Arrangements are made for the party, Borghese and I harmonize our plans. I 
shall not bother you with the details but move directly to the outcome.

Along with us we had taken a young man of the Princess’ acquaintance. Quite 
as seductive as he was comely, no less clever than witty, our Dolni, twenty years 
old, used to fuck us fairly frequently, and knowledge of his mind and parts had 
induced us to select him for the piece of wickedness we were meditating. From 
the very first moment, Dolni set to work and with great art aroused the passions 
of Honorine and the jealous suspicions of her husband. The deeply disturbed Grillo
turned to me in quest of a friendly ear and poured out all his fears; these, as you 
may imagine, I did rather more to increase than allay.

“My good Duke,” said I to that fool, “I am greatly surprised that you have been
so slow to notice your wife’s behavior. I or indeed any other could have 
enlightened you long ago, but one is sometimes reluctant to become the bearer of
evil tidings; you seemed so well protected by your blindness, it is so cruel to blast
such illusions; I held my peace. Dolni’s purpose for being here is the Duchess’ 
presence, as everybody is well aware; why, I had hardly been overnight in Rome 
when I heard of their affair.”

“Then it is an affair?”

“To put it mildly, my Lord. But I see that you still entertain doubts, and they 
can be more painful than the naked truth itself. It is in the morning or while you 
are out taking a walk that Dolni ordinarily dishonors your bed: catch the two 
culprits in the act tomorrow, and for your honor’s sake be not laggardly in 
revenging yourself for so brazen an affront.”

“You will aid me, Madame?”

“In so far as I am able to. A word of advice: beware of speaking of this to the 
Princess: intimately connected with your wife, privy to her passion—it is 
notorious—I believe she connives at what is going on under her roof.”

“Not a word to her then. Tomorrow morning I shall be hidden in the dressing 
room adjoining the bedchamber.”

Lest we be overseen in conversation together we separate at once, I having 
recommended to the Duke that he avoid me the whole of that day. I seek out the 
Duchess and, encouraging her to banish all scruples in order to enjoy to the full 
the pleasures at whose mere thought the young man has already made her giddy,
I notify her that the Duke means to go ahunting the next day, which will enable 
her to pass the entire morning in riot with Dolni.

“Get started early, the two of you, and when you are well under way I’ll arrive 
and we shall carry on as a trio.”

My proposal fetched gay laughter from the Duchess, and she assented to it 
gladly. The moment drew nigh; thinking the two lovers properly at grips, I bade 
the Duke follow me on to the stage.

“So then, good sir,” said I, directing his attention to the frantically copulating 
couple, “is this less than you require to be convinced?”

Furious Grillo, drawn dagger in hand, hurls himself upon the adulterous pair. 
Aiding his arm, I see to it the blow falls upon his faithless spouse: the blade sinks 
deep into her flank, the Duke would now vent his rage upon the lover, but nimble 
Dolni rolls away, springs to his feet, scampers from the room, Grillo hot in his 
pursuit. They race down a long corridor … at its farther end two trap doors open, 
one dropping the young man into an underground passage, where he is safe, the 
other tumbling Grillo into the works of a frightful machine fitted with a thousand 
sharp blades for carving to ribbons whatever is placed inside it.

“Great God, what is this? what have I done?” cries the Duke, “oh, hideous 
snare! Diabolical knaves, all your design was to trick me! And you, dearest wife, I 
was mistaken, they deceived me—you were seduced, at bottom you are 
innocent—”

These last words were scarce out of the Duke’s mouth when Borghese sent his 
naked and bleeding wife flying to join him in the pit.

Over the open trap we lowered a grillwork, upon it we three, Dolni, Olympia, 
and I, lay down flat and peered at our captives. “There she is, my Lord,” said I, 
“innocent no doubt and yet more certainly wounded by your treatment of her. 
Succor her if you dare, but know that in doing so your peril is great.”

Grillo starts impulsively toward his wife; but his movement releases a spring, 
the machine starts to whirr, its many blades to turn, their edges slash at the two 
victims who in less than ten minutes are threshed shapeless, of them nought but 
blood and splintered bone remains. I need not describe our ecstasy, Borghese’s 
and mine, as we watched that scene; both frigged by Dolni, we loosed discharge 
after discharge, at least a dozen in all, the sight of that atrocity left our cunts in a 
state nearly as gruesome, and inspired our minds to a very rare degree.

“Come spend the day with me tomorrow,” Olympia suggested when we had 
returned to the city, “I shall introduce you to the personage who has offered me a
hundred thousand crowns to burn down all the hospitals and alms-houses in 
Rome. The man who is to attend to the lighting of the fires will be there too.”

“What, do you still have that horror on your mind, Princess?”

“Certainly, Juliette. You confine your criminal activity to upsetting households 
whereas I make mine felt by at least half a city. Incendiary Nero is my model; I 
too would like to stand on my balcony, a lyre in my hand, and while singing gaze 
forth upon my native land become a pyre for my countrymen.”

“Olympia, you are a monster.”

“Oh, not so great a one as you; the base scheme that brought the Grillos to 
their end was absolutely typical of your invention, I’d never have dreamt up the 
like.”

At Borghese Palace the next day Olympia presented her guests to me. “The 
first of these gentlemen”—it was to the elder she alluded—“is Monsignor Chigi, 
related to that line of princes several of whom have occupied the Holy See; he is 
today at the head of the Roman police; the proposed fire I mentioned to you 
yesterday will benefit him, and the hundred thousand crowns fee he is to pay me 
is part of his investment in a very profitable venture. And here is Count Bracciani 
who, as Europe’s foremost physician, is to conduct the operation. Juliette,” 
Olympia added in a lowered tone, “both are friends of mine; I implore you to take
their eventual requests of you into kindly consideration.”

“You shall not be embarrassed by my behavior,” I assured her.

And the Princess having given the strictest orders that we be left undisturbed, 
conversation was engaged.

“I am having you dine,” said Olympia, “with one of the most famous scoundrels
to come out of France in generations; she has been giving us Romans daily 
examples of very high proficiency in crime; her presence need not hinder you, my
friends, in the forthcoming discussions of the one we are preparing.”

“Truly, Madame,” said the master of the police, “you here qualify as crime an 
altogether unpretentious and certainly very comprehensible act. I consider 
charitable institutions the most baneful things a large city can contain; they drain 
the people’s energy, they soften its fiber, they promote sloth; they are in every 
sense pernicious; the needy individual is to the State as the parasite branch is to 
the peach tree: it causes it to wither, drinks its sap, and bears no fruit. What does
the horticulturist do when he espies that branch? He cuts it off, and without 
qualms. The statesman must proceed likewise: one of the basic laws of Nature is 
that nothing superfluous subsist in the world. You may be sure of it, not only does
the shiftless beggar, always a nuisance, consume part of what the industrious 
man produces, which is already a serious matter, but will quickly become 
dangerous the moment you suspend your dole to him. My desire is that instead of
bestowing a groat upon these misfortunates we concentrate our efforts upon 
wiping them out; my desire is that they be totally eliminated, extirpated; 
exterminated; killed, that is to say, and why make any bones about it? killed as 
one kills a breed of noxious animals. That is the first reason that led me to offer 
Princess Borghese one hundred thousand gold crowns for destroying these houses
that are a blight upon our city. The second is that upon their sites I mean to build 
hospices for travelers, pilgrims, and the like; some buildings razed, others 
constructed in their place, don’t you see, and the revenues which went formerly 
to pay for maintaining the hospitals I now ask to have paid to me; and paid to me
they shall be; mine as well shall be an annual one hundred thousand crowns 
rental: thus I sacrifice only the first year of an assured income to Madame 
Borghese, who in Count Bracciani, she tells me, has the suitable man for 
delivering Rome of these houses and for making a need felt for those I am ready 
to put up on their foundations, and for which I shall have no trouble obtaining the 
funds originally set aside for the hospitals.(18) There are twenty-eight of these 
asylums in the city,” Chigi continued, “as well as nine conservatorios containing 
roughly eighteen hundred poor girls whom, needless to say, I include in my 
proscriptions. All that must be set simultaneously ablaze; there will be some thirty
or forty thousand good-for-nothings sacrificed—firstly, to the welfare of the State;
secondly, to the pleasures of Olympia, who is going to reap a pretty penny from 
this affair; thirdly, to my fortune, for with what I already possess, I become one 
of Rome’s richest ecclesiastics if the plan goes successfully through.”

“It would appear,” said Bracciani, “that I, who am to execute it, come off the 
most poorly; for it seems not yet to have occurred to you to offer me a sequin out
of the great profits you are due to make.”

“Chigi supposed that I would give you some of my hundred thousand,” Olympia
said to the Count, “he was mistaken: the sum is modest, once divided it amounts 
to twice nothing at all, and I feel you should demand a hundred thousand for 
yourself; you are worth that much to Monsignor, what more capable practitioner 
could he hope to find? 

“Softly,” said the churchman, “let’s have no falling out at the start of an 
undertaking so important, it would be the way to have it all end very dismally and
to provoke difficulties for one another. I grant the Count the same emoluments 
Madame Borghese is to have, I grant a further hundred thousand francs gratuity 
to this charming woman,” Chigi went on, smiling in my direction; “Olympia’s 
friend must have a similar character and by that title alone deserves to be treated
as an accomplice.”

“She has all the virtues you can expect in one,” said the Princess, “and I 
guarantee she will not disappoint you. The question of remunerations may be 
considered settled; in behalf of my friends I accept your offers; let us now bend 
our thoughts to success.”

“I shall obtain it,” said Bracciani, “and it shall be entire: there shall not escape 
a single one of the victims Chigi’s profound statecraft, or rather his voluptuous 
wickedness, dooms to die.”

“Upon what henceforth shall Roman doctors be able to experiment, I wonder?”

“As Juliette implies, it is very certain,” Olympia observed, “that almost all of 
them have long been in the habit of trying out their remedies upon these poorer 
patients whose disappearance will pose a problem to the profession. I am 
reminded,” she added, “of what young Iberti, my personal doctor, said to me only 
the other day upon arriving at my bedside fresh from one of those experiments. 
‘What concern to the State is the existence of the vile beings that ordinarily crowd
those dens?’ he said in response to the look of disapproval I assumed in order to 
find out how he would justify himself; ‘you would be doing society an enormous 
disservice by not permitting us medical artists to test our talents upon society’s 
dishonoring dregs. These have their use; Nature, in making them weak and 
defenseless, indicates what it is to be, and to refrain from so using them is to 
flout Nature’s instructions.’ ‘But,’ said I, departing a little from the central issue, 
‘when, in a different case, some sordid interest leads a man distinguished by 
wealth or by position to seize the favorable opportunity afforded by a person’s 
illness to commit a crime against that person, and when this man invites a doctor 
to hasten the patient’s last moments, is it a grave fault for the doctor to accept 
the proposition?’

“‘Great heavens, no,’ my young Aesculapius replied, ‘provided he is well paid 
he has no real choice but to accept. Doing the deed, he has nothing to fear from 
his accomplice, neither does his accomplice have anything to fear from him: both 
have everything to gain from guarding their secret. Refusing to do the deed would
get the doctor nowhere, for he could hardly boast of having declined a proposition
which is not of the kind that is made to an honest man: from a refusal he would 
thus extract nothing but solitary and intellectual pleasure much inferior to that 
which the offered sum would procure him. And even were he to proclaim that to 
such a proposition he had said no, he’d not be praised for it; but only told he had 
done his duty. And as for those who do it there is never any reward, needless to 
go to the bother of chasing empty applause. Comparing what, apart from that 
applause, he is to gain from acceptance or refusal, he discovers that in electing 
the latter alternative he may either say nothing of the proposition and all alone 
reap the meager enjoyments that having a good opinion of oneself provides to 
fools, or create a stir and thereby doom his accomplice—and what does he gain 
from dooming the accomplice rather than the patient?—in order to obtain the 
tawdry and barren satisfaction of having it said he has done his duty. Weigh it up:
a futile pleasure as against the sum offered him to shorten the patient’s life: what
responsible man could conceivably hesitate an instant? To the sane physician only
one course is open: bargain for a high price, then kill and keep his mouth shut.’

“Those were the words, those the views of Iberti, the prettiest, the wittiest, the
most engaging doctor in Rome(19) and you will readily understand how little 
difficulty he had convincing me. But to return to the business before us,” Olympia 
continued; “are you sure of the operation, Bracciani? Is there not the danger that 
the perfidious efforts of rescuers might ruin the effects we are striving for? 
Humane impulses, as much to be dreaded as loathed, and capable of spoiling 
many a fair crime—dare we suppose that they will not move a certain number of 
people to rush to the aid of our victims?”

“I expect this,” said the Count. “I take up my position atop a high hill in the 
middle of Rome. From there I launch invisible bombs, thirty-seven of them, one 
for each of the thirty-seven asylums; they land in barrage. Other projectiles follow
at carefully spaced intervals: rescuers flock to a new burning area after having 
mastered the flames in a former one, which I set promptly back on fire.”

“In this way, Count, you could have an entire city ablaze.”

“Exactly,” said the physician, “and our present undertaking, limited in scope 
though it be, may very well cause half the population of Rome to perish.”

“Some of the hospitals are located in extremely poor quarters of the city,” said 
Chigi, “those quarters shall be destroyed infallibly.”

“Such considerations do not make you pause?” Olympia wondered.

“Not for one instant, Madame,” Chigi and the Count replied as one man.

“These gentlemen seem to have firmly made up their minds,” I observed to the
Princess, “and my guess would be that the crime they are about to commit is to 
them something of slight importance.”

“There is nothing of crime in our project,” Chigi explained. “All our errors under
the chapter of ethics come from the absurdity of our ideas touching good and evil.

“If we fully apprehended the indifference of all our actions, were we properly 
persuaded that those we call just are anything but that in the eyes of Nature, and
that those we characterize as iniquitous are perhaps, in her view, the most 
perfect measure of reason and equity, for a certainty we would make far fewer 
miscalculations. But childhood prejudices lead us astray and will never cease 
inducing us into error so long as we have the weakness to listen to them. It does 
indeed seem that the lamp of reason does not begin to enlighten us until such 
time as we are no longer able to profit from its rays, and not before stupidity has 
been added to stupidity that we arrive at the discovery of the source of all that 
ignorance has caused us to commit. We almost always employ the laws of our 
government as our compass for determining right and wrong, just and injust. The 
law, we say, prohibits doing this or that, this or that is hence unjust; than this 
manner of judging none is more deceiving, for the law is oriented toward the 
general interest; now, nothing is at a farther remove from the general interest 
than individual interest, its very opposite; hence, nothing less just than the law 
which sacrifices all individual interests to the general interest. But, they maintain, 
man wishes to live in society; he must therefore forego a portion of his private 
good for the sake of public good. Very well; but how ever could he have made 
such a pact without being sure of receiving at least as much as he gives? Now, he
extracts nothing from the pact he makes when consenting to the law; for you put 
him far more heavily to contribution than you satisfy him, and for every occasion 
upon which the law protects him there are a thousand others when it restricts 
him; he hence ought not to have consented to the law, or ought to have insisted 
that it be made infinitely more lenient. Laws have served only to delay the 
annihilation of prejudices, to lengthen our term of shameful bondage to error; law
is a bridle man imposed upon man when he saw with what ease man freed 
himself of other bridles, hence a makeshift—to answer what purpose? There are 
punishments for the guilty, true enough; in them I see cruelties but not a means 
to make men better, and that it seems to me is the end to which one should have 
labored. Punishments, aye—and there’s nothing easier to escape, this certitude 
encourages the emancipated and venturesome spirit. Ah, let it be understood 
once and for all, laws are nothing but futile and dangerous; their sole effect is to 
multiply crimes or to cause them to be committed in safety by compelling the 
criminal to act in secrecy. But for laws and religion there is no imagining the 
degree of grandeur and glory human knowledge would have attained today; no 
imagining how these infamous curbs have retarded progress; that is our single 
debt to them. Priests dare inveigh against the passions; lawyers dare fetter them 
with laws. But merely compare the ones and the others; see which, passions or 
laws, have done mankind the more good. Who doubts, as Helvétius proclaims, 
that the passions are in morals precisely what motion is in physics? ’Tis to strong 
passions alone invention and artistic wonders are due; the passions should be 
regarded, the same author goes on to say, as the fertilizing germ of the mind and 
the puissant spring to great deeds. Those individuals who are not motivated by 
strong passions are mediocre beings. Only great passions will ever be able to 
produce great men; when passion falters decrepitude enters in, when it is absent 
stupidity prevails. These fundamentals established, I ask how laws that inhibit the
passions can be anything but profoundly and in every sense dangerous. In the 
history of any country compare the periods of anarchy with those during which 
order was most vigorously maintained by the most vigorously enforced laws, and 
recognize that only at moments when the laws were held in contempt do 
stupendous actions occur. Law resumes its despotic sway and a fatal lethargy is 
seen to invade the spirits of men; though vice ceases to be noticeable, the 
disappearance of all virtue is yet more conspicuous: the inner workings rust and 
revolutions begin to breed.”

“But,” Olympia interrupted, “you wish to do away with all laws in an empire?”

“No. Restored to a state of Nature, mankind, I affirm, would be happier than it 
can possibly be under the absurd yoke of law. I am opposed to man’s 
renunciation of a single ounce of his capacities. He has no need of laws for his 
self-protection; in him Nature put the necessary instincts and energy for that; 
taking the law into his own hands he will always obtain a speedier, purer, more 
incisive, stronger-brewed justice than anything to be had in a courtroom, for his 
act of personal justice will be determined by his personal interest and the hurt he 
has personally sustained, whereas the laws of a people are never other than the 
mass and the result of the interests of all the lawmakers who cooperate in 
erecting those laws.”

“But without the laws you will be oppressed.”

“That matters not to me if I have the right to repay oppression in kind: I prefer
to be oppressed by a neighbor whom I can oppress in my turn than to be 
oppressed by the law before which I am helpless. My neighbor’s passions are 
infinitely less to be dreaded than the law’s injustice, for the passions of that 
neighbor are held at bay by mine, nothing checks the injustices of the law, 
against the law there is no reprisal to be taken, no recourse to be had. All the 
defects in humans belong to Nature; accordingly, man can have no better laws 
than those of Nature; no man has the right to repress in him what Nature put 
there. Nature has elaborated no statutes, instituted no code; her single law is writ
deep in every man’s heart: it is to satisfy himself, to deny his passions nothing, 
and this regardless of the cost to others. Think not to hinder this universal law’s 
impulsions whatever their effects may be; you have no right to curb them; let this
be the concern of him they outrage; if strong, he will know how to react. The men
who thought that from their necessity to join together was derived a necessity for
framing laws to themselves fell into heaviest error; they had no more need of 
laws gathered in society than dwelling alone in the forest. A universal glaive of 
justice is of no purpose; everybody naturally possesses one of his own.”

“But not everyone will wield it appropriately, and iniquity will become 
general—”

“Impossible. Never will Tom be unjust toward Dick when he knows Dick can 
retaliate instantly; but it’s a very unjust Tom you have as soon as he discovers he 
has nothing to fear except laws that he can elude or from which he can make 
himself exempt. I go farther, I grant you that without laws the sum of crime 
increases, that without laws the world turns into one great volcano belching forth 
an uninterrupted spew of execrable crimes; and I tell you this situation is 
preferable, far preferable to what we have at present. I envisage a perpetual 
outpouring of conflict, injury, and aggression; it is nothing beside what takes 
place under the rule of law, for the law often smites the innocent, and to the total 
of victims produced by the criminal must be added the mass of those produced by
legal miscarriage and iniquity: give us anarchy and we will have these victims the 
less. To be sure, we will have those crime sacrifices; but the ravages of the law 
will be a thing of the past. Invested with the right to do his own revenging, the 
oppressed man will proceed with speed, diligence, economy, and certitude to 
punish his oppressor and none other.”

“However, opening the door to the arbitrary, anarchy is necessarily the cruel 
image of despotism—”

“Another error; ’tis the abuse of the law that leads to despotism; the despot is 
he who creates the law, who bids it speak or be still, who uses it to serve his own 
interests. Deprive the despot of this means for abuse and there’s an end to 
tyranny. There has never been a tyrant who failed to raise laws for props in the 
exercise of his cruelties; if everywhere human rights shall be well enough 
distributed to enable each man to avenge the wrongs done him, no despot shall 
arise, for he would be overthrown the moment he attempted to make his first 
victim. Never are tyrants born of anarchy, you see them flourish only behind the 
screen of the law or attain supremacy by means of it, basing their authority upon 
law. Viviousness thus reigns under the rule of law; thus, lawful rule is inferior to 
anarchy: the greatest proof whereof is the government’s obligation to plunge the 
State into anarchy whenever it wishes to frame a new constitution. To abrogate 
its former laws it is driven to establish a revolutionary regime in which there are 
no laws at all: from this regime new laws finally emerge. But this second State is 
necessarily less pure than the first, since it derives from the earlier one, since, in 
order to achieve its goal, constitution, it had first to install anarchy. Men are pure 
only in their natural condition; as soon as they stray out of it their degradation 
begins. Give up the idea of improving men by laws, give it up. I tell you, by laws 
you will render them greater scoundrels, more cunning, more wicked, never more
virtuous.”

“But crime is a plague to the world, Monsignor. The more laws there are, the 
fewer crimes shall there be.”

“A pretty jest. But seriousness commands us to recognize that it’s the 
multitude of laws that is responsible for this multitude of crimes. Cease to believe 
such-and-such a deed is criminal; make no laws to repress it; the crime 
disappears.

“But I return to the first part of your proposition: crime, you say, is a plague to
the world. What sophism! That which deserves to be called a plague to the world 
would be some destructive mechanism threatening the existence of all the world’s
inhabitants; let us see if crime answers this description.

“A crime being committed presents the picture of two individuals, one of whom
is performing the act called criminal, the other of whom is being made this act’s 
victim. Two individuals: one happy, the other unhappy; crime is therefore not a 
plague in the world since, although rendering half the world’s population unhappy,
it renders the other half very happy indeed. Crime is nought but the means 
Nature employs to attain her ends in regard to us and to preserve the equilibrium 
so indispensable to the maintenance of her workings. This explication alone 
suffices to make clear that it is not for man to punish crime, because crime 
belongs to the Nature that possesses every right over us and over which we 
dispose of none. If, viewing it from another angle, crime is the consequence of 
passion, and if the passions, as I have just said, must be beheld as the sole 
springs to great deeds, you should always favor the crime which gives energy to 
your society over the virtues which disturb its operations and undermine its 
strength. You cannot now continue to punish crime; you ought instead to 
encourage it, and thrust virtues into the background where they will be buried 
forever under the scorn they deserve from you. We must of course take great 
care not to confuse great deeds with virtues: very often a virtue is farthest of all 
from a great deed, and more often still a great deed is sheer crime. Well, great 
deeds are frequently very necessary; virtues never are. Brutus, the kindly head of
his family, would have been but a dull and melancholy fellow; Brutus, the 
murderer of Caesar, simultaneously performs a crime and a great deed: the 
former personage would have remained unknown to history, the latter became 
one of its heroes.”

“And so, according to you, one may feel at complete ease amidst the blackest 
crimes?”

“’Tis in virtuous surroundings comfort is impossible since it is clear that you 
then exist in an unnatural situation, in a state contrary to the Nature which cannot
exist, renew herself, preserve her energy and vitality save through the immensity 
of human crimes; and so the best course for us is to endeavor to make virtues 
out of all human vices, and vices out of all human virtues.”

“It has been to that end,” said Bracciani, “that I have toiled since the age of 
fifteen, and I may truthfully report that I have enjoyed every minute of my 
career.”

“My friend,” Olympia said to Chigi, “with the ethical beliefs you have just laid 
before us you must have very lively passions. You are forty, the age when they 
speak most imperiously. Oh, yes, you have surely achieved horrors!”

“In the position he holds,” said Bracciani, “with the inspection-general of the 
Rome police, occasions for doing evil must certainly not be lacking.”

“There is no denying it,” said Chigi, “I am in an exceedingly favorable position 
for doing evil, and it would be yet harder to claim that I let pass many occasions 
for doing it.”

“You commit injustices … you suborn witnesses, you falsify evidence,” asked 
Madame Borghese, “you use the instruments of Themis entrusted to you to doom 
a good many innocent persons?”

“And having done all you say, do no more than act pursuant to my principles; 
which I believe is to do well. If I suppose virtue a dangerous thing in this world, 
am I wrong to immolate those who practice it? If, reciprocally, I consider vice 
useful on earth, am I wrong to let escape from the law those who profess it? They
call me an unjust man, I know, they may, for all I know, call me worse yet; their 
opinion matters not to me: provided my behavior accords with my principles I 
have an easy conscience. Before acting according to those principles I began by 
analyzing them, then based my conduct thereupon; let the entire world blame 
me, little do I care, I have done well by my own lights, and for my actions I am 
accountable to no one but myself.”

“There’s the true philosophy,” Bracciani remarked, “I have not developed my 
principles as much as Chigi, but I assure you that they are absolutely the same, 
and that I put them into practice just as often and just as faithfully.”

“Monsignor,” said Olympia to the first magistrate of Rome’s police, “you are 
accused of making much too extensive use of the strappado; you apply it, they 
say, to numerous innocents and especially to them, prolonging the torture, so we 
commonly hear, to the point where it invariably costs the guiltless party his life.”

“I am going to elucidate the enigma,” said Bracciani. “The torture you mention 
composes this scoundrel’s pleasures; he stiffens watching it exercised, he 
discharges if it does away with the patient.”

“Count,” Chigi retorted, “I fail to notice anything constraining you to celebrate 
my tastes here, nor do I recall having charged you to unveil my foibles.”

“We are much obliged to the Count for this disclosure,” I put in with vivacity; 
“it announces glad tidings to Olympia, for from such a man much can be expected
and I will frankly confess that what he has reported has already touched me 
deeply.”

“And we should be yet more deeply touched,” said Olympia, “were Chigi to 
care to enact his favorite game before us.”

“Why not,” the libertine replied; “have you an object to hand?”

“I’ll have no difficulty finding one.”

“Yes, but it may not have all the required qualities.”

“What might the required qualities be?”

“Those of material indigence,” said Chigi, “of blamelessness, of the 
submissiveness due to a supreme judge.”

“Are you able to combine all that?” Olympia asked.

“Oh, yes,” the magistrate assured her, “my prisons are teeming with such 
individuals and at your demand, in less than an hour I’ll have produced you 
something suitable to the pleasures you intend to procure yourselves.”

“Could you describe the article?”

“A young woman of eighteen, a Venus for beauty, and eight months pregnant.”

“Pregnant!” I expostulated. “And you will subject her in that state to such 
rough handling?”

“If worse comes to worst, it will kill her, and as a matter of fact it is pretty 
certain to. But that’s how I like to have them: pregnant. You get two pleasures 
instead of one: it’s what they call ‘cow and calf.’”

“And this poor creature,” said I, “I’ll wager she is guiltless….”

“I’ve had her ripening two months in prison. Her mother suspects her of a theft
I myself had committed in order to get hold of the girl; the trap was nicely laid 
and succeeded irreproachably. Cornelia is safe and sound behind bars, and you 
need but say the word and I’ll have her do a better rope-dance for you than ever 
was done by any acrobat. Afterward I shall have it bruited that out of compassion 
I had her spirited away to save her from punishment, and while covering up what 
fools call a crime I’ll have the merit a superb deed confers.”

“Excellent,” I said; “however, this mother you are leaving alive, I fear she may 
someday reveal everything, and won’t that bring on no end of difficulties? It 
should surely be easy enough to persuade her that she is her daughter’s 
accomplice and that she was party to the theft for which she wishes to see the 
guilt remain on the girl’s shoulders.”

“And who knows, the family may include a few other members,” the Count 
suggested.

“Were there twenty,” said Olympia, “it seems to me that Chigi’s personal safety
would require murdering them all.”

“You people are insatiable,” the magistrate sighed, “I merely ask you not to lay
up to your concern for my welfare what really originates in your perfidious lust. 
Alas, there’s nothing to do but content it. Cornelia has a brother in addition to a 
mother; I promise to have all three of them die before our eyes and under the 
torture with whose use the Count wishes to identify the source of my pleasures.”

“It is just that we had in mind,” Olympia said; “once you go so far as to indulge
in such bloody pranks as these, I feel you should carry them to the limit; I know 
nothing worse than stopping halfway. Oh, fuck,” the whore grunted, rubbing her 
cunt through her dress, “I declare to you I’m leaking already.”

Therewith Chigi rose to his feet and went to issue the necessary orders. A little
garden ringed by dense cypress trees and adjoining Olympia’s boudoir was 
chosen for the place of execution, and we fondled one another while waiting for 
the merriment to begin. Chigi and Olympia were thoroughly acquainted with each 
other, but Bracciani had never had anything to do with my friend and I was 
unknown to both of the men. So the Princess took it upon herself to make the 
initial advances; such libertines never stand long on ceremony. The hussy sets 
straight to undressing me and soon turns me over naked to my two admirers. 
They devour me, but in the Italian style: my ass becomes the unique object of 
their caresses, they both kiss it, tongue it, nibble it, worry it; they make tireless 
and prolonged to-do over it, cannot get their fill of it; and behave for all the world
as if they are unaware I am a woman. After fifteen minutes of these nasty 
preliminaries some order is restored. Bracciani approaches Olympia who has just 
cast aside her every stitch, and I become Chigi’s prey.

“Do not be impatient, charming creature,” that infamous libertine says to me, 
his face glued to my rump; “my capacity for pleasure dulled from long habituation
to its sensations, I must struggle before I feel the blunted needle’s prick. It will 
take time, I may weary you, and it may be that I finally fail to do myself honor; 
but you shall have given me pleasure, and that, I think, is quite enough for any 
woman to strive after.”

And the lecher rattled and banged his tool with all his might, the while 
continuing to savor my bum.

“Madame,” said he to Olympia in whose posterior Bracciani was foraging, “I am
not too fond of having thus to do the job all alone; it appears to me that the 
Count would also appreciate some assistance; you surely have some little girls or 
boys somewhere about, pray send for them. Frigged, licked, pumped, socratized, 
we shall reach the altars of the Callipygian Venus ready and fresh.”

Olympia rings, two girls of fifteen promptly answer the summons; the libertine 
always kept the likes within call.

“Ah, very good, very good,” said the magistrate, “tell them to busy themselves
promptly at these chores it is disagreeable to have to undertake oneself.”

No sooner heard than obeyed, into the maidens’ hands Chigi deposits the 
unglorious vestiges of his failing manhood, and my buttocks continue to be the 
object of his kisses; his tongue soon penetrates; but success is not yet in sight. A 
luckier Bracciani is already inside Olympia’s anus while his young satellite, on her 
knees behind him, sucks his vent. Peering at this group in action, Chigi takes 
heart; he spreads my buttocks, lays his half-stiffened member between them, and
has himself flogged to brace his attack…. The traitor! He dishonors my charms; 
lacking consistency enough to hold his ground, he is put to rout. And for his 
discomfiture blames the little girl; she had been fustigating him.

“Had you laid on harder,” he cries, very wroth, “this would never have 
happened.” So saying he gives the child such a mighty buffet he sends her flying 
three yards away.

“What’s this, Monsignor, what’s this!” Olympia exclaims. “Be a little harsher 
with the slut, take a lash to her, that’s what I always do when they disappoint 
me.”

“Right you are, Madame,” says Chigi, catching up a whip.

And despite the graces, the mildness, the gentleness of that sweet child and 
despite the beauty of her ass, the barbarian smites it with such force that great 
patches of skin are gone off it by the sixth blow. Noticing his glance wander to my
behind and that he has taken a firmer grip on the whip

, “Strike, libertine,” I say, “be bold and strike; I surmise your intentions, I defy 
your blows. Lay on, dear friend, and spare me not.”

Chigi does not reply to me, he whips me; he whips me so soundly that his 
flabby tool, brought back to life at last, is in sufficient fettle to perforate me. I get 
myself hastily into the proper stance, he embuggers me, he is embuggered in his 
turn, and there we are on the threshold of joy.

“Shall we discharge?” inquires Bracciani, still bum-fucking my companion.

“No,” is Chigi’s answer, “no; we must remember the great operation ahead of 
us, and restrict ourselves for the moment to getting into form: only to the agonies
of Cornelia and her family, to that atrocity alone must we accord our fuck.”

This resolution is adopted; without concern for our feelings, the two libertines 
instantly dismount and the pleasures of the table create a diversion to those of 
lubricity. In the middle of the meal, Chigi, almost drunk, suggests that one of the 
girls, she whom he did not whip, be placed flat upon the table and that we eat a 
dozen sugared omelettes hot off her buttocks. It’s done; burned to the quick, the 
poor child emits ringing screams, which does not prevent the company from 
digging their forks all the more vigorously into bits of food they lift from a platter 
of bleeding and scorched flesh.

“It would be amusing to sup a little off her breasts,” Bracciani observes.

“To this you have my agreement,” says Chigi, “provided I am allowed to clyster
her. With boiling water, be it understood.”

“And I shall clyster her too. A pint of acid into her cunt,” said Olympia in the 
shrill tone that would enter her voice whenever some infamous idea entered her 
head.

“Since I must pronounce in my turn,” said I to the assembly, “I humbly submit 
that another serving of omelette be eaten off this engaging little thing’s face, that 
we so manage our silverware as to pluck out her eyes, that she then be impaled 
in the center of the table, for a decoration.”

All these proposals are put into howling effect; we four swill and eat ourselves 
giddy while watching the divine spectacle of that charming little girl writhing and 
slowly expiring in hideous pain.

“How did you find my dinner?” Borghese asked us as we reached dessert.

“Splendid,” we replied.

And truly, it had been no less sumptuous than delicate.

“Why then,” said she, “let’s swallow some of this.”

It was a liqueur which immediately brought splashing up all we had just filled 
ourselves with, and in the space of three minutes our appetite was as keen as it 
had been before sitting down to dine. A second feast is brought on, and we fall to 
like wolves.

“A sip now of this other liqueur,” says Olympia, “and it will all flush out below.”

This ceremony is scarce over when pangs of hunger make themselves felt. In 
comes a third dinner, more succulent than either of the preceding two; we begin 
to feed anew.

“No ordinary wine this time,” Olympia says; “let’s start with Aleatico, we’ll end 
with Falernian, and spirits after cheese.”

“And the victim?”

“Jesusfuck,” Chigi declares, “there’s still life in her.”

“Never mind, let’s get her off the table and buried, dead or alive. We shall 
replace her with a fresh one.”

No sooner said than done: the first of the girls is prised loose and removed and
the same great skewer is run into the second girl’s asshole, she serves as our 
centerpiece for the rest of the third meal. New to these excesses of the table, I 
feared I would not be able to bear up under them, but was mistaken; emptying 
the stomach, the elixir we were taking soothed it too; and although we had each 
eaten of the ninescore plates offered to our voracity, none of us felt any the worse
for it. The second victim was still breathing when we came to this final dessert; 
irritated, our libertines had at her hammer and tongs. Foaming from fuckshed and
drunkenness, there was nothing they did not inflict upon her bedraggled body, 
and I must own that I was in the forefront of the general assault. Bracciani made 
a number of physical experiments upon her, the last consisted in producing an 
artificial thunderbolt: it smote her, such was the cruel end she came to. Life had 
just seeped out of her when the arrival of Cornelia and her family wakened in us 
desires for new and more frightful horrors.

If Cornelia’s beauty was without peer, neither was there anything to match the 
majesty of feature, the elegance of figure, that distinguished her unfortunate 
mother, aged thirty-five. Leonardo, Cornelia’s brother, was only fifteen and in no 
respect inferior to his kin.

“Ha,” Bracciani exulted as he grabbed the lad to him, “here’s the prettiest 
bardash I’ve laid eyes on in a long time.”

But this ill-starred family seemed so laden down by an air of suffering and 
sorrow that one could not help but pause a moment to consider it in this state; 
the criminal, you know, always delights in battening upon the grief his wickedness
has caused the virtuous.

“I spy a light kindling in your eyes,” Olympia murmured to me.

“That may well be,” said I, “only a heart of stone would be left unmoved by 
such a spectacle.”

“I know none more delicious,” the Princess agreed, “in all the world not one so 
stirs my bowels and warms my womb.”

“Prisoners,” spoke forth the magistrate, affecting a solemn and awful tone, 
“you are, I believe, fully aware of your crimes?”

“We have never committed any,” Cornelia replied.

“For a moment I thought my daughter guilty of a theft but, enlightened by 
your behavior, I have seen through your schemes.”

“Madame, you’re going to see them even more clearly later on.”

And we conducted our three captives into the little garden prepared for the 
executions. There Chigi submitted them to a thorough questioning; I frigged him 
meanwhile. You cannot imagine with what art he would lure them into a hundred 
snares, nor the subterfuges he employed to trip them up, and notwithstanding the
candor, the naïveté of their defenses, Chigi found all three guilty, very guilty, and 
pronounced sentence on the spot. Olympia pinions the mother, I seize the 
daughter, the Count and the magistrate leap upon the youth.

A few preliminary tortures seemed in order before turning to the final one with 
which these orgies were to conclude. Olympia must take a whip to Cornelia’s 
belly, with rods Bracciani and Chigi beat Leonardo’s fair buttocks all to tatters, and
I mauled the mother’s breasts. In due time we bound their arms behind their 
backs and attached the fatal ropes. Again and again they were hoisted a goodly 
distance into the air and dropped nearly to the ground; fifteen consecutive 
bounces wrench their shoulders from the socket, break their arms, split their 
breast-bones, tear their chests amain, at the tenth the infant in Cornelia’s womb 
drops out and flies into Chigi’s lap, whose member I am frigging upon Olympia’s 
hinder parts, while Bracciani is working the windlass. The sight of this accident 
made us all discharge, and the frightful truth is that we kept right on with the 
game. Though our sperm was spent and our heads calm, none of us thought to 
beg quarter; and the bouncing continued until we had bounced the ghost clean 
out of those wretches. Thus it is crime will sport with innocence when, having 
wealth and influence on its side, nought remains for it to do but combat 
misfortune and poverty.

The appalling project planned for the morrow was carried out brilliantly. From a
terrace Olympia and I surveyed the disaster, frigging ourselves as the 
conflagrations spread. By evening the thirty-seven asylums were all in flames and
the dead already exceeded twenty thousand.

“Godsfuck!” I exclaimed to Olympia, discharging at the enchanting spectacle of
her and her confederates’ crimes, “how divine it is to perform such pieces of 
mischief! Inexplicable and mysterious Nature, if ’tis true these evil acts outrage 
thee, why makest thou me to delight in them? Ah, wench, thou deceivest me 
perhaps, as of old I was by the foul deific chimera to which they said thou wert 
subordinate; and what if we were no more thy bondsmen than a god’s? Causes, 
may be, are unnecessary to effects, and we all, through some blind force that is 
in us, a force both irrational and essential, we are but stupid machines of the 
vegetation whose secret workings, explaining the origin of all motion, also 
demonstrate the origin of all human and animal activity.”

The fire lasted eight days and nights during which we had no glimpse of our 
friends; they reappeared on the ninth morning.

“It is all over,” said the magistrate; “the Pope has ceased wringing his hands; I 
have been granted the privilege I was seeking: my profit is as well as in the bank,
and here are your rewards. Dear Olympia,” Chigi continued, “that which would 
most surely have touched your benevolent heart was the burning of the 
conservatorios; had you only been able to see all those little maids, 
panic-stricken, naked, trampling one another in their maddened efforts to escape 
the flames, and the horde of ruffians I had stationed at the entrances, pitchforks 
in hand, while pretending to rescue them driving the greater part back into the 
fire but saving a few, the prettiest of the lot, to be sure, who shall live until the 
day they are sacrificed to my tyrannical lust…. Ah, Olympia, Olympia, had you 
been witness to all that you’d have died of pleasure.”

“Villain,” said Madame Borghese, “how many have you preserved?”

“Nearly two hundred; for the time being they are under guard in one of my 
palaces and shall later on be parceled out to my farms in the country. The best 
twenty specimens shall be yours, I promise them to you, and by way of thanks 
ask only that from time to time you bring me other such creatures as this 
charming person,” Monsignor said, pointing to me.

“Why,” said Olympia, “from what I know of your philosophy upon this article, it 
surprises me that you still think of her.

“I admit,” said the magistrate, “that my sympathies do not by any means go 
with the giving of my prick; signs that to the fucking she gets from me a woman 
is responding by love is enough for me to cease paying her in any coin save that 
of scorn and hate. Indeed, I have very often conceived both those sentiments for 
the object about to become of service to me, and my pleasures, taken in this 
manner, have gained considerably therefrom. All this relates to my beliefs 
touching gratitude; I do not like having a woman imagine I am somehow indebted
to her because I soil myself from contact with her; of her I demand nothing 
beyond submission, and the same insensibility as the convenience upon which I 
sit every day when I clear my bowels. I have never thought that from the junction
of two bodies there need or indeed can result that of two hearts: this physical 
connection, in my view, is fraught with great possibilities for contempt, for 
disgust, for loathing, but with none at all for love; I know of nothing so gigantic as
that sentiment, nothing so apt to pall pleasure, nothing, in a word, that is farther 
from my heart. However, Madame, I dare assure you with a degree of warmth,” 
Chigi went on, taking my hands in his, “that the mentality you have shown 
yourself to possess sets you apart in my estimation, and that you will always 
merit consideration from all libertine philosophers; having credited you with 
intelligence, I take it for granted that you are eager to please only them.”

From these flatteries, whereof I made no great case, we passed on to more 
serious things. Chigi wished for yet another glimpse of my ass, declaring that his 
interest in it was positively indefatigable. So he and I, Bracciani, and Olympia 
removed into the secret sanctuary of the Princess’ pleasures where further 
infamies were celebrated and, upon my honor, I blush at describing them to you. 
That accursed Borghese was prone to the most fantastic practices. A eunuch, a 
hermaphrodite, a dwarf, an eighty-year-old woman, a turkey, a small ape, a very 
big mastiff, a she-goat, and a little boy of four, the great-grandchild of the old 
woman, were the lust-objects presented us by the Princess’ duenna.

“Great God,” I cried at beholding this menagerie, “what depravation!”

“It’s the most natural thing in the world,” Bracciani reminded me; “as you wear
out one pleasure you are obliged to look for another; this leads far. Tired of 
commonplace things, you desire unusual ones, and that is why crime becomes the
final station of lust. I know not, Juliette, what use you will find for these bizarre 
objects, but you may be certain that the Princess, my friend Monsignor Chigi, and 
I shall enjoy ourselves mightily among them.”

“Why, I must simply accommodate myself,” said I; “you’ll never see me hang 
back where it is a question of debauchery or incongruities.”

Even as I was speaking, the mastiff, doubtless trained in the trick, began to 
snuffle beneath my petticoats.

“Ah ha! Lucifer is under way,” said Olympia with a laugh. “Undress yourself, 
Juliette; surrender your charms to this superb animal’s libidinous caresses, it can 
prove a memorable experience.”

I consent, needless to say; for what horror could have revolted me, I who 
devoted every one of my days to the quest of every kind of horror? Getting down 
on all fours I take up my position in the center of the room; the dog circles me, 
sniffs me, licks me, mounts me, and finishes by encunting me as nicely as you 
please, and discharging into my womb. But a rather peculiar thing happened: the 
beast’s member had swollen to such proportions in the course of our conversation
that his attempts to withdraw now caused me enormous discomfort. Failing to 
extricate himself, he seemed disposed to start in again; we decided that the 
simpler way would be to let him do so; sufficiently reduced by a second 
discharge, he pulled out a still colossal engine after having twice washed me with 
his sperm.

“There’s a fine fellow,” said Chigi; “you’re going to see my lord Lucifer deal as 
handsomely with me as he has with Juliette. Extremely libertine in his tastes, this 
charming animal honors beauty wherever it is to be found: I wager he will fuck 
my ass with no less delectation than he has just fucked madame’s cunt. But I 
propose to do more than dreamily endure an assault. Bring me that nanny, let me
fuck it while playing whore to Lucifer.”

I had never seen anything as bizarre as this play. Chigi, sparing of his seed, 
loosed none; but had nonetheless the look of taking wonderful pleasure from this 
voluptuous extravagance.

“Now watch me,” said Bracciani, stepping to the fore, “I shall put on a different
spectacle for you.”

He has himself embuggered by the eunuch and embuggers the turkey. 
Olympia, her bare buttocks turned toward him, held the bird’s neck wedged 
between her thighs; she beheads it the same instant the physician ejaculates.

“That,” Bracciani assured us, “can afford exquisite pleasure; there is no 
describing the effect of a turkey’s anus contracting as you cut off its head at the 
critical instant.”

“I have never tried it,” said Chigi, “but so loudly and so often have I heard this 
manner of fucking praised that I believe the time has come to see for myself. 
Juliette,” he went on, “be a dear and hold this child between your thighs while I 
embugger it; blasphemies will announce my delirium, that will be the signal for 
you to cut the little rascal’s throat.”

“All very well,” said Olympia, “but Juliette must have some pleasure in return 
for facilitating yours. I shall place the hermaphrodite to her mouth: caressing its 
two sexes at once, she’ll suck out proof first of its virility and then of its female 
existence.”

“Wait,” said Bracciani, “positions may so be arranged as to enable me to 
bum-stuff the hermaphrodite and take an ass-fucking from the eunuch, the 
crone’s bum being posed above my face so that she splatters shit over my 
features.”

“What nastiness!” said Olympia.

“Madame,” said the Count, taking her up very quickly, “it has its explanation; 
there is not a single taste, not a single penchant which may not be shown to have
a cause.”

“Since this is to be a collective enterprise,” said Chigi, “I’ll have the monkey 
sodomize me while the dwarf, straddling the child, presents me his ass for 
kissing.”

“But there remains Lucifer, the goat, and myself,” Olympia bade us notice.

“We can easily find a place for everybody,” said Chigi. “If you and the goat 
stand close enough to me I’ll insert myself now in your ass, now in the animal’s, 
Lucifer embuggering the one while I am busy with the other; but I still hold to my
intention of discharging in the youngster’s fundament, and do not forget, Juliette, 
you’re to play the butcher when I am overtaken by my spasm.”

The tableau is composed; never was anything so monstrous achieved in 
lubricity; we discharged none the less for that, all of us; off came the child’s head 
at just the right moment; and when we quit our complex formation it was for 
each to extol the heavenly pleasures by which our originality had just been 
rewarded.(20)

The rest of the day was spent in more or less similar lewd doings. I was fucked
by the ape; once again by the mastiff, but asswardly; by the androgyne, by the 
eunuch, by the two Italians, by Olympia’s dildo. All the others frigged me, licked 
me, teated me in every part, and it was only after ten hours of piquant enjoyment
I came out of those peculiar orgies. A delicious supper crowned the holiday; a 
Greek sacrifice was celebrated: firewood was collected, all the animals we had 
frolicked with were slaughtered ritually and lubriciously, their bodies thrown upon 
the pyre and, atop the holocaust, bound hand and foot, the crone was burned 
alive; only the eunuch and the hermaphrodite were left, and with them we flew 
on to other pleasures.

Five months had I been in Rome and I was nigh to wondering whether I should
ever obtain the audience with the Pope that Cardinals Bernis and Albani had led 
me to hope for, when at last, several days after the adventure I have just related,
I received a gallant little note from Bernis who besought me to come to him early 
the following morning, he would present me to His Holiness who, though he had 
wished to see me long ere this, had been unable to satisfy his desire until now. I 
was advised to array myself simply but at the same time with elegance, and to 
avoid all perfumes. “Braschi, like Henry IV,” the Cardinal wrote, “prefers that each
thing smell as it should smell; he abominates art, stands fast for Nature. Hence it 
is essential that you abstain even from the bidet.”

Obedient in all these points, I reached the Cardinal’s palace by ten o’clock. Pius
was awaiting us at the Vatican.

“Holy Father,” Bernis said, presenting me to him, “here is the young 
Frenchwoman you have wished to see. Singularly honored by the favor you do 
her, she promises unquestioning compliance with all it may please Your Holiness 
to demand of her.”

“She shall not repent her complacency,” said Braschi. “Before turning to the 
impurities wherewith we shall be occupied I welcome this opportunity for a private
interview with her. Go, Cardinal, and tell the chamberlains that the gates shall be 
closed to everybody today.”

Bernis retires and His Holiness, taking me by the hand, escorts me through 
immense apartments until we come to a remote chamber where luxury and 
effeminacy, under the drab colors of religion and modesty, offered everything that
most flatters the lascivious disposition. It was all blurred outlines, melting 
distinctions: next to a Theresa in ecstasy one saw a Messalina embuggered, 
underneath an image of Christ there crouched a Leda….

“Repose yourself,” Braschi said to me. “In this place of ease I forget distances, 
and smiling upon vice when it appears in shapes as amiable as yours, I permit it 
to sit at virtue’s side.”

“Brazen fraud,” I said to that old despot, “you are so in the habit of deceiving 
others that you seek even to deceive yourself. What the devil is this prattle of 
virtue when your sole purpose in bringing me here is to sully yourself with vice?”

“I am not of those who can be soiled, dear girl,” the Pope replied to me. 
“Successor of the disciples of God, the virtues of the Eternal gird me round, and I 
am not a man even when for a moment I adopt human failings.”

After letting loose a burst of ungovernable laughter, “Bishop of Rome!” I cried, 
“enough of this insolent haughtiness, desist, I say, you are speaking to a woman 
who is philosopher enough to appreciate you; with your leave we shall look a little
into your power and your pretensions.

“In Galilee, Braschi, there develops a religion, its bases are these: poverty, 
equality, and hatred of the rich. The principles of this sacred doctrine are that it is
just as impossible for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven as for a 
camel to pass through the eye of a needle; that the rich man is damned simply 
because he is rich. To the disciples of this cult it is forbidden ever to lay up 
provision, they are commanded to forsake all that they have. Jesus, their chief, is 
emphatic and clear: ‘The Son of God came not to be ministered unto, but to 
minister…. They that are first shall be last…. Whosoever exalteth himself shall be 
abased; and he that humbles himself shall be exalted.’(21) The first apostles of 
this religion earned their living by the sweat of their brow. Is all this not true, 
Braschi?”

“It is indeed true.”

“Well then, I would now have you tell me what relation there can be between 
these primitive institutions and the tremendous wealth you accumulate here in 
Italy. Is it the Evangile or the knavery of your predecessors that has put you in 
possession of these boundless riches? Poor fellow! and do you fancy you can still 
impose upon us?”

“Atheist, at least show respect for the descendant of Saint Peter.”

“You descend from nothing of the sort: Saint Peter never set foot in Rome. At 
its beginnings and for many years to come the Church had no bishops, only 
acquired them when, toward the end of the second century of our era, it came 
somewhat to be known and to take on a little consistency; how dare you maintain
Peter was in Rome when he himself wrote from Babylon?”(22)

“Do you think to confound criticism by saying that Rome and Babylon were the 
same thing? Pouah, nobody believes anything you say anymore. But was Peter 
even your type of man? Is not your predecessor depicted to us as a penniless 
ragged fellow who catechized the penniless and ragged? It would much appear 
that he resembled one of those founders of orders that live in indigence and 
whose successors swim in gold. I know that those who followed Peter sometimes 
gained money, sometimes lost it; but it is nonetheless true that superstition and 
credulity are yet so widespread that you still have some thirty or forty million 
servants on earth. But do you suppose the lamp of philosophy is not soon to shine
before their eyes? Do you suppose they shall for very long go on accepting a 
master who dwells three or four hundred leagues away? That they shall for much 
longer be willing to think, judge, act only according to your dictates? Hold title to 
their properties only upon condition they pay you tribute, enter into no marriage 
save it be with your approval? No, my friend, you miscalculate if you count upon 
them remaining still a long while in bondage and error. I know that in times past 
your ridiculous rights went a great deal farther than now they do; you used to sit 
above the very gods, for those gods were only thought to dispose of empires 
while ’twas you who disposed of them. But I repeat it to you, Braschi, all that is 
being eclipsed, it is passing away; and in fact, my dear Pope, is it not staggering 
to see to what point superstition can denature the simplest things? Agree with 
me, that one is hard put to know which one ought most to admire, the prodigious 
blindness of whole peoples, or the gigantic effrontery of those who dupe them. 
How is it possible, after the appalling irregularities in which you and your like have
been wallowing for centuries with the entire world looking on, that you can still be
revered as you are? How is it possible that you still keep a few proselytes? ’Twas 
only the stupidity of princes and of populations that consolidated the grandeur of 
the popes and gave them the inconceivable audacity to arrogate to themselves 
pretensions so contrary to the spirit of their religion, so revolting to reason, and 
so harmful to polities. Those who are aware of the grip superstition exerts must 
still be amazed at its perennial successes; for there is not a single blunder, not a 
single extravagance to which the devout are not prone. Certain political interests 
conspired to aid the growth of superstition’s child. During the years of the Roman 
Empire’s decline, its chiefs, occupied in costly and very remote wars, were 
constrained to deal tactfully with you, knowing you to be in possession of the 
minds of the people; shutting their eyes to your enterprises they unwittingly 
promoted the destruction of their empire; through ignorance, the barbarian 
hordes adopted the political system of the emperors, and that is how, little by 
little, you became the masters of a fair part of the European peoples.

“The sciences were entrusted into the hands of the monks, your worthy 
liegemen; no one was permitted to shed light on the universe, men were in 
bondage to what they did not understand, and the warriors who fought around 
the world found it easier to bend you a worshipful knee than to analyze you. The 
fifteenth century brought a shift in the wind, the dawning of philosophy heralded 
superstition’s downfall; clouds lifted and men dared look you in the face. In you 
and yours they soon came to see nothing but impostors and frauds; a few nations
still subjugated by their priests remained faithful to you; but the light of reason’s 
torch shines at last for them as well. Oh, my good, my blessed Pope! your role is 
ended. To hasten the important revolution which must bring down forever the 
pillars of your superstitious establishment one need only cast a glance at the 
history of your antecedents in the See. I shall outline it for you, Braschi, from my 
erudition it will be shown that since the women of my country are instructed to 
this degree, the France I am proud of shall not be long shaking off your ridiculous 
yoke.

“What do I behold at the beginning of your Christian era? Battles, strife, 
tumults, seditions, massacres, the fruit solely of the greed and the ambition of the
rogues who pretended to your throne; the proud pontiffs of your disgusting 
Church were already going in triumphal cars through Rome; lust and lewdness 
were already defiling them; the purple enwrapped them already; and ’tis not your
enemies I consult for evidence of the reproaches addressed to you in those days, 
no, I refer to your partisans, to the very Fathers of the Church; listen to Jerome, 
to Basil: ‘When I was in Rome,’ says the former, ‘I sought to make the language 
of piety and virtue heard; the Pharisees surrounding the Pope jeered and 
tormented me; and I quit the palaces of Rome to return to the grottoes of Jesus.’ 
Thus did your satellites, driven to it by the force of truth, level the accusing finger
at you even at this early hour. With what vehemence the same Jerome elsewhere 
rebukes you for the scandals occasioned by your debauches, your dishonesties, 
your intrigues to milk money from the rich, to have yourselves named the heirs of
the mighty and above all of the Roman ladies you first tupped and then dunned. 
Shall I send you to read the emperors’ edicts? See therein the efforts Valentinian, 
Valens, and Gratian deployed to repress your greed, your libertinage, your 
overweening ambition. But let us go on with our sketch and paint in broad 
strokes. Do you fancy, Braschi, do you believe that one can have anything but 
doubts of your holiness, of your infallibility, when one observes:

“A Liberius, out of fear and weakness dragging the entire Church into 
Arianism?

“A Gregory, proscribing the arts and sciences, and giving as reason for this that
ignorance alone can favor the absurdities of his loathsome religion—a Gregory 
who dares carry impudence so far as to flatter Queen Brunhilde, that monster 
whom France remembers with shame to this day?

“A Stephen VI regarding Formosus, his predecessor, as so defiled by crimes 
that he feels under the ridiculous and barbaric obligation of punishing the dead 
pope’s corpse?

“A Sergius, soiled by all sorts of debauchery, whores always leading him 
around by the nose?

“A John XI, son of one of those sluts, and who himself lived in regular incest 
with Marosia, his mother?

“A John XII, the idolatrous magician who employed the very temple of God as 
the theater for his most shameful debauches?

“A Boniface VII, so eager for the papal tiara that he murders Benedict VI in 
order to succeed him?(23)

“A Gregory VII, who, more despotic than any king, made them all come 
begging pardon at his door; who caused seas of blood to be shed in Germany, 
uniquely for the sake of his pride and ambition; who maintained that a pope could
do no wrong; that all popes were infallible; that to be seated in Saint Peter’s chair
sufficed to render a man as powerful as Almighty God?

“A Pascal II, who, in observance of these abominable principles, dares arm an 
emperor against his own father?

“An Alexander III, who has Henry II of England ignominiously flogged for a 
murder that prince never committed; who promulgates the bloody crusade 
against the Albigensians?

“A Celestine III, who, overflowing ambition and tyranny, dares use his foot to 
push the crown upon the head of Henry IV, prostrate before him; and then kicks 
that crown off again, to show the Emperor what is in store for him should he be 
lacking in respect for the Pope?

“An Innocent IV, poisoner of Emperor Frederick during the interminable wars 
between Guelphs and Ghibellines, for which your pride and your passions were 
responsible and which brought about the demoralization of all Italy?

“A Clement IV, who has a young prince decapitated for having done nothing 
worse than present a claim to the succession of his fathers?

“A Boniface VIII, famous for his quarrels with the kings of France; impious, 
ambitious, the author of that sacred farce known under the name of Jubilee, the 
single purpose whereof is to fill the pontifical coffers?(24)

“A Clement V, enough of a scoundrel to have slain Emperor Henry VI by means
of a poisoned host?

“A Benedict XII, who buys celebrated Petrarch’s sister to make her his 
mistress?

“A John XXIII [sic], notorious for his extravagances; who condemns as heretics
all who maintain that Jesus Christ lived in simple poverty, who distributed crowns,
who changed just into unjust, and whose madness led him to the point of 
excommunicating angels?

“A Sixtus IV, who drew a considerable revenue from the brothels he had 
installed in Rome, who sent the Swiss a crimson flag, and with it the invitation to 
cut one another’s throats for the prosperity of the Roman Church?

“An Alexander VI, the mere mention of whose name is enough to excite the 
indignation and horror of those who have some idea of his story; an enormous 
scoundrel, without probity, or honor, or sincerity, or pity, or religion, whose lewd 
debauchery, cruelties, poisonings surpassed everything Suetonius reports of 
Tiberius, Nero, and Caligula; in fine, a libertine who lay with his own daughter 
Lucrezia,(25) who was wont to have fifty naked whores run about on all fours, in 
order to fire his imagination from the various postures they assumed?

“A Leo X, who to repair the depredations of his predecessors, invented the 
scheme of selling indulgences, though such an unbeliever that in reply to his 
friend Cardinal Bembo, who quoted him a passage out of Scripture, he could say: 
‘What the devil are you up to, coming to me with your Jesus Christ fables?’

“A Julius III, that true Sardanapalus, who carried impudence to the point of 
raising his catamite to be a cardinal; who one day, nude in his chamber, obliged 
the members of the College who entered there to remove their clothes too, 
saying, ‘My friends, if we were to go about thus in the streets of Rome, we would 
be not so much revered. Now if our raiments alone inspire respect, are we really 
nothing at all without them?’

“A Pius V, adored for a saint, fanatical, tigerish, who was the cause of all the 
persecutions exercised against the Protestants in France; instigator of the Duke of
Alba’s ferocities; murderer of Paleario whose only crime was having said that the 
Inquisition had a dagger for stabbing men of letters; and who finally declared that
he had never been in so little hope of salvation as since he became Pope?

“A Gregory XIII, frightful panegyrist of the St. Bartholomew massacre and who
privately addressed letters of congratulation to Charles IX for having himself 
participated in the slaughter?

“A Sixtus V, who declared that in Rome one could bugger and be buggered as 
much as he liked during the hottest part of summer, and whose method for 
establishing order and calm in that city was to bathe it in blood?

“A Clement VIII, author of the famous Gunpowder Plot?

“A Paul V, who waged war against Venice because a civil magistrate had 
presumed to punish a monk for having raped and killed a twelve-year-old girl?

“A Gregory XV, writing to Louis XIII: ‘Put them all to fire and sword who abide 
not by me’?

“An Urban VIII, who cooperated in those Irish massacres where one hundred 
and fifty thousand Protestants died, etc., etc.?

“There they are, my friend, such are they who were the Vicar of Christ before 
you. And you are amazed, you are vexed, you are downcast and confounded that 
we hold in just horror the insolent or corrupt leaders of such a sect? Ah! may all 
nations be quick to rid themselves of their illusions regarding these papal idols 
who until now have procured them nought but trouble, indigence, and woe! Let all
the peoples of the earth, shuddering at the terrible havoc wrought for so many 
centuries by this long line of rascals, hasten to dethrone him who is Pope today 
and at the same time put an end to the stupid and barbarous, the idolatrous, 
sanguinary, impious, infamous religion capable of having such monsters at its 
head.”

Pius VI, who to all this had lent a very attentive ear, sat gazing in astonishment
at me when I reached the end of my speech.

“Braschi,” said I, “thou art surprised at my wit and learning; know that it is 
thus all the children in my country are nowadays brought up: the age of error is 
past. Act accordingly, old despot, break thy cross, burn thy hosts, fling thy gauds 
and thy images and thy relics on the dungheap: after having freed populations 
from the oath of fealty that bound them to sovereigns, free them now from 
error’s dungeons where thou holdest them prisoner. Believe me, get thee down 
off thy throne ere thou art submerged beneath its wreckage; better to cede thy 
place pacifically than to be evicted from it by force. Opinion rules everything in 
the world; it is changing toward thee and all thy mummeries. Vary in tune with 
the times. When the scythe is uplifted, wiser to step aside than await the blade. 
Thou art not poor; retire, become a simple citizen in Rome again. Change the 
funeral livery of all this frocked crowd hanging about thee, dismiss thy friars, open
thy cloisters, liberate thy nuns, let them marry, drown not the seed of one 
hundred generations in the barren ocean of chastity. Awestruck Europe shall 
admire thee, thy name shall be writ big on the columns of memory, never shall it 
be recorded there save thou exchangest the melancholy honor of being pope for 
that, far more precious, of being a philosopher.”

“Juliette,” Braschi said, “they did indeed tell me you were a clever girl, but you 
outdo all reports; such loftiness of ideas is extremely rare in a woman. It is not 
with you feigning is best, I drop the mask; behold the man, behold him who is set
on enjoying you and who shall not higgle over the price.”

“Listen to me,” I replied, “it is not to play the vestal I have come here, and 
since I let myself be enticed into the most mysterious recesses of your palace you
must surely be aware I have no intention of resisting you; but instead of getting a
congenial partner, an ardent woman, someone of flesh and bone, with an intuition
into your tastes, a fondness for them, you’ll have nought but a stone statue 
unless you grant me four things, and they are these:

“To begin with I demand, as a first mark of trust, that you give me the keys to 
your most secret chambers; I wish to visit every nook, every cranny, to see all of 
what each contains.

“The second thing I would have from you is a dissertation upon murder: I 
myself have murdered rather a lot, and have my views upon the question; I am 
eager to hear yours. What you say shall probably fix my attitude definitively; not 
that I believe you incapable of error, but I have confidence in the studies you 
must have made; you will speak frankly to me, for philosophers cannot trifle with 
anything but the truth.

“My third condition is that you convince me of your profound contempt for all 
the rigamarole and ritual cant of Christian worship; to do so you have simply to 
proceed thus: after having had your chaplains

celebrate High Mass upon the ass of a bardash, and having with your holy prick
rammed the little flour-and-water God into my anus, you will then fuck me on 
Saint Peter’s altar. I warn you that I shall not be fucked by you in any other way. 
Such follies are nothing new to me, but the idea of seeing them committed by you
rouses me.

“The fourth clause is, that inside several days you give me a lavish supper with
Albani, Bernis, and my friend Princess Borghese, that at this supper there sparkle 
more lewdness and glitter, more libertinage than was ever displayed by any pope 
of old, the occasion must be gayer a thousand times, and for infamy a thousand 
times richer than the feast Alexander VI had served to Lucrezia.”

“Assuredly,” said Braschi, “these are indeed strange conditions.”

“Either you accept them or never in your life shall you possess me.”

“Young woman, you seem not to realize that I have you in my power, and that 
at a mere word from me—”

“I know that you are a tyrant,” I interrupted, “that you are base and a knave, 
cruel and wicked: without those qualities, it’s obvious, you’d not be in the post 
you hold; but forasmuch as I am no less a rascal than you, you love me. You love 
me, Braschi. It makes you glad to see to what point wickedness of your own sort 
can fill the soul of a woman; I am your joy, mighty Braschi, and you shall be 
mine, little Braschi; you shall satisfy me.”

“Oh, Juliette,” Pius VI said to me, folding me in his arms, “you are a most 
uncommon creature, your genius is irresistible, I shall be your slave; with the 
mind that appears to be yours, I am in expectation of very piquant pleasures from
you, of enormities. Here, the keys, they are on this ring … take them, go visit my 
abode; after I have received your favors I promise you the dissertation you solicit.
As well, you may count upon the supper you demand, and as for the profanation 
your heart is set on, it shall take place this very night. I accord no more faith than
you to all those spiritual mummeries, my angel; but you know the obligation we 
are under to make fools of the simple. I am like the charlatan with his quackeries,
I must look as though I believed in the stuff if I am to vend it.”

“There’s plain proof you are a rascal,” I said; “were you honest you would 
prefer to enlighten mankind rather than deceive it; you would tear the blind from 
their eyes rather than tighten it.”

“Of course; but I’d starve to death.”

“And what necessity is there that you live? Is it so urgent that, for the sake of 
your digestion, fifty million people wander in error?”

“Yes, because my existence means everything to me, and those fifty million 
people nothing; because the foremost of Nature’s laws is of self-preservation … at
the expense of no matter whom.”

“You are showing your true colors, Pontiff, that is all I was after. So let us 
shake hands, since we’re a pair of rogues each as bad as the other, and 
henceforth an end to all shamming; agreed?”

“Excellent,” said the Pope, “we’ll concern ourselves with pleasures only.”

“Very well,” I rejoined, “start by carrying out one of your promises; get me a 
guide, I wish to tour this place.”

“I shall guide you through it myself,” said Braschi.

“This superb palace,” he told me as we walked along, “stands on the site of an 
ancient one in whose gardens the paths were illuminated at night by the bodies of
the early Christians; Nero had them spaced at regular intervals and daubed with 
pitch. They served as flares.”(26)

“Oh, my friend, such a spectacle is made for eyes like mine, a joyous sight it 
would have been to one animated by my own loathing for your creed and its 
adepts.”

“Forget not, little minx,” said the Holy Father, “that ’tis to the head of this 
religion you are speaking.”

“He has as little liking for it as I,” was my response, “he knows what it is 
worth; and esteems it only for the income it yields him. Come, come, my friend, 
were you able, you would deal just as harshly with the enemies of the religion off 
which you fatten.”

“Certainly, Juliette: intolerance is the underlying principle of the Church; 
without an implacable rigorism, its temples would be quickly in ruins; and where 
the law is unheeded the sword must smite.”

“Despotic Braschi!”

“But how else would you have princes reign? Their power is seated upon mere 
opinion; let it change and they are undone. Their one means for stabilizing it 
consists in terrorizing the public, in putting fear into hearts and a cloud over 
vision, in order that pygmies appear as giants.”

“Ah, Braschi, I have told you so already, the people are coming to their senses;
the days of the tyrants are numbered; the scepters they hold and the irons they 
impose, all will be shattered upon the altars of Liberty, as the cedar topples 
before the north wind’s blast. Far too long has despotism deprived them of their 
rights, the people must inevitably reach out and take them back, a general 
revolution must inevitably rage over all Europe; all must come tumbling down, 
shrines and thrones with it, and space must be cleared for double the energy of a 
Brutus and twice the virtues of a Cato.”

We were still walking. “A thorough visit of these buildings is no mean 
undertaking,” Braschi said to me; “the palace contains four thousand four 
hundred and twenty-two rooms, includes twenty-two courtyards, and its gardens 
are vast. Let us have a look at this,” said the Pope, leading me into a gallery 
above the vestibule of St. Peter’s basilica. “From here,” the Pontiff explained, “I 
shed my blessings upon the world; here, I excommunicate kings; here, I 
pronounce null and void the vows whereby princes hold nations in fee.”

“Poor player, you strut upon no very solid stage whose foundations are 
absurdity; philosophy shall bring all your little theater crashing down.”

From thence we passed into the celebrated picture gallery. In all Europe there 
is no room longer, not even the gallery of the Louvre; none contains such fine 
paintings. While admiring the “Saint Peter of the Three Keys,” “Pontiff,” I said to 
Braschi, “another monument to your pride?”

“’Tis an emblem,” the Pope explained, “of the unlimited power Gregory VII and
Boniface VIII attributed to themselves.”

“Holy Father,” said I to the old bishop, “surrender these emblems, put a whip in
your gatekeeper’s hand, bare your venerable ass for a beating, and summon in a 
painter, you’ll at least have the merit of auguring true.”

We went next into the library laid out in the form of a T. In that library there 
were a great many cupboards, but few books on display.

“Everything is false in your house,” I pointed out to Braschi; “you keep three 
out of four of these bookcases sealed shut lest it be seen they are empty. 
Deception and fraudulence are everywhere your motto.”

Upon one of those shelves I found a manuscript of Terence where drawings of 
the masks to be worn by the actors precede each of the plays. As well, much to 
my satisfaction, I came across the original letters Henry VIII wrote to Anne 
Boleyn, the slut with whom he was in love and whom he married despite the 
Pope; memorable period of the Reformation in England.

After this we traversed the gardens where groves of orange trees and myrtle 
were growing and fountains played.

“The other part of the palace, and it is there our tour will end,” the Holy Father 
said to me, “is used as a preserve for lust-objects in the one sex and in the other;
they are lodged behind bars; some will appear at the supper I have promised 
you.”

“Ah, Braschi,” said I, full of enthusiasm, “so you keep things in cages, do you? 
I trust it is rather a hard life they lead? Do you whip a little?”

“One inevitably becomes severe as one gets on in years,” good Braschi 
admitted; “for a man of my age there is no sweeter pleasure; I confess that I 
prefer it to all the rest.”

“If you whip it is because you are cruel: fustigation on the part of a libertine is 
but the vent he gives his ferocity; were he to dare, he would express it in other 
ways.”

“Well, Juliette,” was the Holy Father’s pleasant reply, “I am sometimes very 
daring indeed, as you shall see, yes, as you shall most certainly see.”

“My friend, let us not forget the treasures I am to examine. You must have 
gold, your greed is legendary; I share that vice and would fain plunge my hands 
into heaps of those gleaming, fresh-minted coins that are so agreeable to the 
touch and to the eye.”

“We are not far from where they are stored,” said the Pope, leading me down 
an obscure passageway. We came to a small iron door, he opened it. “Everything 
the Holy See possesses is here,” my guide continued, ushering me into a vaulted 
chamber in the center of which were chests containing, in crowns and sequins, 
between fifty and sixty millions at the very most. “I am afraid I have spent more 
than I have contributed to the hoard. Sixtus V founded it as a testimonial to the 
stupidity of Christians.”

“If there is to be nothing hereditary about your tiara,” said I, “you are great 
dupes to amass riches in this world; had I been in your place I would have 
dilapidated the funds long ago. Scatter money to your friends, multiply your 
pleasures, enjoy yourself without stint, far better that than to leave these sums to
accumulate for the conquerors’ taking, since overthrown you shall be. Pontiff, I 
foretell it to you now, one free nation or several in confederacy, rid of monarchical
impediment, shall attack and defeat you; grieved though you must be to hear it, 
know nevertheless that you are by all odds the last pope the Church of Rome is 
going to have. What’s to be taken from here?”

“A thousand sequins.”

“A thousand sequins! The miserly beggar! Pope, there is a scale standing by, 
I’ll fill my pockets and let’s see whether I cannot get out of here with three times 
my weight in gold; you can hardly pay a woman less who has merits like mine.”

So saying I began to scoop up handfuls of coins.

“Stay, my dear, you shall fatigue yourself to no purpose; instead, let me give 
you a certificate for, let us say, ten thousand sequins redeemable upon 
presentation to my treasurer.”

“Such an act of generosity touches me very little,” said I, “’tis upon Venus you 
place these stakes.”

And as we were leaving that treasure room, the

subdued light favoring my preconceived design, I succeeded in taking an 
imprint of the key with a bit of wax I had brought for that purpose; Braschi, 
occupied with his own thoughts, noticed nothing; and we retraced our steps to the
apartment in which he had received me.

“Juliette,” he said then, “although but one of your conditions has been fulfilled 
so far, you must be content with me; let us now see whether I shall be content 
with you.”

And at this the lecher unties my skirt-strings.(27)

“But,” say I, “what of the rest?”

“Since I kept my word on the first article, Juliette, you need not doubt that I 
shall do as much on the others.”

The old rake already had me at his disposition; I was bent forward over a sofa 
while he, the droll fellow, one knee on the floor, was peering narrowly at what 
seemed to be of extreme interest to him.

“It is superb,” he declared; “Albani spoke well of it to me, but I anticipated 
nothing of this degree of superiority.”

The Pontiff’s kisses waxed gradually more ardent: his tongue thrilled here and 
there along the perimeter, then danced inside, and I saw one of his hands scurry 
toward the region of his debilitated manhood. I was all afire to see the prick of 
the Pope, I craned my head around but in that posture could make out nothing.

“If,” said I, “you are willing to be disturbed for a moment we might arrange 
ourselves more conveniently and I will be able to facilitate your enterprise without
in the least diverting your homage.”

Then, helping him recline upon the sofa, I planted my behind over his face and 
leaned down to frig his member while with the hand not devoted to that chore I 
stroked his buttocks, then strove to arouse him anally. These divers occupations 
put me in position to analyze the Holy Father, and I shall describe him to you as 
best I can.

Braschi is plump, his buttocks broad, chubby, but firm, so toughened, so 
calloused by the habit he has of receiving the scourge, that a knife-point would 
sooner penetrate walrus-hide; his asshole is slack and prodigiously wide, and how
could it be otherwise in view of the twenty-five or thirty fuckings it ordinarily gets 
every day? His prick, once aloft, is not without beauty, it is lean, wiry, clears 
nicely at the tip, and is somewhere near eight inches long by six in circumference.
Hardly had it reared itself when the papal passions received energetic expression:
as His Holiness’ brow was wedged between my buttocks, first his teeth, then in 
short order his nails made themselves felt. So long as ’twas done in playful spirit I
held my peace; but when Pius VI began to lose all sense of proportion, I turned 
around.

“Braschi, with you I accept the accomplice’s role but I decline that of victim.”

“When I am hot and when I pay,” the Pope rejoined, “I am not much inclined 
to split hairs. Shit, Juliette, be a good girl and shit, that will calm me; I worship 
shit and my discharge is certain if you can supply me some.”

It being within my power to gratify him, I return to my post; I push, I grunt, I 
shit; the pontifical prick hardens to such a point I believe it is about to discharge.

“Ready yourself, be quick,” cries the pig, “I am going to embugger you—”

“No, you’re not,” say I, “it will sap your strength, our nocturnal orgies will 
suffer from your thoughtlessness now.”

“You are mistaken,” the Pope assures me, clinging fast to my two buttocks, “I 
frequently fuck thirty, forty asses without losing a drop of sperm. Into position, I 
tell you, bugger you I must, bugger you I shall.”

What could I reply to that? He was a very determined man; this was confirmed
by the state of his prick, at which I glanced again; I offered my ass; Braschi 
speared it dry and deep. This scraping whence resulted mingled pain and 
pleasure, the moral irritation resulting from the idea of holding the Pope’s prick in 
my ass, everything marched me toward happiness: I discharged. My bugger, 
sensing as much, hugged me frenziedly and drove me hard, he kissed me, he 
frigged me. But completely in control of his passions, the lecher roused them 
without giving them any final outlet; after a harrowing fifteen minutes he 
withdrew.

“You are delicious,” he affirmed, “I have never fucked a more voluptuous ass. 
Let us dine. I shall give orders for the execution of the scene you wish to 
transpire on Saint Peter’s high altar; we shall repair to the basilica after our 
meal.”

We were but two at table, and we conducted ourselves like perfect swine. For 
lewdness there are few people in this world who can compare with Braschi; there 
are none more schooled in the finer points of debauchery. His is a delicate 
stomach; he would not touch certain food until it had been prepared for eating, 
after wetting each morsel with my saliva I would feed it into his mouth, in my 
mouth were rinsed the wines he afterward drank, he sometimes injected half a 
bottle of Tokay or sack into my fundament, then swallowed what I flushed forth 
and if by chance it included a mard or two, he would be in raptures.

“Oh, Braschi!” I exclaimed during a moment of lucidity, “what would they say, 
the people upon whom you professionally impose, if they could see you in the 
midst of these turpitudes?”

“They would express for me the same contempt I have for them,” Braschi 
answered, “and despite their pride they would own to their absurdity. But no 
matter! let’s continue to dazzle and dupe them: the reign of error shall someday 
come to its end, we must enjoy it while it lasts.”

“Why yes, yes indeed,” I concurred, “let us fuddle and fool mankind, it asks for
no greater service…. Braschi, say now, shall we not immolate a few victims in the 
temple whither we are soon to go?”

“Of course we shall,” the Holy Father replied, “blood must flow before orgies 
are satisfactory. Seated on Tiberius’ throne, I imitate his voluptuous practices; 
and I too know no more delicious discharge than that expelled in echo to the 
plaintive accents of the dying.”

“Do you indulge often in those excesses?”

“Rarely do I let a day go by without plunging into them, Juliette, and never do 
I retire for the night with unbloodied hands.”

“But from where does this monstrous taste come?”

“From Nature, my child. Murder is one of her laws; whenever she feels the 
need for murder she inspires in us a longing to commit it, and willy-nilly we obey 
her. I shall shortly employ more vigorous arguments to demonstrate that this 
fancied crime is no crime at all; if you desire, I shall perform it. In an effort to 
accommodate their doctrine to conventional notions, ordinary philosophers have 
submitted man to Nature; I am prepared to prove to you that man is in no wise 
dependent upon her.”

“My friend,” said I, “I remind you of your promise: this dissertation is part of 
our bargain, pray fulfill it now, we have the time.”

“As you like,” said the mitred thinker; “I shall ask for your whole attention, the 
subject demands it.

“Of all the extravagances into which man’s pride was to lead him, the most 
absurd was probably the precious case he dared make of his person. Surrounded 
by creatures worth as much and more than he, he nonetheless considered himself
at liberty to make away with those beings which he fancied subordinate to him, 
the while believing that no penance, no punishment, could wipe clear the crime 
consisting in an attempt upon his own life. To the initial folly stemming from pride,
to that revolting stupidity of considering he was sprung from some divinity, of 
supposing himself in possession of an immortal soul, to this atrocious blindness he
was doubtless obliged to add the other of esteeming his mortal self beyond price. 
Indeed, how could the beloved masterpiece of a bountiful divinity, how could 
heaven’s favorite have come to any other conclusion? the severest penalties had 
incontrovertibly to be prescribed for whoever should wreck such a splendid 
machine. This machine was sacred; a soul, the brilliant image of a yet more 
brilliant divinity, animated this construction whose destruction must be the most 
dreadful crime it would be possible to commit. And even as he reasoned thus, to 
appease his gluttony he roasted the lamb entire on a spit, he carved into pieces 
and boiled in a pot this gentle and peaceable lamb, a creature shaped by the 
same hand that shaped him, his inferior simply because differently built. However,
had he reflected a little he would have thought a great deal less highly of himself;
a rather more philosophical glance cast at the Nature he misunderstood would 
have caused him to see that, a weak and ill-formed product of that blind mother’s
manufacture, he resembled all other creatures, that his condition was bound 
inextricably to the condition of all others, necessitated like all the others’, and 
hence not one whit better than theirs.

“No earthly creature is expressly formed by Nature, none deliberately made by
her; all are the result of her laws and her workings, in such sort that, in a world 
constituted like ours, there had necessarily to be such creatures as we find here; 
very different creatures probably inhabit other globes, the myriads of globes 
wherewith space is freighted. But these creatures are neither good nor beautiful, 
precious nor created; they are the froth, they are the result of Nature’s 
unthinking operations, they are like vapors which rise up from the liquid in a 
caldron that is rarefied by heat, whose action drives out the particles of air this 
liquid contains. This steam is not created, it is resultative, it is heterogeneous, it 
derives its existence from a foreign element and has in itself no intrinsic value; its
being or not has no adverse effect upon the element it emanates from; to this 
element it adds nothing, owes nothing, this element owes nothing to it. Let some 
other vibration different from heat modify this element, it will continue to exist in 
its new modification, and the vapor which resulted from it before will cease to 
result from it now. Let Nature become subject to other laws, these creatures 
resulting from the present laws will exist no more under these different ones, but 
Nature will nonetheless still exist, although by different laws.

“Man thus has no relationship to Nature, nor Nature to man; Nature cannot 
bind man by any law, man is in no way dependent upon Nature, neither is 
answerable to the other, they cannot either harm or help each other; one has 
produced involuntarily—hence has no real relationship to her product; the other is
involuntarily produced—hence has no real relationship to his producer. Once cast, 
man has nothing further to do with Nature; once Nature has cast him, her control 
over man ends; he is under the control of his own laws, laws that are inherent in 
him. With his casting man receives a direct and specific system of laws by which 
he must abide, under which he must proceed ever after; these laws are those of 
his personal self-preservation, of his multiplication, laws which refer to him, which
are of him, laws which are uniquely his own, vital to him but in no way necessary 
to Nature, for he is no longer of Nature, no longer in her grip, he is separate from 
her. He is an entity entirely distinct from-her; of such little usefulness is he to her 
workings, of such little necessity to her combinations, that whether he were to 
quadruple his species or annihilate it totally, the universe would not be in the 
slightest the worse for it. If man destroys himself, he does wrong—in his own 
eyes. But that is not the view Nature takes of the thing. As she sees it, if he 
multiplies he does wrong, for he usurps from Nature the honor of a new 
phenomenon, creatures being the necessary result of her workings. If those 
creatures that are cast were not to propagate themselves, she would cast new 
entities and enjoy a faculty she has ceased to be able to exercise. Not that she is 
unable to recover the use of that faculty, if she wished to have it, but she never 
does anything needlessly, and so long as the first series of beings propagate 
themselves by faculties inherent in them, she suspends propagation: our 
multiplication, only one of the laws inherent in us, is therefore decidedly 
detrimental to the phenomena whereof Nature is capable.

“Thus, those that we regard as virtues become crimes from her point of view. 
Whereas, contrariwise, if creatures destroy one another, they do well as regards 
Nature; for no obligation to reproduce has been imposed upon them, they have 
simply received the faculty to reproduce; turning to destruction, they cease 
exercising it, and give Nature the opportunity to resume the propagation from 
which she refrained so long as it was needless. You may perhaps object that if this
possibility of propagation she has left her creatures were detrimental to her, she 
would not have bestowed it in the first place. But observe that she has no choice 
in these matters, that she is bound by her laws, that she cannot alter them, that 
one of her laws is the casting of creatures which are cast at a single stroke and 
emerge such as they must remain, and that another of her laws is that her 
creatures be invested with the possibility to propagate themselves. Observe as 
well that were these creatures to cease propagating, or to destroy themselves, 
Nature’s original rights, contested hitherto, would be restored to her; whereas in 
propagating, or in not destroying, we confine her to her secondary functions and 
deprive her of her primary powers. Thus, all the laws we humans have made, 
whether to encourage population or to prevent its destruction, necessarily conflict
with all of hers: and every time we act in accordance with our laws, we directly 
thwart her desires; but, reversibly, every time we either stubbornly refuse to 
undertake the propagation she abhors, or cooperate in the murders which delight 
her and which serve her, we are sure to please her, certain of acting in harmony 
with her wishes. Ah, does she leave us in any doubt of the point to which our 
increase inconveniences her? can we not tell how eager she would be to halt our 
multiplication and be delivered of its ill effects? Is all this not proven by the 
disasters she sends to harry us, by the divisions and discords she sows in our 
midst, by the thirst for murder she constantly inspires in us? These wars, these 
famines she hurls at us, these pestilences she now and again looses with the aim 
of wiping us off the face of the earth, these great villains she fabricates in 
profusion, these Alexanders, these Tamurlanes, these Ghengis Khans, all these 
heroes who lay the world waste, by these tokens, I say, does she not plainly 
demonstrate that all our laws are contrary to hers, and that her purpose is to 
destroy them? Thus it is that these murders our laws punish so sternly, these 
murders we suppose the greatest outrage that can be inflicted upon Nature, not 
only, as you very well see, do her no hurt and can do her none, but are in some 
sort instrumental to her, since she is a great murderess herself and since her 
single reason for murdering is to obtain, from the wholesale annihilation of cast 
creatures, the chance to recast them anew. The most wicked individual on earth, 
the most abominable, the most ferocious, the most barbarous, and the most 
indefatigable murderer is therefore but the spokesman of her desires, the vehicle 
of her will, and the surest agent of her caprices.

“Let us go further. This murderer thinks he destroys, he thinks he consumes, 
and these beliefs sometimes engender remorse in his heart; let us put him 
confidently at ease, and if the system I have just developed is a little beyond his 
reach, let us prove to him from what happens before his very eyes that he has 
not even the honor of destroying; that the annihilation upon which he flatters 
himself when in sound health, or at which he shudders when he is sick, is no 
annihilation at all, and that annihilation is unfortunately something he cannot 
possibly achieve.

“The invisible chain which links all physical beings together, the absolute 
interdependence of the three kingdoms, animal, mineral, and vegetable, proves 
that all three are in the same case as regards Nature, that all three are resultant 
from her primary laws, but neither created nor necessary. These kingdoms are 
governed by the same laws. All three mechanically reproduce and destroy 
themselves, because all three are composed of the same elements, which 
sometimes combine in one fashion, sometimes in another; but these laws and 
workings are distinct from Nature’s laws and workings, and independent of them; 
upon the three kingdoms she acted only once, she cast them, cast them once and
for all; since having been cast they have acted on their own; they have acted 
according to their own laws, the foremost of these being a perpetual 
metempsychosis, a perpetual variation, a perpetual permutation embracing all 
three in a perpetual movement.

“In all living beings the principle of life is no other than that of death: at the 
same time we receive the one we receive the other, we nourish both within us, 
side by side. At the instant we call death, everything seems to dissolve; we are 
led to think so by the excessive change that appears to have been brought about 
in this portion of matter which no longer seems animate. But this death is only 
imaginary, it exists figuratively but in no other way. Matter, deprived of the other 
portion of matter which communicated movement to it, is not destroyed for that; 
it merely abandons its form, it decays—and in decaying proves that it is not inert;
it enriches the soil, fertilizes it, and serves in the regeneration of the other 
kingdoms as well as of its own. There is, in the final analysis, no essential 
difference between this first life we receive and this second, which is the one we 
call death. For the first is caused by a forming of some of the matter which 
renews and reorganizes itself within the entrails of mother earth. Thus does 
exhausted matter re-enter the regenerating womb, there to refertilize particles of 
ethereal matter which, but for it, would remain in their apparent inertia. And 
there, in brief, is the whole science of the laws of these three kingdoms, laws 
which exist apart from Nature, independently of her, laws which they received at 
their first emergence into being, laws which thwart this Nature’s will to erupt 
anew; there, in brief, are the sole means through which the laws inherent in these
kingdoms operate. The first generation, which we call life, is as it were an 
example. Only from exhaustion do its laws become operative; only through 
destruction are these laws transmitted; the former requires a kind of corrupted 
matter, the latter, petrified matter. And there is the sole cause of this immensity 
of successive creations: each of them consists of a repetition of the first principles
of exhaustion or of destruction, which shows you that death is as necessary as 
life, that there is indeed no real death, and that all the plagues we have just 
spoken of, all the cruelties of tyrants, the crimes of the wicked, are as necessary 
to the laws of the three kingdoms as the action which revivifies them; that when 
Nature sends them forth upon the earth, with the intention of annihilating these 
kingdoms which prevent her from using her faculty for casting new creatures, she
acts from sheer impotence, because the first laws received by these kingdoms at 
the time of their first casting engraved the reproductive faculty in them forever, 
and this, Nature could erase only by destroying her own self, which she is 
powerless to do, because she is herself subject to laws from whose authority she 
cannot possibly escape, and which shall last eternally. Thus, through his 
murderings the wicked man not only aids Nature to attain ends she will 
nonetheless never entirely achieve, but also aids even the laws the three 
kingdoms received at their original casting. I say original casting to facilitate the 
intelligence of my system, for, there never having been any creation and Nature 
being timeless, the first casting of a given being endures so long as that being’s 
line survives; and would end were that line to be extinguished; the extinction of 
all beings would make room for the new castings Nature desires; to this end the 
one means is total destruction, and that is the result toward which crime strives. 
Whence it comes out certainly that the criminal who could smite down the three 
kingdoms all at once by annihilating both them and their capacity to reproduce 
would be he who serves Nature best. Now look again at your legislations in the 
light of this startling truth, and see how just they be.

“No destruction, no fodder for the earth, and consequently man deprived of the
possibility to reproduce man. Fatal truth, this, since it contains inescapable proof 
that the virtues and vices of our social system are nought, and that what we 
characterize as vices are more beneficial, more necessary than our virtues, since 
these vices are creative and these virtues merely created; or, if you prefer, these 
vices are causes, these virtues only effects; proof that a too perfect harmony 
would have more disadvantages than has disorder; and proof that if war, discord, 
and crime were suddenly to be banished from the world, the three kingdoms, all 
checks upon them removed, would so flourish as to unsettle and soon destroy all 
the other laws of Nature. Celestial bodies would come all to a halt, their influences
would be suspended because of the overly great empire of one of their number; 
gravitation would be no more, and motion none. It is then the crimes of man 
which, stemming the rise of the three kingdoms, counteracting their tendency to 
preponderate, prevent their importance from becoming such as must disrupt all 
else, and maintains in universal affairs that perfect equilibrium Horace called 
rerum concordia discors. Therefor is crime necessary in the world. But the most 
useful crimes are without doubt those which most disrupt, such as refusal to 
propagate and destruction; all the others are petty mischief, they are less even 
than that, or rather only those two merit the name of crime: and thus you see 
these crimes essential to the laws of the kingdoms, and essential to the laws of 
Nature. An ancient philosopher called war the mother of all things. The existence 
of murderers is as necessary as that bane; but for them, all would be disturbed in
the order of things. It is therefore absurd to blame or punish them, more 
ridiculous still to fret over the very natural inclinations which lead us to commit 
this act in spite of ourselves, for never will too many or enough murders be 
committed on earth, considering the burning thirst Nature has for them. Ah, 
unhappy mortal! boast not that thou art able to destroy, it is something far 
beyond thy forces; thou canst alter forms, thou art helpless to annihilate them; of
the substance of Nature, not by one grain can thou lessen its mass, how wouldst 
thou destroy since all that is, is eternal? Thou changest the forms of things, vary 
those forms thou may, but this dissolution benefits Nature, since ’tis these 
disassembled parts she recomposes. Thus does all change effected by man upon 
organized matter far more serve Nature than it displeases her. What is this I say? 
Alas! to render her true service would require destructions more thorough, vaster 
than any it is in our power to operate; ’tis atrocity, ’tis scope she wants in crimes;
the more our destroying is of a broad and atrocious kind, the more agreeable it is 
to her. To serve her better yet, one would have to be able to prevent the 
regeneration resultant from the corpses we bury. Only of his first life does murder
deprive the individual we smite; one would have to be able to wrest away his 
second, if one were to be more useful to Nature; for ’tis annihilation she seeks, by
less she is not fully satisfied, it is not within our power to extend our murders to 
the point she desires.

“Oh, Juliette, bear it ever in mind that there is no real destruction, that death 
is itself nothing of the sort, that, physically and philosophically viewed, it is only a 
further modification of the matter in which the active principle or, if you like, the 
principle of motion, acts without interruption, although in a less apparent manner.
Thus a man’s birth is no more the commencement of his existence than his death 
is its cessation; and the mother who bears him no more gives him life than the 
murderer who kills him gives him death; the former produces some matter 
organized in a certain way, the latter provides the occasion for the renascence of 
some different matter; and both create.

“Nothing is essentially born, nothing essentially perishes, all is but the action 
and reaction of matter; all is like the ocean billows which ever rise and fall, like 
the tides of the sea, ebbing and flowing endlessly, without there being either the 
loss or the gain of a drop in the volume of the waters; all this is a perpetual flux 
which ever was and shall always be, and whereof we become, though we know it 
not, the principal agents by reason of our vices and our virtues. All this is an 
infinite variation; a thousand thousand different portions of matter which appear 
under every form are shattered, are reconstituted to appear again under others, 
again to be undone and to rearise. The principle of life is but the result of the four
elements in combination; with death, the combination dissolves, each element 
returning entire into its own sphere, ready to enter new combinations when the 
laws of the kingdoms summon them forth; it is only the whole that changes form,
the parts remain intact, and from these parts joined anew to the whole, new 
beings are forever being recomposed. But the principle of life, uniquely the fruit of
the combining of elements, does not exist by itself, only through this union does it
exist and it changes entirely when this union ceases, becomes more or less 
perfect depending upon the new work created out of the debris of the old. Now, 
as these beings are both completely indifferent one to the other, and completely 
indifferent not only to Nature but to the laws of the kingdoms also, the changes I 
make in the modifications of matter can be of no importance: of what importance 
is it if, as Montesquieu says, I make a round lump of something into a square 
lump; what can it matter if of a man I make a cabbage, a lettuce, a butterfly, or a
worm; in this I do nothing but exercise the right I have been given to do it, and if 
I wish, if I can, I may thus trouble or destroy all beings without being able to say 
that I have acted contrary to the laws of the three kingdoms and consequently to 
the laws of Nature. Far from it; I serve those laws one and all; I serve the three 
kingdoms in giving the earth the nutriment which facilitates her other 
productions, which is indispensable to them, and without which her productions 
would be at an end; I serve Nature’s laws in acting in consonance with the aims 
of perpetual destruction Nature announces, and whose purpose is to enable her to
develop new castings, the faculty wherefor is suspended in her owing to the 
continuing presence of what she has cast before.

“Are you able to believe that this blade of grass, this mite, this maggot, into 
which the body I slew has latterly metamorphosed, is of more or less outstanding 
importance to the laws of the three kingdoms which, embracing them all three, 
can have a predilection for none? Shall it be in the eyes of Nature, who vomits 
forth her castings indiscriminately, that some one production or other of these 
castings shall attain to exceptional value? This would be tantamount to upholding 
that of the millions of leaves growing upon this aged oak tree one of them is the 
darling of the trunk, because it is perhaps a little larger than its neighbors. ‘It is 
our pride,’ Montesquieu continues, ‘which prevents us from sensing our puniness 
and which, puny as we are, causes us to want to be taken account of in the world,
to be of mention there, to be a figure of note in it. We are wont to fancy that the 
loss of such a perfect being as we would be ruinous to Nature, and we do not 
conceive that one man the more in the world, or the less, or all mankind, or one 
hundred million earths like ours and each full of men, are but subtle atoms, very 
tiny and indifferent to Nature.’ So rend away, hack and hew, torment, break, 
wreck, massacre, burn, grind to dust, melt, in a word: reshape into however 
many forms all the productions of the three kingdoms, and you simply shall have 
done them so many services, you shall have done nothing but be useful to them. 
You shall have been the minion of their laws, you shall have executed those of 
Nature, because we are creatures of too little strength and too narrow possibilities
ever to cooperate in anything but the general order of things, and what you call 
disorder is nothing else than one of the laws of the order you comprehend not 
and which you have erroneously named disorder because its effects, though good 
for Nature, run counter to your convenience or jar your opinions. Ah, if these 
crimes were not necessary to the general economy, would they be, as they are, 
inspired in us? Would we in the depths of our hearts sense both the need to 
commit them and the charm of having committed them? How dare we think that 
Nature could instill in us impulses which cross her purposes? Eh, indeed, we may 
rather believe this: that she took all good care to place well outside our reach the 
power to do anything that might really discomfort or harm her. Come, little girl, 
let us try to drink dry of its rays the sun that lights our world, let us try to alter 
the stars’ rhythmed march, reverse the flight of heavenly bodies in space; aye, 
those are crimes that would veritably offend Nature; and Nature has seen to it 
that we shall never commit them. As for what she has put in our power to do, we 
have thereby her authorization to do it; all that is inside our grasp is ours to 
have; let us tamper with it, destroy it, change it without fear of harming her. Let 
us be rather persuaded that we are aiding her, and that the more we turn our 
hands to deeds of the species we improperly term criminal, the better servants to 
her we are.

“But would there not be some substantial difference between one species of 
crime and another, and may there not be murders so base, so heinous as might 
be revolting to Nature? What an idea! What stupidity to entertain it even for a 
moment! This person upon whom our human conventions shed an aura of 
sanctity, can he be of superior worth in Nature’s eyes? In what way can the body 
of your father, of your mother, of your sister outvalue, in Nature’s consideration, 
that of your slave? Such distinctions cannot exist for her; she does not even 
perceive them; she cannot possibly perceive them; and this body, so precious 
according to your laws, will metamorphose itself just as surely as the body of that
helot you so thoroughly despise. Arm yourself in the knowledge that the atrocity 
you dread pleases her; she would have you inject an ever greater dose of atrocity
in those that you call your destructions, that you become an intransigent 
opponent of any reproduction is her wish, her greatest expectation of you, that 
you annihilate the three kingdoms: this you cannot do; why then, if the atrocity 
she desires of you cannot attain the farther target she sets you, turn it upon the 
nearer and you shall have satisfied her to the best of your abilities. Unable to 
please her by the atrocity of a global destruction, at least provide her the 
pleasure of local atrocity, and into your murderings put every imaginable foulness 
and horror, thereby showing utmost docility in your compliance with the laws she 
imposes upon you; your inability to do all she wants does not exempt you from 
doing all you can.

“From the foregoing it would clearly appear that infanticide fits in closest with 
her designs because it severs the chain of progeniture, it consigns the greatest 
number of seeds to the tomb. In killing his father the son breaks nothing, he 
removes the uppermost link of the chain; when the father kills his son he 
prevents further links from ever being added thereunto; the line is doomed; it is 
not doomed by the son’s destroying the father, for the son remains, and in him 
lives the future of the line. Either children or young mothers, preferably when 
they are pregnant, these are the two murders which best answer the aim of the 
kingdom and above all of Nature, ’tis in that direction everybody should exert 
himself if he wishes to please the harsh dam of humankind.(28)

“Ah, do we not see, do we not sense that atrocity in crime pleases Nature, 
since ’tis according to this factor alone she regulates the amount of delight to 
provide us when we commit a crime. The more frightful it is, the more we enjoy 
it; the blacker, the fouler it is, the more we are thrilled by it. Thus it is that an 
inexplicable Nature asks for viciousness, for vileness, for atrocious-ness in the 
deed she prompts us to, she wants us to adorn it with the same features she puts
into the banes and plagues wherewith she besets us: so let us proceed fearlessly, 
imaginatively, let us set all scruples and bars aside, let us scorn humanity’s vain 
laws, the idiotic institutions which prisoner us. Let us heed none but Nature’s 
sacred voice, full certain that its instructions will always contradict the absurd 
principles of human morality and of infamous civilization. Do you then think 
civilization or morals have made men better? Imagine no such thing, take care 
not to suppose it; the one and the other have served only to soften man, to 
obscure in him the laws of Nature who made him free and cruel; alienated from 
her, the entire species sank straight into degradation, its ferocity changed into 
cunning, and ever since then the insidious evil man has done has only become 
more dangerous to his fellows. Since commit this evil he must, since it is 
necessary, since it is agreeable to Nature, let us leave man to commit it in the 
manner most satisfying to him, and let us prefer him fierce to treacherous, the 
peril is less.

“Let us not tire to repeat it: never has any intelligent nation presumed to erect 
murder into a crime: in order that murder be crime one must admit the possibility
of destruction, an altogether unacceptable proposition, we have just agreed to 
that. Once again: murder is nothing more than a formal variation resulting in no 
loss(29) whatsoever to the law of the three kingdoms nor to the law of Nature, 
but redounding prodigiously to their benefit. And why punish a man for restoring 
a little ahead of time a portion of matter which is destined to the elements 
anyhow, and which, as soon as it returns to them, these same elements employ 
in new compositions: the sooner you kill that fly, the sooner we will have back a 
pasha, do you prefer to spare a cockroach and forego an archbishop? There is 
then nothing wrong or bad in restoring to the elements the means to recompose a
thousand insects at the expense of a few ounces of blood diverted out of its usual 
canals, in a somewhat larger species of animal conventionally known as man.

“Murderers, to be brief, are in Nature as are war, famine, and cholera; they are
one of the means Nature disposes of, like all the hostile forces she pits against us.
Thus when one ventures the statement that an assassin offends Nature, the 
absurdity one utters is as great as though one were to declare that cholera, 
famine, or war irritates Nature or commits crimes; it is exactly the same thing. 
But we cannot flog or burn or brand or hang cholera or famine, whereas we can 
do all of these to a man: that is why he is wrong. You will almost always find 
wrongs measured not by the size of the offense, but by the vulnerability of the 
aggressor; and there is your explanation for why wealth and position are always 
right, and indigence is always at fault.

“As concerns the cruelty which leads to murder, we may confidently submit 
that it is one of man’s most natural dispositions; it is one of the sweetest 
penchants, one of the keenest he has received from Nature; cruelty in man is 
simply an expression of his desire to exercise his strength. It pervades all his 
deeds, all his words, all his behavior; education disguises it sometimes, but it is 
quick to reappear. It then manifests itself under all kinds of forms. The violent 
throbbings it causes us to feel, either at the idea or upon the execution of the 
crime cruelty suggests to us, are invincible proof that we are born to serve as 
blind instruments to the kingdoms’ laws as well as to Nature’s, and that once we 
lend ourselves to do their bidding, voluptuousness invades us through every pore.

“So reward him, this murderer, employ instead of punishing him; remember 
that there is no crime, of whatever slight importance in itself, that does not 
however demand as much strength and energy, as much courage and philosophy, 
as the grand crime of murder. There are a thousand cases in which an enlightened
government ought only to use assassins…. Juliette, he who knows how to stifle 
the cries of his conscience to the point of making a game of the lives of others, 
this man already has the stuff qualifying him for the very greatest undertakings. 
There are heaven knows how many people in the world who turn criminal on their
own account simply because an undiscerning government ignores their worth and 
neglects to put them to work; the result is that the unlucky souls are broken on 
the wheel for plying the same trade in which they might otherwise have got 
themselves covered with renown and honor. The Alexanders, the Saxes, the 
Turennes might perhaps have become highway robbers had distinguished birth 
and smiling fortune not readied them for laurels in the career of glory; while 
assuredly the Cartouches, the Mandrins, and Desrues would have become great 
men had the government known how to employ them.

“Oh, height of fearful injustice! wild animals may exist, such as the lion, the 
wolf, the tiger who live from murdering alone; in so living these animals disobey 
no laws, and there are other animals to be met with in the world who, to satisfy 
another passion than hunger, indulge in the same excesses—and these other 
animals, so it is claimed, commit crimes!

“We often complain of the existence of such and such a beast whose form or 
aspect is offensive to our eyes, or which causes us some nuisance or other, and 
we console ourselves by saying, rightly and with common sense, ‘ ’Tis a 
dreadful-looking creature, a harmful one too, but it is useful; Nature has created 
nothing in vain; this animal probably breathes a certain air that would poison us, 
or else it eats insects of still greater danger to us.’ Let us be equally philosophical 
in every other regard, and in the murderer see nought but a hand guided by 
irresistible laws, a hand that ministers to Nature and which, through the crimes it 
accomplishes, of whatever sort you wish to suppose them, acts at the behest of 
certain intentions unknown to us, or prevents some accident perhaps a thousand 
times more to be deplored than the one it occasions.

“‘Sophistry! Nothing but sophistry!’ fools shrill at this point; ‘it is true that 
murder offends Nature, that he who has just committed it will shudder for the 
rest of his life at what he has done.’ Imbeciles. ’Tis not because the deed is bad in
itself that the murderer shudders, for be certain of it, in those countries where 
murder is recompensed he shudders not…. Does the warrior shudder over the 
enemy he has just felled? The sole cause of the uneasiness we feel after the deed
lies in its prohibition; every man has sometime in his life, before a perfectly 
commonplace action which circumstances happen to forbid, sensed all the terror 
he could possibly know from rendering himself guilty of that action. A sign is 
nailed over a door, saying it is forbidden to trespass here: no matter who he is 
who makes up his mind to go in will do so with a kind of shudder, and yet this 
thing he does is not evil. It is thus from nothing but the prohibition that the terror
is born, and not at all from the action itself which, as we see, may inspire the 
same fear though there be nothing criminal to it. This pusillanimity which 
accompanies the murder, this little moment of fright, derives infinitely more from 
prejudice than from the kind of deed at hand. However, let the wind blow in 
another direction for a month, let the sword of Justice smite what you call virtue 
for a while, and let the laws reward crime: you’ll see the virtuous quaking and the
wicked serene as they both go about acquitting themselves of their favorite 
deeds. In these matters Nature is silent; the voice that thunders inside us belongs
to the prejudice which with a little effort and determination we can quell forever. 
There is however a sacred organ whose intimate murmur used to resound in us 
before the voices of error or of education made themselves heard; but this other 
voice, which reminds us of our bondage to the elements, constrains us only to 
that which favors the harmonious accord of these elements, and their 
combinations modified after the forms which these same elements employ in 
composing us. However, this last-named voice is not strident, nor theatrical, it 
dins no knowledge of God into us, makes no mention of consanguinary or social 
duties, for these things are false and it speaks the truth only. Neither does it tell 
us not to do unto others that which unto our own selves we would not that there 
be done; if we care to listen closely to it, ’tis quite the opposite message we will 
hear.

“‘Be ever mindful,’ Nature says to us instead, ‘be ever mindful that all which 
thou wouldst not have done unto thyself, being the grave harm done a neighbor 
whence there is much profit to be had, is precisely that which thou must do to be 
happy; for it is writ in my laws that ye all destroy yourselves mutually; and the 
true way to succeed therein is to harm thy neighbor without stint or cease. 
Whence it cometh that I have placed the sharpest bent for crime in thee; whence 
it is that my intention be that thou render thyself happy, at the expense of 
whosoever it be. Let thy father, thy mother, thy son, thy daughter, thy niece, thy 
wife, thy sister, thy friend be no dearer to thee than the lowliest worm that 
crawleth on the face of the earth; for bonds, duties, allegiances, affections, none 
of these hath ever been had from me, they were wrought by thy weakness only, 
by thy education, and by thy folly; they concern me not nor interest me at all; 
thou mayst violate them, break them, loathe them, annul them; ’tis all one to me.
I cast thee into being as I cast the ox, the ass, the artichoke, the louse; to them 
all I gave faculties, some of greater, some of lesser proportions; use what are 
thine; once gone forth out of my bosom, thou canst touch me no more, whatever 
thou doest. If thou keepest thee safe and increase, thou shalt do well as regards 
thyself; if thou dost destroy thyself and others, nay, if thou contrivest, using such 
capacities as thou hast, to lay the three kingdoms waste and to devastate them 
so there shall be nothing left, ’tis there something whereat I shall be pleased 
beyond measure; for I in my turn shall use the fairest attribute of my power, that 
which is my ability to create, to make beings anew—which thy accursed 
progeniture hinders me from doing. Cease to engender, destroy absolutely all that
exists, thou shalt disturb not the slightest thing in my scheme or workings. But 
whether ye destroy or create, the two be nearly the same in my eyes, whichever 
way thou wouldst proceed, I benefit from thy doings, nothing is lost in my 
domain: the leaf that falls from the shrub is as useful to me as the cedars that 
forest Lebanon, and the rot-spawned worm is of no less nor more considerable 
value in my eyes than the mightiest king on earth. So form or destroy as thou wilt
and at thy ease; tomorrow’s sun shall rise just the same, all the globes I hang 
and guide in space shall hold nonetheless firm in their orbits; and if thou dost 
destroy all, as these three kingdoms annihilated by thy wickedness are the 
necessary results of my combinations and as I form nothing anymore, because 
these kingdoms are created with the faculty of reproducing themselves mutually; 
smitten by thy traitorous hand, they shall be re-formed by me, I shall cast them 
again and it shall be on earth as it was before. The vastest, the profoundest, the 
most atrocious of thy crimes shall thus only have pleased me.’

“Such are the laws of Nature, Juliette; such are the only laws she has ever 
dictated, the only ones which are precious to her, the only ones we should never 
transgress. If man makes other laws, we may deplore his stupidity, but we must 
never let it be binding upon us; we may fear becoming the victim of his absurd 
laws, but let us not violate them any the less; and, free of all prejudices, directly 
we can do so with impunity, let us seize every opportunity to revenge ourselves 
for the odious constraint of his laws by perpetrating the most signal outrages. 
Regret nothing but that we are unable to do enough, lament nothing but the 
weakness of the faculties we have received for our share and whose ridiculous 
limitations so cramp our penchants. And far from thanking this illogical Nature for 
the slender freedom she allows us for accomplishing the desires she inspires in 
us, let us curse her from the bottom of our heart for so restricting the career 
which fulfills her aims; let us outrage her, let us abominate her for having left us 
so few wicked things to do, and then giving us such violent urges to commit 
crimes without measure or pause.

“‘O Thou,’ so should we speak to her, ‘Thou, unreasoning and reasonless force 
of which I find myself the involuntary result, Thou who hurled me into this world 
with the desire that I offend Thee, and who hast however denied me the means 
so to do, inspire in my blazing soul some crimes which would serve Thee better 
than these poor melancholy things Thou hast put inside my reach. I would obey 
Thy laws, since they require horrors of me and for horrors I have a fiery thirst; 
but provide me better to do than Thy debility has given me so far. When I have 
exterminated all the creatures that cover the earth, still shall I be far from my 
mark, since I shall have merely served Thee, O unkind Mother, for it is to 
vengeance I aspire, vengeance for what, whether through stupidity or malice, 
Thou doest to men in never furnishing them the means to translate fairly into 
deeds the appalling desires Thou dost ever rouse in them.’

“And now, Juliette,” continued the Pontiff, “I believe I shall present to you 
some examples such as will prove to you that in all ages and everywhere, man 
has placed his delight in destroying, and Nature hers in permitting it.

“At Capodimonte, if a woman gives birth to twins, her husband strangles one of
the infants on the spot.

“Everybody knows the case the Arabs and Chinese make of their children. 
Hardly half the number born are kept; they kill, burn, or drown the rest, and 
principally the females. The same horror of offspring prevails in Formosa.

“The Mexicans never set out on a military expedition without first sacrificing 
children of the one sex or the other.

“Japanese women are allowed to procure abortions as frequently as they like; 
no one holds them to account for the fruit they are unwilling to bear.(30)

“The king of Calicut has in his palace an armchair of iron, beneath which he 
lights a great fire; in it, on certain festival days, a child is made fast, and it 
remains seated until it has been reduced to cinders.

“Never was murder punished by death among the Romans; and for a long time
the emperors in this regard followed Sulla’s law, which merely condemns the 
murderer to a fine.

“On Mindanao this same crime is honored; he who commits it is sure, after 
producing proof of the deed, of being raised to the rank of a brave, with the right 
to wear a red ribbon.

“Among the Caraguos the same honor is obtained by the quantity of murders 
alone: it takes the killing of seven men before one is entitled to the red turban.

“On the banks of the Orinoco, mothers drown their daughters the moment they
see the light.

“In the kingdom of Zopit and in Trapobania, fathers cut the throats of children 
of whichever sex, once they grow weary of the sight of them or when these 
children begin to take on airs.

“In Madagascar all infants born on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays are 
abandoned to wild beasts by their own parents.

“Up until the Empire removed to the East, a Roman child of whatever age who 
displeased his father would be put to death by him.

“Several chapters in the Pentateuch clearly show that fathers had the right of 
life or death over their children.

“A law the Parthians had, and the Armenians too, authorized a father to kill his 
son and even his daughter when they reached marriageable age.

“Caesar found this same custom established amongst the Gauls.

“To his subjects Czar Peter of the Russias addressed a public declaration the 
gist of which was that, by all laws human and divine, a father had the right of life 
and death over his children, without appeal and to be exercised without any 
permission, on the spur of the moment. No sooner had he published his decree 
than Peter proceeded to act according to it.

“The Galla chief, as soon as he is elected, must distinguish himself by an 
incursion into Abyssinia; ’tis the multiplicity of his crimes which renders him 
worthy of his post. He must plunder, rape, mutilate, massacre, burn; the more 
appalling his exploits, the more he is honored.

“Each year the Egyptians sacrificed a young maiden to the Nile. When 
compassion gripped their hearts and they decided to interrupt this usage, the 
river’s fertilizing floods ceased and Egypt faced famine.

“So long as human sacrifices comprise a spectacle they ought never to be 
forbidden in a warlike society. Rome was mistress of the world all the while she 
had these cruel spectacles; she sank into decline and from there into slavery as 
soon as Christian morals managed to persuade her that there was more wrong in 
watching men slaughtered than beasts. But it was not humane sentiment that 
stood behind the arguments of Christ’s followers, it was their great fear lest, were
the star of idolatry to rise again over the Empire, they themselves might be 
sacrificed during their adversaries’ amusements. That is why the rascals preached
charity, that is why they fabricated the ridiculous myth of brotherhood, which I 
know, Juliette, others must surely have exploded to your satisfaction. What I have
just advanced accounts for everything in this fine ethic which even the enemies of
this pernicious religion have been timid enough and mad enough to respect. We 
continue.

“Almost all the savages of America kill their elders when the latter are seen to 
be ailing; ’tis a kindly act on the part of the son; the father curses him if he does 
not dispatch him when he becomes aged and helpless.

“In the South Seas there exists an island where women are killed once they 
have passed the age for engendering, as creatures henceforth useless to the 
world; and as a matter of fact, what more are they good for then?

“The peoples of the Barbary States have no law against the murder of their 
wives or their slaves; they are fully and authentically masters thereof.

“In no Asian harem is killing of the women outlawed; whoever murders his own
down to the last has simply to purchase some more.

“It is an article of faith, on the island of Borneo, that all those persons a man 
kills will be his slaves in the next world; and as a result, the better a man wishes 
to be served after his death, the more he kills during his life.

“When the Tartars of exotic Karaskan espy a foreigner who has wit, riches, and
fair looks, they kill him in order to appropriate his qualities to themselves and 
later generations.

“The custom in the kingdom of Tangut is for a young man, dagger in hand, to 
venture forth on certain days of the year, and to kill whomever he encounters, 
indiscriminately and with impunity; they who die by his hand, it is maintained, are
assured of greatest happiness in the life after this.

“In Kachao there are murderers for hire, upon whom one calls in time of need: 
when you have someone to have killed, you engage one of these mercenaries and
pay him his fee when the work is done.

“This reminds me of the story of the Old Man of the Mountain. That prince, who
held in his power the lives of all other sovereigns, had simply to send one of his 
subjects on a visit to this or that foreign potentate, and the emissary would strike 
his quarry down upon meeting him.

“Professional assassins are available in Italy too, you may be sure: a wise 
government will always tolerate them. And no just government will claim an 
exclusive right to dispose of human life.

“In Zeeland, in the old days they used to sacrifice ninety-nine men each year 
to the gods of the country.

“When the Carthaginians saw the enemy at their gates they immolated two 
hundred children picked from the ranks of the higher nobility; one of their laws 
stipulated that only children of that caste were to be offered to Saturn. A fine was
levied upon the mothers who during this ceremony betrayed the least hint of 
sorrow; the immolations took place before their eyes. Well-advised people who 
brand sentimentality as a crime!

“A Northern king, whose name escapes me at the moment, immolated nine of 
his children with the sole arm, he said, of extending his life at the expense of 
those from whom he took life away. Do not frown at this whimsical notion, but 
rather smile. For prejudices are pardonable when they produce pleasures.

“Shu Um-chi, father of a late Chinese emperor, had thirty men stabbed to 
death upon his mistress’ grave, to appease her manes.

“On his last voyage to Tahiti Cook discovered human sacrifices which had gone 
unnoticed by those who had preceded him on that island.

“As Herod, King of the Jews, lay on his deathbed he had all the Judean nobility 
convoked in the hippodrome of Jericho, then ordered his sister Salome to cause 
them to perish one and all at the moment he sighed out his ghost, so that he 
might be mourned universally and the Jews, weeping for their friends and 
kinsmen, be forced to sprinkle tears upon his ashes too. How strong must be that 
passion whose effects extend beyond the grave! Herod’s order, however, was not 
carried out.

“With his own hand Mahomet II cut off the head of his mistress, to 
demonstrate to his soldiers that his was not a heart to be softened by love; even 
so, he had just spent the night with Irene and slaked his desires.(31) The same 
personage, suspecting that it was one of his masculine playthings who filched a 
cucumber out of his garden, had everyone in his seraglio paraded and bellies slit 
open till at last the fruit was found in the guilty one’s entrails…. Finding some 
faults in a painting of the decollation of John the Baptist, he had a slave 
summoned and smote off his head, and showed Bellini, a Venetian and the author
of the painting he was criticizing, that he had imperfectly grasped Nature. ‘See 
here,’ said Mahomet, ‘this is how a severed head ought to look.’ Once again, it 
was this great man who, philosophically convinced that subjects exist for nought 
but the service of sovereigns’ passions, had one hundred thousand naked slaves 
made up into fascines and cast into the moats outside the walls of Constantinople 
at the time he was laying siege to that capital.

“Abdalkar, general of the king of Visapur, had a harem containing twelve 
hundred wives; he receives orders to lead his troops into the field; he fears lest 
his absence become a pretext for his wives’ infidelity; he has all their throats cut 
before him on the eve of his departure.

“The proscriptions of Marius and Sulla are masterpieces of cruelty; Sulla, 
butcher of half of Rome, dies a tranquil death at home in the midst of his loved 
ones. Let it now be maintained, after such examples, that a God watches over us 
and must punish crimes!

“Nero had ten or twelve thousand souls put to death in the circus because 
somebody, no telling just who, jeered at one of his drivers. It was during his reign
that the amphitheater at Praeneste collapsed, causing the death of another 
twenty thousand people; who doubts that he was the cause of the accident, and 
that he arranged it as a lewd prank?

“Commodus dealt severely with Romans who read the life of Caligula, he threw
them to the wild beasts. During his nighttime revels he amused himself mutilating
passers-by; or else would collect fifteen or twenty unlucky creatures picked up at 
random in the street, have them bound fast, and then, wielding a mace or club, 
exterminate them for fun.

“The eighty thousand Roman captives Mithridates slew in his states, the Sicilian
Vespers, the St. Bartholomew slaughters, the Dragonnades, the eighteen 
thousand Flemings the Duke of Alba beheaded to establish in the Low Countries a 
religion which abhors bloodshed: so many models of murder which prove that 
passions should always be generous in the taking of human life.

“Constantine, that so very stern emperor, so beloved of the Christians, 
assassinated his brother-in-law, his nephews, his wife, and his son.

“The natives of Florida tear their prisoners limb from limb; but to this practice 
sometimes add another, the very refined one of introducing an arrow into the 
anus and driving it in shoulder-high.

“There is nothing to equal the cruelty of the Indians toward theirs; the entire 
tribe must share in the pleasure of beating them to death; and while this is going 
forward, they are obliged to sing. Another refinement of cruelty: to deny victims 
even the solace of tears.

“Savages behave in the same way with captives. Their fingernails are torn out, 
their breasts and fingers torn off; their flesh is stripped away in ribbons from their
bodies; their genitals are pricked with awls, it is usually women who take charge 
of these tortures. They flog their victims, flay them; do, in a word, everything 
ferocity can invent to render the deaths of these wretches more frightful, and 
rejoice when they expire.

“And the child itself, does it not offer us the example of this ferocity which 
astounds us in adults? The child’s behavior proves that ferocity is natural: see it 
cruelly strangle a pet bird and laugh at the poor thing’s convulsions….

“Maori aboriginals are by no means alone in eating their enemies; others feed 
them to their dogs. Some revenge themselves upon pregnant women, slit open 
their bellies, snatch out the child, and dash its brains out upon the mother’s skull.

“The Heruli, the Germans, sacrificed all captives taken in war; the Scythians 
were content to immolate one out of every ten of them. For how long have the 
French not been massacring theirs? After the battle of Agincourt, that dark day for
France, Edward [sic] slew them all.

“When Ghenghis Khan seized China, he had two million children killed before 
his eyes.

“Glance a little at the lives of the twelve Caesars, in Suetonius’ biography you’ll
discover a thousand atrocities of this kind.

“Such is the scorn for the Pulias who form a caste in Malabar that they may be 
killed on sight. When one wishes to practice his skill at archery, he shoots at the 
first Pulia he finds, male or female, young or old.

“Provided they leave a coin on the corpse, the Russian, Danish, and Polish 
nobility have the right to kill serfs; the right estimation of a man’s life, whoever 
that man be, must always be in money, because money can serve as a reparation
while blood repairs nothing. If lex talionis is odious at all, then ’tis surely so in this
case; for the murderer may sometimes have a motive for committing his 
assassination, but you, simpleton children of Themis, you have none for 
committing yours. Your position is clear, it is strong? Ah, then answer me this 
question:

“What is it, according to you, that constitutes the crime in murder? The 
depriving a fellow being of his life? I deprive him of his life—and that is enough 
for you, who are not in the least concerned to know what kind of man he was I 
deprived of life; but if that man had committed a great many crimes himself, in 
killing him I do nothing worse than the law would do, and if I do evil, then so does
the law: in which is it preferable to believe, the innocence of him who kills a 
criminal, or the infamy of the law that kills the criminal?

“In how many lands and over how many centuries have they not been 
immolating slaves upon the tombs of masters? Do these people, in your opinion, 
believe there to be anything of the crime in murder?

“Who can guess at the number of Indians the Spaniards slew in their conquest 
of the New World? From nothing but transporting the invaders’ baggage, two 
hundred thousand perished in the space of a single year.

“Octavian had three hundred persons butchered in Perugia, merely to fete the 
anniversary of Caesar’s death.

“A Calicut pirate cruising down the coast runs upon a Portuguese brigantine; he
boards her, finds the crew all asleep, and cuts the throats of them all, because 
they dared take a nap while he was on a foray.

“Phalaris used to shut his victims up in a bull of bronze, so constructed as 
horribly to amplify the screams of the wretches imprisoned within. Strange 
invention of cruelty! and how much imagination it supposes in the tyrant who 
devised it!

“The Franks had the right of life and death over their wives, and exercised it 
without respite.

“The King of Ava detects rebellion in that handful of his subjects who have 
refused to pay their taxes; he has four thousand of them arrested and burns them
all in the same great bonfire. There are never any revolutions in the states of a 
prince as enlightened as he.

“Eulins of Romagna learns that the city of Padua has risen against him; he 
claps chains on eleven thousand of these thoughtless townsmen and in the public 
square puts them to death in the most various and crudest manners.

“One of the many wives of the king of Achem lets out a cry while dreaming, 
and it wakes all the others; hubbub in the harem; the monarch inquires into the 
cause for the disturbance; nobody is able to give him a satisfactory answer; 
whereat he puts all the three thousand women to torture, he has them subjected 
to unbelievable torments; nothing is found out; the two hands and two feet are 
then hacked off each one of them, and they are all cast into a lake.(32) The 
motive for this cruelty is not far to seek; it is undoubtedly of that kind which 
strikes bright sparks of lubricity into the soul of him who practices it.(33)

“In a word, murder is a passion, like gaming, wine, boys and women; never is 
it got rid of, once it has anchored in habit. No activity irritates as does this one, 
none prepares so much delight; it is impossible to weary of it; obstacles sharpen 
its flavor, and the relish for it we have in our heart goes to the point of fanaticism.
You, Juliette, have experienced how wonderfully it combines with debauches, and 
appreciated the tart flavor it gives them. It exerts a puissant influence at once 
upon the mind and the body; it inflames all the senses, it enchants, it dazzles. Its 
impact upon the nervous system, the commotion it produces there is greater by 
far than that of any other voluptuous agent; one is never fond of this one save 
inordinately, furiously, one never indulges in it save ecstatically. The plotting of it 
titillates, the execution electrifies, the remembrance inspires, the temptation to 
repeat it is enormous, the desire to do this and nothing else, constantly, is 
overwhelming. The nearer a creature comes to us, the more it wakes our interest,
the more directly it touches us, the more intimately, the more sacred its ties with 
us, the greater our delectation in immolating the victim. Refinements enter into 
the thing, as happens with all pleasures; from the moment this personal stamp is 
added, all limits are abolished, atrocity is wound, to its topmost pitch, for the 
sentiment that produces it exhales it in keeping with the increase or worsening of 
the torture; all one’s achievements now lie short of one’s intentions. The agonies 
leading to death must now be slow and abominable if they are to quicken the soul
at all, and one wishes that the same life could revive a thousand times over, in 
order to have the pleasure of murdering it that often, and that thoroughly.

“Each murder is a commentary and critique of the others, each demands 
improvement in the next; it is shortly discovered that killing is not enough, one 
must kill in hideous style; and though one may be unaware of the fact, lewdness 
almost always has the direction of these matters.

“A rapid glance now at these simultaneously voluptuous and barbarous 
inventions. A sketch of them will not be displeasing to you, I know: there is 
always something interesting and sublime about the violent aspects of Nature.

“The Irish used to crush their victims beneath weights. The Norwegians would 
stave in their skulls…. The Gauls broke their backs…. The Celts drove a saber 
through their breastbones…. The Cimbrians disemboweled them or else roasted 
them in furnaces.

“The Roman emperors used to enjoy watching young Christian virgins being 
whipped; having their bubs and buttocks tweaked with red-hot pincers; into their 
wounds boiling oil or pitch would be poured, and the same liquids squirted into all 
the orifices of their bodies. They themselves would sometimes play at torturer, 
and the martyrdoms then became a great deal crueler; rarely would Nero cede to 
someone else the pleasure of immolating these hapless creatures.

“The Syrians flung their victims off mountain-tops. The Marseillais clubbed his 
to death, and was particularly wont to fasten on the poor, exhibiting a preference 
Nature always inspires.

“The blacks of the Calabar River district deliver up small children to birds of 
prey, which devour their flesh. The sight thereof is prodigiously cherished by 
savages.

“Historians tell us that in Mexico, the patient’s four limbs would be held by four
priests, the high priest would open him from throat to navel, tear out his 
still-throbbing heart, and smear the gore over the idol; at other times the patient 
would be drawn forward and back over a keen-edged stone till it sawed into his 
belly and his entrails spilled out.

“In all this vast crowd of peoples covering our globe, hardly a one is found that
has ever attached the slightest importance to human life, because the fact is that 
nothing less important exists.

“Into the urethral canal the Americans insert a twig covered with little thorns, 
which they twirl in one direction, then in the other, spinning it between their 
palms and keeping at it for a considerable length of time, to the appalling distress
of the victim.

“The Iroquois affix the ends of their victim’s nerves to sticks and, by rotating 
these, wind out the nerves like string; in the course of the operation, the body 
twitches, bends, and is dislocated in an odd manner, and must be very exciting to 
watch.”

“You may be certain that it is,” Juliette remarked at this point, and went on to 
describe to the Holy Father the circumstances under which she had been able to 
witness this torture being performed; “the sight is overpowering; and you, my 
friend, could have gone for a swim in the downpour of fuck it cost me.”

“In the Philippines,” the Pope pursued, “a guilty woman is tied naked to a stake
and facing the sun; it kills her in time.

“In Juida the belly is cut open, the entrails removed, the cavity stuffed with 
salt, the body hung out on a pole in the market place.

“The Quoias hurl javelins at the back, the body is then cut into quarters, and 
the dead man’s wife is forced to eat it.

“When the Tonkinese go each year to pick the arecas they poison one of the 
nuts which is then fed to a child, a happy harvest being ensured, they consider, by
the immolation of this victim. Here again we find murder an act of religion.

“The Hurons suspend a cadaver above the patient, in such wise that all the filth
that spills from this dead body may splash upon his face, and to this vexation 
such others are added as cause him to expire in due time.

“The fierce Cossacks of Ousk and those parts tie the patient to the tail of a 
horse, which is then ridden at a gallop over rough terrain; Queen Brunhilde, you 
will recall, died from a similar trial.

“The ancient Russians impaled through the flanks and hooked by the ribs. Our 
Turkish contemporaries place the skewer through the fundament.

“During his Siberian travels Gmelin saw a woman buried alive up to the chin; 
thus was she fed; and expired only on the thirteenth day.

“The vestals were walled up in narrow little niches, where was placed a table 
and upon it a lamp, a loaf, and a bottle of oil. In Rome they have lately discovered
an underground passage leading from the imperial palace to the field beneath 
which these vestal catacombs were built.(34) Which proves that the emperors 
either went to witness these enjoyable sights, or had the doomed vestals fetched 
to their palace, to enjoy them there and then kill them in a manner analogous to 
their particular tastes and their passions.

“In Morocco and Switzerland the guilty one is clamped between planks and 
sawed in two. Hippomenes, the African king, had his son and daughter devoured 
by horses that had been deprived of food for a long time; and did it without 
thought for any sacred ties of kinship; it is no doubt from this feat he got the 
name Hippomenes.

“The Gauls first kept their victims five years in prison, then impaled and 
burned them, all this in honor of the Divinity, for it is upon that splendid machine 
all human iniquities must be blamed.

“The ancient Germans smothered their victims in a mud-slough. The Egyptians 
inserted sharpened reeds into every part of the body, then set them afire.

“The Persians, the world’s most ingenious race for the invention of tortures, lay
their victim in a round boat and inverted another over him, so that he was sealed 
between these two halves of a hollow sphere, except that his hands, feet, and 
head remained outside, passing through slots. He was forced to eat and drink in 
this situation; were he to refuse, his eyes were pricked with pointed instruments; 
honey was sometimes daubed on his face, so as to attract wasps; worms ate him 
alive. Who would believe it? Victims sometimes endured eighteen days of this 
treatment. What sublime science! And what art! For art consists in causing a little 
dying every day for as many days as possible. The Persians used also to grind 
between millstones, or would flay alive and with green thorns rub the skinned 
body, which causes unheard-of sufferings. Nowadays in the harems, the 
fashionable torture for women with whom some fault has been found is to cut 
multiple incisions in all their fleshier parts, and then to pour molten lead into each
of the wounds, one by one, drop by drop; to impale by way of the matrix, or to 
make a pincushion of the patient, using not pins, however, but sulphur-dipped 
splines which are lit and fueled by the victim’s own fat.”

And Juliette assured His Holiness that she was familiar with this torture too.

“Daniel,” the Pope went on, “informs us that the Babylonians cast unfortunates
into hot ovens.

“The Macedonians crucified head downward.

“The Athenians administered toxic brews, drowned in a bathtub after having 
slit the veins.

“The Romans occasionally hung by the virile privities from a tree; the torture of
the wheel was passed on to us by the Romans. With them an ordinary method of 
quartering was to bend down the crests of four saplings till they touched the 
ground, to attach the victim’s four limbs each to one of these treetops, and then 
to let them all fly back upright at the same moment. Mettius Suffetius was drawn 
and quartered by four chariots. Under the emperors they flogged to death. Or 
placed the victim in a leathern bag along with serpents, and tossed the bag into 
the Tiber. At other times the victim was strapped to the rim of a great wheel, 
which would be spun very swiftly for a while, then suddenly made to turn in the 
opposite direction, which loosened the victim inwardly and often caused him to 
vomit his very bowels.

“The great Torquemada had the tongs applied in his presence to the fleshier 
parts of the patient’s body; and at other times would have him sat upon a pointed
stake in such a manner that all his weight must bear on his rump: a frightful 
position, whence there result singular convulsions and a death accompanied by 
spasmodic laughter very extraordinary to observe.(35)

“Apuleius speaks of the mortification one woman was made to undergo, its 
details are rather droll. An ass was killed, its entrails removed, and into its skin 
she was sewn, all save her head; she was thus exposed to wild beasts.

“The tyrant Maxentius bound a living man to a dead man and left him to rot 
upon the corpse.

“There are countries where the patient is tied close to a bonfire; holes are 
bored in his body whereby the flames enter and consume him gradually from 
within.

“At the time of the Dragonnades, girls who were loath to embrace the True 
Faith were seized and, in order to bring about a change in their minds, their anus 
and womb were funneled full of gunpowder. Next, they were exploded like bombs.
You have simply no idea how this gave them a taste for the host and for auricular 
confession. And how can one help but love a God in whose name such wondrous 
fine deeds are wrought!

“Coming back again to classical tortures we see St. Catherine bound to a 
nail-studded cylinder and rolled down a mountainside. Now there, Juliette, is a 
pleasant way of getting to heaven, don’t you agree?

“We see other martyrs of this same religion, whose apostle I am rather more 
from interest than from taste, having needles driven under their fingernails, 
roasted upon grills, lowered head downward into a pit containing a dog and a 
snake otherwise deprived of food and drink, and having to endure a thousand 
other horrors of whose details you have a fair inkling.(36)

“Moving next to foreign customs, in China we see the executioner answerable 
with his life for the patient’s if this patient loses his before the appointed term, 
which is ordinarily very long, sometimes eight, even nine days, and during this 
time the tortures are varied with utmost artistry.

“The English chopped into pieces and boiled them in a pot. In their colonies 
they slowly crushed the Negroes in the sugar-cane mills, which is as slow a way 
to die as it is dreadful.

“In Ceylon the victim is condemned to eat his own flesh or his children’s.

“The inhabitants of Malabar are choppers also, they use a saber. Or else they 
feed to tigers.

“In Siam if you fall out of favor you may expect to be gored and trampled to 
death by bulls. The king of this country put a rebel to death by feeding him upon 
his own flesh, whereof he was given a slice from time to time; those same 
Siamese sometimes squeeze the victim’s body in a jacket through which he is 
pricked by very sharp instruments, to force him to hold his breath: next, the body
is cut suddenly in two, the upper part placed straight on a red-hot brass griddle, 
which halts the escape of blood and prolongs the life of the patient whose 
existence has been reduced by a half.

“It is not very different in Cochin-China, where they strip the man bare, bind 
him to a post, and remove one piece of his flesh every day.

“The Koreans inflate the victim’s body with vinegar and when he is swollen to 
goodly proportions, drum upon him with sticks till he dies. Their king put his sister
in a brazen cage beneath which a fire was kept burning, and she danced to amuse
His Majesty.

“In other parts the victim is fixed so that he lies in the air, one transverse bar 
supporting his thighs, his ankles attached to another; his shins are beaten with 
rods; occasionally he is struck on the buttocks; this latter method is widely 
practiced in Turkey and the Barbary States.

“The object they call the pao-lo in China is a brass column standing twenty 
cubits high and having eight in diameter; it is hollow; from within it is brought to 
an extremely high temperature; when it is glowing, the patient embraces the 
column, is bound fast to it, and is slowly grilled. ‘Twas, they say, an emperor’s 
wife who invented this torture, and never saw it being used without discharging 
deliciously.(37)

“The Japanese carve open the belly; the patient is sometimes pinioned by four 
men; from afar the fifth runs upon the sufferer and as he somersaults over him, 
deals him a skull-shattering blow with an iron mace.

“The Moravian Brothers used to tickle to death. A somewhat similar torture has
been tried on women: experience shows they may be masturbated to death.

“But what will surprise you even more is to see persons of condition and high 
rank plying the trade of executioner. What then is one to suppose, unless that 
they are guided by a cruel form of lubricity?

“Moulay Ismael was himself the chief executioner of the criminals in his 
empire; in Morocco no one was put to death save by his royal hand; and no one 
took off a head as nicely as could he. In performing these feats, so he used to 
say, he found inexpressible delight. Ten thousand unfortunates came to know the 
vigor of his arm: in those lands where he held sway it was a current opinion that 
he who perished by the monarch’s hand earned an eternity of bliss in Paradise.

“The king of Melinde himself metes out the bastinadoes in his country.

“Bishop Bonner of London himself depilated those who were unwilling to be 
converted, or lashed them. He held one man’s hand on a brazier until the nerves 
were burned.

“Uriothesli, England’s Lord Chancellor, had a very pretty woman who did not 
believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ brought before him, and he himself flogged 
her to ribbons and cast her into the fire. And do you fancy the lecher got through 
all this without an erection?

“In the year 1700, at the time of the war of the Camisards, Abbé du Chayla 
ranged the Cévennes, whipping all the little girls who would not renounce their 
Protestantism; so severely did he deal with some that they died, and the shooting
began forthwith.

“It has been reported in several countries that when two criminals are being 
executed at the same time, the headsman steeps his hands in the blood of the 
first and wipes it on the face of the second before decapitating him.

“Murder, we must conclude, has been revered and made a common practice all
over the earth; from pole to pole human victims are sacrificed. Egyptians, Arabs, 
Cretans, Cypriots, Rhodians, Phocaeans, Greeks, Pelagians, Scythians, Romans, 
Phoenicians, Persians, Indians, Chinese, Massagetae, Getae, Sarmatians, Irish, 
Norwegians, Suevi, Scandinavians, all Northern peoples, Gauls, Celts, Cimbrians, 
Germans, Bretons, Spaniards, Moors, Blacks, all of them individually and 
generally have slain human beings upon the altars of their gods. From time 
immemorial man has taken pleasure in shedding the blood of his fellow man and 
to content himself he has sometimes disguised this passion under a cloak of 
justice, sometimes under one of religion. But, and of this let there be no doubt, 
his purpose, his aim has always been the astonishing pleasure killing procures 
him.

“After such examples, Juliette, after such striking demonstrations, shall you be 
convinced that there is no commoner deed than murder in all the world, that 
there exists none more legitimate, and that it would be extravagance in you to 
have the slightest misgivings or a single regret over all those you may have 
committed, or to form the cowardly resolution not to commit any more?”

“Adorable philosopher!” I cried, flinging my arms around Braschi’s neck, “never
has anyone dealt with this important matter in the way you have done; never has 
it been so precisely, so thoroughly, so plausibly explained; with so many curious 
anecdotes; with so many trenchant examples. Ah, all my doubts are dissipated 
now, I surrender to right reason; all my scruples are removed, the way ahead lies
clear, and I am at the point of desiring, with Tiberius, that all mankind might have
but a single head which one could have the pleasure of cutting off at a single 
stroke.

“Let us go, Father, the hour is advanced; did you not say that morning must 
not find us still in our impurities?”

We moved into the basilica.


Part Five

Enormous screens surrounded the isolated altar of St. Peter, making a space 
about one hundred yards square with the altar in its center; this room was 
completely shut off from the rest of the cathedral. Twenty girls and twenty young 
boys were disposed on tiered benches backed against each of the four sides of the
arena; at each of the four angles of that superb altar, between the steps 
descending from it and the front row of benches, was a small Greekish altar 
intended for the victims. By the first a girl of fifteen was to be seen; by the 
second, a young woman of twenty, gravid; by the third, a youth of fourteen; by 
the fourth, a young man eighteen years of age and fair as Apollo. Three priests 
faced the great altar, ready to consummate the sacrifice, and six naked choirboys 
were there to serve it, two of them stretched prone upon the altars, their 
sparkling behinds ready for use as holy stones. Braschi and I reclined upon an 
ottoman situated on a stage raised ten feet above the ground, access to which 
was had by a stairway whose steps were covered by a magnificent Turkish carpet;
this stage was large enough to provide easy accommodation to twenty persons at 
least. Six little Ganymedes of seven or eight, all naked, sitting on the steps, were 
at a snap of the finger to execute the orders of the Holy Father; various costumes
both gallant and picturesque adorned the men, but that worn by the women was 
too delicious not to merit particular description. They wore a shift of unbleached 
gauze fitting loosely, negligently to their figure, hiding none of it; and had a pink 
collarette around the neck. The tunic I have just spoken of was, by means of a 
broad bow of the same pink, gathered up in behind and left the flanks absolutely 
exposed; over this shift each had on a blue taffeta simar which, falling in ample 
folds back over the shoulders, shaded nothing in front; their hair floated in free 
tresses; upon her head each wore a simple crown of roses. I was so taken with 
the elegance of this dishabille that I decided at once to adopt something similar. 
The ceremony began.

As soon as His Holiness formed a desire, the six aides-decamp poised on the 
stairs immediately flew to satisfy it. Three girls were called for. The Pope sat down
on the face of one of them, bidding her tongue his anus; the second mouthed his 
prick; the third dandled his balls; and while this was going forward my ass 
became the object of Pius VI’s lewd kisses. Mass was said and orders given that 
my wishes be carried out as promptly and fully as the Pontiff’s own. The Host 
once consecrated, the acolyte brought it up to the stage and respectfully 
deposited it upon the tip of the papal prick; the very next moment the bugger 
claps it into my bum, wafer first. Six girls and six pretty boys press around us, 
making flashing display of their asses and tools; I was myself being frigged from 
below by a very comely youth whose prick one of the girls was masturbating. 
There was no resisting this onslaught of lewdness; Braschi’s sighs, moans, 
pulsations, and blasphemies report his nearing ecstasy and precipitate mine; we 
discharge with screams of pleasure. Sodomized by the Pope, the body of Jesus 
Christ nested in one’s ass, oh, my friends! what rare delight. It seemed to me I 
had never in all my life tasted quite the like. We fell back exhausted amidst that 
crowd of celestial playthings surrounding us, and the sacrifice was over.

Forces must be regained; Braschi would have no tortures started until he was 
stiff again. As twenty girls and that many boys labored to restore him to life, while
he looked avidly on I got myself thirty or so fuckings from a group of youths, 
exciting them four at a time while being caressed by a pair. Braschi, as I say, 
watched me perform these libertine excesses, he cheered me on and exhorted me
to more. A new Mass was celebrated, and this time the Host, conveyed by the 
fairest prick in the room, was introduced into the fundament of the Holy Father, 
who, beginning to stand aright, had asses fence us in and he re-embuggered me.

“Good,” said he, withdrawing after a few lunges and recoveries, “I merely 
wanted to temper the blade. We may now immolate.”

He gives the signal for the first execution; it was to be of the eighteen-year-old
young man. We have him approach, and having kissed, caressed, sucked, polluted
him, Braschi informs him he is going to be crucified like St. Peter, head downward.
He hears his sentence with stoic resignation and undergoes it courageously. I was
frigging Braschi while the nails were being driven in; and who do you suppose 
wielded the hammers? The same priests who had just celebrated the Masses. 
After affixing the young man to his cross they attached the latter to one of the 
spiraled pillars of Saint Peter’s altar, and attention was turned to the girl of fifteen.
She too was led up, the Pope embuggered her; I was frigging her; she was first 
condemned to the most vigorous fustigation, then hanged from a second pillar.

Up stepped the boy of fourteen, Braschi embuggers him too; and desiring to 
carry out this execution personally, he subjected him to every known vexation 
and horror. It was at this point it occurred to me what a villain Braschi was. One 
has but to be on the throne to carry infamy to the last extreme: the impunity 
these diademed rascals enjoy leads them into refinements nobody else would 
even dream of. Sotted from lust, the monster finally tears the child’s heart out 
and devours it while loosing streams of evil fuck. The pregnant woman remained.

“Entertain yourself with this baggage,” Braschi said to me, “I leave her fate in 
your hands. I am not going to stiffen again, I can feel it, but it will nevertheless 
gladden me to see you have at her: no matter what the state I happen to be in, 
crime always amuses me. So don’t spare her.”

The wretch approaches.

“Whose is this child?” I ask her.

“One of His Holiness’ minion’s.”

“And it was done within His Holiness’ sight?”

“Yes.”

“The father, is he present?”

“He is standing there.” She pointed toward a young man.

I now addressed him. “What you put into her you shall now take out—here is 
the knife, and act this very instant if you do not wish to feel its edge.” The 
crestfallen fellow did as he was told; each thrust of the dagger drew a discharge 
from me, and when the body was all one great wound and I all dry, we retired.

Braschi was bent on having me pass the rest of the night with him, the 
libertine adored me.

“You are firm,” he declared, “and that is how I like a woman to be. Among 
them you do not have many rivals.”

“Princess Borghese surpasses me,” I replied.

“Far from it,” the Pope retorted, “she is forever having fits of remorse. A week 
from today,” he continued, “I shall give you the supper I have promised; the 
Princess will be there, and your friends the Cardinals too. Believe that I am 
sincere, beloved child, when I say that I hope we shall achieve horrors exceeding 
anything we have accomplished this evening.”

“I too look forward to the occasion,” I said politely, having in mind the theft I 
was planning to operate on my next visit to the Vatican, “yes, I am in expectation 
of great things.”

Braschi, who had been rubbing his testicles with a spirituous lotion meant to 
stimulate them, proposed that we return to our tricks.

“I’m afraid I lack the consistency to embugger you,” said he, “but you might 
suck me.”

I got astride his chest; my asshole settled over his lips and the rogue, Pope 
that he was, blew his seed into my mouth while forswearing his God like an 
atheist.

And he fell asleep. I was greatly tempted to take this opportunity to steal 
everything I could carry out of his treasury; I knew the way, he had shown it to 
me himself, I would encounter no guards. But this project having been concerted 
with Olympia, I did not want to cheat her of the pleasure of participating in it; 
moreover, Elise and Raimonde were to be along and between the four of us we 
would be able to get away with that much more booty.

Pius VI awoke after a short while. There was to be a consistory that day. I left 
him in peace to discuss the state of Christian conscience throughout the world, 
and besought pardon of mine for not having laden it with a sufficient quantity of 
crimes. I have said it before, I affirm it again: nothing is worse than virtuous 
remorse for a soul accustomed to evil; and when one exists in a state of complete
corruption, ’tis infinitely wiser to overdo wickedness than to rest in arrears; for 
doing more always brings some pleasure, while from doing less one has nothing 
but pain.

Two or three baths washed away the Pontifical stains, and I betook myself to 
the Borghese Palace to tell my friend of my Vatican success.

To avoid the monotony of details I shall not tarry long over those of the new 
orgies we celebrated there. The Sistine Chapel was their scene; above four 
hundred subjects of both sexes appeared at them; what was enacted in the way 
of impurities beggars description. Thirty virgin girls, between the ages of seven 
and fourteen and one more beautiful than the next, were violated and afterward 
massacred; forty boys met the same fate. Albani, Bernis, and the Pope buggered 
one another and were buggered, gorged themselves on drink and infamy, killed, 
bibbled and fucked themselves senseless, and when finally they were, that was 
the moment we chose, Olympia, Elise, Raimonde, and I, to slip away and pillage 
the treasury. We made off with twenty thousand sequins which Sbrigani, posted 
nearby with a few trusty individuals, had transported straight to the Princess’ 
home where, the next day, we divided the loot. Braschi never noticed the theft, or
else deemed best to feign not to have noticed it. I did not see His Holiness again; 
he felt, I suspect, that my visits to the Vatican were a little more than he could 
afford. In view of these circumstances I saw no reason to remain on in Rome, 
indeed, it seemed wiser to leave; Olympia was desolate when she heard the 
news; but part we must, despite the strain, and at the beginning of winter I set 
forth for Naples with a packet of letters of recommendation to the royal family, to 
Prince Francavilla, to every other grandee and high-bred figure in Naples. My 
funds I left in the hands of Roman bankers.

We traveled in an excellent coach, Sbrigani, my women and I. Four mounted 
valets were escorting us, when between Fondi and Minturno, where the road 
follows the Gulf of Gaeta and at some twelve or fifteen leagues from Naples, ten 
horsemen appeared toward dusk. Pistol in hand, they proposed that we quit the 
highway and come have a talk with Captain Brisatesta who, honestly retired in a 
castle overlooking the bay, did not suffer gentlefolk traveling in the land to pass 
so near his dwelling without gratifying him with a visit. We had no trouble 
understanding the meaning of this language and after a rapid estimation of the 
odds between our forces and the opposing ones, we felt called upon to capitulate.

“Comrade,” said Sbrigani to the officer, “I have always heard it said that rascals
get on together; if you exercise the profession in one way, we exercise it in 
another, and both of us are engaged in dupery.”

“You will tell all that to my captain,” this lieutenant replied, “as for me, I simply
obey orders and especially when my life depends upon it; march.”

As the riders had been tying our valets to the tails of their horses during this 
exchange, we found ourselves without anything further to add. We advanced. The
officer had climbed into our carriage and four of his men were driving it. For five 
hours we continued thus, and it was during that time our guide informed us that 
Captain Brisatesta was the most famous brigand in all Italy.

“He has,” said the lieutenant, “twelve hundred men enrolled, and our 
detachments roam the Papal States as far north as Trento and southward to 
land’s end in Calabria. Brisatesta’s wealth is colossal. He made a journey to Paris 
last year and while there espoused the charming lady who today does the honors 
of the house.”

“Brother,” I said to the bandit, “it would seem to me that the honors of a thief’s
house must not be very onerous.”

“I beg your pardon,” the officer returned, “Madame’s employment is more 
considerable than one might think: ’tis she who cuts the captives’ throats, and I 
assure you she acquits herself in a thoroughly conscientious and commendable 
manner, you will be enchanted to die by her hand.”

“Ah, I see,” said I, “that then is what you call doing the honors of the 
house—you are not reassuring, sir officer. And is the Captain presently at home, 
or shall we have dealings with Madame alone?”

“You will find them both at home. Brisatesta has just now returned from an 
expedition to the interior of Calabria which cost us a few men but which was 
worth a great deal of money. Since then our pay has tripled; oh, he is a kind man,
our Captain, as fair and just as they come. He always pays us according to his 
means; he’d give us ten ounces a day(1) if his earnings permitted it. But here we 
are,” the officer said. “I am sorry that darkness prevents you from seeing the 
location in which this superb house is set. Down below is the sea, we turn upward
to reach the castle which cannot be approached otherwise than on foot; we must 
therefore alight. From now on the path mounts steeply.”

Following the lead of our guides, after an hour and a half of struggling single 
file up the highest mountain I had ever climbed in my life, we came to a moat, a 
drawbridge was lowered, we traversed some fortifications bristling with soldiers, 
were challenged, allowed to pass, then found ourselves inside the citadel. It was 
indeed a formidable one, and maintained as it was by Brisatesta looked capable of
withstanding any assault or siege.

It was about midnight when we arrived; the Captain and his dame were in bed,
they were wakened. Brisatesta came at once to examine the catch. His was a 
striking appearance. He stood five feet ten inches tall, was in the flower of his 
manhood, his face was exceedingly handsome and at the same time exceedingly 
harsh. He cast a quick piercing glance at the men in our party, his eyes lingered 
only a little longer upon each one of us women; his brusque manner, his fierce 
stare made us tremble. He spoke a few words to the officer; the men were 
immediately led off in one direction, our trunks and belongings borne off in 
another. My friends and I were cast into a lightless dungeon, where after groping 
about we found some straw; there we lay ourselves wearily down, rather to 
bewail our ill fortune than seek the repose our horrible situation denied us. What 
cruel thoughts assailed us then, how were our souls not tried! The anguishing 
recollection of our past pleasures rose to mind, and only made our present plight 
seem darker. From dwelling upon our state of affairs we could deduce nothing but
melancholy presumptions; thus tormented by the past, terrified by the present, 
shuddering at the future, the blood hardly ran at all through our feverish veins. 
’Twas then Raimonde thought to invoke religion.

“Don’t bother with those illusions, child,” said I, “when one has despised them 
one’s whole life long it is impossible, no matter what the circumstances may be, 
to believe in them again; let them lie. Only remorse, furthermore, recalls one to 
religion and I am far from repenting or even regretting anything I have ever 
done; of all those deeds there is not one I am not prepared to commit afresh, 
granted the chance; it is over being deprived of my capacities I grieve, and not 
over the results obtained from them when they were in my possession. Ah, 
Raimonde, you do not realize the grip vice exerts upon a soul like mine! Riddled 
with crimes, fed by crime, it exists for nought but to batten on crime, and even 
with my neck on the block, still I shall be wanting to commit more; I’d like crime 
to emanate from my very ashes, I’d like the ghost of me wandering the world to 
harass mortals with crimes or to inspire crimes in them. I think, however, we 
need not be afraid, for we are in the hands of vice: a god will protect us. Much 
greater would be my dread were we prisoners of the frightful goddess men dare 
call Justice. The spawn of despotism mated to imbecility, if ’twere that whore held
us captive I would already have said my last farewells; but I have never been 
afraid of crime; the sectators of the idol we worship respect their peers and smite 
them not; we’ll join forces with these people if need be. Though I’ve not yet met 
her, I like what I have heard about this Madame Brisatesta; I wager we shall 
please her; we’ll make her discharge; and she’ll not kill us. Come here, Raimonde,
and you too, dear Elise, and since the only pleasure remaining to us is frigging, let
us enjoy it.”

Stirred by my speech and my fingers, the little minxes fell to playing; Nature 
served us just as well in this hour of grim adversity as in bygone days of 
prosperity. Never had I been so rocked, so whelmed by pleasure; but the return 
to reason was frightful.

“We are going to be slaughtered like sheep,” I said to my companions, “we are 
going to die like dogs, it is useless to delude ourselves, death is the fate in store 
for us. And it is not death that I dread, I am philosopher enough to be very sure 
that I’ll be no more unhappy after vegetating a few years on earth than I was 
before I got here; no, it is pain I dread, these scoundrels are going to make me 
suffer; they will perhaps enjoy torturing me as I have enjoyed torturing others; 
this captain has an evil look to me, he has long moustaches, a bad sign, and … 
and his wife is probably as cruel as he…. Oh, a moment ago I was full of 
confidence, and now I quake.”

“Madame,” Elise spoke up, “deep inside me there is a hope, I know not what it 
is, but your teachings put me at ease. It is according to the eternal laws of 
Nature, you have told me so, that crime will triumph and virtue be humbled; I 
place my trust in that immutable decree; ah, dear mistress, it shall spare us from 
disaster.”

“To be sure, to be sure, and my reasoning thereupon shall appear lucid and 
incontrovertible,” said I to my companions. “If, as cannot be doubted, might 
makes right, and the mass of crimes weighs heavier in the balance than on the 
other side do virtue and its practitioners, human self-interest is but the result of 
man’s passions and nearly all of them lead to crime; well, crime’s interest is to 
humble virtue; therefore, in almost all the situations of life, I shall lay my stake 
by crime rather than by virtue.”

“But, Madame,” said Raimonde, “look here, as matters stand between our 
captors and us, we are virtue, and vice is represented only by them; therefore 
they shall crush us.”

“We are speaking in general terms,” I replied, “this is but a particular case; 
Nature may make a single exception to her rules, and thereby confirm them, you 
know.”

We were in the midst of such discussions when a jailer, of more forbidding 
aspect even than his master, unlocked the door and handed us a plate of beans.

“Here,” said he in a guttural voice, “don’t waste any, it’s all you’re going to 
get.”

“What,” I demanded, “is it then to be of hunger we are to die?”

“No, for from what I hear you’re to be done in tomorrow, and Madame 
probably feels there’s no use spending good money to have you form turds you’re
not going to have time to shit.”

“But, dear fellow, you do perhaps know what kind of death is being prepared 
for us?”

“It’ll depend on what Madame’s fancy happens to be, our Captain leaves all 
that up to her; she does whatever she likes; but, you being women, your death 
ought to be milder than the one the men in your party shall have to face, for 
Madame Brisatesta is not very sanguinary except with men. She enjoys them 
first; then, when she’s tired of them, she puts ’em out of their misery.”

“And this does not arouse her husband’s jealousy?”

“Not at all, he does the same with women, when he’s finished amusing himself 
with them he turns ’em over to his wife who pronounces this or that sort of a 
sentence and usually executes it herself if the Captain is no longer in the mood for
such pleasures.”

“Your master seldom kills?”

“Hardly at all. Five victims a week, maybe six. You see, he’s done so much 
slaughtering in his time! He’s tired of it. Besides, he knows his wife has a dreadful
weakness for killing, and since he’s very devoted to her, he just steps aside and 
allows her to handle the business. Adieu,” said the churl, fitting the key into the 
lock, “I must be getting on my way, I have others to serve; we are kept pretty 
busy here; thanks to heaven, the house is always full, you’ve no idea the number 
of prisoners we take—”

“Comrade,” said I, “our belongings—are they safe?”

“Safe and sound in storage. You’ll not be seeing them again, but don’t worry, 
nothing is ever lost around here, we are very careful about that.”

And the door clanged shut behind him. Through a slot between the bars a 
weak ray of light entered the dungeon, enough to enable us to see one another’s 
faces.

After a moment I spoke to Elise. “Well, my dear, does that not suffice to dash 
whatever hope you have?”

“Not entirely,” was the amiable girl’s answer to me, “I cling to it in spite of all. 
Let us eat and not despair.”

That meager repast was barely finished when our warden reappeared.

“They are calling for you in the council chamber,” he informed us. “You won’t 
be kept waiting, it’s for today.”

We trudged after him.

It was a long room we entered at one end. At the other was a table, behind it a
woman sat writing. Without looking up she signaled for us to approach; then, 
laying aside her quill, she raised her eyes and ordered us to reply to the questions
she was about to ask … oh, my friends! what expressions can I find to convey my 
surprise. This woman about to interrogate me, this consort of the most wicked of 
all Italy’s brigands, it was Clairwil—my precious Clairwil, whom I found again 
under these incredible circumstances. I could contain myself no longer; I rushed 
into her arms.

“Whom do I behold?” cried Clairwil. “What! Juliette, is it you? Oh, tenderest 
friend, let me kiss you and may this, which would have been a day of sorrow for 
any other, become one of rejoicing for you!”

The multitude of feelings that beset my soul, the conflict between them, their 
vivacity and heat cast me into a veritable stupor. When I opened my eyes again I 
found myself in an excellent bed, surrounded by my women and Clairwil, who 
were vying for the pleasure of comforting me and giving me the care my state 
required.

“Long lost and dearest heart, I have you back again,” said my friend of olden 
days. “What happiness this is for me! I have already told my husband who it is 
destiny has brought under our roof; your servants, your effects, everything shall 
be restored to you, we ask only that you spend a few days with us; our style of 
life will cause you no alarm, I know you to have principles, and to be immune to 
scandal; what we achieved together in the past permits me to suppose that you 
will find this a sympathetic atmosphere.”

“Oh, Clairwil, your friend is ever the same,” I exclaimed; “my mind has 
matured with age, and the progress I have made is of a sort that only renders me
worthier of you; I joyfully await the criminal spectacles you prepare for me: we 
shall enjoy these pleasures together. For I have come a long way from the 
pusillanimity that came near to being my undoing once upon a time, and your 
friend, be sure of it, blushes no more save at virtue. But you, dear angel, where 
have you been? What have you done? Ah, we have been separated for ages; what
lucky star has led us both to this place?”

“You shall have all the particulars,” Clairwil assured me; “but I want you to 
begin by calming yourself, by recovering your serenity, by accepting our apologies
for having given you such a poor welcome. You are going to see my husband, I 
venture to predict you will take very kindly to him…. Oh, Juliette, recognize the 
hand of Nature; she has always championed the cause of vice, she does so again,
as you see. Had you fallen into the clutches of a virtuous woman, you, vicious 
rascal that you are, you were doomed; but we are of your own sort, and by us 
you can only be saved. Cheerless followers of virtue, avow your weakness and 
may the everlasting superiority of crime over your souls of slime impose eternal 
silence upon you.”

Brisatesta arrived just as his wife concluded this speech. Whether because the 
situation had altered or because my now tranquil spirits caused me to view things 
with a different eye, this brigand no longer struck me as so frightening; 
scrutinizing him attentively, I found him extremely attractive; and so in truth he 
was.

“You have got yourself a fine husband,” I congratulated my friend.

“Look well at his face, Juliette,” Clairwil replied, “and tell me if you think none 
but the bonds of wedlock unite us.”

“You bear a strange likeness to each other, it is true.”

“This splendid fellow, oh, Juliette, is my brother; events had separated us, a 
journey he made last year brought him back to me. Marriage reinforced our ties; 
we wish them to be indissoluble.”

“And indissoluble they shall be,” said the Captain, “for when two people 
resemble each other so perfectly, when their inclinations, their morals so 
completely conform, ’tis madness ever to part.”

“You are a couple of rascals,” said I, “you live in the depths of incest and 
crime, there shall never be any absolution for you; were you in my place, just 
come from Rome, all these sins would make you quake to the soul, and the fear 
of never being able to purge them would prevent you from persevering in your 
wickedness.”

“Let us dine, Juliette,” said my friend, “you can finish your sermon over 
dessert.” Then, opening the door to an adjoining room, “There,” she went on, 
“are your possessions, your servants, there is your Sbrigani; be all of good cheer 
in this house, become its friends, and when you have gone away from here, make
it known abroad that the charms of sweet amity have their faithful even in a den 
of crime and depravity.”

A magnificent meal was awaiting us. Sbrigani and my women sat down beside 
us; my valets joined my friend’s in serving the dishes and pouring the wine; and 
we were soon all one happy family. It was eight o’clock in the evening when we 
rose from the table. Brisatesta never left it before he was drunk; it appeared to 
me that his beloved wife had adopted the same failing. From the dining hall we 
passed into a larger salon where our hostess suggested we twine the myrtle of 
Venus to the vine leaves of Bacchus.

“This bugger here has the look of a man with something in his breeches,” said 
she, pulling Sbrigani to a couch. “Brother, peep under Juliette’s skirts, you’ll find 
she is favored in the way you appreciate.”

“Oh, God,” I cried, my head beginning to reel also, “to be fucked by a highway 
robber, by an assassin!”

And I was not done speaking when I was bent over a sofa by the outlaw, a 
prick as thick as my arm was already nudging between my quivering buttocks.

“Fair angel,” the libertine said, “you will pardon a little preliminary rite without 
which, well standing as you see my prick to be, it would nonetheless be 
impossible for me to do your charms the profound homage they deserve; I shall 
be obliged to bloody this gorgeous ass, but trust my skill, you’ll hardly feel a 
thing.”

Catching up a steel-tipped martinet wherewith he dealt my behind a dozen 
whistling blows, he had laid open that entire part of me inside two minutes, 
without causing me anything like a disagreeable sensation.

“That should do very nicely,” said the Captain, “my thighs shall be wet as they 
press against you, and my prick lodged deep in your bowels will perhaps wash 
them with a dense sperm, unobtainable save through this ceremony.”

“Lay on, brother, lay on!” called Clairwil from the midst of her fucking with 
Sbrigani, “her ass has weathered the worst, we used often to wear whips out 
upon each other.”

“Oh, sir!” I cried upon feeling the Captain’s outsized bludgeon thunder into my 
rectum, “the lash was as nothing to this….”

But my protest came too late, Brisatesta’s monstrous engine had already 
struck rock-bottom; I was embuggered to the hilt. Others were imitating us: 
Clairwil, as was her custom, offering only her rear to her fucker, was solidly run 
on by Sbrigani’s spirited device, while Raimonde, frigging her clitoris, was 
bestowing the same voluptuous services to her that I was extracting from Elise.

Oh, friends of mine, this bandit chief, what a fucker was he! Not so much 
attached to the one shrine where I at first thought his tastes would hold him fast, 
he alternately repaired to each of them and by that dual intromission the rascal 
kept me in constant discharge.

“There it is, Juliette,” said he as he withdrew and couched his enormous 
member between my bubs, “the explanation and cause of all my wild ways and 
delinquencies; it is the pleasures I receive from this fine prick that have shaped 
my career; as is the case with my sister, crime heats me, and I am unable to 
loose a drop of fuck save through the plotting or enacting of some horrors.”

“Why then, for sweet fuck’s sake let us create a few of them,” I replied. “Since 
we are all animated by the same desire and the opportunity for satisfying it is 
probably within our grasp, let’s blend bloodshed and fuckshed. Have you no 
victims about?”

“Ah, slut,” said Clairwil, overtaken by a spasm, “I recognize you in those 
words, they are your hallmark. Come now, brother, let us please this charming 
creature, we’ll immolate the Roman belle we arrested this morning.”

“Right you are, have her brought up; her death will amuse Juliette, we shall all 
frig and discharge while conducting the operation.”

The traveler arrives. Friends, will you guess the identity of the woman who 
now stands within my sight? Borghese, yes, she, the delicious Borghese; the 
sensitive Borghese; brokenhearted at my departure, life had lost all meaning for 
her, she had flown forth in search of me, and Brisatesta’s men had just taken her 
on the Naples road as they had taken me the day before.

“Clairwil,” I exclaimed, “this woman’s not for victimizing either, she is an 
accomplice, she is the friend who assumed the place you had occupied in my 
heart, to the extent that another could replace you there; treat her lovingly, my 
angel, the rascal is deserving of us.”

And the heavenly Olympia kissed me, caressed Clairwil, and seemed to implore
Brisatesta.

“Oh, Godsfuck,” muttered the latter, erected like a Carmelite, “this 
complication of adventures, heating in me desires to fuck this lovely lady, cool me
to other projects; first let’s fuck her, then we’ll decide her fate.”

I surrender my post to Olympia; her nobly formed ass receives the wide praise
it deserves. Using the same means he employed with me, Brisatesta makes the 
same artistic shambles of it and sodomizes it straight off and tempestuously. My 
women frig me, and Sbrigani goes on rasping Clairwil. For once no other stimulant
is needed to rouse our spirits; Brisatesta lines us up in a row, all five on our 
hands and knees upon a sofa and our flanks nicely lifted: Sbrigani and he plumb 
us turn by turn, while one ass-fucks the other fucks cunt, and the scoundrels 
finally discharge, Sbrigani in Clairwil’s fundament, Brisatesta in Olympia’s.

Some more decent behavior succeeded these pleasures. Borghese, newly 
emerged from a dungeon, also needed a bite to eat; she was served a supper and
we went to bed. After breakfast the following morning, the reunion of a Parisian 
petite maîtresse with a bandit chieftain in the wilds of Italy still seemed so 
surprising to us all that we begged the Captain to relate what promised to be a 
very unusual story.

“I shall tell it if you like,” Brisatesta consented; “but it includes details rather 
more scandalous than those one would ordinarily hazard in company; your 
manners, however, vouch for your philosophy and I believe there is nothing I 
need keep from your hearing.”

BRISATESTA’S STORY

If modesty still had any habitation in my soul, I would surely hesitate to 
disclose my eccentricities; but having long ago arrived at that degree of moral 
corruption where one is safe from all shame, not the slightest scruple prevents 
me from confiding to you all down to the least and seamiest events of a life 
which, summed up in a phrase, amounts to a tissue of crime and execration. The 
gracious personage you see at my side, and who bears the title of wife to me, is 
that and my sister also. We are both the children of that famous Borchamps, 
renowned not only for his concussions but for his wealth and libertinage as well. 
My father had just entered into his fortieth year when he married my mother, 
twenty years his junior and much richer than he; I was born before the marriage 
was a year old. My sister Gabrielle came into the world six years later.

I was turning sixteen, my sister ten, when Borchamps apparently decided that 
henceforth he alone would be in charge of my upbringing; we had been away at 
school, we were now fetched home. And to return under the paternal roof was to 
be restored as it were to life; the little we had learned of religion my father 
helped us now to forget, and the most agreeable talents he taught us instead 
replaced the gloomy obscurities of theology. We were soon to notice that my 
mother was in no wise pleased by such proceedings. Mild-tempered, gently bred, 
innately pious and virtuous, she was far from imagining that the principles our 
father was inculcating in us were someday to make for our happiness; and full of 
her little notions, she interfered as best she could in her husband’s enterprises, 
who while mocking her and sneering at her objections, went on notwithstanding 
to destroy not only all there was in us of religion’s principles but those of morality 
also. The most inviolable bases of what is popularly understood as natural law 
were likewise reduced to rubble; and this amiable father, in his eagerness that we
become as thoroughly philosophical in our outlook as he, left no stone unturned in
his effort to render us impassive before prejudices and insensible to remorse. To 
forestall the possibility of these maxims suffering contradiction, he took care to 
keep us well isolated from the world outside. Only the occasional visit of one of 
his friends, and of that friend’s family, ever mitigated our lonely retirement; the 
intelligence of the sequel requires that I now say something of this worthy 
individual who would pay us visits.

Monsieur de Breval, forty-five years of age at the time, nearly as wealthy as 
my father, like him had a young and virtuous wife and, like him, a pair of 
charming children, one of whom, his son Auguste, was fifteen and the other, 
Laura, a truly stunning creature, almost twelve. Each time Breval came to our 
house he brought his wife and children along; we four youngsters would be put 
together under the supervision of a governess named Pamphylia, she being 
twenty, very pretty, and perfectly in my father’s good graces. All four being raised
in the same manner, having identical information and attitudes, the conversations 
we had and the games we played were well in advance of our years; and truly, 
anyone eavesdropping upon our conventicles would have sooner taken them for 
meetings of a philosophical circle than for the recreations of juveniles. By dint of 
being made familiar with Nature we were shortly lending an ear to her voice, and 
the extraordinary thing is that it did not inspire us to mingle. Each remained 
within the bonds of kinship; Auguste and Laura were in love, confessed their 
sentiments with the same candor, the same joy, as Gabrielle and I declared ours 
to each other. Incest does not cross Nature’s plans, since the first natural 
impulses we had were in that direction. There is this too which may seem 
remarkable: our young ardors were accompanied by no twinges of jealousy. This 
ridiculous feeling is no proof of love; begot of pride and selfishness, it is more a 
token of the fear of seeing another object preferred to oneself than to that of 
losing the object one adores. Although Gabrielle might be fonder of me than of 
Auguste, she embraced him no less warmly for that; and although I might 
worship Gabrielle, I did nonetheless conceive violent desires to be loved by Laura.
Thus did six months go by without us combining any earthly element into this 
soulful metaphysics; ’twas not willingness that we lacked, but instruction, and our
fathers, who were keeping a watchful eye upon us, at last decided to lend their 
aid to Nature.

One day when the weather was very warm and our elders, as was their wont, 
had forgathered to spend a few hours among themselves, my father, half-naked, 
came to find us and he proposed that we move from the nursery into the 
apartment where he and the other adults were; we accompanied him, the young 
governess following on our heels. And there, fancy our surprise at seeing Breval 
on top of my mother, and his wife the next instant underneath my father.

“Pay close attention to this mechanism of Nature,” our young Pamphylia said to
us, “study it well, your parents may soon be disposed to initiate you into these 
mysteries of lubricity both for your education’s and your happiness’ sake. Examine
each of these groups; you observe that they who compose them are enjoying the 
pleasures of Nature; apply yourselves to imitating them….”

Upon all this we bent the stare of open-mouthed bewilderment, this being the 
usual effect such a spectacle has upon children’s minds; but a keener interest 
took hold of us by and by, and we went forward to view matters from nearer on. 
It was then we perceived the difference in the four actors’ situations: the two men
were taking manifest pleasure in what they were about, while the two women 
seemed not to have their heart in the game and even showed what looked like 
repugnance for it. Pamphylia demonstrated, explained, pointed things out, and 
identified them by name.

“Retain it all carefully,” said she, “for you shall soon be put into action.”

She then entered into the most extensive details. There came a momentary 
pause in the scene, but one which, instead of reducing its interest, enhanced its 
attractiveness. Leaping hotly away from Madame de Breval’s behind (for those 
gentlemen ass-fucked only), my father drew us toward him and had each of the 
four of us touch his member, showing us how it was to be frigged. We laughed, 
we gaily did as we were told, and Breval watched us while continuing his buggery 
of my mother.

“Pamphylia,” my father said, “relieve them of their clothes; it is time to join a 
little practice to the theory of Nature.”

The next instant, we are naked; Breval drops what he is in the middle of doing,
and the two fathers fall to caressing us indiscriminately, fingering us and sucking 
us here and there and everywhere, without forgetting Pamphylia, whom the 
rascals fondle and kiss almost to pieces.

“What an atrocity!” cried Madame de Breval, “how does one dare behave in 
such a way with one’s own children?”

“Silence, Madame,” her husband shouted at her; “confine yourselves, both of 
you, to the passive roles you have been allotted; you are here to be made use of, 
not to harangue us.”

Thereupon returning quietly to work, the libertine and his colleague continued 
their examinations just as phlegmatically as if in this height of impurity there 
were nothing that could justify the two mothers’ feelings of outrage.

The sole object of my father’s fervent attentions, he appeared to be neglecting 
all the others in favor of me. Gabrielle, if you wish, did indeed interest him too; 
he kissed her, he frigged her; but his most impassioned caresses were all aimed 
at my youthful charms. I alone seemed to inflame him; I alone received that 
voluptuous caress of the tongue in the ass, sure sign of a man’s predilection for 
another man, certain gage of the most refined lust, and which true sodomites are 
loath to lavish upon women, from fear of the appalling disgust the environs 
expose them to; now ready for anything, my father steers me to the couch where
my mother is lying, places me flat upon her belly, has me held there by Pamphylia
who, naked pursuant to his orders, during the operation gives him the world’s 
prettiest ass to handle. His lips moisten the spot he wishes to penetrate; once he 
considers the outer gates sufficiently ajar, his engine arrives before the portal of 
the temple … thrusts … pushes … passes in … drives far, and depucelates me with 
ecstatic effects.

“Good my Lord,” shrieked my mother, “oh, what manner of horrors are these! 
Was your son made to be the victim of your libertinage, and are you not at all 
aware that what you have just done bears the stamp of two or three crimes, for 
the least of which there are gallows raised?”

“Eh, but, Madame,” was my father’s dry retort, “’tis precisely what you tell me 
that is going to make me discharge the more deliciously. You have nothing 
whatever to fear, the boy is at a very fit age to endure these mediocre assaults, it
could easily have been done four years ago, and ought to have been: I depucelate
far younger children in the same manner every day. I have every intention of 
soon doing the same to Gabrielle, even though she is but ten: my prick is slender,
thousands will tell you so, and as for my skill, it is incredible.”

Be all that as it may, blood seeps from my wounds; floods of sperm stanch it, 
my father grows calmer, continuing, however, to caress my sister who takes my 
place after I have been dismissed.

Meanwhile, Breval was not wasting his time; but being more enamored of his 
daughter than of his son, it is upon Laura he first opens fire and the little thing, 
likewise placed upon her mother’s bosom, has just seen her maidenhead blasted.

“Fuck your son,” my father calls to him, “I am going to embugger my 
daughter: let them all four slake our brutal thirsts this day. The time has come to 
have them enter into the one role Nature assigned them to play; it is time they 
realize that it is only to serve as our whores they were born, and that were it not 
in the hope of fucking them, we might never have created them at all.”

The two sacrifices are offered simultaneously. To the right one sees Breval 
depucelating his son while kissing his wife’s asshole and palpating his daughter’s 
buttocks, still slimed with his fuck; to the left, my father bum-fucking Gabrielle 
while he licks my behind, while he molests my mother’s with one hand and frigs 
Pamphylia’s anus with the other; both gentlemen discharge, and quiet is restored.

The remainder of the evening is devoted to giving us lessons. We are married; 
my father mates me to my sister; Breval does the same with his children. They 
excite us, prepare avenues, consolidate junctions; and while they have us thus 
linked front to front they sound our asses, now this ass, now that, taking turns; in
such a manner that Breval would be buggering me while Borchamps was fucking 
Auguste, and while all this was going on, the two mothers, constrained to 
participate in the celebration of the orgies, would, along with Pamphylia, be 
making broad display of their charms to the two libertines. A number of other 
lubricious scenes follow that one: my father’s imagination was limitless. Messieurs
place the children upon their mothers, and while the husband of one bum-fucks 
the wife of the other, they oblige us youngsters to frig our mothers. Pamphylia 
runs up and down the ranks, she cheers the contestants on, emboldens them, 
shows them the way; her turn comes, she is sodomized; delicious discharging 
finally pacifies spirits, and festivities are declared at an end.

Several days later my father summoned me into his library.

“My friend,” said he, “you alone shall henceforth provide me the joys of my 
life; I worship you, and wish to fuck nobody else; I am going to send your sister 
back to her nunnery. She is very pretty, I do not gainsay it, I have received much 
pleasure from her; but she is female, and that in my view is a serious flaw. 
Moreover, I could well become disturbed by the pleasures you might taste with 
her; I want only you beside me. You shall be lodged in your mother’s apartment; 
she will step down from her place and yield it to you, she has no other choice; we
shall lie every night together, I shall spend myself dry in your splendid ass, you 
shall discharge in mine, we shall be very happy with each other, ’tis certain. Such 
assemblies as the one at which you were present will be held no longer; Breval is 
mad about his daughter, and plans to behave with her as I am going to do with 
you. We shall not cease to be friends; but, too envious of our mutual pleasures, 
too jealous of our own, we have reached the decision to mingle them no more.”

“But my mother, Sir,” said I, “may not all this anger her?”

“Dear friend,” my father replied, “listen carefully to what I have to say to you 
on that head; you are clever enough to understand me.

“This woman who brought you into the world is perhaps the creature who in all
the universe I most supremely detest; the ties binding her to me render her a 
thousand times more loathsome yet, that is my attitude. Breval has a similar one 
toward his own wife. The manner in which you have seen us use these women is 
the result of our disgust and our indignation; it is far less for the sake of 
amusement than in order to debase and degrade them that we prostitute them as
we do; we outrage them from hatred and a kind of cruel delectation you yourself 
shall, I trust, someday come to know, and whereof the aim is to extract an 
unspeakable pleasure from vexations imposed upon an object one has enjoyed 
over much and over long.”

“But, Sir,” was the question common sense bade me put, “you will then 
torment me also when at last you grow weary of me?”

“That is an altogether different affair,” my father explained, “they are neither 
conventional usages nor laws which bind us, but rather similarities of taste, 
common convenience, that is to say, true love; furthermore, our union is criminal 
in the eyes of mankind, and one never wearies of crime.”

Knowing neither more nor better at the time, I believed all I was told and from 
there on lived with my father on exactly the same footing as if I had been his 
mistress; I passed all my nights at his side, very often in the same bed, and we 
would ass-fuck each other until we collapsed from exhaustion into sleep. 
Pamphylia was, after Breval, our second confidante and a regular collaborator in 
our pleasures; my father liked having her whip him while he embuggered me; he 
would also sodomize and lash her; and sometimes she would be made to kiss and
caress me, then my father would invite me to do whatever I cared to with her, 
upon condition that, while I was doing it, I caress and kiss his ass. And 
Borchamps, like Socrates, taught his disciple even as he fucked him. The most 
impious, the most antimoral principles were suggested to me; and if I was not 
already out robbing on the highways, it was through no fault of Borchamps. Now 
and then, at holidays, my sister came to the house, but she was not warmly 
welcomed there; very unlike my father in this regard, whenever I could obtain a 
moment alone with her I bore her testimony of great ardor, and fucked her at the 
slightest chance.

“Father dislikes me,” Gabrielle told me, “he prefers you…. So it is, so let it be. 
Live happily with him and never forget me….”

I kissed Gabrielle and swore I would adore her always.

I had for quite some time noticed that my mother never emerged from 
Borchamps’ private study without a handkerchief pressed to her eyes and heaving
sighs of greatest sadness. Curious to know the cause of her sorrow, I cut a slit in 
the partition separating that study from my boudoir and, when the first 
opportunity for spying upon them came, stole quietly to the hole and peered 
through it. I was witness to horrors; my father’s loathing for his-wife vented itself 
in the form of frightful physical mistreatments. There is no imagining what his 
ferocious lust would inflict upon that unhappy victim of his aversion; after beating 
her senseless with his fists, he would kick her as she lay on the floor, at other 
times he would flog her bloody with a martinet, and more often still he would 
prostitute her to an exceedingly ill-favored man, unknown to me, and with whom 
he held lewd commerce himself.

“Who is this fellow?” I one day asked Pamphylia, to whom I had confided my 
discoveries and who, full of friendliness for me, offered to help me make more of 
them.

“He,” said she, “is a professional scoundrel your father has saved two or three 
times from hanging; the sort of man who for six francs would assassinate anyone 
you wanted put out of the way. One of Borchamps’ greater pleasures is to have 
him flog your mother and then, as you have yourself seen, to prostitute her to 
him. Borchamps is dreadfully fond of the man, and used to have him very often in
his bed before that became your regular place. But you have still a few things to 
learn about the libertinage of him who sired you: be at your spyhole tomorrow 
and you will observe a scene to outdo all those you have just now described to 
me.”

No sooner am I at my post than four stout swashbuckling lads march into my 
father’s library, clap a pistol to his nose, seize him, bind him fast to one side of a 
double ladder, then, catching up each a bundle of withes, beat him about the 
buttocks and thighs, perhaps a thousand strokes apiece; the blood was bubbling 
out of him when they loosed his bonds to toss him upon a couch and assault him 
in such wise that at all times he had a prick in his mouth, one in either hand, and 
one in his bum. He was fucked more than twenty times over, and by what pricks, 
my God! I could not have got my hand around the smallest of them.

“I’d have liked to have been embuggering you while watching all that,” I 
admitted to Pamphylia, “perhaps, dearest friend, you might be able to induce my 
father to have my mother the victim of a similar joust.”

“Oh, that should not be difficult,” the dear girl assured me, “you have simply to
propose a horror to Borchamps for him to seize the idea. You’ll not have to wait 
long for the scene you desire.”

A few days later, in effect, Pamphylia told me the moment was at hand, I glued
my eye to the crack in the partition. My poor mother was lashed and sodomized 
with such force that the quartet left her motionless on the floor. As usual, 
Pamphylia lent me her superb hindquarters during the show; and I may honestly 
say that I had never discharged more deliciously before.

I avowed everything to my father, including the extreme pleasure his 
clandestine revels had been procuring me.

“The suggestion that you treat your wife as you have just done originated with 
me after I saw how you had yourself treated.”

“My friend,” Borchamps wanted to know, “are you capable of helping me in 
these operations?”

“Be sure of it,” I replied.

“Truly? This woman who brought you into the world?”

“She labored only in her own behalf, and I detest her as powerfully as you 
possibly can.”

“Kiss me, my beloved, you are delicious; and believe me when I say that you 
shall from now on begin to taste the most violent pleasures in the realm of human
experience. Only in outraging what man is stupid enough to call the laws of 
Nature is he able to find authentic delight. Why, dare I believe my ears? You will 
mistreat your mother, word of honor?”

“More cruelly than you, I swear it.”

“You will martyrize her?”

“Martyrize her, torture her, I’ll kill her if you like.”

And Borchamps, who had been fondling my behind throughout this 
conversation, here lost control of himself, spilling his seed before he had time to 
shoot it into my ass.

“Until tomorrow, my friend,” said he, “it’s tomorrow that I put your mettle to 
the test; between now and then, no nonsense, eh? Rest yourself, as I intend to 
do: fuck is vital to any such undertaking, one must lay by a double dose of it if 
one wishes to achieve infamies.”

At the appointed hour my mother passed into Borchamps’ study; Borchamps’ 
wicked protégé was there; the scene was frightful. The poor woman burst into 
tears at seeing me there, and that I was one of her most implacable enemies. I 
strove to improve upon the horrors wherewith my father and his friend beset her. 
Borchamps would have the man embugger me as I lay atop my mother clawing 
the sacred breast whence I had first drawn sustenance. Energetically prodded by 
a length of good prick in my ass, my imagination wonderfully stimulated by the 
thought of being fucked by a professional rogue, I went a bit farther than I had 
been told and came away with the nipple of my very respectable mother’s right 
breast in my teeth; she emits a scream, loses consciousness, and my delirious 
father rushes to replace his friend in my ass, covering me with praise, and filling 
me with sperm.

I had just attained my nineteenth year when my father at last chose to broach 
all that was on his mind.

“I simply cannot stand the presence of that woman any longer, 

he declared; “I must get rid of her—but not outright, not crudely. Rather, by 
torturing her…. Will you assist me, my boy?”

“The thing to do,” said I, “is cut her belly open, one horizontal slash, one 
vertical, I’ll go into her entrails with a hot iron, I’ll cauterize her heart and viscera,
she will die, but very gradually.”

“Heavenly child,” my father sighed, “little angel….”

And this infamy, this execration by which I made my entry into the career of 
crime, it was enacted. My father and I consummated it in the throes of acutest 
pleasure; the rascal fucked my ass and frigged my prick while I massacred his 
wife.

Unhappy dupe that I was! Lending myself to this crime I toiled toward nought 
but my own undoing; it was only in order to wed another woman that my father 
had got me to slay my mother, but so well had he hid his scheme that I went a 
whole year without guessing what he was about. Once I had wind of it I spoke to 
my sister. I told her the entire tale.

“My child, this man is bent on destroying us,” said I.

“That has been my opinion for a long time,” Gabrielle replied; “ah, dear 
brother, I would have spoken to you had I thought you would heed a warning, but
you were blind to everything, and to his character blindest of all; we are both 
ruined if we do not take measures to prevent it. Are you as firm of soul and 
purpose as I, and shall we act in concert? I have here some powder, a schoolmate
gave it to me; by these means she freed her own self from the parental yoke; let 
us do the same. If you cannot bring yourself to it, leave the thing to me; the urge
has been on me for years, and I shall be acting in accordance with Nature’s 
reiterated counsels: and what she demands of us is just. Do I see you shudder, 
my friend?”

“Not from fear. Give me this powder: before noon tomorrow it shall be in the 
guts of him who presumes to make fools of us.”

“Not so fast! Don’t think I am ceding you all the honor of breaking our 
shackles; we shall perform the deed together. I shall be at dinner tonight; take 
half the packet, put the stuff in his wine. To make sure of our kill, I’ll put the other
half in his soup. We’ll be orphaned in an hour; in three days’ time we shall be sole
owners of the possessions fortune has destined us to.”

No mouse ever scampered straighter into a trap than did Borchamps drink his 
way to the doom our wickedness prepared for him; he fell dead at dessert. This 
sudden end was attributed to a choleric stroke, and all was forgotten.

Being nearly twenty-one years of age, I obtained patents of majority and the 
wardship of my sister. Once affairs were arranged she emerged as one of the 
most eligible matches in all France. I found her a man as rich as she, of whom 
she very dextrously disencumbered herself when once, by means of a child, she 
was assured of his legacy. But let us not anticipate events. Once I saw my sister 
properly established, I put my wealth into her safekeeping and told her of the 
exceedingly great desire I had to travel abroad. I converted a million into letters 
of credit with the foremost European bankers; then I embraced my dear 
Gabrielle.

“I adore you,” I told her, “but I must be on my way and this absence will 
doubtless last a little while. We are both of us made for great things and to go 
far; let us both gain more knowledge and acquaintances; later, we shall join 
company definitively, for heaven has intended us one for the other, and heaven’s 
wishes must not be disappointed. Love me, Gabrielle, forget me not, and I shall 
ever cleave to my love for you.”

As for what became of Clairwil, the story, Juliette, is already known to you, at 
any rate for the greater part; she had, as I told you, contrived to slough off her 
conjugal ties, she was able to live a free and happy woman in the lap of 
abundance and lewd joys; her liaisons with the Minister cemented her disorders 
by guaranteeing their absolute impunity. There was a moment when, in desperate
straits, you were led to form unreasonable suspicions and could doubt of her 
loyalty to you; but do greater justice to her heart, never was she your enemy, 
never did the Minister inform her of the fate he intended for you. I shall therefore 
say no more of her here, and shall be content to recount my own adventures; you
will in due time hear of their denouement, of how we were brought back together 
and what the reasons are that enjoin us to live as we do, one for the other, in this
impenetrable asylum of crime and infamy.

The northern courts excited my curiosity, it was toward them I bent my steps; 
The Hague was the first I visited. The Stadtholder had just recently married 
Princess Sophia, niece of the King of Prussia. No sooner did I set eyes upon that 
ravishing creature than I desired her; and I had no sooner declared my heat than 
I fucked her. Sophia of Prussia was then eighteen years of age, and possessed the
loveliest figure and the most delicious face ever to be seen; but her libertinage 
was excessive and her debauchery so notorious that by now her suitors were 
interested chiefly in her money. Promptly enlightened upon this object, I put 
myself gallantly forward; willing enough to pay for my pleasures, but young and 
vigorous enough to expect women to contribute to the cost of my travels, I was 
resolved never to accord my favors save to those who were capable of 
appreciating them.

“Madame,” said I to the Princess after I had been tupping her steadily for 
almost a month, “I flatter myself in the belief that you will acknowledge the 
expense I have incurred on your account; few men, you will agree, can match me
for endurance, none is better membered: all that comes with a price, Madame, in 
the age we live in.”

“Oh, how you put me at ease, Sir,” the Princess replied, “I so much prefer to 
have you at my orders than to be at yours. Here,” she continued, handing me a 
purse bulging with gold, “and remember that I now have the right to demand that
you serve my passions, however bizarre they be.”

“It is only meet,” said I; “your gifts oblige me, I am at your entire disposition.”

“Come this evening to my country house,” said Sophia, “come alone, and be 
not afraid, no matter what happens.”

Though made somewhat apprehensive by these last words, I nevertheless 
decided to let nothing daunt me, so that I might come to a thorough acquaintance
of this woman, and thereby be able to eke more money out of her.

So it is I set forth alone and arrive at the indicated time and place; an aged 
woman opens the door and, without a word, ushers me into a mysterious room 
where I am greeted by a young lady of nineteen, exquisite to behold.

“The Princess will soon appear, Sir,” says she, in a voice both sweet and 
pleasing. “Meanwhile, as she has instructed me to do, I shall ask you to make me 
the most solemn vow never to disclose anything of the strange rites which are to 
be celebrated here in our sight.”

“Doubt of my discretion offends me, Madame,” I rejoined, “I am dismayed, I 
am pained that the Princess can form it.”

“But if you were to have cause for complaint? If perchance your part in the 
proceedings were to be that of victim only?”

“I should glory in it, Madame, and my silence thereupon would not be the less 
eternal.”

“Such a reply might exempt me from insisting farther were I not obliged to 
comply strictly with my orders. I must have the required oath, Sir.”

I swore it.

“And I add that if by misfortune you were not to keep your pledge, the 
speediest and most violent death would be your unfailing reward.”

“Madame,” I protested, “this threat is superfluous; my manner of fulfilling your
request would indicate that it was unmerited.”

But Emma disappeared from the room even as I was speaking, and for a 
quarter of an hour I was left to my thoughts.

When she returned she was accompanied by Sophia. Both were in a disorder 
that convinced me the hussies had just been frigging themselves.

“Eh, by Christ’s tears,” said Sophia, “let’s not coddle the bugger any longer; we
have bought him, he is ours to use, let us make the most of our purchase.”

Emma invites me to remove my clothes.

“You see very well that we ourselves are naked,” she said upon observing me 
hesitate; “do two women frighten you?”

And aiding me to undress do

wn even to my stockings, once I am divested of every stitch they guide me to 
a bench upon which they have me kneel on hands and knees. A catch is released;
and suddenly all my limbs are shackled fast, and three sharp blades stand 
pointed, one at my belly, one at either flank, in such sort that I cannot stir a 
muscle. Outbursts of laughter answer the alarmed glances I cast around me, but 
what causes me truly to tremble is to see these two women pick up long iron 
martinets and approach me with visibly villainous intent.

After twenty minutes the flagellation wore to an end.

“Come, Emma,” Sophia then called to her fricatrice, “come, be a good girl and 
kiss me next to the victim; I like to juxtapose love and anguish. Let’s chafe cunts 
opposite the wretch, dear heart, and watch him suffer while we discharge.”

The royal whore rings, two fifteen-year-old maids, beauties each, come to 
receive her orders; they strip off their clothes and upon pillows strown in front of 
me the tribades spend an hour wallowing in swinish delights; now and again one 
of them would wriggle toward me, she would provoke me with a display of her 
charms presented from every angle and as soon as she saw the impression she 
was able, despite my inconveniencing position, to cause upon me, she would 
slither away again, laughing at my helplessness. Sophia, as you may easily 
imagine, played the leading role in this obscene drama, everything centered upon 
her, all efforts were deployed in her favor, and I assure you I was perfectly 
amazed to find such science, such subtlety, and such impurity in someone so 
young. It was very clearly to be seen that the rascal’s passion, as with nearly 
every other woman who has a taste for her sex, was to have her clitoris sucked 
while sucking that same part in others. But Sophia did not stop there: she was 
encunted, embuggered with dildoes; and there was not a tit she took but she 
gave a tat. And when from sucking and fucking the slut was very high and very 
hot, “Come,” she said, “let’s settle this knave’s affair.”

The whips are fetched out again, the two newcomers are armed with a pair of 
them. Sophia opens the assault by dealing me fifty rapid and powerful strokes. In 
the midst of her cruelty she preserved an unbelievable calm. After every ten 
stripes she would come around and gaze gleefully at my face, studying the effects
necessarily wrought there by the ferocious pain she inflicted; once she was done 
she established herself in front of me, flung wide her thighs, bade her three 
consorts whip me as hard as she had just done, and during the ordeal she had 
herself frigged.

“One moment,” said she when the tally had risen nearly to two hundred lashes,
“I am going to slip beneath him in order to suck him while the whipping 
continues; arrange yourselves in such a way that my clitoris gets a sucking in 
return from one of you and I have someone else’s clitoris to finger.”

The actresses take their place, the play begins … and, violently excited by the 
blows I was receiving, deliciously sucked by Sophia, I shall not pretend that 
before three minutes of this had gone by I had not filled her mouth with fuck; she
swallowed it and promptly slithered out from under my belly.

“Emma,” she exclaimed, “he is charming, he discharged, I must now repay him
with a fucking.”

A dildo is fitted around her loins, and here’s the whore in my ass, cunt-sucking 
two of her sweethearts while the third gives her cuntwardly what I am getting 
bumwise from her.

“You may release him now,” she said when at last she could stand no more. 
“Come kiss me, Borchamps,” the Messalina went on; “come express your 
gratitude, I have given you no end of pleasure. Nor is that all: I rarely treat a 
man with such forbearance. Poor child, all this that has just happened must be 
laid up alone to your puerile modesty. Just think of it! You have bedded I don’t 
know how many times with me, and always content to encunt me like any 
imbecile, not once has it ever seemed to enter your silly little head that I have an 
ass. Why, such a story would simply not be believed.”

“The desire made itself felt in me, Madame; but timidity held it in check.”

“A pity … a pity; modesty is no longer excusable at your age. But shall we let 
bygones be bygones? Will you make amends for your callowness, and forget my 
cunt a little in order to concern yourself a little with my ass? (She herewith turned
around and showed it to me.) A pretty ass, is it not? See how smooth it is, how 
fair, and how it yearns for you—so fuck it, Borchamps. Take his prick, Emma, 
there’s a dear, and clap it into my ass.”

My response was to bestow a thousand kisses upon that truly superb behind; 
and my engine, trained by Emma upon the cunning little hole, shortly convinced 
Sophia of my burning eagerness to right past wrongs.

“Stay,” the Princess bade me, “’tis I who now wish to be slave to you, I shall 
place myself in the machine where a moment ago you were captive, now I shall 
be yours; exercise your rights, sultan, and take a keen revenge.” (The irons hold 
her wrists and ankles fast.) “Spare me not, I beseech you; punish at once the 
whorishness and the cruelty in me.”

“Buggeress!” I cried, divining her tastes, “it’s a lashing you want, and they 
shall be awful strokes you’ll get.”

“I do dearly hope so,” said she. “Touch the skin on my ass, see how it glistens, 
fairly cries out for the whip.”

“Aye, it is so,” said I, therewith dealing the first blow. And while I smote her 
with might and main the lovely Emma, kneeling before me, sucked my engine and
the two girls of fifteen busied themselves about my ass. When Sophia’s was all in 
tatters, my furious device, bolting headlong into her anus, consoled her for my 
barbarity.

“Ah, fuck!” she shrieked, “how delicious to be embuggered directly after a 
whipping; nothing marries so happily as these two pleasures.”

Emma then advances upon her mistress, frigs her, kisses her, teats her, frigs 
herself, and we all three sink in a sea of delights.

“Borchamps,” the Princess said to me as we were readjusting ourselves, “there
is, it seems to me, a certain community of spirit between us, and I feel less 
reluctant to confide myself to you.”

Upon a signal the young girls retired and we three having seated ourselves 
around a table, here as follows is the speech Sophia made to us the while we 
drank punch and genever.

“To ordinary souls, to small minds it will perhaps appear odd that as my device 
for sounding your character I choose lubricity. Surprise at that is ridiculous; if by 
misfortune this be your case, let me then tell you, my dear, that I never judge of 
what a man is in the course of life, save by his passions in libertinage. He whose 
fiery spirit displays energetic tastes is indubitably susceptible of resolute action 
where interest or ambition is the concern: you are hot-blooded and no dullard. 
Say, Borchamps, what are your politics regarding human life?”

“Princess,” I answered, “of what price was it in the eyes of the Duke of Alba 
when he undertook to subdue these provinces?”

“Delicious man,” said my ardent interlocutress, “such is the reply I wanted 
from you; I count upon your courage,” she added, squeezing my hand, “now 
listen to what remains for me to propose to you.

“Niece of Europe’s hero, sprung from the line of a man made to reign over the 
entire world, I bring to these Low Countries his soul, his vision, and his vigor; I 
presume that you recognize, Borchamps, that I am fitted for better than to be 
wife to a republican doge, and this soft, mercantile, and craven people, born to 
wear irons, ought to be honored by mine. I am nothing loath to reign over the 
Dutch, but the throne raised upon these humid plains must be wet also with their 
tears and built by their gold. One hundred armed battalions assure my project; 
Frederick is sending them from Königsberg. This revolution does not doom my 
husband’s head; he is worthy of me, and Batavia’s blood, shed in great floods, will
cement the throne to which I pretend. It is therefore not the scepter I offer you; I
simply propose to you the place of him who is to defend my keeping of it: you 
shall be our counselor, our minister, our strong right arm; the proscriptions will be
dictated, executed by you: the post requires boldness; have you that quality in 
suitable measure? Answer as you are of a mind.”

“Madame,” said I after taking thought for a moment, “before fixing upon this 
startling act of power and authority, did it occur to you to inquire how this 
revolution might be viewed by the neighboring powers? The French, the English, 
the Spanish, the northern States also, who see in you mere courtiers and 
tradesmen, shall they sit calmly by and watch you become rivals and 
vanquishers?”

“We are sure of France’s attitude; we don’t care a fig for the rest. Once 
sovereign in the United Provinces we shall take the field against the three major 
kingdoms and perhaps bring them very quickly to their knees. Everyone trembles 
before a warlike nation; such shall ours become. One great man is enough to 
subject the world: there is that greatness in my soul, I have it from mighty 
Frederick. We here are weary of belonging to whoever bothers to invade us and of
being the easy prize with which every European conqueror’s career begins.”

“Once given arms to repulse the cruelties of Spain, will the Dutch surrender 
them and suffer your tyranny?”

“Courts shall be set up, as they were by Alba. There is no other way to bring a 
people to heel.”

“Your subjects will flee the land.”

“I’ll have the property they leave behind. From the flight of rebels I stand only 
to gain; it will simplify the matter of maintaining my grip upon those who stay. My
aim is not to become the quaking monarch of many, but to rule despotically, if 
need be over a few.”

“Sophia, I believe you cruel, and it is nought, I fear, but lust(2) that fires you in
this ambition.”

“Nearly all the vices in the heart of man have the same cause: all proceed from
his more or less marked propensity to lubricity. This propensity, ferocious in a 
strong spirit, leads the solitary mortal, lost and alone in Nature’s wilderness, to 
perpetrate a thousand furtive horrors, and him who governs others, to perpetrate 
a thousand political crimes.”

“Oh, Sophia, I understand what it is you seek; ambition in you is nothing else 
than the desire to lose your fuck with somewhat greater warmth.”

“Little does it matter what sentiment engenders ambition once it exists and is 
confirmed by a crown. But, my friend, if you reason thereupon, you waver; waver,
and you tremble; and for him who trembles I have no use at all.”

Singularly aroused by Sophia’s propositions, taking a view analogous to hers in
seeing herein sure means for exercising my native ferocity, I promised 
everything. Sophia embraced me, had me repeat the most solemn oaths to 
absolute secrecy, and we took leave of each other.

I went thoughtfully homeward; by the time I reached my lodgings I was 
beginning to sense the full danger of the engagements I had just contracted, and 
noticing that the risks involved in breaking them hardly outweighed those in 
keeping them, I spent the night in dreadful perplexity. There’s nothing for it, I 
said to myself, I am done for either way, the only solution lies in flight. Oh, 
Sophia, had you but proposed some private crimes, I’d gladly have committed 
them all, for with you as my accomplice I could have laughed at the law. But to 
expose myself to every imaginable risk only to be the agent of your despotism! 
No, woman, count not upon me. Ready I am and very willing to commit crimes for
my passions’ sake, not one will I do to benefit the passions of others. When my 
refusal comes to your knowledge, tax Borchamps not so much with 
faintheartedness as with greatness of soul….

I stole out of the city that very night and made in all haste for the port nearest 
England. En route I was momentarily assailed by regrets: what with my profound 
liking for crime, it was hard for me to think I had declined Sophia’s offer of the 
political means for committing a lot of it. But I reminded myself that her projects 
had been rather too uncertain; and, in addition, that I would be happier operating
for my own advantage than for that of some crowned individual.

Upon reaching London I took apartments in Piccadilly, where I had the 
misfortune, the very next day, of being robbed of every penny I had about me; 
this was a serious loss, since the previous week, in The Hague, I had cashed all 
my letters of credit. There was nothing else for me to do than set straight out 
with the letters of recommendation I had to various London notables, and to beg 
some aid at least for the short time it would take me to obtain funds from my 
sister.

From what I had heard tell of Lord Burlington I decided that this was the man 
to see first. When he had finished reading my letters, I recounted my woes; the 
good Englishman was prepared to do me every sort of service. Although 
Burlington was not very rich, one thousand guineas were his immediate offer, and
he simply would not hear of my lodging anywhere except under his own roof. I 
accepted his invitation all the more readily for having already taken stock of this 
honest family and detected there a quantity of possibilities for repaying, in the 
form of crimes, the debt of gratitude I owed my benefactor.

Before entering into the details of the little infamies with which I was about to 
occupy myself, it is essential that I give you an idea of the persons in whose midst
I had landed.

Burlington, the kindliest and most ingenuous of men, must have been nearing 
fifty-five; blithe, guileless, void of penetration, at once generous and a fool, such 
was my Lord’s portrait. A son-in-law and two daughters composed the rest of the 
household. Tilson, but twenty-three, had just wedded the elder of the girls, who 
was about the same age as he. They were a delicious couple the like of which 
Nature affords us only rare examples; charms, graces, naïveté, candor, piety, 
gentility, good breeding, nothing was lacking, and this personification of all the 
virtues assembled consoled Burlington for the wild conduct of Miss Cleontine, the 
younger of his daughters, at most eighteen years of age, and the loveliest 
creature you have ever clapped eyes on. But mischievousness, nay, downright 
wickedness, black whorishness carried to extreme lengths, those were Cleontine’s
incorrigible vices; wherein she had the audacity to assert she was a thousand 
times happier than ever was Clotilda in her dull and tedious virtues.

Upon perceiving the girl’s delicious character I became straightway enamored 
of her, to the extent a man so corrupt as I could be enamored of anyone; but her 
father having confided to me all the heartaches this young person caused him, I 
found myself obliged to proceed with utmost circumspection.

Over and beyond the tumultuous impressions Cleontine was producing in my 
soul, Tilson’s pretty face and the graces of his charming wife remained ever clear 
in my eye, and if Cleontine inspired the more libertine desires in me, her 
brother-in-law and sister quickened the more sensual. I imagined Tilson’s ass as a
masterpiece, and the desire to fuck him burned just as keenly in me as the idea 
of doing the same to his voluptuous partner. Set upon by all these various 
passions, it seemed to me that the proper way to satisfy them was to begin with 
Cleontine. Everything which can conspire to a woman’s downfall being already 
contained in the soul of her whom I was attacking as well as in my means for 
seduction, the dear child was quickly mine.

Nothing so fresh, nothing so plump, nothing so pretty as all the parts of that 
charming thing’s body, nothing so eloquent as the voice of her passions, nothing 
so lewd as her mind. There was a moment when, truly, I wondered whether I was
not better behaved than she; whereupon, as you may readily imagine, there was 
no restriction to the pleasures we tasted; and Cleontine avowed to me that the 
more a delight seemed in conflict with the laws of Nature, the more it stimulated 
her lubricity.

“Alas!” she said one day, “I have come to the point where I find none strong 
enough to satisfy me.”

Her pretty ass was attacked on the spot, and the pleasures she gave me in 
that style were so piquant, so poignant, so thoroughly shared by her, that we 
came to the mutual agreement not to bother with any other sort.

So taken up was I over that beautiful girl’s charms that a year elapsed and I 
had still not dared communicate my projects to her, or at least had not thought 
to, so busily was I occupied with our affair. Burlington and I were quits, and for 
the better carrying out of my plans I had left his house and taken quarters 
nearby. He, his family, his children would pay me daily visits, and our intimacy 
became so great that my marriage to Cleontine was soon being rumored about 
town. Oh, but I was far from such a piece of folly! I was willing enough to amuse 
myself with that interesting creature, but marry her! ah no, never; only Lady 
Tilson excited that desire in me.

A wife, said I to myself, a wife can answer no purpose save that of serving us 
as a victim, and the more her beauty is of the romantic type, the better she is 
equipped for this role. And here is Clotilda. To see her in my clutches, ah, how it 
stiffens my prick; how marvelous she must be in tears! How delightful it must be 
to cause them to flow from such heavenly eyes. Oh, Clotilda, what an unhappy 
woman you shall be if ever you become mine.

These designs once formulated, it was henceforth only to help achieve them 
that I continued to cultivate Cleontine. To that end I could think of nothing better 
than to kindle in her a fancy for her brother-in-law and then to arouse his young 
wife’s jealousy. Cleontine admitted that she had now and then felt an urge for 
Tilson, but that the thought of his stupidity and virtuousness had always dashed 
cold water on her desires.

“But what does intelligence matter!” I replied. “Once beauty decorates an 
individual, there’s enough to warrant having him. Even as you see me now, 
Cleontine, I am dreaming of the world’s most wonderful ass, Tilson is its 
proprietor, and I am sweating from eagerness to fuck it.”

This idea diverted my mistress, and she was won over—put a few nasty 
thoughts in a woman’s head and there is nothing you cannot get out of her. A 
pang of jealousy, however, made her pause; she wondered if, taken by the 
husband, I might not perhaps become too fond of his wife; she questioned me.

“Come, come,” said I, feeling that prudence was needed here, “you are being 
extravagant. My eye alights on a pretty boy, the sentiment is purely material; but 
where it comes to women, my love for you, Cleontine, is not something from 
which I can swerve.”

My insipid compliments, the irregularity of my caprices, everything seduced 
Cleontine, she served me; that was all I wanted of her. Before a month had 
passed my beloved Tilson was in my mistress’ arms; I watched him as he lay 
there, caressed him as he lay there, fucked him as he lay there; such scenes of 
libertinage occupied another month and then, the illusion gone and I having had 
my fill of them both, I began to dwell on schemes for undoing them, for including 
my benefactor in the holocaust, and for spiriting Clotilda away, taking her to the 
farthermost ends of the world to glut myself on the divine pleasures I awaited 
from her.

As the young woman positively worshiped her husband it was easy for me to 
strike sparks of jealousy into her soul: Lady Tilson listened to me, believed me, 
and when all I had left to do was convince her, the means stood ready to hand.

“Cleontine,” I said one day to my voluptuous whore, “shall I confess it to you, 
my love? I am fairly dying to marry you. The similarity between our two 
characters, our two temperaments, leads me to feel that we would be very happy 
together. But you are penniless, I am rich … and unless I am wholly mistaken, 
delicacy would forbid you from entering into a marriage unprovided with the 
blessings of fortune. There is a way, Cleontine, whereby you could swing this 
capricious fortune into your favor and hasten its gifts. Between you and wealth I 
see no more than three lives standing in the way.”

And noticing Cleontine wax drunk on the poison I was distilling into her soul, I 
bravely doubled the dose.

“Nothing simpler,” I went on, “than to get rid of Tilson. His wife is willful, 
headstrong, extremely jealous; she will not learn of her husband’s guilty dealings 
with you without furiously desiring to be revenged upon him; I will counsel her, I 
will furnish her what she needs; I see Tilson in his forefathers’ tomb before a 
week is out.”

“My sister is virtuous.”

“She is vindictive; her upright soul would not all by itself hatch the plot I shall 
suggest to her, but when warmly proposed by me she will seize what I offer her, 
be sure of it.”

“And the others?” Cleontine abruptly demanded.

“Ah, little minx,” said I, folding her in my arms, “every passing minute brings 
added proof that Nature created us for each other. And so here is how we shall be
rid of those others, my angel: once Lady Tilson has acted upon my advice and 
removed her husband from the picture, I shall unveil the whole intrigue to her 
father who, likewise pressed by my solicitations, shall, I am confident of it, call in 
the police. She will be brought to trial. Her lawyer, selected and perfectly feed by 
me, will embrace Clotilda’s cause and so plead it as to shift the guilt onto the 
father who will be shown to have murdered his son-in-law and had his daughter 
arraigned on false charges. The witnesses, the testimony, the proofs: with 
guineas all that is to be found in London, just as with louis it is in Paris. A 
fortnight and Burlington is lying in one of His Majesty’s jails.”

“Your benefactor?”

“Ah, Cleontine, what must I call the man whose existence casts a cloud upon 
our future together? This arch-enemy is no sooner flung into prison, condemned 
(he will be, Cleontine, inside a month from today), than he mounts the scaffold; 
he is no sooner dead, I say, than your sister is freed and we leave. We leave 
England, I wed you, and simply consider how easy it will be to eliminate the last 
obstacle preventing you from taking exclusive possession of Burlington’s estate.”

“Oh, my friend, you are a villain!”

“I am but a man and one who adores you, Cleontine, who cares for nought but
to see you rich and his married wife.”

“But my father … and all he has done for you—”

“Beside the sentiments I owe you all others pale, they vanish: I must possess 
you, Cleontine, there is nothing I do not sacrifice in order to succeed.”

The ardent creature effuses her gratitude, showers kisses upon me; she 
swears to aid me, and streams of fuck, shot from one side and from the other, 
seal vows I have not the faintest intention of keeping.

However, since the first act of the play was to bring me to the catastrophe I 
was secretly planning, I hastened to stage that first act. Directed by me, Clotilda 
surprises her husband in her sister’s arms. But it is not to revenge herself solely 
upon the faithless one that I recommend, it is to immolate them both.

“Yes, that is how I feel in the matter, and it concerns me,” I tell her. “I am too 
furious at what has been done to you not to sacrifice those who have inflicted this
outrage. From now on your life itself shall be in danger from such monsters; you 
must either consent to their destruction or reconcile yourself to being destroyed 
by them.”

An expressive silence is Clotilda’s response to this; and the same beverage rids
her, at a stroke, of a sister and a husband…. I had fucked them both that 
morning.

I turn now to the second act in the Burlington tragedy.

“Oh, Clotilda,” I say, rushing to her in great terror, “these two sudden deaths 
have alarmed your father, I fear suspicion is wakening in his breast. Why would 
he not attribute the loss of his son-and-law and daughter to your vengeance, 
aware as he is of the motives that would lead you to seek it? Well, if he comes to 
a very obvious conclusion, you, my dear, are in a damnable case; you must have 
the best defense ready if this misfortune arises.”

An hour later I am in conference with the father.

“You are baffled, Sir? You search far afield for the assassin of Tilson and 
Cleontine, you need not look beyond Clotilda,” I pointed out to that honest man; 
“for whose interests are so closely associated with this horror? And if, as there is 
scarce any room for doubt, the wretch has been to this point capable of scorning 
her duties and the yet more powerful voice of Nature, presume the dire danger 
that must accrue to you in letting this tiger remain at your side.”

To these calumnious assertions I add a string of spurious proofs; Milord is 
convinced; his daughter is taken into custody. My barrister hirelings fly to find 
her; they have no trouble persuading Clotilda that some recrimination is 
imperative, everything needed to support the counterattack is furnished her. This 
interesting creature entreats me not to abandon her; her hand, if I deign accept 
it, will be the reward for my loyalty. I swear to hold steadfast by her, come what 
may. Burlington, sharply suspected of the crime he ascribes to his daughter, is 
dragged promptly before his judges; he is, at my instigation and at my expense, 
himself accused of having had treacherously murdered his daughter and 
son-in-law, and of having had Clotilda imprisoned as guilty of an atrocity he alone 
has committed. The trial created enough stir in London to last only a month; and 
in that brief period I had the satisfaction of freeing from behind bars her for 
whose sake I had perpetrated my terrible acts, and of seeing their third victim 
expire.

“Clotilda,” I cried, once gratitude had brought that lovely woman to my feet, 
“make haste, claim your inheritance; having no child by Tilson you unfortunately 
cannot pretend to anything there, but realize what belongs to you and let us be 
off. Our conduct will not bear too close scrutiny, let us not wait for eyes to open 
but get us speedily away from here.”

“Oh, Borchamps, it is a terrible thing for me, to owe my life only to my father’s
death!”

“Ha, an end to idiot remorse, stifle it directly,” was my quick reply to my 
charming mistress; “remind yourself that your father aspired only to your doom, 
and that any measure enforced by self-preservation is warranted.”

“But you shall at least be there, Borchamps, to dry away my tears?”

“Can you doubt it, dear angel?”

“Ah, then call a priest, let the ceremony be for tomorrow; let wedlock’s sweet 
pleasures crown us the same day, and the next morning let sunrise see us set 
forth from a land where the consequences of this horrible affair might at any 
moment turn to our disadvantage.”

All is done as I desire it, and Clotilda is my wedded wife. Clotilda’s mourning 
for her first husband had been too brief for us to dare publish our marriage, but it
nonetheless received the sanction of the law, human and divine.

I wish here to make it very plain that Clotilda cannot be considered even partly
responsible for any of the pieces of mischief I have just related to you. The 
passive instrument of my maneuvers, she was in no wise their cause; no, I shall 
not hear of that gentle and charming person being blamed for anything that had 
befallen: the murder of her sister and husband, to which she had consented only 
through silence, was all alone my doing, she was still less guilty of her father’s 
death, and had it not been for my interventions, my briberies, perjurers and the 
rest, she would surely have gone to the gallows instead of Burlington.

All this I am at pains to say lest in the eyes of my auditors there be lost to 
Clotilda’s character one jot of the candor, modesty, or rectitude I accorded her 
when first I gave her description. And so also it was that however I might reason 
with her, she remained forever the prey of remorse; it is true that the manner 
whereby I acquiesced in the love she confessed for me did for a while attenuate 
her sufferings from that quarter. But let me repeat it once and for all, so long as 
the sequence of events obliges me to speak of her, never visualize Clotilda as 
anything but conscience-stricken, guilt-ridden. As such appearing to me a 
thousand times more piquant, she gave me the most extraordinary inspirations. 
Who would believe it? Even before enjoying her charms I thought to profane 
them. Clotilda was no sooner my wife than I hardened over the twofold idea of 
fucking her in a brothel that first night and of prostituting her charms to the first 
comer.

Early on in my stay at London I had made the acquaintance of a celebrated 
procuress at whose house I used to sport with the prettiest rascals in town, to 
compensate myself for the monotonies entailed by a regular intrigue. I go off to 
find Miss Bawil, I impart to her my resolutions, she answers for their success; in 
the bargain I put the clause that the libertines to whom Clotilda is to be 
surrendered confine themselves to pollutions, nastiness, and brutalities. 
Everything arranged between us, I return to Clotilda and propose that after the 
wedding ceremony we consummate our marriage elsewhere than in this mansion 
fraught with gloomy memories; a friend, I tell her, has invited us to stay the 
night. Trusting Clotilda accompanies me to Miss Bawil’s, where a merry feast is 
spread before us. Someone less a scoundrel than I would have enjoyed this 
moment during which happiness displaced Clotilda’s chagrins and she was 
oblivious to all save the charm of belonging to me. The poor fool was kissing me 
tenderly in her joy when three rascals posted by break suddenly in upon us, 
daggers in their hands.

“Run for your life!” they say to me. “Begone and leave this woman to us, we’ve
some frolicking to do before you get to her.”

I flee from the room and pass into an adjoining one whence, through a 
spyhole, I am able to observe everything. Clotilda, half in a swoon, is promptly 
stripped by these ruffians who expose her naked to my gaze. The effect was 
enchanting as libertinage here performed the usual office of love. ’Twas thus 
profaned I had my first glimpse of the graces with which Nature had endowed the 
exquisite creature, ’twas thus the world’s most beauteous ass was revealed to my
lascivious stare. A superb courtesan was frigging me in the meantime, and at a 
previously arranged signal the outrages redoubled. Clotilda, sprawled over the 
knees of one of the three was flagellated by the other two, after that condemned 
to the most lubricious and the most humiliating penances. Obliged to tongue the. 
asshole of one, she had also, at the same time, to frig the other two. Her 
face—that moving emblem of her sensitive soul—her breast, her lily-white and 
rosy breast, were washed by the impure jets of that unholy trio’s ardor, who, so 
instructed by me and to humiliate the heavenly creature’s virtue that much more 
thoroughly, ended by pissing and shitting upon her body while I proceeded to 
embugger another whore sent to complete my excitement during the scene. 
Quitting this second girl’s ass without having discharged there, I pick up a rapier 
and rush into the dining room; I look as though I have returned at the head of 
reinforcements, I rescue Clotilda, my bought ruffians take to their heels and, 
casting myself theatrically at my beloved’s feet, “Oh, dearest soul,” I cry, “have I 
not arrived too late? May not these monsters have already—”

“No, my friend,” replies Clotilda as she is being wiped and made tidy, “no, your
wife is still worthy of you—humiliated, mistreated for a certainty, but not 
dishonored. Oh, Borchamps, why ever did you bring me to this house?”

“Ah, be calm, my angel, all danger is past. Miss Bawil has enemies, this 
untimely incursion was their work; but my call for help was heard, the house 
freed, and we can spend the rest of the night here in safety.”

Clotilda was not easily reassured; at length, however, she recovered from her 
experience and we betook ourselves to bed. Greatly heated by the scene I had 
lately provoked, astonishingly electrified to hold beauty, virtue sullied in my arms,
I wrought prodigies of vigor…. While this charming creature wanted something of 
her sister’s disorderly imagination, she made up for that shortcoming by a more 
just, more lucid spirit and by an infinitely fetching beauty of physical detail. It 
would be impossible to be fairer of skin, better made of body, impossible to have 
sweeter, more winsome, more tantalizing parts. Clotilda absolutely untutored in 
lubricity and new to its pleasures, was ignorant even of the possibility of traveling 
Cythera’s narrower bypath.

“My angel, a husband must find some first fruits to pluck on the wedding night;
having none but these,” said I, touching her asshole, “you will surely not refuse 
them to me.”

So saying I catch a good grip on her flanks and from sodomizing her five times
in succession bring my seed to a boil; it was however in her cunt I deposited it. 
And ’twas there and then that Clotilda, luckier or more ardent with me than with 
Tilson, conceived a very unlucky daughter, who due to my inconstancy and 
neglect, I never saw at her birth.

Dawn found me so tired of my goddess that had I consulted my sentiments 
alone, Clotilda would indeed never have got out of London; but, persuaded that 
this creature could perhaps be useful during my travels, we readied ourselves for 
departure. Helped by me, Clotilda assembled her fortune, it came to twelve 
thousand guineas all told and, taking them with us, I and my wife left London two
years to the day after I had first set foot there.

Since I was ever bent on visiting the courts of the North we now headed for 
Sweden. We had already been traveling some nine or ten weeks when one day, 
looking back over our adventures together, Clotilda hazarded a few reproachful 
remarks upon the violence of the means I had employed to win her. My prompt 
reply was framed in such language as to give my dear wife very clearly to 
understand that I was perfectly ready to have her commit crimes but by no 
means prepared to see her repent them. Clotilda’s tears flowed forth afresh; I 
then revealed to her the whole truth of what had happened.

“And every single part of it,” I told her in conclusion, “was my handiwork; the 
desire to be rid of your sister and your husband, both overmuch fucked by me; 
that of fucking you too and of appropriating your money by killing your father: 
such, my sweet, were the real motives behind all my enterprises. Whence you will
observe that in all this I have toiled for none but my own sake, and not one 
instant for yours. To this I may usefully add, dear creature, that my intention 
being to plunge into a very nefarious career, I did not unite you to my destiny in 
order to have you thwart that aim, but to promote it.”

“In that case, what is the distinction you draw, Sir, between a slave and a 
wife?”

“And you, tell me now, what distinction do you draw between a slave and a 
wife?”

“Ah, Borchamps, why did you not take this line the very first day I met you? 
How bitter have now become the tears you force me to shed over my unhappy 
family!”

“No more weeping, Madame,” was my harsh warning to her, “and no more 
illusions concerning your fate; I expect utter submission from you. If it so pleased
me to have the carriage stopped this instant and to have you suck the prick of the
man who’s driving it, you’d suck that prick, my dear, you’d suck it. For if you did 
not, I’d blow your brains out on the spot.”

“My God, Borchamps! Is this love?”

“Why, I do not love you, Madame, what an idea. I have never loved you; I 
wanted your money and your ass, I have them both, and it may not be long 
before I have had altogether enough of the latter.”

“And the fate then in store for me will probably be the one Cleontine met?”

“With you I shall probably resort to less mystery and surely a great deal more 
artistry.”

At this point Clotilda thought to use the weapons of her sex: she leaned toward
me in an effort to kiss and sprinkle me with her tears; I thrust her rudely away.

“Cruel man,” she said, half-choked by her sobs, “if you wish to offend the 
mother at least respect the poor creature who owes its life to your love: I am 
pregnant … I beg you to stop at the first town we come to, for I do not feel at all 
well.”

We did indeed stop and Clotilda, who took directly to bed, fell gravely ill. 
Irritated at having to interrupt my journey and at being delayed by a creature for 
whom I was beginning to have the keenest distaste, to which there had to be 
added the loathing wherewith I had always beheld pregnant women, I was on the 
point of taking a charitable leave of them both, she and her child, when a woman 
who was staying in a chamber near ours, stopped me in the hallway and bade me
come for a moment into her room. Great heavens! what was my surprise upon 
recognizing Princess Sophia’s pretty confidante, the same Emma of whom I spoke
a short while ago.

“What an unexpected encounter, Madame,” said I, “and what a fortunate one! 
But are you here by yourself?”

“I am indeed,” that charming personage replied, “I too have had to flee from 
an insatiable, ambitious mistress whom it must become damnation to serve. 
Well-advised you were, Borchamps, to have been of such firm resolve! You did not
then know and may still be unaware of the chores her perfidious politics were 
reserving for you. She told you the Stadtholder was party to her scheme; she 
lied; her intention was to have you put that prince out of the way, and had the 
attempt failed you would have been a dead man. In despair after your escape, 
nevertheless she continued to harbor her wicked designs for another two years, 
and finally insisted that I undertake the murder she was meditating. Had it been a
question merely of an ordinary crime, I would doubtless have executed it, for 
crime amuses me; I enjoy the shock it imparts to the mechanism, its 
effervescence delights me, and rid as I am of all prejudice, I give myself over to it
without qualms before or regrets afterward; but a deed so important as that 
one—well, discretion is the better part of valor and I followed your example in 
order that having declined to be her accomplice, I not become her victim.”

“Charming woman,” said I, putting my hand in Emma’s bosom, “let us banish 
all ceremony, we are nearly enough acquainted for it to be of no purpose. Let me 
tell you once again, dear angel, how very pleased I am to have found you again. 
Restrained by the exigent Sophia, we were unable to act in accordance with what 
we felt for each other; here, however, nothing hinders us—”

“You say so, my friend; but this woman accompanying you, might one know 
who she is?”

“She is my wife.”

And I hasten to recount to my new friend the whole of the London story, and 
how I whittled the Burlington family down to the sole survivor now lying sick in 
another room of this inn. Emma, a great rascal at heart, saw all the humor in the 
adventure and when she was done laughing asked if I would not introduce her to 
my tender spouse.

“Surely, you shall not go on dragging her about forever,” she said to me, “leave
her here, I’m a more suitable companion for you than this prude. And I ask no 
sacraments from you, not I. I’ve always detested Church ceremonies. Although 
noble-born, but a lost woman through my debauchery and thanks to my 
attachment to Sophia, from you I want only the title of mistress and dearest 
friend. How are your finances?”

“In the very best order. I am extremely rich.”

“A pity. I have one hundred thousand crowns and was counting upon offering 
them to you, thinking thereby to get you somewhat into my power, which would 
be agreeable to me.”

“I dare say, Emma, and I am touched by your delicacy, but it is not in this 
manner you would ever get me into bondage; mine is too lofty a soul to consent 
to dependence upon a woman: I must either dominate her or not use her at all.”

“Why, very well then, I shall be your whore, I like that role; how much will you 
pay me a month?”

“What did you get from Sophia?”

“The value of one hundred French louis.”

“I will give you the same; but you will be faithful? Submissive?”

“As a slave.”

“Slavery implies that you be dispossessed of the tokens of freedom and the 
means to fail your master. Hand your funds over to me.”

“Here they are,” and Emma fetched me her casket.

“But, my angel,” said I, raising the lid, “you must have stolen this sum: with 
one hundred louis a month you could not possibly have composed this fortune, 
Emma, not at your age.”

“Do you suppose I left that Messalina without first giving her treasury a feel?”

“And if I were to do unto thee that which thou hast done?”

“Borchamps, I love you, what I have is yours; I am not entrusting my money 
to you, I am giving it; but this gift and my favors are not to be had save upon one
condition.”

“And that condition?”

“It is that we be this very instant rid of the drab piece of baggage you are 
towing across Europe.”

“You are paying me for her death?”

“That is what I demand in exchange for my hundred thousand crowns.”

“Exquisite little minx! The idea is amusing; but the project must be 
embellished by a few rather severe episodes.”

“Ill though she is?”

“But the object is to do her in, is it not?”

“To be sure.”

“Well, come along, I shall present you as an irate wife who demands that I 
return to her; I shall excuse myself for a fit of blind passion which, in my 
embarrassed situation, forced me to behave in my mysterious manner; you will 
fulminate; I shall be obliged to tell her that I am abandoning her, and the poor 
woman will die of chagrin, she and the infant inside her.”

“She is pregnant?”

“Indeed she is.”

“Why, we shall have a jolly time!” And in Emma’s sparkling eyes I saw how this
villainy was arousing her; the whore is overcome by emotion, she kisses me, a 
paroxysm shakes loose her fuck…. We enter.

So well did we play our parts that the wretched Clotilda swallowed everything 
down to the dregs. Emma, witty, malicious, and a wicked tease, maintained that 
when I’d deserted her I’d also robbed her, and that not a button or a handkerchief
in the room belonged by rights to this bedridden adventuress. I agreed that all 
this was indubitably so, and my sorrowful wife, only too well aware of the black 
situation menacing her, turned her beautiful face away to hide her weeping.

“Oh no, sir traitor, I shall not let you out of my sight,” Emma declared with 
great energy, “I am not going to budge from here, for I intend to get my due.”

Supper is brought into the room. Emma and I eat heartily and call for the best 
wines in the house while the helpless Clotilda watches herself being stripped, 
plundered to the last penny, and stares at the prospect of soon having nothing left
to feed upon but her despair and her tears. Our copious repast finished, it was 
upon the foot of the forlorn soul’s bed that we celebrated the pleasure of our 
reunion.

A pretty thing she was, that Emma; twenty-one years old, a face that 
personified voluptuousness itself, the figure of a nymph, great dark eyes, the 
freshest mouth, the whitest teeth, the most cunning little tongue, the fairest and 
smoothest skin, marvelously molded in breast and buttock, a libertine too, and in 
the highest degree, with all the salt and all the spitefulness of cruel lubricity. We 
fucked deliciously in every style and manner while battening upon the spectacle, 
equally rare and stimulating, of my wife wrung by moans, grief, and anxiety.

As I was embuggering her, Emma would have her unfortunate rival show us 
her ass. Clotilda was almost too sick, too exhausted to move; howbeit, obey she 
must. I slapped that splendid behind whereof I had made such feast of late and 
which I was now so unkindly abandoning; I smote it so hard that the poor 
woman, weak from distress, from pain, from illness, lay motionless upon the bed.

“We could strangle her,” said I, bum-fucking Emma with great zest.

“We could, but it would be a serious mistake,” replied the clever and 
imaginative girl; “far better simply to abandon her more or less alive, to damage 
her reputation with the innkeeper, and to make sure that, left without resources, 
she will either perish from hunger or try to survive from libertinage.”

This last idea having caused me a prodigious discharge, we made ready to 
depart. We removed every last object from the room; we despoiled Clotilda even 
of her nightgown; we plucked even the rings off her fingers, unscrewed the rings 
from her ears, took even her shoes, her slippers, in a word, she was left as naked
as the day she was born; the poor dear wept and said the most melting things to 
me.

“Alas, short of murdering me, you could not carry barbarity any farther. May 
heaven forgive you as do I; and whatever be the career you follow, give a thought
sometimes to the woman who never did you any wrong unless it was to love you 
too much.”

“Come, come, cheer up,” said Emma, “all you have to do to earn some money 
is frig some pricks. Why, instead of blaming us you ought to thank us: along with 
the rest we could deprive you of life. Count your blessings.”

The horses were harnessed, the carriage waiting at the door. As we were about
to mount Emma had a word with the people of the inn.

“The creature we are leaving behind up there,” she told them, “is an arrant 
whore who stole my husband; as chance would have it, I came upon him in this 
place: I recover what is mine by law and right and, together with him, am taking 
away the belongings that slut robbed from me. Here is her lodging and board, 
paid up until today, I’ll answer for no more: do with her whatever you see fit, she 
has all she needs to settle any debts she may incur from you and to return home 
to her own country. And here is the key to her room; adieu.”

The coachman cracked his whip and we whirled off without waiting to learn 
what happened next in an adventure which now ceased to hold anything of 
interest for us.

“I am most content,” said Emma. “Your management of this affair reveals a 
character very kindred to mine; I already feel attached to you. How do you 
suppose it will fare with Madame?”

“She will beg alms or render lewd services; what matter is it to us?”

And to turn the conversation upon a worthier theme, I besought Emma to tell 
me a little more about herself.

“I was born in Brussels,” the splendid creature began; “never mind from what 
lineage I come, know simply that my parents are persons of foremost rank in that
city. When yet very young I was sacrificed to an unendurable husband; the man I 
loved picked a quarrel with him and on their way to the dueling-ground, slew him 
from behind. ‘I am lost,’ my lover said to me, ‘I lent too much heed to vengeance,
now I must flee. If you love me, Emma, come away with me; I am not poor, we 
shall have enough to live in peace and ease for the rest of our days.’

“Oh, Borchamps, could I refuse a man whom my advice had undone?”

“This murder was of your devising?”

“Are you in a doubt, my dear, and should I disguise anything from you? I 
followed my lover into exile; he failed me; I had the same trick played upon him 
he had played upon my husband. Sophia learned of my story; she was much 
taken by my crime … was soon adoring my person. The development of my 
character pleased her, we rubbed cunts; I was initiated into all her secrets; ’tis to 
her I am indebted for all the principles in which I am unshakable today: although 
in the end I robbed her, it is no less true that I had a constant affection for the 
Princess. The outstanding libertinage of her mind, the warmth of her imagination, 
oh, the basis of my attachment to her was sound; and had it not been for the 
dread her final proposals caused me, I might perhaps have remained with her for 
the rest of my life.”

“It may be, Emma, that I know you better than you know your own self: you 
would quickly have become tired of being no more than the pawn of the crime of 
others, you would have begun to want to commit it on your own behalf, and, 
sooner or later, you would have left that woman. Is she jealous?”

“Frightfully.”

“She did at least permit you women?”

“Never any except those she involved in her pleasures.”

“I repeat it, Emma, you would not have lived long with Sophia.”

“Oh, my friend, I give thanks to the fate which delivered me out of her hands 
and into yours; let us be ever mindful of the honor that prevails amongst thieves, 
exert our craft upon everybody else, but never turn it against each other.”

Pretty though Emma was, and despite the analogy between her character and 
mine, I was not yet sure enough of myself to be able to guarantee an exact 
balance in the association she desired, and I left her to interpret my silence in 
whatever way she chose. For indeed, was there a single crime in the world I could
engage myself not to commit?

However, our liaison grew stronger, we reached certain understandings; their 
first basis was the inviolable and mutual promise never to lose an occasion to do 
evil, to contrive such occasions whenever it was in our power; it was likewise 
agreed that the fruit of our common thievings and rapine would always be evenly 
shared.

We had gone hardly twenty leagues when we were presented with an 
opportunity to put our maxims into action and our oaths to the test. We were 
traversing Götaland and were in the neighborhood of the town of Jönköping when 
a French carriage driving ahead of us struck a wheel into the rut and broke the 
axle. The master, whose valet was in charge of the advance horses, had nought to
do but get down and wait with his baggage by the roadside till help should come. 
This help we offered when we drew abreast of him, and learned that the man was
a French merchant going to Stockholm on business for his company, who were 
well-known traders. Villeneuir’s age was twenty-three and never had anyone so 
pretty a face; together with his charming outside he had all the candor and 
sincerity of his nation.

“A thousand thanks for your kindness in offering me a seat in your carriage to 
the nearest post,” said he. “I am all the more obliged to you forasmuch as in this 
chest I am carrying objects of major importance: diamonds, gold, bills of 
exchange I have been commissioned by three Paris firms to deliver to their 
Swedish correspondents. You can imagine the state I would be in were I to have 
the misfortune of losing such things.”

“Why, Sir, if that be the case we are in great good luck to be able to ensure the
safety of such precious effects,” said Emma. “Will you see fit to entrust them to 
us and bestow upon us the honor of saving you from your predicament and your 
fortune from eventual marauders?”

Villeneuil climbs in; we recommend that his postilion guard the carriage and 
team until the young man is able to send his valet back with fresh horses and 
someone to repair the damage.

No sooner had we started off with our charming prey than Emma covertly 
sought my hand….

“Agreed,” I murmured in an undertone, “but this calls for a few episodes.”

“Assuredly,” said she.

And on we drove.

Having come to the little town of Vimmerby we found Villeneuil’s lackey at the 
posting station and sent him back in all haste after his master’s equipage.

“You were doubtless intending to stay the night here?” I said to the young 
man. “We ourselves cannot, since we must endeavor to reach Stockholm as soon 
as possible; so we shall let you down, Sir, and take our leave of you now.”

To this the ardent Villeneuil, who had, not without emotion, been gazing at the 
charms of my friend, replied with a look seeming to express regret that we should
be parting so soon; spying the shadow come across his countenance, Emma 
quickly spoke up, saying that indeed, she did not see why it was necessary to say 
such an early goodbye, and that since we had been enjoying our journey 
together, why might we not all continue on to the capital?

“Yes, and why not?” said I. “This then is what I would suggest: Monsieur will 
leave a message here at the posting station, instructing his valet to join him at 
the Hotel de Danemark, where we shall be stopping in Stockholm. Thereby 
everything is arranged and we remain together.”

“An infinitely welcome suggestion,” says the young man, casting a sidelong 
glance at Emma, who by means of one just as impassioned announces that she is 
in no wise sorry to see him fall in with any proposal which might lead to a 
lessening of the distance between them.

Villeneuil scribbles a letter, it is handed to the innkeeper, our horses are 
watered, then we fly on toward Stockholm. We had another thirty leagues still to 
cover; we arrived the following evening and ’twas only then my companion 
informed me of the ruse she had devised to ensure the execution of the deed we 
were meditating. The rascal, excusing herself under the pretext of having to 
attend to a need, had dismounted from the carriage at Vimmerby and quickly 
written out a message of her own; she had substituted it for Villeneuil’s, and in 
hers prescribed to the lackey that he seek his master not at the Hotel de 
Danemark, but at The English Arms.

Once in Stockholm her first care, as you may readily imagine, was to appease 
the young merchant’s inquietudes, who wondered why his carriage was being 
delayed; she did everything she felt most likely to make him easy and to dazzle 
him at the same time. Villeneuil had tumbled head over heels in love with her; the
thing became plain beyond all doubt, and Emma accordingly staged a flawless 
performance; Villeneuil seemed jealous of me.

“Needless to say, you are unwilling to have this turn into an adventure out of a 
popular novel,” Emma observed; “you desire me, Villeneuil, but love has nothing 
to do with your feelings. And I, moreover, cannot become yours; nothing on earth
would ever induce me to leave Borchamps; he is my husband. Therefore be 
content with what I can offer you, and do not aspire after what I am unable to 
accord; and rest assured that provided we keep inside those boundaries, my 
husband, a born libertine, is the man to join in our happiness: surrendering to it, 
we can perfectly well provide him the joy of one such lewd scene as he delights 
in. Borchamps has a fondness for men. You are extremely handsome, Sir; 
consent to avail him of your charms, only do that and I believe I can guarantee he
will let you enjoy mine in peace.”

“Do you think so?”

“I am certain of it. This complaisance—it does not go too much against the 
grain?”

“Not at all. It’s a practice from college days, I find nothing strange in seeing it 
preserved and am myself as much given to it as anyone else.”

“And so it but remains to make the arrangements?”

“You have my consent to everything….”

Whereupon the clever Emma flings open the closet in which I have been 
hiding. “Come along, Borchamps,” she cries, “Villeneuil offers you his ass, have 
supper brought up, then bar the door and let’s to our frolicking.”

“Charming young man,” say I, stepping forth from concealment and thrusting 
my tongue into the traveler’s mouth, albeit penetrated by the desire to kill him 
once I have fucked him, “your accommodation moves me. And as a matter of 
fact, is this not a very simple sort of transaction? I cede you my wife, you lend me
your behind, why refrain from happiness when it may be so easily had?”

Even as I spoke my friend was unbuttoning Villeneuil’s breeches; and if her 
delicate hands brought the world’s prettiest prick into view, mine just as soon 
discovered the most sublime ass it is possible to see. Kneeling before that 
heavenly furniture, I was carried utterly away, and I would perhaps still be licking 
it, sucking it, had my dear Emma not called my attention away from it to have me
admire the exquisite member wherewith our prey was provided in front. No 
sooner have I taken that superb engine in charge than I present him an ass which
is burning from the desire to possess it.

“Oh, Villeneuil!” I cried, “deign to begin with me; those charms you covet,” I 
went on, nodding toward Emma’s, “shall be yours directly you have rendered 
yourself master of my ass; such is the price of their having, they’ll not be yours 
save you pay it.”

I am fucked; that was all Villeneuil’s reply. I lift my mistress’ skirts for him, he 
fondles her, he kisses her while fucking me; unable to cope with his passions, the 
animal quits me to snap his dart into Emma’s panting cunt. Seeing his bum well 
inside my reach, I leap upon it and sodomize him to avenge the affront he has 
just offered me; he discharges; I waylay him as he retires from Emma’s cunt; 
finding him still stiff enough for that, I clap him into my anus again, embugger 
Emma, and sweetest ecstasy crowns our pleasure anew; we begin again. 
Villeneuil encunts my friend, I embugger him; the whore flopped and thrashed 
about between the two of us for nearly two hours; Villeneuil sticks her ass, I her 
cunt, I refuck Villeneuil, he refucks me back; the whole night, in a word, is passed
in drunkenness and once it is dissipated worry breeds afresh.

“Still no sign of my valet,” says Villeneuil.

“It must be the repair of your carriage that is holding him up,” Emma replies; 
“there could be no misreading your message, its terms were clear; so have a little
patience. Besides, have you not got your most precious effects with you? You can 
perfectly well take them to their destination.”

“I shall go tomorrow,” says Villeneuil.

And as he was much spent from the pleasures of the night before, he went 
early to bed.

Once he lay in the arms of sleep, I turned to Emma and said: “The time has 
come. Either we act now or this fellow’s immense riches slip from our grasp.”

“Ah, my friend, we are in a hotel, what shall we do with the corpse?”

“Cut it into pieces and burn them; this man is accompanied by nobody, nobody
will come here to look for him. Thanks to the precautions you took, the valet will 
go hunting for him at the other end of town. We’ll let him explain things in any 
way he wishes; he can demand inquiries, he can make them himself, I defy him 
to find hide or hair of his master: when we came through the city gates I gave 
our names to the guard and described Villeneuil as a footman in our hire. Well, we
have dismissed the footman. There’s an end to it.”

Then, opening the treasure chest with the key we had quietly taken out of 
Villeneuil’s pocket, and contemplating that enormous treasure of gold and 
precious stones, “Oh, my dear friend,” said I, “would we not be mad to hesitate a 
moment between the life of this fool and the possession of such riches?”

We were gloating over the spectacle when all of a sudden there came a 
knocking at the door. I shot a glance at Emma, shot another out of the window: 
great heavens! there in the street stood Villeneuil’s carriage. And here was his 
valet. The lout had discovered where we were, at The English Arms they had told 
him that since we were not among their guests, there must have been some 
error, and that we would surely be found elsewhere, probably at the Hotel de 
Danemark. As for hiding his master from him, ’twas too late for that: as he 
walked in he saw Villeneuil lying asleep in his bed.

“My good man,” I said, going straight up to the valet, and putting a finger to 
my lips, “take care lest you wake him; he has been having a bout of fever, it is of 
utmost importance that he rest; go back to the inn where you were, and be 
certain that if he sent you there in the first place it was for the very best of 
reasons: owing to the secret business he has in this city he cannot afford to have 
the same public lodgings as his servants. He very positively charged us to tell 
you, in the event you were to appear, to return to the address specified in the 
note which my wife wrote out at his dictation when we stopped at Vimmerby; you
are to remain at The English Arms and await his further orders, without 
anticipating them, without coming here to find out what they are.”

“Humph,” said the valet, “that suits me. I’ll send the carriage back.”

“Do so. Here is some money if you run short of it; don’t worry about your 
master, he is in good hands, and inside three days you will surely be hearing 
news.”

Valet and carriage disappear; my companion and I discuss how now to 
proceed.

“Let us start,” I say, “by following our initial scheme: we first get rid of this 
Villeneuil; once he is out of the way we shall have no trouble killing the valet, and 
this will get us the carriage, the horses, the rest of the baggage, which were not 
even in the bargain at the outset.”

The unfortunate young man is cut up bit by bit, each is reduced to ashes in a 
charcoal brazier until of Villeneuil not a trace remains; and we, heated by the 
grisly deed we have just performed, pass the rest of the night in the filthiest 
debauch. In the morning I betook myself, alone, to The English Arms.

“My friend,” said I to the valet, “I have instructions from your master to 
conduct you to where he is awaiting you in a house in the country, it lies two 
leagues from here; your effects may remain at the inn and as we leave, make it 
clear that they are not to be touched, unless I come to fetch them, and in that 
case that they be turned over to me; let us make haste.”

We set out from the city and when I have my man in the bleak and desolate 
parts that stand on the edge of Stockholm, “Off you go,” I say to the wretch as I 
fire a ball into his brain, “go look for your master in hell; ’tis there we send 
everyone who has money but lacks the intelligence to give it up before we take it 
from him.”

With a kick I roll the dead body over the brink of a precipice and, my operation
terminated, turn about to drive back to town when, on the farther side of the 
road, I spy a child of thirteen or fourteen tending a flock of sheep.

“Eh, she must have seen me,” say I to myself, “she could not help but see me 
… did she see everything? … Ah, by God, let’s not waste time weighing the two 
sides of the question.”

I seize the little shepherd, wrap a scarf around her head; I rape her; her two 
pucelages are blasted at a single stroke, I put a bullet into her head at the same 
instant I discharge in her ass.

There, say I to myself, very pleased with what I have done, that is the sure 
way of avoiding all trouble from a witness, and I drive swiftly back to The English 
Arms where I have Villeneuil’s horses hitched, his trunks loaded into his carriage, 
and everything brought round to our hotel.

It was a silent Emma who greeted me there; I was disturbed by her air of 
worry.

I demanded what the matter could be. “Is your nerve failing you?”

“I am uneasy about the consequences this affair may have,” she replied. 
“Villeneuil does not come to Stockholm without giving his correspondents 
foreknowledge of his arrival; they will wonder what has befallen him; he will be 
sought for at all the inns; questions will be asked; the whole thing is bound to 
come out. And when it does, let us, my friend, be already gone from this dreadful 
country where everything frightens me nearly to death.”

“Emma, I thought you were of sterner stuff; if you are obliged to fly every time
you commit a felony, you will never be able to settle down anywhere. Come, my 
dear, put away idle fears; Nature, who desires crimes, watches over those who 
commit them, and one is very rarely chastened for having abided by her laws. I 
have credentials recommending me to everyone of outstanding note in Sweden; I 
am going to present them, be sure that among all these new acquaintances there 
shall not be one who is unable to furnish us material and opportunity for fresh 
evil-doing; let us indeed be careful, but above all not to escape from the happy 
fate that awaits us.”

At the time I was in Sweden, the capital, and the whole kingdom as well, was 
being shaken by the rivalry of two powerful parties: one, discontented with the 
Court, was straining for the day when it would seize power; the other, that of 
Gustavus III, seemed determined to stop at nothing in order to keep despotism 
enthroned; the Court and everything connected therewith made up this second 
faction. The first was composed of the Senate and of certain portions of the 
military. A new monarch had just begun his reign, and the malcontents felt this 
the propitious moment to swing into action: a dawning authority is more easily 
confronted than an entrenched one; the senators were aware of it and were 
planning to go to any lengths to secure the rights they had been striving for years
to usurp; they exercised their constitutional prerogatives to the limit and even 
beyond, daring to open letters to the King in their public assemblies, and to 
answer or interpret them as they chose; little by little, the power of these 
magistrates had grown to the point where Gustavus could scarcely appoint men to
office in his own realm.

Such was the state of affairs in the country when I paid a call upon Senator 
Steno, the guiding spirit of the senatorial party. The young magistrate and his 
wife received me with demonstrations of the most agreeable politeness and, I 
dare add, of the liveliest interest. I was scolded for not having brought my wife 
the very first day; and ’twas only by accepting an invitation to dinner for the 
following day, at which both of us would be expected, that I succeeded in quieting
young Steno’s reproaches.

Emma, who passed for my spouse and who combined all the features in which 
good society delights, was received with extreme cordiality; and the warmest 
friendship sprang up at once between that charming creature and the Senator’s 
engaging wife.(3)

If the young Swede, twenty-seven years of age, could be rightly taken for one 
of the most winning, wealthiest, wittiest persons of his generation, one might 
without exaggeration declare that Ernestine, his lady, was very surely the 
prettiest creature to be found in all Scandinavia. Nineteen years, the loveliest 
blonde hair, the most majestic figure … the prettiest brown eyes, the sweetest 
and most delicately formed features, such were the endearing qualities wherewith
Nature had embellished this angelic woman who, in addition to all these physical 
favors, possessed a fully adorned mind, the firmest character, and the soundest 
philosophy.

At our fourth meeting Steno asked me to whom were addressed the other 
letters of recommendation I had been given. I brought them all forth, and when 
upon the superscriptions he read the names of several courtiers, a frown 
darkened his face.

“Amiable Frenchman and distinguished guest,” said he, handing me back my 
sheaf of papers, “we must forego the pleasure of seeing anyone who comes 
bearing such credentials. Powerful interests divide my house from these where 
you are to go. The sworn enemies of the Court’s despotism, my colleagues, my 
friends, my relatives are not on speaking terms with those who serve or benefit 
from this despotism.”

“Ah, Monsieur,” said I, “your attitude conforms too closely to mine for me not, 
this very minute, to make the slight sacrifice of everything that would appear 
likely to bind me to the party of your opponents; I abhor kings and their tyranny. 
Is it even presumable that into such hands as this royal personage’s Nature can 
have entrusted the task of governing men? The ease with which a single 
individual may be seduced, deceived, does this not suffice to spoil any intelligent 
man’s taste for monarchy? Make haste, brave senators, restore to the Swedish 
people the liberty Gustavus seeks to wrest away from them, as his ancestors did 
before; may the efforts your young prince is now undertaking to increase his 
authority come to the same failure as those lately attempted by Adolphus. But, 
good my Lord,” I continued heatedly, “lest in future any doubt remain in your 
mind as to the sincerity of the promise I make you to embrace your party and 
uphold it for the rest of my sojourn upon Swedish soil, here are the letters I was 
to carry to Gustavus’ supporters and clients, here they are, I say, let us, you and 
I, throw them into the grate, yes, all of them, and allow me to leave up to you the
choice of friends with whom I am to consort while in your city.”

Steno clasps my hand, and his young wife, witness to this conversation, is 
unable to prevent herself from showing how greatly flattered she is to have 
attracted to her party so essential a man as I.

“Borchamps,” Steno said, “after this declaration, which so plainly comes from 
the heart, I can have no doubt of your way of thinking. Are you indeed capable of 
adopting our interests as your own, of binding yourself to us by all the ties which 
identify friends and sinew a conspiracy?”

“Senator,” I replied with vehemence, “before you now and upon my life I do 
hereby swear to stand fast in the fight until the last of the tyrants shall be wiped 
off the face of the earth, if the weapon for their destruction is put into my hand by
you.”

And I thereupon recounted my experience with the Princess of Holland, fit 
proof to demonstrate my abhorrence of tyranny and of those who wield it.

“My friend,” the Senator said to me, “is your wife’s attitude in this the same as 
yours?”

“To that question the answer is unambiguous: they were for reasons similar to 
mine that she left a Sophia who lavished favors upon her.”

“Very well then,” said Steno, “my comrades sup tomorrow night at my house, 
join us, both of you, and you will discover certain startling things.”

I related this interview to Emma.

“Before entangling us in this, my friend, consider well where it may lead; and I
would ask you not to forget that when you refused to serve Sophia’s cause, you 
were acting a great deal less, as it appears to me, from partisan spirit than 
through aversion for political affairs.”

“No,” I rejoined, “you err; I have since given the matter very close thought, 
and realized that it was uniquely my lifelong horror of the despotism of a single 
person which drove me to turn my back upon the Stadtholder’s wife; had her 
aims been different, I might perhaps have agreed to everything….”

“But see here, Borchamps,” Emma protested, “your principles seem to me 
without rhyme or reason: you are a tyrant yourself, and you detest tyranny; 
despotism breathes in your tastes, in your heart, permeates your soul, and you 
assail its tenets; explain me these contradictions or cease to count upon me to 
follow you.”

“Emma,” said I to my companion, “penetration will here suffice; listen to what 
I am going to tell you, and remember it well. If the Senate is ready to rise in arms
against Sweden’s sovereign, it is not from horror of tyranny but from envy at 
seeing despotism exercised by another than itself; once it has got the power into 
its hands you will see a sudden transformation wrought in its attitude, and they 
who hate despotism today will use it to perfect their happiness tomorrow. In 
accepting Steno’s proposal, I play the same role as he and, like him, I am eager 
not to shatter the scepter, but to wield it to my advantage. And I tell you this 
which you may also remember: I shall part company with this society the instant 
I notice it animated by any other principles or tending in any other direction; and 
so, Emma, of contradictions you need accuse me no more, nor those whom you 
see combating tyranny by despotism only: the throne is to everybody’s taste, and
’tis not the throne they detest, but him who is seated on it. I sense in myself 
certain dispositions to take a hand in worldly affairs; to succeed therein one needs
neither prejudices nor virtues; a brazen front, a corrupted soul, an unflinching 
character, all these I have; fortune beckons to me, I heed the call. Put on fine 
array tomorrow, Emma, be proud, clever, and sluttish, those, I gage, are the 
qualities that will be necessary in Steno’s house, they are the ones which will 
please my confederates, show them, you have them; and there is this last: 
tremble at nothing.”

We are there at the appointed hour and having been admitted at the gate 
overhear a lackey say to the porter: “These are the last who’ll be coming; let 
nobody else in.”

Beside this vast palace was a garden, and the society was gathered in a 
pavilion located at its farther end; tall trees shrouded this spot which one might 
have taken for a temple raised to the god of silence. A servant points the way 
without escorting us thither; we follow the path, enter the pavilion.

The assembly, apart from ourselves, numbered eight persons. Steno and his 
wife, with whom I have already acquainted you, rose to greet us and present us 
to the others I shall now describe. They were three senators and their three 
wives. The eldest of the men must have been fifty, his name was Ericsson: he had
an air of stateliness and majesty, but there was something hard in his glance and 
cutting in his speech. His wife was named Fredegunda, she was thirty-five, had 
more beauty than graciousness, features bordering on the masculine, but proud; 
what, in a word, they call a handsome woman. The second senator was forty 
years of age and called Volf: here were prodigious vivacity, very considerable wit, 
but a wickedness apparent in every line and detail. Amelia, his wife, was scarce 
twenty-three; ’twas there the most piquant face, the most agreeable figure, the 
sweetest mouth, the most roguish eye, the fairest skin in all the world; one 
cannot be all this and at the same time have a mind more lively and an 
imagination more ardent; nor be more libertine, nor more delicious. I was struck 
by Amelia, I do not pretend otherwise. The third senator was named Brahe, he 
was surely less than thirty years old, slender, spare, crafty of eye, alert, quick, 
unsettled of gesture, and looked to be all his confreres’ better in rigor, cynicism, 
and ferocity. Ulrika, his wife, was one of the most beautiful women in Stockholm, 
but simultaneously the most mischievous and the most vicious, the most attached
to the Senatorial Party, and the most capable of leading it to victory; she was two 
years younger than her husband.

“Friends,” said Steno once the doors were bolted and the shutters drawn, “had 
I not thought this French gentleman and his lady worthy of us they would not be 
present in our midst; I therefore urgently request you to admit them into our 
Society.”

“Sir,” said Brahe, addressing himself to me in a tone at once forceful and 
dignified, “what Steno tells us about you is encouraging and inspires confidence; 
this confidence however will be better established by the answers you give in 
public to the various questions that are now going to be put to you.”

He then asked: “What are your motives for hating the despotism of kings?”

To this I replied: “Envy, jealousy, ambition, pride, rage at being dominated, my
own desire to tyrannize others.”(4)

He: “Does the welfare and happiness of nations enter as a consideration into 
your views?”

I: “I am concerned solely for mine own.”

He: “And what role do the passions play in your manner of regarding all things 
political?”

I: “The leading and most vital one; according to my belief, every one of those 
individuals known as statesmen pursues now, and has always pursued, no other 
veritable objective, is now and has always b

een moved by no other veritable intention than to satisfy his voluptuous 
inclinations to the full; his plans, the alliances he forms, his schemes, his taxes, 
everything, his laws included, everything is bent toward his personal felicity, for 
the public’s well-being there can be no room in his meditations, and what the 
dizzard people see him do is never done save to render him mightier or richer.”

He: “So that if you were mighty or rich you would turn these two advantages 
nowhere but to those of your pleasures or your follies?”

I: “They are the only gods I recognize, the only delights of my soul.”

He: “And religion, how do you visualize it in regard to all this?”

I: “As the mainstay of tyranny, that mechanism which the despot must always 
set in motion when he wishes to strengthen his throne. The flame of superstition 
was ever the aurora of despotism, and it is always by means of consecrated irons 
that the tyrant breaks the people to his will.”

He: “And so you exhort us to the use of religion?”

I: “Certainly, if you are of a mind to reign, let a God speak in your behalf and 
men will obey you. When, God’s wrath in your hire or your hands, you have 
brought them to their knees, their money and their lives are as good as yours. 
Persuade them that all the woes they have suffered under the regime you wish 
them to repudiate have come from nought but their irreligion. Cause them to 
tumble at the feet of the hobgoblin you brandish before them; prostrate, they will 
serve as steppingstones to your ambition, your pride, your lust.”

He: “You yourself do not believe in God?”

I: “Is there a single rational being on earth who can credit such lies? Nature, 
forever in movement, has she any need of a mover? Would that the living body of
the first charlatan to mouth talk of this execrable chimera could be abandoned to 
the shades of all those poor wretches who have perished on its account.”

He: “How do you consider the actions that are denominated criminal?”

I: “As Nature’s inspirations to which resistance is madness; as the surest 
means a statesman can employ to accumulate the substance of happiness and 
safeguard it; as essential to the workings of all governments; as the sole laws of 
Nature.”

He: “Have you committed crimes of every sort?”

I: “There is not one wherewith I am not stained, and which I am not ready to 
stain myself with again.”

Here Brahe outlined the history of the Templars. After an energetic 
commentary upon the death, both unjust and atrocious, to which Philip the Fair 
put their last Grand Master, Molay, for the sole purpose of laying hands upon the 
Order’s property:

“In us you see,” he said to me, “the leaders of that Northern Lodge which 
Molay himself instituted even as he awaited his doom in a cell of the Bastille. If 
we accept you into our midst it is only upon the most express condition that, upon
the victim about to be presented to you, you swear to avenge our great founder, 
and at the same time to fulfill the clauses of the oath here set forth. Recite it 
aloud and intelligibly.”

“I do hereby swear” said I, reading from the vellum, “to exterminate all kings 
till none remain alive on earth; to wage incessant war against the Catholic religion
and the Papacy; to preach liberty for all the world’s peoples; and to strive to build
a universal republic.”

An awful clap of thunder dinned deafeningly; the pavilion rattled upon its 
foundations; the victim rose up through a trap in the floor, in his two hands lay 
the poniard with which I was to smite him; he was a fair youth of sixteen years, 
entirely nude. I take the proffered weapon, I drive the blade into his heart. Brahe 
comes up with a golden chalice, gathers the blood, has me drink first thereof, 
presents the goblet to the others one by one, and each drinks, pronouncing a 
barbarous phrase whose meaning is this: We shall die rather than break faith with
one another. The platform descends, the cadaver disappears, and Brahe resumes 
his interrogation.

“You have just now,” says he, “shown yourself worthy of us; you have seen 
that we are of the same intrepid stuff we require in you, and that our wives are 
likewise dauntless. Are you so careless of the crime you have just committed as 
to be able to employ it even in your pleasures?”

I: “It augments them, it electrifies them; I have always regarded murder as 
the soul of libidinous delights; its effects upon the imagination are enormous, and 
lubricity is as nought unless depravity of spirit fuel its fire.”

He: “Do you admit of restrictions in the taking of physical pleasure?”

I: “I know not what they are.”

He: “All sexes, all ages, all conditions and sorts, all degrees of kinship, all 
manners of enjoying these various individuals, all this, I say, is then a matter of 
indifference to you?”

I: “I make no discriminations.”

He: “But you do nonetheless have preference for certain forms of enjoyment?”

I: “Yes, I am particularly disposed toward the stronger ones, those which fools 
dare call antinatural, criminal, ridiculous, scandalous, the unlawful, the illegal 
kind, the antisocial and ferocious ones: for those I have a predilection, and they 
shall always be the delight of my life.”

“Brother,” said Brahe, “take your place amongst us, you are received into the 
Society.”

And when I had sat down, “In asking now,” Brahe went on, “whether your 
wife’s attitudes and principles correspond to your own, we refer ourselves only to 
you.”

“They do. I swear to it in her behalf,” I replied.

“Then heed what I am about to tell you,” the Senator began.

“The Northern Lodge, whose chiefs we are, has a considerable following in 
Stockholm; but the rank and file Masons know nothing of our behavior, our 
secrets, our customs, they trust our leadership and obey our instructions. I have 
therefore to speak to you upon but two matters, Brother: our morals and our 
intentions.

“These intentions are to overthrow the Swedish throne as well as every other 
throne, everywhere, and principally those occupied by the Bourbons. But our 
Brothers in various parts of the world will attend to that; our task is here in our 
own country. Once upon the throne of the kings, there shall never have been a 
tyranny to equal ours, no despot shall ever have put a thicker blindfold over the 
eyes of the people; plunged into essential ignorance, it shall be at our mercy, 
blood will flow in rivers, our Masonic Brethren themselves shall become the mere 
valets of our cruelties, and in us alone shall the supreme power be concentrated; 
all freedom shall go by the board, that of the press, that of worship, that simply 
of thought shall be severely forbidden and ruthlessly repressed; one must beware
of enlightening the people or of lifting away its irons when your aim is to rule it.

“You, Borchamps, shall not be permitted to share in this authority, your foreign
origins exclude you therefrom; but you shall be entrusted with the command of 
the armies and above all the robber bands which, very early in the day, shall 
spread murder and rapine across the length and breadth of Sweden to consolidate
our hold upon the countryside. When the time comes, will you swear faithful 
allegiance to us?”

“I swear it in advance.”

“We may then turn to the question of our morals.

“Their depravation, Brother, is appalling; the foremost of the moral pledges 
which bind us, after those political ones I have just indicated, is mutually to 
prostitute our wives, our sisters, our mothers and our children one to the other; 
to enjoy all those persons, pell-mell, in the presence of one another and, 
preferably, in the manner that God, as they say, punished at Sodom. Victims of 
both sexes serve in our orgies, and ’tis upon them falls the brunt of our desires’ 
irregularity. Is your wife of your own mind touching these immoralities, and as 
determined as you in their execution?”

“Be certain of it!” said Emma.

“That however is not all,” Brahe continued, “the most frightful disorders 
entertain us, there is no excess before which we hesitate. With us, atrocity is 
often carried to the point of stealing, of murdering in the street, of poisoning 
wells, streams, of perpetrating arson, of occasioning famines, of blighting 
livestock, and of sowing epidemics among men, less perhaps for the sake of our 
amusement than to weary the population of the present government and to cause
it ardently to yearn for the revolution we are preparing. Do these actions revolt 
you or are you able to participate in the Society’s program without remorse?”

“The sentiment you refer to there has always been a stranger to my heart: the 
entire universe come to bits in my hands would not cost me a tear….”

Whereupon I receive the fraternal accolade from the entire assembly. They 
then bade me bare my behind, and each of those present, men and women alike, 
came forward to kiss it, suck it, and then thrust a muddied tongue into my mouth.
Emma was exposed up to the waist; her skirts were held up by ribbons pinned to 
her shoulders, and she was subjected to the same homages; but lovely though 
she was, no word was spoken in her praise: the assembly’s regulations prohibited 
encomiums, I was given forewarning of it.

“We shall all undress,” said Brahe who presided over the meeting, “we shall 
then move on into the adjoining room.”

Ten minutes later we were ungarbed and ready, and we flocked into a large 
chamber lined with Turkish couches, the floor strown with cushions and large 
ottomans. The statue of Jacques Molay at the stake adorned the center of the 
room.

“You see there,” said Brahe, “the effigy of him we must avenge; let us, while 
awaiting that happy day, swim in the ocean of delights he himself was preparing 
for his Brethren.”

A mild warmth suffused that agreeable retreat which shaded candles 
mysteriously lighted. There was a sudden swirl and the next instant all had come 
to grips. I leap toward the fetching Amelia; her glances had aroused me, and till 
then all the heat in me was due to her; her desires fling her my way before my 
arms can fold around her. I could give you no clear picture of her charms: I was 
too overpowered then to be able to paint them now. There was never a mouth so 
sweet, never an ass so beautiful. Amelia bends away, of her own accord offering 
me the shrine in which she knows full well I am wont to do my worship, and I 
soon perceive that, be it from habit, be it from taste, the rascal is lending herself 
more for the sensation than to be obliging, and that no other attack would have 
pleased her nearly so much. The desire to embugger the three other women, and 
their husbands also, prevented me from losing my fuck in Amelia’s incomparable 
ass; and I hurled myself upon Steno, then sodomizing Emma. Enchanted by this 
stroke of good fortune, the Senator showed me a very brave behind, whereof I 
nonetheless took early leave in order to probe that belonging to Ernestine, his 
wife, a fair and voluptuous creature over whom I toiled for a long while. 
Fredegunda attracts me, however: Ernestine’s joys had been all daintiness and 
delicacy, but this one’s were all transports and frenzy. Leaving her, I flew to her 
husband. Ericsson, fifty years old, flutters under my prick like a dove under her 
mate, and the lecher answers my tooling with such fervor and zeal that he steals 
away my seed; but Brahe, who hails me then, is, by some fervent sucking, soon 
able to restore to my engine all the energy which Ericsson’s fine buttocks have 
just drained out of it; those Brahe presents to me, and whose anus I sound, 
quickly make me forget the happiness of a moment before. I fuck Brahe an 
uninterrupted half-hour and only quit him for Volf who has been sodomizing 
Ulrika, whose delicate ass obtains my sperm before long. What libertinage! what 
foulness of mind and filth of behavior in this last-named creature! Everything 
voluptuousness can have of the tartest, everything libertinage contains of the 
wildest was organized and applied by this Messalina. Grabbing my prick directly it 
had discharged, the slut did everything under the sun to revive it and lodge it in 
her cunt; but I proved invincible. Staunch adherent to the Society’s laws, I 
reached the point of threatening Ulrika with denunciation if she persisted another 
instant in her attempts to seduce me; furious, the rascal crammed my device 
back into her ass and flung and danced so ardently about that she squirted fuck in
every direction.

While I was thus fucking every ass in the room, Emma, just as bountifully 
regaled, had not missed a prick; they had all, even mine, been in and out of her 
ass, but not all had discharged there; these were libertines of mark whom a 
single enjoyment, be it of an uncommonly fine ass, was not apt to electrify so 
keenly as to cost them their fuck, no, they did not part with it as readily as all 
that; they every one, for example, buggered me, and from not one of them did I 
get sperm. Ericsson, the most licentious of the lot, might well have fucked fifteen 
such ones as he had at his disposal, and it is doubtful whether his prick would 
have purpled. Young and vigorous though he was, Brahe, had it not been for the 
incredible episodes whereof we shall speak anon, would not have brought matters
to their conclusion either. As for Steno, his struggles were over: bewitched by 
Emma, that voluptuous creature’s stunning ass had, so he said, sufficed, and his 
boiling fuck had flooded it. On the other hand, Volf, more refined in his needs, still
lacking what he required for discharge, had also merely tuned his instrument, and
it was only at supper, which was shortly announced, that I began to glimpse the 
essential peculiarities of my new acolytes’ tastes. This supper was awaiting us in 
another hall, where six fair boys of from fifteen to eighteen and six charming girls
of the same age were at hand, naked, to serve us. After a sumptuous repast 
further orgies were celebrated and now the whole truth about those Swedish 
despots’ unruly passions finally came out.

Steno, as we know, had discharged with ease into Emma’s ass; he nonetheless
desired, for the perfection of his ecstasy, that a young boy suck his mouth 
amorously and simultaneously finger his asshole while he himself fucked a man: 
such was his passion.

To rescue his honor, Ericsson had first to lash the skin off a pair of young 
persons, one male, the other female: without this preliminary he could never get 
anywhere.

There was Volf who would have himself embuggered while, for a solid hour he 
plied a cat-o’-nine-tails against the ass in which he proposed to discharge. 
Otherwise, no erection worth speaking of.

More mischievous yet, Brahe was not disposed to ejaculate until he had 
maimed a victim hard by the ass he coveted.

These passions were unfolded between fruit and cheese. Wine, hope, ambition,
pride went to everyone’s head, all inhibitions were forgotten; the women, 
positively uncontrollable, were the first to set examples of the disorderliness 
which, by the time the evening ended, had cost six victims their lives.

As we were about to take our leave, Steno, in the name of the Society 
expressing his joy at having us in its midst, asked me if I were by any chance in 
need of a sum …; I thought it wisest to say no, at least for the moment. And for a
week I heard nothing more from my new friends. Then, on the morning of the 
eighth day, Steno came to see me.

“We are going on a prowl tonight,” said he, “the women shall not be along; do 
you care to join us?”

“What have you in mind?”

“Some random crimes. We mean to do a little stealing, pillaging, assassinating,
burning. In a word, to commit some horrors; are you with us?”

“Surely.”

“Meet us at eight o’clock at Brahe’s house in the suburbs; we leave from 
there.”

A delicious supper was awaiting us, and twenty-five troopers, chosen for 
superiority of member, were, in spending themselves in our asses, to impart to us
the energy necessary for the projected expedition. We were fucked forty times 
apiece, which was more than I had ever been before at a single tourney. These 
preliminaries left us all afire, in such a state of agitation that we’d have taken a 
knife to the throat of Almighty God himself had the bugger-fucker existed.

Escorted by ten of the stoutest champions in the band, there we are roaming 
the streets like furies, blindly assaulting everybody in our path: as one by one our
victims were robbed and killed, their bodies were tossed into the canals. If we 
stopped anything worth the bother, we’d rape it first, murder it afterward. We 
broke our way into several humble dwellings, which we devastated once we were 
done terrorizing, mutilating, and finally butchering their inhabitants; we permitted
ourselves every imaginable and every nameless execration, and left screams, 
flames, and blood in our wake. We found the patrol, we attacked it, put it to 
flight; and ’twas only when we were glutted on atrocities that we wended our way
homeward as the sun rose to shine upon the debris left by our scandalous orgies.

Needless to say, we had it printed in the press that such were the frightful 
abuses the government was perpetrating, and that so long as the royal regime 
prevailed over the Senate and the law, no fortune would be in safety, no citizen 
would walk in peace abroad or breathe in peace at home. The people believed 
what they read and sighed for a revolution. Aye, so it is the poor fools are 
hoodwinked, so it is the common population is at once made the pretext and the 
victim of its leaders’ wickedness: always weak and always stupid, sometimes it is 
made to want a king, sometimes a republic, and the prosperity its agitators offer 
under the one system or the other is never but the phantom created by their 
interests or by their passions.(5)

However, the hour was approaching, such was the desire for a change that this
was the sole subject of conversations. A more discerning and an abler politician 
than my associates, at the very moment they were convincing themselves that 
success was at hand, I saw that the wind lay in the other direction; calmer than 
they, I sounded out opinion, and from the immense quantity of people I found 
firmly attached to the king and his royalists I drew the conclusion that the 
senatorial revolution was destined to be stillborn. It was then that, faithful to the 
principles of egoism and villainy to which I have been devoted all my life, I 
resolved to change camp on the spot, and inhumanly to betray the one into which
I had been received. Of the two it was the weaker, that was obvious; it was 
neither goodness on the one side nor badness on the other that decided me, force
was the only deciding factor, and it was only with force I wished to keep company.
I would have unfailingly stayed with the senators had I believed their faction not 
the better (I knew perfectly well that it was the more vicious), but the more 
powerful; the evidence convinced me that it was not: I turned traitor. This, it will 
perhaps be said, was infamous; so be it. But infamy meant little to me when my 
welfare or safety lay in treason. Man is born to pursue his happiness on earth, 
and for no other purpose; all the vain considerations opposed thereto, all the 
prejudices which hinder him are better flouted than heeded, for it is not the 
esteem of others that will render him happy; he is happy only if he is so in his 
own opinion, and it will never be from laboring toward his prosperity, whatever 
the road he chooses for getting there, that he will be able to lose self-respect.

I request private audience with Gustavus; I obtain it; I reveal everything to 
him, I name those who have sworn to dethrone him, I give him my word not to 
leave Stockholm until he has investigated the conspiracy I allege, and I ask no 
more than a million by way of reward if my warnings prove founded and exact; 
eternal imprisonment if false. The monarch’s vigilance, aided by my disclosures, 
averts the catastrophe. On the day the insurrection was to break out, Gustavus 
was up and in the saddle before dawn: he sent the people home, isolated the 
plotters, won over the military, seized the arsenal, and all that without shedding a
drop of blood. This was not at all what I had been counting upon; gloating in 
advance over the terrible consequences I fancied my treachery would have, I too 
was up with the sun and gone out to see all those heads fall: the imbecile 
Gustavus spared them every one. I was aghast. Oh, said I to myself, how I regret
having broken faith with those who at least would have drenched this kingdom in 
blood. I have been deceived; they accused this prince of being a despot, and look 
at the clumsy oaf! he is meek as a lamb when I give him the means and the 
occasion to fortify his tyranny! Bah, a plague upon the fellow!

“Ah, mark my words,” said I to all those who cared to listen to me, and they 
were not many, “your prince is jeopardizing the future instead of taking this 
precious opportunity to plant his scepter, as he ought to do, upon a hill of corpses.
Brief will be his reign, believe me, and unhappy his end.”

I was not however obliged to remind him of his promise; Gustavus himself 
summoned me to his palace and along with my fee of a million gave me the order
to get out of his States immediately.

“I pay traitors,” he said to me, “they are useful, I need them; but I despise 
them and, once they have served their purpose, prefer to have them out of my 
sight.”

What does it matter to me, said I to myself as I went away, whether this clod 
esteems or detests me; he has money, that is what I was after. As for the 
character he reproaches in me, he’ll not correct it: I delight in treason and am 
going to commit a little more of it very soon.

Ten minutes later I fly to Steno.

“My wife let it out,” I tell him, “she is a monster; I have just learned the entire 
story, she received money for this horror. Thanks to her treachery I have orders 
to leave Sweden. I shall go, for I must. But before I do I’d like to settle my score 
with her. The town is quiet, nothing prevents us from meeting together this 
evening, let us do so; and let us punish the creature, that is all I ask of you.”

Steno consents. I conduct Emma to the Society without her knowing for what 
reason it is gathering; all the men, all the women rise in fury against her whom I 
accuse, unanimously condemn her to the most atrocious death. Emma, 
bewildered at such charges, seeks to recriminate against me; she is reduced to 
silence. While lubricious scenes are enacted around the scaffold raised for her 
destruction, the luckless wretch, entrusted to my tender mercies, is flayed alive, 
and one by one I slowly grill each part of her whence I have removed the skin. 
Throughout it all I was being sucked, and my four friends, each fucking a bardash,
were whipped by their wives whom young girls were cunt-sucking; never in all my
days had I discharged so deliciously. The operation over with, the company 
mingled; ’twas then that Amelia, Volf’s wife, accosted me.

“I like your firmness,” she declared. “It was long ago I noticed this woman was
not the sort you need; I am more suitable for you, Borchamps. But I am going to 
surprise you: swear to me that I too shall someday become your victim. I cannot 
help it, my imagination is what it is: delirious. My husband is too fond of me to 
satisfy it; I can stand no more: since the age of fifteen the idea of perishing the 
victim of libertinage’s cruel passions has been gnawing my brain. No, I do not 
want to die tomorrow, my extravagance does not go that far. But that is how I 
want to die, and only in that manner. To become, as I expire, the occasion of a 
crime—ah, my head reels at the thought; and in the morning I leave Stockholm at
your side, if you vow to satisfy me.”

Deeply stirred by this so uncommon proposition, I protest to Amelia that she 
will have cause to be content with me: arrangements are made, she slips away to
join me before the night is over, and at sunrise we set forth from the city 
together.

I went out of Stockholm with riches that by now had become immense: I had 
inherited from my wife, I had the King’s million, and my new friend handed over 
to me a further six hundred thousand francs, which she had stolen from her 
husband and insisted that I take.

Saint Petersburg, Amelia and I agreed, was to be our destination, and thither 
we took ourselves. She demanded that we marry, I consented; and it being 
needless, in view of our means, that we deny ourselves anything we desired, we 
rented a splendid mansion in the finest quarter of the city. Valets, retinue, 
equipages, choice wines and good meat, we stinted not, and soon the flower of 
society was honored^ to obtain entry to my wife’s house. The Russians are fond 
of display, lavishness, luxury; but, in everything taking their guidance from us, 
just as soon as a French lord appears with some magnificence in their midst, they
all rush off to copy him. The Empress’ minister came in person to invite me to 
present myself to his sovereign; and knowing I was born for great adventures, I 
accepted his propositions.

Always familiar with those who pleased her, Catherine asked me several 
particular questions about France, and my replies having satisfied her, she gave 
me permission to pay her frequent court. Thus did two years pass, during which 
we, Amelia and I, swam in all that noble city could offer in the way of pleasures. A
note from the Empress finally clarified the reasons lying behind her willingness to 
see me so often. In this missive she besought me to accompany the man who 
delivered it to me: at nightfall he would escort me to one of her country 
residences, situated a few leagues outside the town. Amelia, whom I told of this 
stroke of good luck, did all she could to dissuade me, and was much aggrieved to 
see me set forth.

“Concerning your person,” the Empress began as soon as we were alone 
together, “I have gathered all the information necessary. I know of your behavior 
in Sweden, and whatever others may have said about it, or thought, I strongly 
approve it. For you may be perfectly certain, my good young Frenchman, that it is
wiser to stand for kings than against, theirs is the better side: those who embrace
it and to it remain faithful are never sorry. Behind a mask of popularity Gustavus 
sought to fortify despotism’s position on its throne; exposing the conspiracy 
threatening to foil his designs, you served despotism well; I praise you therefor. 
Your age, your mien, what they publish of your wit, everything appertaining to 
you excites my interest; and to your fortune I may be able to make solid 
contributions, if you rally to my projects….”

“Madame!” said I, truly touched by this woman’s charms, superb though forty 
years old, “the good fortune of pleasing Your Majesty is reward enough for the 
services she enables one to render her, and in advance I swear that her orders 
shall henceforth be the duties cherished of my heart and my heart’s sole 
delights.”

Catherine gave me her hand, I kissed it with feeling; a fichu slips aside, and 
the world’s most gorgeous bosom appears before my eyes; Catherine, covering it 
over again, speaks of her thinness, as if any living man had ever spied anything 
plumper, more delicious, than what I have just had a glimpse of. When the 
Empress observed that I could not contain my enthusiasm, she soon allowed me 
to convince myself that all her other features matched the quality of the sample I 
had just detected. Eh, my friends, what else would you have from me except the 
truth? I showed prick to the Empress before the day was out; and as she found 
me infinitely to her liking I was promptly admitted to the honors of the imperial 
bed. Few women of her day could rival Catherine for beauty; fleshly parts and 
forms are not more richly made nor more prettily turned; and when I’d come to 
know a little of her temperament I ceased to wonder at the multitude of my 
predecessors. All manners of enjoyment were desired by Catherine, and you will 
of course understand that I refused her none of them: her ass especially, the 
fairest ass I’d seen in my life, caused me no end of sweetest comforts and cheer.

“These little malpractices are very prevalent in Russia,” she told me, “and I am
careful not to proscribe them; the size of this swarming population is responsible 
for the wealth of the nobility, and their power interferes with mine, I must use 
every means to weaken it; this one is of effective value and amuses me too, for I 
like vice and its practitioners; promoting it is among my principles. I could easily 
prove to any sovereign that he can ill afford not to do as I. Borchamps, I am 
enchanted to see you treating my behind with such deference and attention”—I 
was kissing it even as she spoke—“and declare to you that it is at your disposal 
whenever you are of a mind to fuck it….”

I made much use, that evening, of the license granted me.

It was here the Empress, who was not altogether without prudence, drew the 
line during our first interview, she did not open herself farther; the second 
transpired a week later, and in the same way. But at the third Catherine spoke to 
me in this wise: “I now feel confident enough in you to associate you with my 
plans. Before disclosing them, however, I require a sacrifice of you, and I want 
you to subscribe to it this instant. Who is the pretty Swede you have in your train,
Borchamps?”

“She is my wife.”

“Be that as it may, I do not want to see her alive tomorrow.”

“The swelling prick you are holding in your hand, Princess,” was my reply, “is 
ready to sign her death warrant in your ass…. 

“Good,” said Catherine, lodging my instrument inside her, “but I am cruel; this 
woman has roused my jealousy to a dangerous point, and since I wish her to 
endure sufferings proportional to the uneasiness she has caused me, I wish that, 
while you and I look on, she be tonged tomorrow, with heated pincers; every 
quarter of an hour the procedure will be interrupted in order that she be 
suspended in this or that manner and half-broken on the wheel; my executioners 
will fuck her at each stage, I’ll have her bathed in quicklime before all the life is 
gone out of her. In the meantime I shall be examining your countenance: if you 
prove steadfast, brave, the secret shall be revealed to you. Otherwise, it shall not 
be.”

Lovely though Amelia was, two years of enjoying her had furiously calmed my 
desires. In her there were overmuch tenderness, overmuch affection, and a mind 
far less cruel than at first I had supposed. What she had told me about the way in
which she wanted to end her days, this, the more I pondered it, had simply been 
an effort on her part to be ingratiating; it did not correspond to her real feelings. 
What was more, Amelia was without all the gracious condescension I expected in 
a woman; she refused to suck me, and as for her behind, while I do not for a 
moment deny that it had had its very great charms, I would ask you, does a 
woman’s still have any after you’ve fucked it for two years? Everything was 
therefore promised to Catherine, who was greatly entertained by the possibility of
satisfying the desire my wife had once expressed touching on the death she 
wished to die: the very next day, Amelia was brought to one of the Empress’ 
houses, a very obscure one and far away from the city, and presented to Her 
Majesty.

There is no imagining the transports of this woman, who was accustomed to 
seeing everything and everyone yield to her will. There is no believing the 
harshness, the tyranny she displayed toward the unlucky Swedish girl; she 
exacted the most debasing services from her; had Amelia lick and frig her, 
submitted her to the most trying vexations, and then, surrendering her to her 
executioners, the monster watched her actually undergo every one of the tortures
prescribed in the plan she had elaborated. She insisted that I embugger the 
hapless victim during the intervals; such was her delirium, she demanded that I 
fuck the executioners even as they were at work torturing Amelia; and pleased to 
see my prick keep at an even stand the whole while, of my character she formed 
the opinion that answered to her desires. My poor bedraggled wife expired after 
eleven hours of varied and violent agonies. Catherine discharged twenty times at 
least; she herself lent the executioners a hand; and she said that a week hence, 
she would unfold her grand scheme to me, and I was dismissed.(7)

Hitherto I had been the Empress’ guest at her country establishments only; 
this time it was into the Winter Palace I had the honor to be admitted.

“From what I have observed of you, Borchamps,” Catherine declared to me, “I 
can be in no doubt about the energy of your character. No longer under the 
influence of childhood prejudices toward what fools call crime, the attitude you 
exhibit is plain and enlightened; but if this mode of action is frequently useful to 
ordinary folk, how often it becomes indispensable to rulers and to statesmen! The
private individual, laying sturdy foundations for his worldly well-being, has seldom
to go beyond one or two crimes in the course of his existence; those persons who
oppose his desires are in number so few that to combat them he needs little in 
the way of arms. But we, Borchamps, perpetually surrounded by flatterers 
seeking only to deceive us, or by powerful enemies whose unique aim is to 
destroy us, how many are the different circumstances under which we are obliged
to employ crime! A sovereign who is jealous of his prerogatives ought never to go
to sleep without his mace under his pillow.

“The famous Peter fancied he was performing a great service for Russia when 
he struck off the chains of a people who had never known nor cherished anything 
but its bondage; but Peter, more mindful of his reputation than of the lot of those 
who were to follow him on his throne, did not realize he was tarnishing 
monarchy’s diadem without making the people happier. And what in fact did this 
great change he instituted gain him? He increased the territories of Russia; but 
what could the greater or lesser extent of his dominions matter to him, who lived 
only upon a few acres of it? Why, at great expense, import arts and sciences from
abroad and plant them in a native soil where he wished to see corn grow? What 
pleased him in the semblance of a freedom which only added to the weight of his 
subjects’ shackles? It may be unhesitatingly affirmed: Peter was as certainly the 
downfall of Russia as will be her liberator he who reimposes the yoke upon her: 
enlightened Russia perceives what she lacks, Russia restored to slavery would see
nothing beyond her physical needs. Now, in which of the two situations is man 
more fortunate: in the one where, the blindfold removed from his eyes, he is able
to discern all his privations? or in the other, where his ignorance prevents him 
from suspecting any of them? These bases once established, does one deny that 
the most violent despotism better befits the subject than the fullest 
independence? And if you grant me this point—which I think it impossible to 
contest—do you blame me for resorting to every conceivable device in order to 
arrange affairs in Russia as they were before the baneful advent of Peter?

“Basilovitch reigned as I mean to reign; his tyranny is the model I propose to 
adopt. He used to amuse himself, they say, dashing out his captives’ brains, 
raping their wives and daughters, mutilating them with his own hands, rending 
them into pieces, and after that burning them; he assassinated his son; at 
Novgorod he punished an insurrection by having three thousand human beings 
thrown into the Volga; he was the Nero of Russia. Well, I shall be her Theodora or
her Messalina; whatever the horror that enables me to strengthen my hold on the
throne, I shall not falter, and the first of those I must consummate is the killing of
my son. You, Borchamps, are the man I have in mind to accomplish this political 
atrocity. He among my compatriots whom I were to select for the task might have
a sentimental attachment to this prince, and instead of an accomplice I would be 
engaging my betrayer; only too well I recall the legitimate grievances I had of the
Russian to whom I entrusted the slaying of my husband; I want no more such 
unpleasant experiences. Nothing necessitates that it be one of my countrymen 
whom I charge with these great commissions; a remnant of the loyalty he 
imagines due one of his nation’s princes could deter him, and crime is always 
bungled when prejudices are operative. With you I have no such fears; I have 
here the poison I want you to employ…. I have spoken, Borchamps; how do you 
decide?”

“Madame,” I replied to this woman whose greatness of character has been 
admitted universally, “even had I lost the taste for crime I was born with, even 
had crime ceased to be my element and very sustenance, this one that you 
propose would flatter me, and the mere idea of ridding the world of a meek and 
debonair prince in order to preserve there the tyranny whereof nobody is a more 
zealous partisan than I, this idea, Madame, would alone suffice to cause me to 
undertake, joyfully, the project you outline to me: count upon my obedience.”

“This profound resignation makes you mine forever,” said Catherine, folding me
in her arms. “I intend, tomorrow, to treat you to an orgy of delights, to make all 
your senses boil. I want you to behold me in pleasure’s throes; and I want to 
behold you in them; and when we are both very merry and very high from lewd 
sights and lewd doings, you shall be given the venom that is to put an end to the 
abhorrent existence of that contemptible creature I failed to avoid bringing into 
this world.”

The rendezvous was at the country house where I had seen the Empress 
previously. She was awaiting me in a magical boudoir, a veritable garden where, 
in the warm air, exotic flowers were blooming in mahogany benches agreeably 
scattered throughout this exquisite chamber. Turkish sofas, surrounded by mirrors
and beneath mirrors affixed to the ceiling, cried to be put to voluptuous use. From
there a more lugubrious alcove was visible; in it was to be seen a quartet of 
twenty-year-old youths. They were in irons, helpless, held at the mercy of 
Catherine’s unbridled passions.

“What you are looking at in there,” the Empress said to me, “is the climax to 
the entertainment. A preliminary series of ordinary pleasures will fettle us 
gradually; we shall not come to grips with those boys until our fever has attained 
its final pitch. Would victims of my sex please you better?”

“Why, ’tis a matter of indifference to me,” I assured her; “I will share your 
pleasures, and whatever the individual upon whom murder is committed, it is 
always certain to stimulate my senses.”

“Ah, Borchamps, nothing else in the world is worth the candle! It is so sweet to
behave unnaturally—”

“But what is more natural than murder?”

“I know; but it constitutes an infraction of the law, and I adore the idea.”

“The law? What can she care for the law who makes the law? Tell me: has Your
Highness already enjoyed these four fine young men?”

“Would they be in my chains otherwise?”

“Do they realize what fate lies in store for them?”

“Not yet; we shall announce it while utilizing them. I shall pronounce the 
sentence of each while your prick is in his ass.”

“I would also like that to be the moment when you carry it out.”

“Ah, you’re a villain, an adorable villain!” Catherine exclaimed.

And the lust-objects appointed for the impending games appeared forthwith. 
They were six lasses of fifteen or sixteen years, of rarest beauty; and six men, 
each five feet ten inches tall, all with members as thick as your forearm and at 
least as long.

“Install yourself there where you have a clear view of me,” Catherine 
instructed me, “and consider my pleasures, keeping your distance; frig yourself if 
you like, but do not disturb me. I am going to taste the supreme delights of 
offering you a display of thorough whorishness; cynicism is part of my character, I
like to make a discreditable parade of myself, scandal excites my mind.”

I do as I am told. The girls undress their queen, then shower her with the 
prettiest caresses. Three of them suck, one her mouth, another her cunt, the last 
her asshole; they are replaced at their posts by the other three; the first team 
relieves the second; and the exercise was conducted at a very smart pace; they 
picked up withes and bestowed a gentle scourging upon Catherine, each toiling 
over a different part of her body. The men stepped forward and while they were 
at work, this or that girl would now and again approach to kiss mouths and stroke
members. When the Tsarina’s body was all a bright scarlet she had herself rubbed
with spirits; then, sitting on the face of one of the little maids, who was ordered 
to tongue her vent, she received a second, kneeling, between her thighs, who 
sucked her clitoris; the third sucked her mouth; the fourth, her teats; and she 
frigged the remaining two, one with either hand. The six lads, now grouping 
themselves likewise, put prickpoint to everything of the six girls’ behinds they 
could reach. No, I had never beheld anything so voluptuous as this exquisite 
ensemble; its maneuvers cost Catherine a discharge. I heard her moan and utter 
blasphemies in Russian, it was her custom.

Another scene was enacted immediately. It was she who now frigged the girls, 
each in her turn; but she sucked only their fundaments; and while she was 
sucking them, the men were tickling hers. This calling for the participation of only 
two subjects, the ten others did before her eyes what she herself was doing. After
a little everything changes again. Now she stuffs a prick into her cunt and, lying 
atop him who is fucking her so, she offers her ass to another who sodomizes her 
mightily; to left and to right she chafes a prick upon a girl’s buttocks; he who 
embuggers her is flogged, and all the rest cluster around her, in suggestive 
attitudes. Thus did the six men fray her cuntwise and asswardly; after which, she 
served the six girls up for fucking, all by herself she fitted pricks into avenues of 
pleasure, sucked each engine as it emerged from this breach or that, meanwhile 
herself titillating the clitoris and kissing the mouth of the girl; she sprawls upon 
the sofa and has herself mounted by the men, one after another: each, raising 
her thighs, was to tup her in front and behind; as this was going forward, each of 
the girls had to squat above her brow, kiss the man serving her, and then piss on 
her face. During this scene the rascal shed another great quantity of fuck. It was 
at its conclusion that she summoned me. I was at the end of my tether, Tantalus’ 
sufferings were as nothing next to mine, and to see me thus was what the whore 
had wanted.

“Are you stiff?” she inquired ironically.

“Have a look at it, slut!” I stormed.

That insolent reply pleased her beyond words.

“Why then,” she went on, turning around, “my ass is at your disposal. It’s full 
of fuck, you can deposit yours in there along with the rest.”

And the saucy creature sucked one of her men’s asses while I sodomized her. 
Ass after ass was presented to her lips; I handled the asses of the girls while I 
fucked away, and despite all I could do, my seed escaped me. She forbade me to 
leave her ass, then commanded the men to fuck me back into fucking form; her 
orders to the girls were to give me their buttocks for kissing, and their cunts to 
her for tonguing; so it was that three times in succession my fuck flowed.

“Let’s perform some cruelties now,” Catherine proposed; “I am spent, I must 
resort to severities.”

Each man then got down on all fours, a girl got astride him, so that each 
couple offered a pair of vulnerable asses. Catherine armed herself with a whip of 
the kind executioners use in Russia for administering the knout,(8) and with her 
royal hand the trollop lashed all those fair behinds so thoroughly that blood lay in 
puddles on the floor; I was whipping her at the same time, but simply with birch 
rods, and after every twenty cuts I had to kneel behind her and lick her anus.

“I am going,” she told me, “to martyrize all these individuals, but in a rather 
more serious manner; once I have had my pleasure from them I propose to put 
them to no very pretty death….”

The men seize the girls, spread their legs wide apart and hold them thus; 
Catherine sends whistling blows of her whip into the poor souls’ gaping vaginas, 
from which she fetches forth streams of blood. Next, the girls lay hold of the men 
and Catherine plies her scourge upon their pricks and balls.

“What concern can any of that be to me now?” she was asking. “Drained and 
limp, it’s worthless, there’s nothing to be done with such tripe but feed it to 
worms; frolic with these individuals, Borchamps, they’re yours and I’ll take my 
turn watching you.”

Directed and encouraged by me, the girls bring the men’s members aloft again
and I am fucked another two times by each of them; I push my prick into all 
those dozen fundaments, I arrange various tableaux, and Catherine masturbates 
while observing me.

“That will do,” says she, “let us move on to more important matters.”

The victims entered; but what was my astonishment at seeing one of those 
young men so closely resemble the Empress’ son that for a moment I could 
believe it was the Tsarevitch himself.

“I should hope,” Catherine said to me upon noticing my surprise, “that you are 
able to read my intentions.”

“Gauging your mind by the standard of my own,” was my answer, “I take it 
that this is the person upon whom we are going to test the poison you have 
selected for the young man who could easily be his twin.”

“Exactly,” Catherine admitted; “I shall be deprived of the pleasure of 
witnessing my son’s agonies, this fellow’s will give me an image of them. My 
illusion will be agreeable; I’ll discharge you perfect floods.”

“Delicious mind,” I cried, “what a pity you are not the whole earth’s queen, and
I your prime minister!”

“Assuredly,” said the Empress, “we’d achieve a great many wicked things 
together, and it would be a planet inhabited by our victims….”

Before anything else Catherine had herself fucked by those four ill-starred 
young men while I embuggered them and the dozen other subjects were either 
flogging or frigging us, or adopting obscene poses.

“The first six men with whom we began our fucking,” the Empress told me, 
“are my ordinary executioners; you shall see them in action upon that pretty 
quartet. As for these women, does your lubricity doom any of them? If so, point 
them out now and I shall dismiss the rest so that we can quietly amuse ourselves 
contemplating the destruction of these unfortunates.”

Two of those charming creatures having made a strong impression upon me, I 
designated them for death, and then only fourteen of us remained: six 
executioners, a like number of victims, the Tsarina and I.

The living image of Catherine’s son was the first victim to appear on the stage.
I myself presented him the fatal drink whose effects were not felt until half an 
hour later; by then we had both, and in every manner, enjoyed him fairly to 
shreds; when we were done, his pains began, and they were terrifying. Ten 
minutes after his first convulsions the wretch expired, before our avid gazes; and 
during the spectacle, Catherine had herself embuggered uninterruptedly. Then 
she had each of the other young men one after the other bound fast atop her 
body: she pecked at them, she frigged them, while the executioners, into whose 
ranks the whore had incorporated me, hacked and slashed those knaves to 
mincemeat as they squirmed and thrashed upon her; the torments we subjected 
them to were beyond number and example. The two girls I had asked leave to 
execute by myself perished under treatment just as rigorous as that which the 
men had undergone, and I dare say I may even have improved upon the horrors 
the Empress had ordered. I opened the cunt of one of them and stuck fifty or 
sixty minikins into the walls of her vagina; then I fucked her. Each thrust of my 
prick, driving those tiny pins in to the head, wrung piercing shrieks from the 
unhappy creature, and Catherine avowed she had never invented anything so 
delightful.

The corpses were removed, and Catherine and I sat down to a private supper; 
we were both naked. She waxed very passionate, bestowed unstinting praise 
upon my rigidity of prick and principle, and for me foresaw the most brilliant 
future at her Court once I had brought about her son’s death. The poison was 
entrusted to me, I promised to take action on the morrow. Twice again did I fuck 
Catherine the Great in the ass, and we parted.

For quite some time I had been the young prince’s familiar; Catherine had, on 
purpose, encouraged those frequentations; she had even wanted me to frig 
myself in that young man’s company, in order to excite her lewdness by the 
details I would give her concerning the person of this child her rage doomed. The 
tête-à-tête had taken place; on another occasion Catherine, in hiding, had even 
watched us indulge in a bout of buggery. This liaison favored the carrying out of 
our plan. The Tsarevitch, as was his wont, came one morning to take breakfast 
with me, and it was then the blow was struck. But from long exposure to his 
mother’s attempts on his life, the young prince had made a rule of never eating 
anything in town without swallowing some antidote as soon as he felt the faintest 
signs of an indisposition. Thus, our perfidious scheme came to nought; and the 
unjust Catherine, immediately suspecting me of having lost my nerve, greeted me
with invectives and had me arrested as I left her palace. You know that Siberia is 
the fate of all this cruel woman’s state prisoners; my holdings were confiscated, 
my personal effects seized, I was led off to that horrible place of exile; there, like 
the others, I had to turn over a dozen animal skins to the commander every 
month, and when I failed to do so, was flogged to ribbons. Siberia was the grim 
school where I converted this punishment into a kind of need which has become 
so violent in me that, for my health’s sake, I absolutely cannot forego having 
myself whipped once a day.(9)

Upon arriving in those remote parts I was given a hut whose former occupant 
had just died after fifteen years of detention. It was divided into three rooms; 
light entered them through windows of oiled paper. It was built of pine, the only 
floor was a deep layer of old fishbones, which shone like ivory. The roof was 
covered over, rather picturesquely, by the foliage of the trees growing around. For
security against the incursions of wild animals the place was surrounded by a 
ditch and a palisade of thick stakes reinforced by horizontal planks; the upper 
ends of those stakes were sharpened to a point, so that one was protected as 
though by a fence of spears, and when the outer gate was shut one was quite as 
safe as in a little fortress. Inspecting the hut I came upon the former tenant’s 
larder: it contained dry biscuits, salted reindeer flesh, some earthenware jugs of 
ale; that was all. Such was the joyless abode to which, after my day of hunting, I 
would return, to weep over the injustice of monarchs and the brutal unkindness of
fortune. Nearly ten years did I spend in this cruel retirement, having no company 
save that of a few other luckless souls in the same plight as I.

One of them, Hungarian by birth, an utterly unprincipled man and who was 
called Tergowitz, appeared to be the only person there with whom I had anything 
in common. He at least had a rational approach to crime; the others committed it 
like the animals they tracked in the awful Siberian forest. Tergowitz alone, instead
of soliciting the compassion of God, generally thought to be the cause of our 
woes, confined himself to cursing the deity every day; although he was guilty of 
every crime under the sun, his iron soul afforded no room to regrets, and if he 
was sorry about anything, it was to be obliged, owing to the circumstances we 
were in, to neglect his penchants. Like myself, Tergowitz was nearing thirty; his 
face was agreeable, and the first thing our exchange of confidences led to was an 
evening of embuggering each other.

“Mark you,” explained the Hungarian as soon as we were finished, “it’s not the 
absence or need of women that drives me to what I have just done, but simply 
taste. I idolize men and abhor females; even if we had three million of them here,
I’d not touch a one.”

“Tell me,” I asked my comrade, “is there anyone else in this miserable region 
whom we might associate in our sodomite pleasures?”

“Yes,” said Tergowitz; “not far from here dwells a Pole named Voldomir, fifty-six
years old, as handsome a man as there’s anywhere to be found … and as fanatic a
bugger; he has been in these wastelands for eighteen years; he is passionately 
fond of me and, I’m sure, will be most willing to become acquainted with you. 
Borchamps, let’s the three of us join forces and get ourselves out of this 
melancholy part of the world.”

That same day we went to find the Pole. He lived fifty versts(10) away: 
someone that distance from you is your neighbor in Siberia. Voldomir, exiled for 
horrible crimes committed in Russia, struck me as a very attractive person 
indeed, but of remarkable ferocity; his manner of address was gruff, flintlike, and 
misanthropy seemed grained in his every feature. It was not until after Tergowitz 
had given him one or two cogent details upon my character that he envisaged me
with a less hostile eye. As soon as we had supped, we all three reached 
mechanically into our breeches. Voldomir had a superb member, but the 
leatheriest ass I had beheld in all my life.

“He never brings in any skins,” Tergowitz explained to me, “that assures him of
his daily beating.”

“Very certain it is,” declared the Pole, “that a lashing affords me greater 
pleasure than anything else in the world, and if you’d like to practice your arm on 
them, I’ll lend you my buttocks.”

Wielding the switches he provided us, Tergowitz and I were an entire hour 
thrashing the Pole, who for all we could do seemed hardly to feel a thing. At 
length, however, electrified by the ceremony, the rake caught hold of my behind 
and into it thrust his colossal and unmoistened prick, I was fucked in a trice; 
Tergowitz bum-tupped him the while; and despite the excessively cold weather, 
we left the smoky hut and ass-fucked each other in the snow. That prodigious 
engine caused one a good deal of pain, and the scoundrel watched me suffer with 
an unpitying smile. Snatching his stave out of my ass, he buried it in Tergowitz’s, 
and for nearly two hours scraped and tore us both, without discharging; I would 
embugger him while he was fucking my comrade. But, younger than he, less 
jaded, I discharged inside his bowels.

The Pole had still not loosed his seed when at last he put his member away. 
“Unfortunately,” he said, “I am obliged to deny myself these pleasures, or indulge 
in them alone, for I am utterly incapable of bringing them to their proper 
conclusion without shedding blood, a great quantity of blood; for lack of men to 
kill, I slaughter animals and smear myself with their gore. But when the passions 
are keen, it is a great hardship to be reduced to these makeshifts….”

“Ah,”, said Tergowitz, “avowing our tastes to our new comrade, I believe we 
can inform him that we have not always confined ourselves to foxes, bears, 
wolves….”

“But where the devil can you find victims?” I demanded of my friends.

“Among our fellow prisoners.”

“Notwithstanding the fact they share your hard lot? You have no mercy upon 
them who, like you, have been treated unmercifully?”

“What do you call mercy?” the Pole asked me. “That sentiment, chilling to the 
desires, can it find entry into a stern heart? And when a crime delights me, can I 
be stopped by mercifulness, the dullest, most stupid, most futile of all the soul’s 
impulsions? Never has my soul been susceptible of any such feeling, believe me 
when I tell you so, and that my contempt is boundless for the man who is such a 
fool as to conceive it for an instant. The urge, the need to shed blood, the most 
imperious of all needs and urges, brooks no interference whatever; he who 
speaks to you now slew his father, his mother, his wife, his children, and repents 
not, no, nor has ever felt a twinge of remorse. With a little courage and 
untrammeled by prejudices, a man can do what he likes with his heart and his 
conscience. Habit adjusts us to anything, and nothing is easier than to develop 
the habit which pleases best: merely surmount the initial revulsions, if you have 
any fire in you, you’ll succeed. Prick in hand, accustom yourself awhile to the idea
that frightens you, you’ll soon come to cherish it: that’s the method I have 
followed to familiarize myself with all known crimes: I yearned to commit them, 
but they scared me; fixing my mind upon them, I’d masturbate, and I perform 
them today as effortlessly as I blow my nose. The erroneous notion we entertain 
of others is always the thing that impedes us in criminal affairs, our childhood 
training leads us, ridiculously, to consider our own selves of no account and others
as all-important. Whence it proceeds that any iniquity wrought against this 
respected fellow being appears a great evil to us, although harming one’s 
neighbor is natural, and Nature’s laws are never so well complied with as when 
we prefer ourselves to others and seek pleasure in tormenting them. If it be true 
that we resemble all other products of Nature, if it be true we are worth no more 
than they, why persist in believing ourselves governed by different laws? Are 
plants and animals acquainted with mercy, pity, social obligations, brotherly love? 
And in Nature do we detect any law other than self-interest, that is, 
self-preservation? The one great trouble is that human laws are the fruits of 
nothing but ignorance or prejudice; the men who framed them consulted their 
stupidity alone, were guided by their mean-spiritedness, their narrow interests, 
and their myopia. A nation’s lawmaker must never be born on its soil; otherwise 
he will simply transmit to his people legalized versions of the infantile nonsense 
he learned in their midst, and his institutions, lacking the force of greatness they 
ought to have, will never inspire awe; for how can you ask that men have respect 
for laws which contradict those Nature engraves in them?”

“Ah, my friend,” said I, carried away by enthusiasm at finding his sentiments 
so similar to my own, and embracing this charming personage, “the theses you 
have just expounded conform to opinions which have long been mine, and in me 
you see someone possessing a soul at least as stoutly armored as yours.”

“I am not quite as advanced as you,” the Hungarian said to us, “I have never 
assassinated anybody apart from my sister, my niece, and a few comrades 
hereabouts, in collaboration with Voldomir; but I have itching fingers and most 
content I’d be were the occasion for a crime to offer itself to me every day of my 
life.”

“Friends,” said I, “people united through so many similarities of disposition and
outlook ought never separate, and when they have the misfortune of being 
prisoners together they should join forces to break out of the bondage to which 
human injustice has reduced them.”

“Our comrade’s views are mine, I am with him,” Voldomir declared.

“So am I,” said Tergowitz.

“Very well then,” I resumed, “let’s be up and away for the frontier of this 
infamous clime. Though bayonets guard it, let us try to slip across the line: once 
we are free, the lives and riches of others will amply compensate us for the losses
occasioned us by the perfidious cruelty of the imperial whore who keeps us 
captive here.”

We drank a few bottles of vodka to our projects, and were about to seal our 
vows with the solemnities of some sodomite fuckshed when a lad of fifteen 
appeared at the door. He came with a request from his father, who wished to 
borrow a few skins from Voldomir and who would return them in a day or two.

“Who is this child?” I asked my friends.

“The son of a great Russian nobleman,” Voldomir replied, “like us exiled for 
having displeased Catherine; he dwells a hundred versts from here.” Then, taking
me aside, he continued in a lower voice: “Since we are soon to leave, and shall be
far away before his father hears about the thing, we might, if you like, amuse 
ourselves with the boy….”

“Yes, by God,” I replied, already laying heavy hands upon our young visitor 
and jerking his breeches down to his knees, “we’ll fuck him first, then eat him 
afterward: this is tastier flesh than the martens and weasels that make up our 
daily fare.”

I embugger first while my comrades hold the child still: Tergowitz’s turn comes
next; Voldomir because of his massiveness of member goes in last; we begin 
again. And when we have had enough of our little darling, we roast him alive on 
the spit and eat him with relish.

“Oh, how mistaken they are,” the Hungarian observed, “to disdain this meat, 
there’s nothing more delicate nor better flavored in all the world, as the wise 
savages understand who have such a predilection for it.”

“That,” said Voldomir, “is simply another of your European absurdities: after 
having erected murder into a crime you cut off your nose to spite your face and 
banished these dainties from your table; and the same overweening pride brought
you to suppose that there was no wrong in butchering a pig for food, while there 
was nothing worse than performing the same operation upon a human being. 
Such are the sinister effects of this civilization I abhor and which causes me to 
regard this degenerated portion of mankind as a race of contemptible fools.”

Our excellent repast concluded, we all three climbed into the Pole’s bed and, at
sunrise, armed to the teeth, we set off with the firm resolve to follow no calling 
other than that of brigand and murderer, to heed nothing except our pleasures 
and self-interest.

Unsure of the road we were to take, our first plan was to make for the Chinese
border since we wished to avoid Muscovy and all the other adjoining provinces 
over which the Empress ruled, where we were almost certain to be arrested. But 
the way to China was far, and instead we chose to cross the deserts to the 
Caspian shore; after several months of travel we came to Astrakhan, without 
anyone having sought to hinder our flight.

From Astrakhan we moved toward Tiflis, killing, pillaging, fucking, ravaging all 
that crossed our path, and entered this second city after laying waste a fair part 
of the countryside. In us none the less was the desire, grown powerful after years
spent in the wilderness, for a civil and quiet place to abide, where less tumultuous
passions can at once be satisfied more luxuriously, more agreeably, and more 
conveniently. In this regard, the libertinage, the beauty, of the Georgians looked 
to promise us all we could ask for.

Tiflis lies at the foot of a mountain on the banks of the River Kur, which 
traverses Georgia; it contains some rather handsome palaces. Having robbed a 
sufficient number of travelers along the way to have accumulated two or three 
thousand rubles apiece, we immediately took sumptuous lodgings. We bought 
pretty serving girls; but the Pole, who refused to have anything female even come
near him, chose a strapping Georgian escorted by two young Greek slaves, and 
we refreshed ourselves a little after the rigors of the long and monotonous 
journey we had just completed. Commerce at Tiflis is chiefly in women. There 
they are publicly sold for the harems of Asia and Constantinople, like cattle in a 
market; anyone has the right to go and examine and handle them in the sheds 
where specimens ranging from lately weaned infants up to girls the age of sixteen
are kept on exhibit. Nowhere will you find greater beauty than in the creatures 
this country produces, nowhere will you find more elegant figures, more attractive
features. But if one cannot look upon them without desiring them, seldom does 
one desire them without having them. Nowhere is whoredom so well established 
in the world as here.

Independence is unknown to the Georgians. The tyranny their overlords exert 
upon them is not mild; and as this aristocracy is exceedingly libertine, there is no 
need for me to insist upon the fact that in this part of the world too, despotism 
expresses itself in lewd terms: they vex their slaves, beat them, whip them, and 
all that in the spirit of cruel lubricity, whose effects, as you are so fully aware, 
lead to crimes of all sorts. But what a contradiction! These nobles, who treat their 
vassals as slaves, themselves grovel before the prince to obtain money and place;
and to ensure success, to him they prostitute their children of either sex and 
starting at the tenderest age.

Tergowitz, naturally adroit and seductive, soon contrived to introduce himself 
and then to lodge the three of us in the house of one of the foremost lords of the 
land who, along with very considerable wealth, owned three daughters and as 
many sons, all of the most excellent beauty. As this gentleman had traveled 
widely, Tergowitz affirmed that he had seen him in Russia, in Sweden, in 
Denmark, and the worthy fellow believed it all. It had been a long time since we 
had been shown such courtesy and such generous treatment, and doubtless still 
longer since a benefactor had found himself rewarded quite as we paid that one 
back. We began by a general assault upon his children: inside a fortnight, all of 
them, boys and girls alike, had been fucked in every manner. Pointing out to us 
that there was nothing left to fuck under the good man’s roof, Voldomir asked 
how we were going to take our leave. “By robbing him,” I replied. “I cannot 
believe his gold is less worth having than the cunts and assholes of his offspring.”

“And when we’ve robbed him?” Tergowitz wondered.

“Why,” said I, “we shall kill him. There are only a few domestics in the house; 
we are strong enough to take them personally in hand, and I feel my prick 
already twittering at the prospect of murdering his pretty children.”

“But hospitality, my friends, have we not been given hospitality?” said 
Voldomir.

“Indeed we have,” I admitted, “and therefor we should be grateful. Just 
behavior on our part demands that we do well by someone who has acted kindly 
toward us. Has not this animal our host told us a hundred times over that as a 
good Christian(11) he is certain he will go straight to heaven? His hypothesis 
accepted, will he not be a thousand times happier there than on earth?”

“Assuredly.”

“Then we must render him this supreme service.”

“To be sure,” said Voldomir, “but you have my consent to all these deaths only 
if it is understood that they be frightful. For too long have our stealing and killing 
been done out of need; the moment has come to steal and kill from wickedness, 
from taste; the world must shudder upon learning of the crime we have 
committed…. Men must be made to blush from shame at belonging to the same 
species as we. More, I insist that a monument be raised to this crime, relating it 
and reminding others of it forever, and that with our own hands we cut our names
upon this granite memorial.”

“Go on, villain, you have our sympathy, speak your mind.”

“He himself must be made to roast his children, to join us in dining on them; 
and while he feeds he must be embuggered by us; after which, the remnants of 
the feast must be sewn to his body; bound and helpless in his cellar, he must be 
left thus to die when he feels ready.”

The scheme is adopted unanimously; unfortunately, however, owing to 
thoughtlessness on our part the discussion was overheard by the youngest of the 
man’s daughters, upon whom we had already vented our desires and who was 
lame from the prodigious abuse she had sustained. Voldomir, with his gigantic 
prick, had left her anus a shambles, and to calm her we had been giving her little 
presents for several days. Quaking with terror at what she had just found out, 
there was no preventing her from rushing off and letting the cat out of the bag. 
Hearing the slut’s story, the father promptly brought a garrison into the house, 
the police instructing these men to keep an eye on us. But the god who protects 
crime always leads virtue into its power; of this there ceased long ago to be a 
shadow of a doubt.

The four soldiers the gentleman led home, and whom he meant to billet in his 
house without explaining to us his reasons for doing so, were immediately 
recognized by us as former comrades who had also managed to escape from 
Siberia; they, as you may easily imagine, preferred our cause to the Georgian 
Christian’s, and the poor man, instead of three enemies under his roof, shortly 
had seven. The proposal to share in the booty and in the enjoyment of all those 
children was so warmly welcomed by our reinforcements that we fell to work at 
once. We tied our benefactor to a pillar in his dining hall and forthwith regaled 
him first with five hundred whipstrokes applied to every square inch of his behind,
then to the pleasure of seeing his six darlings fucked before his eyes. Once they 
had been, we attached them in a circle around him and flogged those six asses 
until the room was awash with their blood; next, we lay them upon their backs in 
the gore and, hoisting their legs into the air, we flailed them with martinets and 
transformed their anterior parts into hash. After that, we tried to induce the 
father to taste a little pleasure with his woebegone children, but all efforts to 
rouse his prick were in vain, and so we castrated and unmembered him and 
constrained his progeny to eat his testicles and his pizzle; this accomplished, we 
sliced off the breasts of his daughters and now fed him forcibly upon the still 
warm and quivering flesh he had himself created.

We were about to move on to the next exercise when discord loomed up in our
midst. Among the four soldiers was a splendid young Russian whose beauty was 
causing Voldomir to stiffen almost as hard as I. I would not, I could not take it 
upon myself to quit the young man’s breeches, from which the Pole, now very 
dark of brow, had several times sought to evict me. When at last I was lodged in 
the youth’s asshole, out of the corner of my eye I spied Voldomir coming up to 
me, dagger in hand; I unsheathed my own knife that instant and without stirring 
from the soldier’s fundament, where I was readying to deposit my seed, I stabbed
my blade into Voldomir’s left side, he fell to the floor, blood gushing from the 
wound.

“Fuck!” exclaimed Tergowitz, then sodomizing one of the other soldiers, 
“there’s a vigorous deed for you. I must tell you, Borchamps, that I’m not at all 
sorry you’ve rid us of that bugger: he’d soon have done the same to us, be sure 
of it.”

I pull out my knife, wipe it dry, and I discharge: never has a murder checked 
an ejaculation, to the contrary. Then, lighting my pipe, “Go on, my friend,” I say 
to Tergowitz, “I’d never have treated our comrade that way had I not long ago 
detected in him all the vices that are ruinous to a society such as ours. Let’s you 
and I now swear an oath of everlasting fidelity to each other, and, you’ll see, we 
shall be able to get along very nicely without him.”

We terminated our operation. Everything had been carried out according to 
plan. We sacked the house, the spoils were considerable; well paid, our allies left 
us very content; but I was loath to be separated from mine: I suggested to 
Carleson that he remain with me, and he agreed. Two mules transported our 
baggage; for mounts we had three fine horses; and so we went forth from Tiflis 
and, skirting the edge of the Black Sea, we came by and by to Constantinople.

It was simply in the capacity of a valet we had Carleson with us; fond of him 
though I was, I sensed full well that a dozen or fifteen discharges inside his 
magnificent ass would appease my passion, and I was wary of putting him on an 
equal footing with us, lest in so doing I create a potentially dangerous rival.

Some highway robberies, a few rapes, as many murders—the obvious and 
easy line of action to take in a country where neither justice nor security exists: 
that fairly sums up our adventures in Asia Minor, and we arrived as serenely and 
surely in the Grand Turk’s capital as if we did not merit a hundred times over to 
appear nowhere there but on the gallows.

Foreigners do not reside in Constantinople itself, they establish themselves at 
Pera a suburb. We repaired thither with a view to taking a few days of rest before 
returning to our trade, which, plied with some success up until now, had put 
Tergowitz and me in possession of two hundred thousand francs each.

However, after consultation with my partner, I wrote to my sister, asking her to
have funds and letters of recommendation for Constantinople sent to me, and 
also for Italy, whither we intended to go after leaving the Ottoman provinces; and
before two months were out I received everything I could want to facilitate our 
enterprises. Straightway introducing myself to the banker with whom a credit had 
been opened for me, I shortly became the admirer of the sixteen-year-old girl he 
prized above all else in this world, and was raising as though she were his own 
child rather than an adopted one. Philogone was fair-haired, candid in her 
manner, and naïve, had the loveliest possible eyes, in a word, the whole effect 
was eminently winning. But here something very odd occurred. Through some 
strange caprice, not uncommon among true libertines and only comprehensible to
them, although Philogone was attractive in the extreme, although the feelings she
inspired in me were properly overpowering, I was moved, as I gazed upon her, by
no desire other than to have her fucked by Tergowitz; that idea alone filled out 
my prick, I frigged it, dwelling upon nothing else. I took the Hungarian to the 
house of Philogone’s protector, Calni was his name; afterward, as we were 
walking home, I revealed my designs to my friend, who seemed much pleased by 
them.

“In all this I toil for your benefit, comrade, only for yours.”

“It would appear to me,” Tergowitz replied, “that we might broaden our 
objectives. This moneychanger, they say, is one of the richest in Constantinople; 
while that girl is being attended to, could we not also rob her guardian? I expect 
that we might then be able to travel through Italy in greater style and comfort.”

“Doubtless,” said I, “but what you suggest there shall not be easy; force is not 
on our side here, we shall have to resort to ruse. Such being the case, let us start
by sowing a hundred thousand crowns in order to reap two million; do you 
disapprove?”

“No.”

“Then leave everything to me.”

I began by renting a country house; the one I chose was superb, isolated, and 
at a good distance from the city. As soon as I had filled it with elegant furnishings 
and hired a flock of domestics, I arranged fashionable gatherings every evening, 
and Philogone and Calni were of course among my guests. Tergowitz passed for 
my brother; to create the most favorable conditions for his moves was my 
concern, and I thought to prepare the terrain by subtly hinting at projects for an 
alliance: I was ever more willingly listened to. Only one thing stood in the way of 
my desires: that wretched girl, against whom I was inwardly plotting the most 
atrocious horrors, had taken it into her head to fall in love with me.

“Surely, Sir, such designs are very flattering,” she told me after I had finished 
speaking of my brother’s ambition, “but since my guardian has left me free to 
choose, honesty compels me to say, and I say it frankly, that I would have 
preferred it had you made this proposal in your own behalf.”

“Lovely Philogone,” I declared, “such words are wonderfully sweet to a man’s 
pride and self-esteem; but I must answer you in the same forthright language. 
Certain regrettable tendencies, for which I am not responsible, render me 
absolutely indifferent to women; and, if you were to become mine, the obligation 
you would come under to ape the sex I prefer would not make you as happy as 
you deserve to be.”

Seeing that Philogone did not grasp my meaning, I called upon the resources 
of libertine expression to explain to her that the shrine in which women sacrifice 
to love was not the one where I was wont to repair, and in exchange for the 
elucidation she requested of me I earned myself a complete view and thorough 
handling of this beautiful girl’s charms, who, with the candor and innocence of her
age, trustingly surrendered the whole of herself to me. Ye gods! what exquisite 
forms! what purity of line, of color! what graces! and, above all, what a delicious 
ass! When, opening its orifice, peeping inside, I was obliged, in pursuit of my 
demonstration, to tell Philogone that ’twas here the temple in which I offered my 
homage, “Little do I care,” was the charming creature’s answer; “oh, Borchamps, 
of such things I know nothing, but must not all my body be yours when you so 
firmly possess my heart?”

“No, siren, no!” I cried, fondling her peerless behind, “no, do what you will … 
love me, worship me, it will be to no avail, I shall not be melted, who for women 
can feel no pity nor any decent emotion; ’tis the promise of pleasures of no very 
delicate order which excites me as I toy with you; and my heart is as immune to 
love as to any other human virtue.” Then letting fall her skirts: “No, Philogone, I 
cannot marry you, I say; my brother can make you a happy woman, and he will.”

Thus did a year go by, and during it confidence was established. Establishing it 
did not, however, engross all my time; I busied myself with the loveliest 
Jewesses, the prettiest Greek girls, and the most handsome boys in 
Constantinople, and to make up for all I had lost during my long-enforced 
abstinence in Siberia, I conversed with better than three thousand individuals in 
the one sex and the other in the course of that year. For a thousand sequins, a 
Jew, who traded in precious stones and had Ahmed’s sultanas among his 
customers, permitted me to accompany him into the harem; and there, risking 
my life, I fucked six of the Grand Turk’s most beautiful wives. They were all 
habituated to sodomy, and ’twas of their own accord they proposed a route 
whereby they avoided pregnancies. Rarely did the Sultan, who always mixes them
with his castrati, approach them otherwise than from the rear; preparatorily, they 
anoint this part with a certain essential oil which shrinks it to such narrowness 
that you cannot embugger them without bloodshed. My wishes went farther: I 
keenly desired to fuck a few of those famous eunuchs, in whose asses the Grand 
Turk is so prone to forget women; but since he keeps a much closer guard upon 
these personages than upon his sultanas, there is no possible way of obtaining 
access to them. Ahmed, I was informed, owned some who were twelve years old, 
in beauty surpassing anything to be encountered on earth. I asked for a 
description of his tastes.

“His favorite passion,” one of his wives told me, “is as follows. A dozen 
sultanas, standing very close the one to the next and displaying nothing but their 
buttocks, form a circle inside which he takes up his position with four of his 
castrati. At a signal from him those twelve women must simultaneously shit into 
the twelve porcelain pots that have been placed for that purpose on the floor 
beneath their asses: she who fails to produce her mard when it is demanded, 
dies. Not a month passes but seven or eight wives pay the extreme penalty for 
this crime; and ’tis the Sultan who executes them, secretly: the manner in which 
he puts them to death is unknown. Once they have shat, a castrato goes around 
and collects the pots and brings them to His Highness, who sniffs them, inhales 
their aroma, dips his prick in the contents, and smears himself therewith: after 
which the pots are laid aside, one castrato embuggers him while another sucks 
his device; the third and fourth give him their pricks to fondle and frig. A few 
moments of this and then the four little darlings shit one by one into his mouth, 
and he swallows. The circle now breaks up; each woman must lick and suck his 
mouth and tongue; he pinches their breasts and claws their behinds while they 
do; as one by one the women are dismissed, they go to a long couch and lie down
upon it in a row; once they are all aligned there, the castrati, wielding switches, 
advance and whip three apiece; when the boys have bloodied those dozen 
behinds, the Sultan inspects them, sucks the bruises, and licks those 
shit-splashed asses and those still replete assholes. That done, he turns back to 
his bardashes and embuggers the four of them in succession; but these are only 
preliminary exercises. His tour of the boys’ asses concluded, the women seize 
them and offer them to him; he lashes them one after the other, and in the 
meantime all those who are otherwise unoccupied cluster around him and, silent 
throughout, manifest an amazing skill in striking a wide variety of the very 
obscenest attitudes. When the four children have been flogged they are presented
to him, he encules them afresh; but at the moment his discharge threatens, he 
withdraws in a fury, hurls himself at one of the women, who are now standing 
motionlessly in a ring around him, their faces turned his way. He attacks one of 
them and beats her until she sinks to the ground, unconscious; he refucks a 
second bardash, whom he also abandons in order to administer a beating to a 
second woman; it is likewise with the third and fourth bardash; and it is as he is 
beating the last woman—who, often as not, perishes beneath his blows—that his 
fuck spurts, without his having to bother to touch his member. The four women 
very frequently succumb from the hard use they have received, and those who 
survive are at least two or three months recovering in bed. He usually strikes 
them on the head and chest, as forcefully as he can, and were they to offer the 
slightest resistance they’d be strangled on the spot.”

“There indeed,” said I to the sultana who was recounting these marvelous 
things to me, “there indeed is a very extraordinary passion and most surely I too 
would adopt it, were I as wealthy as your master.”

“Sometimes the Sultan sees his wives individually, and ’tis then he embuggers 
them. But this great favor is never granted to any save the prettiest and who are 
not over eight years old.”

Being at last ready to realize my fell designs regarding the lovely Philogone, at 
the cost of a few sequins I had her protector’s house burned to the ground. 
Calni’s immediate decision was to remove to my country manor, bringing with him
not only Philogone and his capital, but a number of trusty servants and retainers 
besides: I had not anticipated their arrival with that escort. However, I shortly 
found a way to persuade Calni that this crowd of valets would be far more usefully
employed tidying the debris of his house than standing about idle in mine, where 
my own servants could attend to his needs. Dazed by the calamity that had just 
befallen him, Calni did as I suggested. The treasure chests were already under 
my roof, and Calni was about to begin conducting his affairs from there, when we 
decided to defer action no longer.

“Sir,” said I, walking into his bedroom one fine morning, a pistol in my hand, 
while Tergowitz was posted at the front door as a lookout and I had put my 
Carleson in charge of Philogone and the single valet who could have come to 
Calni’s aid; “dear and loyal sir, you were sadly mistaken if you assumed you were 
getting my hospitality for nothing. Bid this world farewell, my friend: you have 
enjoyed a rich man’s life long enough, it is time that your money pass into other 
hands.”

And firing my shot as I pronounced these last words, I sent the banker to 
settle in hell any debts he might have outstanding. For his part, Carleson dropped
out a window the corpse of the valet he had just killed, and he and I pinioned the 
damosel, who was uttering heart-rending wails and shrieks. Then I summoned 
Tergowitz.

“My friend,” I said, “the moment is at hand; be mindful of the trouble and 
expense I have incurred to prepare this scene, and fuck this girl for me, right 
now, before my eyes, while I bum-tup you and Carleson sodomizes me.”

Tergowitz, nothing loath to comply, speedily divests the lass of her clothing; 
and the world’s fairest body lies quivering at our disposal. My stars! What 
buttocks! Never, I repeat, had I seen any so beautiful, better-shaped, more 
cunningly cleft: I could not refrain from paying them an homage. But when the 
brain is fixed upon a piece of libertinage and heated by the idea, not even the 
devil can alter the course of things. I did not want Philogone, I was tempted by 
nothing except the ass of him who was to fuck her. Tergowitz encunts, I 
embugger Tergowitz, Carleson fucks me, and after a furious ride lasting perhaps 
an hour, we all three discharge as one man.

“Turn her over, by God!” I cry to my friend. “Do you not see she has the best 
ass in existence? Carleson will encunt her, and I shall fuck you both.”

The act is consummated despite the lovely orphan’s tears and screams; and 
before another hour has gone by there’s not a temple of Cythera to which we 
have not shown her the way. My friends were in a lather, Tergowitz especially; I 
alone remained cool before that heavenly girl, or if she inspired any desires in 
me, they were so ferocious and depraved that satisfying them, I’d have deprived 
my comrades of her there and then. Never had my perverse tastes expressed 
themselves against anyone so resolutely as against that girl; I felt as though 
there were no torture violent enough to inflict upon her, and I had to reject as too
mild, too modest, everything my imagination was devising. My rage was at the 
pitch where it was proclaimed in my eyes; I could no longer gaze upon that 
creature save I was gripped by every vicious, every murderous impulse. Can you 
tell me what it was bred such feelings in me? I myself do not know; I simply 
describe to you what I experienced.

“So let us get ourselves gone from here,” said I to my friends; “a prudent man 
cannot be concerned for pleasures alone. Our belongings are aboard a felucca, 
waiting for us at the port and ready to sail, I have chartered it to Naples. Let’s not
tarry; after the pranks we have just performed, we’d be well advised to move 
on…. And this girl, Tergowitz, say: what’s to be done with her?”

“We are taking her along, I presume,” the Hungarian replied, and I detected 
something mutinous in his eye.

“Ah ha! In love, comrade?”

“No, but since we’ve gone to the point of buying the slut with her guardian’s 
blood I see no reason not to keep her.”

And thinking it appropriate to say nothing at this juncture lest some dissension 
arise which could jeopardize our safety, I nodded as though in agreement with 
Tergowitz, and we set forth.

Carleson soon noticed however that I had merely acted from expediency in 
consenting to have Philogone accompany us. He spoke to me about it. In the 
belief I had no cause to be secretive with him, I gave him plain answer, and on 
the second day at sea we decided to get quietly rid of these two turtledoves, and 
that thereafter I would be sole proprietor of our hoard. I exchanged a few words 
with the captain of the vessel; a few sequins won me his sympathy.

“Bah,” said he, “do as you like, but beware of that woman you see over there 
by herself. She seems to think she knows you, and if it’s true, you’ll gain nothing 
from being observed by her.”

“Fear not,” I assured him, “we shall choose our moment well.” Then casting an 
involuntary glance at the creature who according to the captain claimed to be 
acquainted with me, I told myself that for a certainty he was mistaken, in this 
sorrowful personage seeing nothing but a woman apparently of some forty years, 
occupied as a servant to the crew and whose features had been prematurely aged
by hardship, distress, and weariness. Therefore I put her completely out of my 
mind and gave all my attention to our scheme; once the veils of night had 
overspread the sea, Carleson and I laid hands on our slumbering comrade and 
slipped him quietly over the board. Philogone, wakened, heaved a deep sigh; it 
was not, she said, that she so much regretted the Hungarian, but that in all the 
world she loved nobody but me.

“Dear and unlucky child,” was my response, “your love is very ill requited. I 
cannot endure women, my angel, I’ve told you so.” Then dropping Carleson’s 
breeches within her full view, “You can see here,” I went on, “how those 
individuals are made who have a right to my favors.”

Philogone blushed and a few tears rolled down her cheeks.

“But how the devil can you love me,” I demanded, “after the crime you have 
just witnessed me committing?”

“’Tis a dreadful deed, to be sure; but what power has one over one’s heart? 
Oh, Sir, were you to assassinate me, still I would love you.”

Whereupon the conversation began.

The melancholy woman had approached us quietly, and without seeming to be 
listening, she lost nothing of what we were saying.

“What were you doing in Calni’s house?” I asked Philogone. “Such protection is
not given for nothing; was love involved in all that? When the bond of kinship is 
absent, it’s seldom a man keeps a girl in his house save his purposes be lewd.”

“Calni’s sentiments, Sir,” Philogone answered, “were of the purest; his conduct 
was always above reproach, he was a kind-hearted man. Some sixteen years ago,
while journeying in Sweden, my guardian, stopping at an inn, found a destitute 
young woman whom he conveyed with him to Stockholm, whither he was called 
upon business. This young woman was pregnant; my guardian saw to her needs, 
remained at her side; she gave birth to me. Calni, seeing that my mother was in 
no position to raise me, asked her to entrust me to him. Having had no children 
by his wife, they both took the most devoted care of me, and I grew up in their 
house.”

“What became of your mother?” I interrupted, a curious presentiment suddenly
forming in my mind.

“I do not know. We left her in Sweden. She had no resources; apart from the 
aid Calni gave her—”

“And which did not enable her to get very far,” broke in she who had been 
following our words.

And casting herself at our feet: “Philogone! behold her who brought you into 
the world; and you, Borchamps, look pityingly upon the ill-starred Clotilda Tilson 
you seduced in London after having wrought the ruin of her family, and whom, 
when this poor child was in her womb, you abandoned at a Swedish inn, riding off
with a barbarous woman who called herself your wife.”

“Fuck!” I said to Carleson, very little moved by this theatrical speech, “would 
you believe it? At a single stroke fate restores both my wife—and she is charming,
is she not—and an exceedingly pretty daughter. Eh, Carleson! Do you not weep?”

“No, by God,” heartless Carleson replied, “instead of that I’m stiffening, for I 
visualize some delightful episodes that could contribute an added piquancy to this 
adventure.”

“We see eye to eye, dear boy,” I whispered to him; “however, allow me to 
handle the affair: I shall soon provide you with a striking demonstration of the 
way in which Nature’s deepest impulsions affect me.”

Then turning back tenderly to Calni’s ward, “Oh, Philogone,” I exclaimed, “you 
are my daughter, yes: I recognize you by the sweet stirrings the sight of you 
causes in my bowels…. And you, Madame,” I continued, hugging my blessed 
spouse’s neck nearly to the point of strangling her, “ah yes, you are my wife, I 
recognize you too….”

I now placed them side by side. “Kiss me, dearest ones, kiss me! Philogone, 
my beloved Philogone! Behold sublime Nature’s sentiments: yesterday, I had 
precious little desire to fuck you, now I burn to do so.”

Both women recoiled in instinctive horror; but Carleson and I quieted them, 
made them understand that I held their fate in my hands. They mastered their 
shyness. And though they were my wife and daughter, they had much more the 
appearance of a pair of slaves.

My desires had become so intense I could scarce control myself. I would now 
be absorbed in admiring Philogone’s sublime hindquarters, the next instant all I 
wanted was to study the state into which poverty and grief had reduced Clotilda’s 
charms. And lifting the skirts of both at once, my two eyes sufficed not to stare at
them nor my two hands to feel and probe them; I kissed, I foraged, I plotted…. 
Carleson frigged me. All my former ideas changed touching the lovely ass of my 
new-found daughter; strange indeed are the ways of Nature, aye, unimaginable: 
Philogone as Calni’s ward left me cold, now that she was mine the same Philogone
brought my prick up all afire. My cruel desires remained unaltered; previously, 
they had been isolated, now they marched in step with those of fucking this 
glorious girl: whereof I quickly convinced her, jabbing my engine into her asshole;
whereat she uttered piercing screams. The ship’s captain heard them and came 
softly up to me.

“Sir,” said he, “I fear lest your conduct scandalize the crew; our vessel is small,
and for the kind of activity you wish to indulge in more space would be preferable.
At present we are not far off the shore of a little island, deserted, and 
disadvantaged only by the great quantity of bats and owls that are to be found on
it, and which is the reason why human beings have always avoided it. But a 
pleasant hour may be spent there. We are going to land, our sailors will make 
their supper ashore and you can amuse yourself a while.”

These overtures gave me the opportunity to relate to the captain how I had 
just rediscovered a long-lost wife and daughter.

“A daughter!” said he. “But were you not fucking her a short while ago?”

“True, I was. In these matters I am not hindered by many scruples.”

“Aye, Sir, you Frenchmen are right; better to eat the fruit of the tree you’ve 
planted than leave it for others to enjoy. As for that poor creature,” he went on, 
“if it’s your wife chance has restored to you, then I congratulate you. We’ve 
known her for quite some time, she’s made these voyages with us often. Though 
she’s poor, she’s as honest and decent a woman as ever we’ve seen; every man 
aboard will tell you so.”

“Friend,” I said to the mariner, “I do not doubt it for an instant; but this woman
you are praising once behaved abominably toward me; and I shall not pretend 
otherwise,” I added, dropping several more coins in his palm, “my aim in wishing 
to go ashore on this island is to obtain my revenge.”

“Why, Sir, bless my soul,” the captain replied, “do as you like, I’ll not meddle in
your private affairs.” Lowering his tone, and looking at me with deep 
understanding: “When you return to the ship you have merely to say that she 
slipped and fell into the water….”

Enchanted by this good man’s amicable candor, I take leave of him and report 
our conversation to Carleson, then expose my homicidal projects. Scarcely was I 
done speaking when the ship cast anchor.

“Captain,” said I, disembarking with my family, “give us a little time….”

“I am at your service, my Lord, and in your hire alone; we’ll not set sail again 
until you are ready to be off.”

And we started inland.

“Oh, my friend,” I declared to Carleson as we walked along, “the pleasures we 
are going to receive from these two whores! This, I sense it already, will be the 
most arousing of all my murders; look at my prick,” I said, stopping, “just look at 
it foam with rage … I like this island, Carleson. What solitude! We shall be able to 
accomplish wonders.”

A short while later we spied a little ravine delightfully shaded by willow trees 
an

d poplars, the ground covered by fresh green grass; bushes screened the place
on all sides.

“Let us settle ourselves here,” I said to my friend. “’Tis the very finest weather,
we shall take off our clothes. Naked like savages, we’ll imitate them in 
appearance as well as in deeds.”

After kissing Carleson with all possible lewd fervor, “Come,” I said, “let’s get to 
work on them. But mark you now, not a drop of fuck until those sluts have sighed
up the ghost.”

With that I fling both those women down upon the grass; I embugger my 
daughter, I examine the afterparts of my wife, of that Clotilda I’d so adored in 
days bygone and whom I found beautiful even now; from the ass of the one I 
shifted straight into the ass of the other. Carleson was bum-fucking me; I forgot 
my own words and discharged, but while in the act biting my daughter’s breasts 
so cruelly that I left them covered with blood. Still erect, I fit my member into my
daughter’s cunt. “Here,” I say to Calni’s protégée while kissing her mother’s 
buttocks, “open your womb and receive the fuck that gave you life.”

But, forever inconstant, it’s now Clotilda I encunt; she gets fuck from me again
while this time I worry my daughter’s buttocks as fiercely as I’d bitten her teats.

“Not so fast, Carleson,” I say as I withdraw, “you must sodomize our two 
whores, I’ll hold them still for you. First one, then the other.”

My valet embuggers, I lick his testicles—I worshiped that splendid fellow—; I 
get to my feet and suck his mouth while he looses his seed into my wife’s behind;
my daughter is promptly given like treatment. I fuck him while he saws away in 
that unfortunate girl’s anus.

“And now,” I said as soon as he was finished, “some entertainment at our 
victims’ expense.”

Having my Carleson stand up, I require the two whores to lick every part of his
body, not omitting his member, his asshole, and the spaces between his toes, his 
armpits also. I engage him to shit upon a thornbush and I oblige those women to 
go there and eat his excrement, though it means getting their faces scratched and
torn; next, we catch them by the hair, thrust them head first back into the same 
bush, drag them out, toss them back in again, till the thorns have cut them to the
bone; nothing so poignant, so heartrending as their screams, nothing so keen as 
the pleasure we derive from them….

“O just Heaven! What have I done to be treated in this way?” Philogone 
gasped, falling to her knees and imploring mercy. “O you who call yourself my 
father, if it be true that I am your daughter prove it by treating me more kindly; 
and you, my mother … my unhappy mother, must we be dealt the same blow at 
the very moment Heaven’s hand guides us back to each other? Father! oh, my 
father, I have not deserved this fate! Spare me—”

But without even listening to these plaints, Carleson and I garrote the two sluts
and, gathering us each a handful of thorns, we lash them as hard as we can. 
Wounds soon develop everywhere; no more is needed to straighten my prick 
anew; with incredible delight I lap the blood oozing from Philogone’s lacerated 
body. It is my own blood, I reminded myself, and the idea added a further inch to 
my blinding erection. I savor that voluptuous mouth which opens only to implore 
me; I press ardent kisses to those eyes moistened by tears my fury causes to 
flow; and from time to time returning to my dear Clotilda’s ass, I treat it with 
similar ferocity; then, clutching Carleson’s to me, I devour it with caresses and 
suck his marvelous prick.

“We must place them in another posture,” I declare.

We untie them and make them kneel; cords fixed to nearby trees maintain 
their arms in the air, heavy stones laid over their calves and ankles immobilize 
them completely. So placed, both expose their inspiring breasts to us. Nothing so 
fair, so lovely as Philogone’s; Clotilda’s, though a shade less firm, look still to be 
perfectly preserved. This sight brought my irritation to its climax. Oh, the 
pleasure to be reaped from severing the bonds uniting us to others! I have the 
two of them kiss my behind; I shit into their mouths, then, while buggering 
Carleson, I take hold of those breasts, lift them, and shave them all four off close 
to the chest; then, threading those chunks of flesh upon a string, out of them I 
compose necklaces for the two women; they are streaming blood and in that 
state are further wet by the last spurts of fuck which I ejaculate over their bodies 
while Carleson skewers my ass.

“That ought to do,” I say; “we may leave them there, tied as they are: the 
animals of this island will be another three or four days finishing them off. Better 
that they die slowly than that, dispatched by us, they be deprived of the 
possibility of further suffering.”

Carleson, who is exceedingly ferocious of character, was terribly eager to 
complete the work there and then so as not, he said, to be cheated of the 
pleasure of seeing the pair expire; but once I had convinced him that the course I
proposed was the more villainous one, he gave in and we prepared to bid the 
ladies adieu.

“God in Heaven!” Clotilda groaned, “is this to what an original sin will lead us! 
Deep is my guilt owing to that monster, I admit it; but dear God, how severe is 
thy retribution!”

“Ha! This that we are hearing, good friend,” say I to Carleson, “sounds very 
much like rebellion against the Supreme Being; let us avenge the God we so 
mightily revere, you and I. The blasphemer’s punishment used to be to have his 
tongue cut out, justice must not be allowed to languish; furthermore, it is 
essential that these whores be prevented from talking.”

And, going up to them, we force open their mouths and slice three inches off 
each of their tongues.

“Since they cannot speak any more,” Carleson says to me, “there is no reason 
on earth why they ought to be able to see; let’s gouge out the lovely eyes which 
once melted your heart….”

And my prompt response to that wise proposal was to prick out Philogone’s 
while Carleson blinded Clotilda forever.

“Well and good, so far as it goes; but,” I ask, “might not the sluts bite at the 
scavengers that will be coming to feed on them?”

“They are surely apt to try.”

“Then we must break their teeth.”

For that operation we employ a stone; not wishing to damage our patients 
further, lest they be totally insensible to the ravages the wild creatures of the isle 
are soon to inflict upon them, we take our departure. A hundred paces brought us
to a little hillock; from its summit we had a clear view of the thing. Owls, bats, all 
the beasts of prey that abounded on that island had already arrived: soon one 
saw nothing but a dark mass.

“Oh, my brave Carleson,” I exclaimed, “what a spectacle I How comforting it is,
to have wives and daughters of one’s own to treat in this manner. And how sorry I
am that I do not have a hundred other persons to feel just as close to: not one of 
them would escape me. Dear Carleson, see how the sight gladdens me; come, let
me sodomize your peerless ass yet again while I watch.”

I embugger, I frig my friend, and after having each discharged one last time, 
we head back toward the shore.

We had a little story ready for the captain; that and a few sequins, nothing 
more was needed; and we landed at Naples on the third day after our Owl Island 
expedition.

Wishing to settle in Italy, I straightway inquired about land for sale in this fair 
country and purchased the estate upon which you see me dwelling today. But, 
rich though I was, I found it impossible to give up my brigand’s vocation; it has 
too many charms to be abandoned, it too well suits my inclinations for me ever to
be able to embrace some other; theft and murder have become the prime 
necessities of my life; I would simply cease to exist were I deprived of the 
pleasure of indulging in them every day. Here I exercise my honorable profession 
as of old great vassals used to do throughout the dominions that were theirs; I 
have a small army in my hire; Carleson is my lieutenant; ’twas he who arrested 
you on the road; ’twas he I left in charge when I journeyed to Paris to fetch my 
sister, with whom I was so eager to be reunited.

Despite the influence, the power, the wealth she enjoyed, Clairwil did not 
hesitate to leave everything behind in order to throw in her lot with mine; my 
dedication to crime appealed to her, she looked with favor upon the position I had
attained for myself. Joining me, she counted upon being more than ever in a 
position to satisfy those fierce passions for which she is generally known. I 
remained three months in Paris while she readied her departure; then we 
returned together to this den of crime and infamy. Out of a mutual decision to 
reinforce our existing ties by whatever could consolidate them most intimately, we
were married on our way hither, at Lyon; and our hope today is that no 
circumstance shall ever arise to separate two persons so admirably suited to each
other, and who, notwithstanding their execrable penchants, will always make an 
exquisite and delightful duty of welcoming into their retreat and cherishing such 
sincere friends as yourselves.

“Oh, Juliette,” asked Clairwil when once her brother had finished speaking, “do 
you find such a man a worthy partner for me?”

“He is, surely, most worthy of all those who are intelligent enough to feel that 
the highest of all laws is the one bidding the individual to pursue his happiness, 
setting aside anything others may say or think.”

Borghese clasps us in her arms, we all exchange a thousand more kisses. 
Borchamps, whom henceforth we shall call by no other name, and Sbrigan

i seemed equally enchanted at making each other’s acquaintance; Elise and 
Raimonde congratulated themselves upon seeing this conclusion to an adventure 
whereof the beginnings had caused them such keen alarm.

We were all in the midst of these gay effusions when a scout entered to notify 
the captain that his riders were bringing in a coach containing an entire family 
and much money.

“Excellent news,” replied Clairwil’s amiable brother; “these persons, I trust, 
shall be material suitable to answer voluptuous purposes, and as for the money, 
its arrival could not be more timely, for if you are of my mind, our next step 
should be to spend several months in Naples.”

“Agreed,” said Clairwil, squeezing my hand.

“Very well,” Borchamps announced, “whatever funds this capture brings me, I 
devote every penny to our trip.”

At that point the prisoners appeared.

“Captain,” said Carleson, who entered at the head of the band, “today is 
indeed one for thanksgiving: this family is mine. Let me introduce my wife,” he 
continued, presenting a very attractive woman of thirty-four. “These two girls,” he
went on, first indicating the younger, thirteen years of age and lovely to see, then 
the other, fifteen, a creature before whom the Graces would have paled from 
envy, “are out of my testicle. Here is my son,” he added, offering us a 
sixteen-year-old youth of most engaging physiognomy. “Two words from me to 
acquaint you with this affair; my wife may then explain the rest to you. Rosine is 
Danish; seventeen years ago, I made a journey to Copenhagen, met her there, 
and married her. I was then eighteen; hence, am thirty-five now.

“This handsome lad, whom I named Francisco, was the first fruit of our love; 
Christine over there,” and Carleson pointed to the girl of fifteen, “was the next; 
Ernelinde the last. Not long after Ernelinde’s birth came my adventures in Russia; 
certain political deeds saw me deported to Siberia, from where I made my escape
before associating with Borchamps in Tiflis. Chance restores this beloved family to
me, I present it to you, beseeching you to do absolutely whatever you please with
it: I should like to prove to my captain that I am as little concerned as he by ties 
of kinship.”

“Madame,” Borchamps said to Rosine, “have the gracious-ness to satisfy our 
curiosity as regards the rest.”

“Alas, my Lord,” said the beautiful Rosine, “abandoned by that perfidious man I
made do as best I could during the first year of his absence; then, having come 
into a considerable inheritance, I devoted part of my money to searching for my 
husband throughout France and, more recently, in Italy, where I received positive 
assurance he was to be found: I hoped for nothing more than to guide his 
children to the happiness awaiting them in their father’s arms. What was my 
surprise when after all these years my first glimpse of him is at the head of a 
band of robbers. The monster! Such is the infamous trade he was plying while I, 
constantly attached to my duties, was, owing to his desertion, without even the 
bare necessities of life.”

“Oh, this is touching, touching,” murmured Olympia.(12) “Our friend 
Borchamps, I trust, will exploit these circumstances to the fullest….”

“Madame,” Clairwil declared to the unhappy woman, “nothing in all you have 
just told us can exempt you from the common fate of those my husband’s soldiers
take prisoner. Pray tell, to what does it amount, the fortune you bring us?”

“One hundred thousand crowns, Madame,” Carleson’s amiable wife replied.

“One hundred thousand crowns,” Clairwil repeated. “A paltry sum.” Then, 
turning toward me: “Hardly enough to pay our rent in Naples.”

“My friend,” said Rosine, addressing her husband, “together with that I brought
you my heart, and these children begot of your heart’s ardor.”

“Ah,” said the lieutenant, “let’s not bother over trifles; such gifts aren’t worth a
pipeful of tobacco.”

“I’ll be more generous in my estimate,” said I to Carleson, whom I was 
beginning to behold with considerable interest; “the pleasures we await from 
these four delicious objects are not to be despised.”

“We shall soon verify whether or not that is so,” answered Carleson, who had 
already discerned much in my eyes; “but one thing is very certain, Madame, and 
that is that I believe there are few pleasures to rival what I await from you.”

“Truly?” I replied, giving the agreeable fellow’s hand a tender little squeeze.

“I’ll wager it, Madame,” said he, to my lips pressing a kiss that foretold of his 
capabilities; “yes, and I am prepared to repay you in kind.”

“May I suggest that we dine,” said the captain.

“With the whole family together?” the lieutenant asked.

“By all means,” said Madame de Clairwil; “I wish to see them all there before 
sending them somewhere else.”

Orders are issued and the most magnificent dinner is served. Seated beside 
me, Carleson manifested great eagerness to possess me and, I must say, I was 
just as strongly drawn in the same direction. His children were timid in this 
company, abashed; his wife tearful and lovely; everybody else gay and 
exceedingly libertine.

“Come,” said Borchamps, nodding toward Carlson and me, “let’s not make 
these two sweethearts languish any longer, they are fairly dying to come to 
grips.”

“Yes,” said Borghese, “but the scene must be public.”

“She is right,” Clairwil agreed. “Carleson, the assembly gives you leave to fuck 
Juliette, but that must be in its presence.”

“But what will my wife and children think?”

“Why, bless me, whatever they like,” said I, taking Carleson by the sleeve and 
leading him to a couch; “all the saints in paradise might be on hand, my dear, and
I’d not have myself any the less fucked by you.”

And, drawing a monstrous engine out of his breeches, “Pardon, Madame,” I say
to Rosine, “if I usurp pleasures which ought by rights to be yours alone, but, fuck 
my eyes, I have been lusting for your good man a little too long, and now that 
I’ve got hold of him, serve me he shall.” Those words were scarce out of my 
mouth when Carleson’s awesome prick had gone into the depths of my womb.

“Look,” said the captain, dropping his breeches, “was I mistaken in claiming 
that my friend has the world’s fairest ass?”

And, so saying, the bugger embuggers him, while Clairwil kisses me upon the 
mouth and takes hold of my clitoris, and Olympia thrusts three digits into my 
asshole.

“Captain,” asked Sbrigani, ignited by this spectacle, “would you care for a 
penetration? Think you not this prick you see is in a state to satisfy you?”

“Fuck away, Sir, fuck away, my ass yawns,” said the outlaw; “but be so good as
to palpate other asses while you stuff mine.”

“Why, I shall post Elise’s to my right, Raimonde’s to my left, both within easy 
reach,” said Sbrigani, “and for your recreation, situate ahead of you that of the 
wife alongside that of the husband you are fucking and those also of their three 
children.”

The group is arranged, and in less time than it takes to tell everybody 
discharges; and having voiced our determination to squander no further fuck on 
such childishness, by unanimous agreement we advance to more serious orgies. 
For the sake of clarification it behooves me to enumerate the participants in the 
drama.

I beg therefore to remind you that we were twelve: Borchamps, Sbrigani, 
Carleson, Clairwil, Borghese, and myself, those were the six who assumed active 
roles; our patients included Elise, Raimonde, Rosine, Francisco, Ernelinde, and 
Christine.

“Carleson,” said Borchamps, uncovering the young Francisco’s behind, “here is 
an ass to compete with yours, my friend, and I feel I am about to offer it homage 
quite as pure as those whereof yours has for such a long time been deserving 
from me.”

And, while saying that, he was fondling, he was kissing, the prettiest pair of 
buttocks, the whitest, the firmest you shall ever behold.

“I am opposed to this arrangement,” Clairwil protested, “’tis sinning against 
every law, divine and human, to prevent Carleson from depucelating his own son:
this child is going to ass-fuck me, his mother will finger my cunt; and the father 
will embugger his son while Elise and Raimonde give him the whip and while he 
handles the buttocks of Juliette to his left, Borghese to his right, both of whom 
will be giving the whip to Carleson’s two daughters, this before the eyes of 
Borchamps, embuggered by Sbrigani and assisting in the flagellatory operation 
being performed upon his lieutenant’s two children.”

The stage is set, the actors begin, the young Francisco, perfectly sodomized by
his father, irreproachably sodomizes my friend; but her weeping attests to 
Rosine’s misgivings as she lends herself to indecencies which appear to clash with
her standards of behavior. During these multiple couplings, the captain, 
esteeming himself less than sufficiently integrated into the scene, takes it into his 
head, all the while he has Sbrigani’s prick in his fundament, to grab the younger 
of Carleson’s daughters; and, without the least preparation, the rake embuggers 
her, uttering oaths. The girl swoons; undeterred, the captain burrows deeper still, 
for he no longer encounters any resistance; the impression one has is that he 
means to split the wretch in two. Soon losing interest in her, he has at her sister; 
although fifteen years of age, she is so slender, so dainty, so delicate, that the 
introduction of Borchamps’ gigantean member causes her vexations as keen and 
lesions as grave as those Ernelinde has just sustained. Nothing, however, halts 
the brigand’s prodigious efforts: he presses, braces himself, lunges, strikes 
bottom.

“Oh, Carleson,” he cries in his enthusiasm, “those are asses whereof you may 
be proud; rid me of these cunts, if you can, they’re ready for you.”

Clairwil’s bowels, meanwhile, are washed by Francisco’s fuck, and the rascal, 
starting forward as though electrified, in one swift, smooth motion unseats her 
rider, whirls, and comes to rest with the boy’s prick lodged in her cunt, performing
this acrobatic without the slightest disturbance to the father, who, throughout, is 
sodomizing his bewildered son. Carleson at last unlooses his fuck; and Francisco’s
ass becoming vacant, the captain, weary of females, promptly darts his prick 
thereinto, while I, swept away upon a wave of lewdness, rush up to lick this 
handsome man’s ass, which I have been hankering to taste for hours. Carleson, 
perceiving his two daughters idle, encunts one of them while kissing the ass of 
the other and having himself flogged by Elise, whom Raimonde, by Sbrigani 
embuggered, frigs apace. New outpourings of fuck enjoin rearrangements. I am 
at last embuggered by the captain while his sister frigs me, and Carleson, frigged 
by Sbrigani, sodomizes his wife while ass-kissing his three children held by Elise 
and Raimonde, whose cunts the bawdy fellow frigs, Olympia opening those parts 
to his fingers.

“Oh, Borchamps!” I cried from where I was in the thick of the melee, “what 
pleasures I have from your prick, and how I desired it!”

“That will not prevent others from getting their share of it,” the captain 
answered, catching Borghese by the waist and sodomizing her with a lunge; “my 
apologies, Juliette, but to this splendid ass belongs much of the credit for my 
erection ever since we removed our clothes, my thoughts were upon it while 
fucking yours, ’tis yours I shall now dwell upon while fucking this one.”

Noticing Francisco spoiling from inaction, I single him out; my tastes are so 
odd, and the youth so fair, that I know not which sex to adopt with him. I suck 
him, devour his ass, I present mine to him, of his own accord he sodomizes me 
and I camp my cunt atop Rosine’s face; at length, spirits are appeased by a 
further series of discharges, and the captain avers that after having paid so much 
attention to men, the general concern, in what is to follow, must be for the 
delectation of the women.

“Women deriving only mediocre physical pleasures from the use of such 
children, our best advice to them,” said the captain, “would be to aim at mental 
enjoyments. Juliette, you’ll begin. Carleson, reclining upon the sofa, must present
you with a well-hardened prick: you will pose yourself gently upon that prick, 
taking good care that it enters your anus; Clairwil and Borghese will be frigging 
you, one of them your cunt, the other your clitoris—and let them not begrudge 
you this kindness, they will have pleasures in their turn—; while you are keeping 
yourself busy in this manner, Elise and Raimonde will be striking a wide variety of 
lewd attitudes for my delectation; the victims will now approach you, one by one, 
on their knees: first this loyal wife who has come from so far to bring gold and 
offspring to Carleson; his son next, then his two daughters; the same father will 
lead them forward; you will decree a torture for each of these individuals, but a 
mild and simple torture for a start: our entertainments are to last for quite some 
time, hence the procedure must be by degrees. I shall take note of the sentences 
you pronounce, and they will be executed the instant you have completed your 
discharge.”

Positions are taken, but my wicked cohorts wait until my brain is reeling from 
pleasure before sending the victims up to me. Rosine appears first; I order her 
brought near; I examine her in minute detail and, finding her bosom superb, 
proclaim that her breasts shall be whipped. Francisco follows, I observe the 
beauty of his hinder parts, ’tis upon his buttocks the lash is to fall. Christine 
crawls forward, I condemn her to eat the turd of the first one among us who may 
happen to wish to shit. And the young Ernelinde, whose charming countenance 
affects me, will get a pair of slaps from each of us.

“Are you about to discharge, Juliette?” inquires Borchamps, whom my two 
tribades are overwhelming with obscene attentions.

“Yes, by Jesus, I can contain myself no longer—oh, Carleson, your prick is 
performing wonders!”

“There’s the signal,” says the captain; “let us carry out the first round of 
sentences. Borghese will judge next.”

All the penalties I have imposed are undergone; but, by a wise decision, they 
are inflicted by some woman other than she who pronounces them. So it is 
Clairwil who, this time, puts my orders into effect, and as she is of a mind to be 
rid of the fuck deposited in her ass, ’tis her excrement Christine swallows. Ah, 
what ardor the whore then puts into fustigating Rosine’s fair breasts; by the 
thirtieth stroke she has bloodied them both, and the vixen kisses the wounds her 
ferocity has opened; getting to Francisco’s excellent ass, it is with undiminished 
fury the rascal lashes it.

“Your turn now, Borghese,” says the captain. “I am in the hope,” he adds, “that
Sbrigani, realizing our need of his weapon, has not dulled it too soon.”

“Let the sight cheer you,” said Sbrigani, from my behind removing a stiff and 
unruly device and the next instant plunging it to the hilt in Borghese’s ass, “and I 
shall proceed just as circumspectly with this one. Count upon it, captain, I’ll not 
discharge save in the last extremity.”

Borghese sits in judgment; I become the executioner.

“Increased severity,” says the captain, “remember, it’s step by step to lead 
them gradually to death—”

“To death!” exclaimed Rosine. “Just heaven! What have I done to merit this?”

“Had you merited death, buggeress,” said Carleson, sodomizing Borchamps, 
who nests in Raimonde’s ass the while he tongues Elise’s; “yes, fuck my eyes, 
had you merited it, whore, we’d condemn you to something else. We here have 
the greatest respect for vice and the mightiest abhorrence for everything 
resembling virtue; firmly wrought principles found this way of thinking, and with 
your approval, my dear, we shall not deviate a hairsbreadth from our creed.”

“Come along, Borghese, pronounce,” said the captain? being energetically 
fucked by his favorite.

“Rosine,” the hot-tempered Olympia announced, “will receive from each of us 
half a dozen pricks from a bodkin here and there upon her person; the comely 
Francisco will have his buttocks bitten by his father, his member by all the ladies; 
the executioner will then administer twenty blows of a stick upon the back of 
Christine and will break two fingers on each of Ernelinde’s hands.”

These punishments are begun by me: after having six times run the 
needle-sharp instrument well into Rosine’s plump breasts, I pass it to my friends, 
who one by one wield it upon the most sensitive areas of that beautiful body; her 
frightful husband distinguishes himself, ’tis inside her vagina the mischievous 
fellow delivers his six stabs; I see to the rest, and I execute with art and zeal 
enough to provoke everyone into a discharge. Clairwil replaces Borghese.

“Increased severity, sister,” the captain says, “don’t forget the goal we are 
working toward.”

“Never fear,” that harpy replies. “You will soon recognize your kin.”

Carleson returns to the sofa, over his mast-high device the captain’s sister 
hovers, slowly engulfs its length in her ass; Borghese and I frig her amain, and 
she formulates troubles for our victims to endure.

“I would,” says she, “that a hot iron be applied to the two breasts of the wife of
him embuggering me at present; I would,” the slut continued, ever ready to lose 
her head the moment she felt a prick tickling her entrails, “that four gashes be 
inflicted upon the pretty buttocks belonging to the youth whom my brother seems
to be fucking while awaiting our verdict; I would have Christine’s buttocks seared,
and a rinse of boiling oil injected into Ernelinde’s lovely ass, warming though may 
be the caresses I see Borghese bestowing upon it.”

But then a very comical thing occurred: panic-stricken at the thought of the 
clyster intended for her, the girl let loose everything her bowels contained, 
flooding shit all over the floor.

“Blast me,” stormed Borchamps, bestowing a tremendous kick upon the girl’s 
behind, who all but flew out the window someone had just opened to air the 
room, “’tis an outrage if the wretched little whore’s throat is not cut on the spot.”

“What the devil is the matter?” Clairwil demanded of her brother. “It’s nothing 
but shit, and you love shit; would it be Juliette’s you want instead? Come, have 
some then, my fingers feel her mard, she’ll hatch it into your mouth.”

“Bah, we’re becoming a filthy lot,” the captain jubilated, fitting his lips to my 
vent and soliciting what he has been put into hope of obtaining; “when you hear 
such words uttered, fuck is never far off.”

I shit; would you believe it? He shits too, and ’tis into the mouth of Christine, 
whom he has had posted underneath his ass, the villain looses the broadside, 
simultaneously swallowing the dainty I produce for him.

“Your pleasures are indecent in the extreme,” Clairwil observes the instant 
before she has Francisco perform the same operation upon her face.

“Ah, wench,” her brother calls to her, “you’re close to a yield of sperm. I can 
tell it from your infamies.”

“Fuck!” she rejoins, “I wish to be stretched out on the floor, I wish to be rolled,
to wallow in the nastiness that little jade has just spattered about.”

“Are you mad?” Olympia exclaims.

“No, merely determined to satisfy my desires, as always.”

Her wishes are obeyed, and it is while writhing in ordures the rascal is 
overtaken by her spasm.

The punishments are resumed; Borghese metes them out.

“Stay,” says the captain, seeing Olympia pick up the iron due to char Rosine’s 
breasts, “I must embugger this woman while you are torturing her.”

He sodomizes; Olympia operates.

“God’s prick and balls!” he cries, “how sweet it is to ass-fuck an object 
undergoing pain! Woe unto him who passes through life in ignorance of that 
pleasure! There is no greater one in Nature.”

But her fear notwithstanding, at the hands of her father, who embuggers her 
first, Ernelinde receives the formidable remedy prescribed by Clairwil; everything 
else on the program is accomplished in like wise, which brings us around to fresh 
horrors.

Carleson, berserk, and ever aroused by my ass, which, says he, has been 
driving him to this distraction, lays hands upon his children; he beats them, whips
them, fucks them, while we women frig one another opposite a spectacle which 
affords the idea of a wolf rampaging through a sheepfold.

“Up, wench,” and it is Rosine who hears herself addressed by a Borchamps 
embuggering me and fondling the hindquarters of Olympia and of Raimonde, “’tis 
your turn, whore, you are going to torture your children; Carleson, put the point 
of your dagger to the abominable creature’s heart, and if she so much as wavers 
when told what to do, stab her straight to death.”

Rosine is racked by sobs.

“A little self-control,” Olympia advises; “signs of distress excite our cruelty. 
Weep, and it will go worse with you.”

“Catch your elder daughter by the hair,” Borchamps shouts at her, “and you, 
Clairwil, issue the orders; Borghese will follow you; the last word will be 
Juliette’s.”

“I decree,” my friend said, “that the nasty creature chew blood from her 
daughter’s bubs.”

Rosine seems paralyzed; the point of Carleson’s dagger pricks her skin; the 
unhappy mother obeys.

“Olympia, what is your will?”

“That she drip molten wax upon her daughter’s buttocks.”

Again, manifestations of stubbornness; again, prods from the dagger; again, 
compliance on the part of the sorry Rosine.

“And you, Juliette?”

“Oh, I would have the girl given a general lashing by her mother, who shall lay 
on until she has drawn blood.”

What difficulties before these instructions are finally carried out! At first, the 
strokes are so mild that they leave no trace behind; but Carleson’s dagger has its 
stimulating effect, Rosine plies the whip in great earnest, and in due time she 
flays the skin off her daughter’s ass. Comparable tortures are inflicted upon the 
others, each outdoing the other in horror. When my turn comes, one of my 
desires is that Francisco embugger the elder of his sisters while gashing his 
mother, and Borchamps, sodomizing me as I give that command, succumbs to its 
suggestiveness, inundating my bowels.

“Fuck my eyes,” the captain swears, withdrawing from my fundament, his prick
still up and purple, “enough of this, let’s get down to business: we shall begin by 
binding these four individuals belly to belly, so that they compose, as it were, one 
and the same body.”

“Very well, and now?”

“Let each of the eight of us, armed with a red-hot poker, belabor this carrion a 
little….”

Then, after an hour of strenuous exertion: “Rosine, take this dagger,” the 
captain says severely, “plant it in your son’s heart; his father will hold him while 
you do—”

“No, barbarian, no!” that mother shrieks in despair. “No, ’twill rather go into 
my own heart—” and she would have ended her life had I not checked her arm in 
time.

“Slut, you shall obey!” roared Carleson.

And seizing his wife’s hand at the wrist, he himself guides the blade into his 
son’s breast. Clairwil, jealous at seeing herself excluded from the murder of this 
young man, she who only lives for masculine murders, snatches up a second knife
and deals the wretch wounds a thousand times more grievous; Rosine is then 
stretched upon a narrow wooden bench, affixed to it, and then Borchamps would 
have Ernelinde open her mother’s body with a scalpel. The child refuses; menaces
follow. Terrified, bruised, bloodied, excited by the hope of saving her life by 
consenting, her hand, steered by Carleson’s, yields to the barbarous instructions 
imparted to it.

“You received your existence here,” says the cruel father once the opening has 
been made, “you must now return into the womb whence you emerged.”

She is garroted, then pressed, twisted until by dint of much force and 
considerable art, there she is, breathing still, back inside the loins that once gave 
her to the world.

“As for that other one,” says the captain, referring to Christine, “she must be 
bound to her mother’s back. Wonderful, is it not,” he observed when that had 
been done, “the insignificant volume to which three women can be reduced.”

“And Francisco?” Clairwil wanted to know.

“He’s yours,” Borchamps answered, “take him into a corner and finish him off 
in whatever way you like.”

“Come with me, Juliette,” said Clairwil, leading the young man into an 
adjoining chamber.

And there, a couple of frenzied bacchantes, we cause that unlucky youth to 
expire under everything of the crudest and most refined it is in the power of 
ferocity to devise. Returning from those exercises, Carleson and Borchamps found
us so aglow with beauty that neither could resist tupping us straightway; but at 
this the jealous Borghese begins to fume, protesting that the victims are being 
left to languish, and the pleasures of torturing them being delayed. The point is 
well taken, and since the hour is advanced, it is decided that supper will be served
while play proceeds.

“In that case,” says Borghese, upon whom the right to prescribe punishment 
now devolves, having taken no hand in the tormenting and undoing of Francisco, 
“the victims must be disposed in front of us, flat on the table. The first of our 
pleasures will be derived from a view of the state they are already in, and this, I 
believe, is nigh to damnable; the second, from the effect of the further 
mistreatment they will sustain from us once they are there.”

“Aye, set them on the table,” says Clairwil, “but I want to fuck before I sup.”

“But with whom?” I ask my friend. “They are all drained dry.”

“Brother,” the insatiable creature resumes, “have ten of the prettiest members 
of your armed forces brought in, and give them to us for employment as sluts.”

The soldiers appear; we all three, Borghese, Clairwil, and I, defying the pricks 
lifting threateningly at us, fling ourselves down upon cushions scattered about on 
the floor. Elise and Raimonde act as our aides. Sbrigani, the captain, and Carleson
sodomize one another while watching us, and during four great hours, to the 
sound of our victims’ lamentations, the three of us fuck like the world’s mightiest 
whores: our champions, winded and spent, are dismissed.

“What good is a man when he reaches the end of his erection? Brother,” said 
Clairwil, “bring those ten louts back in here, where we can see it done, and have 
their throats cut this instant, if you please.”

The captain issues instructions, twenty of his trusties seize the first ten, and 
the massacre goes forward while we frig one another, Borghese, Clairwil, and I. It
is, so to speak, upon their corpses that a delicious collation is served to us. And 
there, naked, smeared with blood and fuck, drunk with lust, we carry our bestial 
ferocity to the point of mixing in our food those morsels of flesh we detach from 
the bodies of the unhappy women lying upon our table. Gorged on murder and 
impudicity, we at last all fall asleep amidst cadavers and a deluge of wines, spirits,
shit, fuck, and bits of human flesh: I am not sure what happened after that. I 
simply recall that when I opened my eyes to the light I found myself lying 
between two cadavers, my nose in Carleson’s ass, with whose shit my gullet was 
filled, and whose prick was wedged in Borghese’s ass, where he had forgotten it. 
The captain, who had gone to sleep with his head pillowed on Raimonde’s 
shit-slimed buttocks, still had his prick in my behind, and Sbrigani was snoring in 
the arms of Elise … the victims in pieces still lay on the table.

Such was the state in which the star of day found us out, and far from 
wondering at our excesses, never, I believe, did it smile so brightly since the 
world was born. Thus, you see, it is false that heaven condemns men’s erring 
behavior, ’tis absurd to suppose heaven offended thereby. Would it accord its 
favors to villains as well as to honest folk if it were annoyed by crime?

“Why, no. No,” I said to my friends who, that morning, were listening calmly 
while I exposed my thoughts, “we offend nothing by surrendering to crime. A 
god? How incur his displeasure when no god exists? Nature? Still less is Nature to 
be vexed by our misconduct,” I went on, summoning to mind the moral science 
upon which I had been nourished, excellent fare. “Man is in no wise Nature’s 
dependent; he is not even her child; he is her froth, her precipitated residue. No 
other laws govern him than those graved in mineral, in vegetal, in animal stuff; 
and when he reproduces, while he conforms to laws which are peculiar to him, he 
does nothing by any means necessary to Nature, nor by any means desired by 
her. Destruction more fully satisfies this universal mother, since it tends to restore
to her a potential she is cheated of through our propagation. Thus, our crimes are
pleasing to her, my friends, and our virtues are an affront; thus, atrocity in crime 
is what answers her most ardent desires; for he who were to serve her best 
would incontestably be him whose crimes through their number or magnitude 
destroyed even up to destroying the possibility of a regeneration which, 
perpetuated in the three kingdoms, only narrows Nature’s capacity for further 
creative thrusts. Little fool that I was, oh, Clairwil! before we parted I was yet an 
adept of Nature; the systems I have absorbed since then have freed me from her,
and moved me toward the simple laws of the natural realms. Having embraced 
these systems, ah, great dupes we must me, dear friends, if ever we deny 
anything to the passions, since they become the motor forces of our being, and 
we are just as unable to turn a deaf ear to their promptings as we are to be born 
again, or to return to being unborn. Indeed, these passions are so inherent in us, 
so necessary to the functioning of our inner workings, that their satisfaction 
becomes fundamental to our existence. Oh, dear Clairwil,” I continued, taking my 
friend’s hand warmly in mine, “the degree to which I am now these passions’ 
slave! Oh, whatever they might be, how willingly I would sacrifice everything to 
them! This victim or that, how little must it matter! None more deserves to be 
spared than any other. If, according to popular prejudice, one existed which might
seem to merit exception, from the simple breaking of this curb my delights must 
increase: I would interpret the excessive foretaste of pleasure as a command to 
act, and my hand would fly to do the bidding of my desires.”

A striking instance of the rewards fortune almost always lavishes upon great 
criminals now added its support to my arguments.

We had scarce come out of the scene of horror I have just described when 
Borchamps’ troops rode in with six wagonloads of bullion that had been on its way
to the Emperor, sent by the Venetian Republic. Only one hundred men were 
escorting this magnificent convoy when, in a mountain pass in the Tyrol, two 
hundred of our captain’s cavalry fell upon them and captured this hoard after an 
hour-long battle.

“There I am, rich for the rest of my life,” said Clairwil’s fortunate brother. 
“Notice, if you will, at what moment this happiness befalls us. ’Tis into hands 
soiled by wife-killing, infanticide, sodomy, multiple murders, prostitution, and 
infamies that heaven deposits this treasure; ’tis to reward me for these horrors 
heaven puts it at my disposal. And you would have me doubt that Nature is 
otherwise than honored by crimes? Ah, my thinking is not likely to change on this 
question, and I shall go on committing them forever, since the consequences are 
so encouraging. Carleson,” said the brigand, “before we begin the count, from the
contents of one of these wagons take a hundred thousand crowns, they’re yours, 
the gift testifies to the satisfaction I received from your courage and 
purposefulness during the late scene for which you supplied the actors.”

Carleson kissed his commander’s knees in thanks.

“I see no reason to hide it, fair ladies,” Borchamps said to us, “I am 
exceedingly fond of this lad, and when one loves, it’s with money you must prove 
it. At the beginning, of course, I supposed that the enjoyment would sooner or 
later pall; but it has been quite the other way, the more I discharge with this 
delicious boy, the more attached to him I become. A thousand pardons. 
Mesdames, ten thousand, but ’twould perhaps not be the same thing with any of 
you.”

We passed several more days in Borchamps’ retreat; and then, seeing us eager
to be off, he spoke to us as follows:

“My thought, good friends, was to accompany you to Naples, the prospect 
pleased me. But with the wish that is mine soon to quit my present calling, I 
ought to dedicate myself to business rather than pleasure. My sister will go with 
you to that noble town, and here are eight hundred thousand francs to defray the 
costs of your stay. Hire an appropriate mansion upon your arrival, give out that 
the three of you are sisters—as indeed one might be ready enough to believe, 
certain features in common create a kind of resemblance among you. Sbrigani will
continue to look after your affairs while you make the most of the numerous sinful
opportunities that magnificent city offers. Elise and Raimonde will be your 
chaperones. As for myself, I shall come to visit you if I can; amuse yourself, all 
three, and forget me not in your pleasures.”

We left. I regretted Carleson, I admit it; I had, while a guest in Borchamps’ 
castle, got myself prodigiously fucked by that pretty fellow, whose prick had been 
admirable, and it was something of a hardship for me to forego it. My feelings had
nothing to do with love: I have never worshiped that god; the question was 
merely of the need to be well fucked, and nobody satisfied it better than Carleson.
The obligation, moreover, to hide our activities in order to avoid displeasing 
Borchamps, very jealous of his handsome lieutenant, had lent an 
out-of-the-ordinary flavor to the enjoyment of him, and our last farewells were 
sealed by a mutual inundation of fuck.

Reaching Naples, we rented a superb house on the Chiagia quay, and passing 
ourselves as sisters, as the captain had advised, we gathered round us a royal 
entourage of domestics. First, we devoted a month to a careful appraisal of the 
morals and manners of this half-Spanish nation; we considered its government, 
its policies, its arts; its relations with the other nations of Europe. This study 
completed, we esteemed ourselves ready to sally forth into society. Our 
reputation as light ladies soon spread about. The King conceived a wish to see us;
as for his wife, that spiteful woman did not look upon us with sympathy.(14) 
Worthy sister to her who had married Louis XVI, this arrogant princess, after the 
example of all the other members of the House of Austria, sought to captivate her
spouse’s heart solely in order to rule him politically; ambitious like Marie 
Antoinette, it was not the husband she cared about, it was the kingdom she 
wanted. Ferdinand, slow-witted, simple-minded, blind—in fine, a king, Ferdinand 
fancied he had a friend in that headstrong wife, when in fact he had only a spy 
and a rival, and the whore, like her sister, in devastating, in plundering the 
Neapolitan nation, toiled to the advantage of nobody except her Hapsburg tribe.

Shortly after our presentation I received a billet from the King of Naples, 
couched in these or very similar terms:

“To Paris, the other day, Juno, Pallas, and Venus were offered; he has made his
choice, upon you he bestows the apple; come to receive it tomorrow at Portici, I 
shall be there alone; your refusal would disappoint me cruelly and gain you 
nothing. I shall therefore expect you.”

A communication so despotic, so laconic, deserved the most straightforward 
reply; I made it verbally, and contented myself with assuring the page boy that I 
would be punctual. Once the messenger has left, I fly to tell my sisters this piece 
of good news. All three thoroughly determined to banish the least suspicion of 
envy from our relations, to adopt a lightsome attitude toward human folly, to 
wring profit from it, to laugh at it—Olympia and Clairwil besought me not to miss 
the adventure. And arrayed like that very goddess who had merited the apple, I 
spring into a coach-and-six which, a few minutes later, brings me to the gate of 
the royal castle, renowned for the ruins of Herculaneum upon which it stands. 
Mysteriously introduced into this house’s most obscure apartments, I at last come
to the King, nonchalantly reposing in a boudoir.

“My choice has created jealousies, naturally?” the fool says, speaking French 
with a villainous accent.

“No, Sire,” I answer him, “my sisters noted this preference with equanimity, as
did I, no more touched, in honor, not to be included therein than am I by the vast 
honor you perhaps fancy it does me.”

He stares. “A singular reply, bless my soul.”

“Ah, though full aware that to please kings one must always flatter them, I, 
who in them perceive nought but ordinary mortals, never speak to them save it 
be to tell them the truth.”

“But if that truth is harsh?”

“You wonder why they deserve to hear it? But why should they suppose 
themselves less entitled than other men to the naked truth? Because they have a 
yet greater need of it?”

“They dread it more.”

“Tush. Let them then behave justly, let them renounce an empty pride out of 
which they strive to enslave men, and a liking for truth will replace their fear of 
it.”

“But, Madame, such speeches—”

“They startle you, Ferdinand, I see it. You doubtless thought that, flattered by 
your choice, I was going to approach you on my hands and knees; that I was 
going to bow down before you, serve you. No; a Frenchwoman, the pride that my 
sex and nationality inspire in me lends itself ill to such usages. Ferdinand, if I 
have been willing to grant you the interview you solicited, ’tis because I consider 
myself perhaps a little better equipped to enlighten you regarding your veritable 
interests. So forget for a moment the frivolous pleasures you promised yourself 
with an ordinary woman, and listen to one who knows you well, who knows your 
kingdom still better, and who can, concerning these subjects, speak to you in a 
manner your courtesans do not dare.”

Seeing that the King, slackjawed from surprise, bewildered, was paying all 
possible attention to me, I addressed him thus:

“My friend, you will permit me to dispense with those vainglorious nicknames 
and titles which tell only of the impertinence in him who receives them and of the 
shameless baseness in him who mouths them; my friend, I say, I have lately been
examining your nation with utmost care, and have found it extremely difficult to 
put my finger upon its genius; I have been studying it since coming to Naples, 
and I confess I as yet see nothing there. Nevertheless, I think I have detected the
reason for the trouble I have been having. Your people have lost track of their 
origins; successive misfortunes, foreign domination after foreign domination, have
left them limp, spineless, habituated to a slavery which has drained them of their 
one-time energy, rendered them unrecognizable. This nation, which sought 
liberators for so long, managed every time, through incredible blundering, to end 
up with another master. A great lesson for any people eager to break their 
shackles: let them learn from the Neapolitans’ example that success lies not in 
imploring protectors, but in shattering the throne and laying low the tyrants who 
sit upon it. Every other people has used the Neapolitans to establish a power; 
they alone have remained weak-willed and listless. One seeks for the genius of 
the Neapolitans, and as in the case of every population accustomed to slavery, 
one encounters nothing but the genius of their sovereign. Be sure of it, Ferdinand,
the faults I perceive in your nation are not so much hers as your own. But 
something more surprising still: the very excellence of your people’s territory is 
perhaps the unique cause of their poverty: a more barren soil, a climate less mild,
and the Neapolitans would have been forced to be industrious, and from meeting 
the challenge of adverse conditions they would have developed the vigor that 
eludes them owing to the fertility of their land. Thus it is that this fine country, 
with the advantages of a meridional location, is inhabited by a people who would 
be better off in the north.

“Since coming into your States I have looked everywhere for your kingdom, 
and all I discover is your city: a pit that swallows up all the wealth of the nation, 
and thereby impoverishes it. I cast an eye about this capital, what do I see? 
Everything ostentation and opulence can display of the most magnificent, and that
cheek to jowl with the most afflicting evidence of indigence and idleness. On the 
one hand, noblemen living like kings; on the other, citizens in a worse case than 
serfs. And the vice of inequality everywhere, that all-destroying poison; and all 
the more difficult to root out, since the political order is built upon the enormous 
disparity between classes. Hereabouts, you either see men who own whole 
provinces or else drudges without even an acre; and between these two 
extremes, nothing. As a result, everything divides each man from his fellow. If 
these rich folk had some virtues, at least—but they arouse my pity, they make a 
dazzling show of themselves and possess none of the qualities which offset the 
ridiculous in such displays; they are proud without being urbane, tyrants without 
civility, magnificently appareled without elegance, libertines without any subtlety. 
In my opinion, they all resemble your Vesuvius: so many beauties before which 
one recoils. All their means for distinguishing themselves boil down to subsidizing 
convents and keeping actresses, to feeding horses, valets, and hounds.

“When in the course of my considerations I came upon your people’s formal 
refusal to adopt the tribunal of the Inquisition, I was impressed favorably; yet, I 
realized, this did not make the Neapolitans one whit less weak, although they did 
something that calls for strength.

“Your clergy is accused of having accumulated great wealth. In my eyes, this is
not something to blame them for: their greed, matching that of the nation’s 
rulers, redresses the balance somewhat: the latter throw money about, the 
priests hoard it. When the day comes to seize the kingdom’s treasures, one will at
least know where they are to be found.(15)

“Closely analyzing your nation, I see that it contains but three estates, all three
of them either useless or poverty-ridden: the people surely belong to that latter 
class, the priests and courtesans form the other two. One of the major 
shortcomings from which this little empire of yours suffers, my friend, is that in it 
there exists but one power to which everything else is subsidiary: the King, here, 
is the State; the minister is the government. As a consequence, no possible 
emulation save that to which the sovereign or the sovereign’s agent gives 
rise—what greater flaw could any system have?

“Though Nature lavishes much upon your people, their circumstances are 
strait. But this is not the effect of their laziness; this general paralysis has its 
source in your policy which, from maintaining the people in dependence, shuts 
them out from wealth; their ills are thus rendered beyond remedy, and the 
political state is in a situation no less grave than the civil government, since it 
must seek its strength in its very weakness. Your apprehensiveness, Ferdinand, 
lest someone discover the things I have been telling you leads you to exile arts 
and talents from your realm. You fear the powerful eye of genius, that is why you 
encourage ignorance. ’Tis opium you feed your people, so that, drugged, they do 
not feel their hurts, inflicted by you. And that is why where you reign no 
establishments are to be found giving great men to the homeland; the rewards 
due knowledge are unknown here, and as there is neither honor nor profit in 
being wise, nobody seeks after wisdom.

“I have studied your civil laws, they are good, but poorly enforced, and as a 
result they sink into ever further decay. And the consequences thereof? A man 
prefers to live amidst their corruption rather than plead for their reform, because 
he fears, and with reason, that this reform will engender infinitely more abuses 
than it will do away with; things are left as they are. Nevertheless, everything 
goes askew and awry, and as a career in government has no more attractions 
than one in the arts, nobody involves himself in public affairs; and for all this 
compensation is offered in the form of luxury, of frivolity, of entertainments. So it 
is that among you a taste for trivial things replaces a taste for great ones, that 
the time which ought to be devoted to the latter is frittered away on futilities, and
that you will be subjugated sooner or later and again and again by any foe who 
bothers to make the effort.

“In view of its situation, your State needs a fleet for its defense. I have seen a 
few soldiers in your country, but not one warship. With this insouciance, with this 
unpardonable apathy, your nation foregoes the possibility of becoming the sea 
power which by all rights it ought to be, and as your forces on the land do not 
make up for your lack of a navy, you will finish by amounting to nothing. 
Expanding nations will laugh at you, and if ever a revolution were to regenerate 
some one or other among them, you will be rightly deprived of the honor of 
constituting a weight on the scales. Anyone at all could make you tremble, even 
the Pope if he cared to bestir himself.

“Well, Ferdinand! It is not worth dominating a nation if one rules it in such a 
way. And do you think a sovereign, even a despot, can be happy when his people 
do not flourish? Where are the economic principles in your State? I have searched
for them high and low, and uncovered none anywhere. Are you promoting 
agriculture? Encouraging the growth of population? Protecting trade? Aiding the 
arts? Not only is there no sign hereabouts of anything others are doing elsewhere,
but everything I see points in the opposite direction. The outcome of it all? Your 
pallid monarchy languishes in indigence; you yourself become a nullity in the 
concert of European powers; your downfall is not far off.

“Shall I examine your city from the inside? Shall I analyze its manners? 
Nowhere do I perceive those simple virtues that provide the bedrock to society. 
Company is kept out of snobbery, friendship goes on through habit, marriage is 
determined by material need; and as vanity is foremost among the Neapolitans’ 
vices, a fault they acquired from the Spanish under whose heel they lived for so 
long; as, I say, pride is a vice inherent in your nation, its members prefer to avoid
close scrutiny for fear lest the face of horror appear once the mask is removed. 
Your aristocracy, ignorant and stupid as it is everywhere else, brings disorder to 
its peak by placing its trust in lawyers, melancholy and dangerous breed swollen 
now to such ridiculous proportions there is practically no justice anymore. The 
little there is costs its weight in gold; and among all the countries I have visited, 
this is perhaps the only one where I have seen more wit exercised absolving a 
guilty man than is elsewhere devoted to justifying an innocent.

“I had imagined your court would offer me some ideas of polite behavior and 
gallantry, I see it contains nothing but boors or imbeciles. Weary of monarchical 
vices, I had the hope, in coming here, of finding a few antique virtues: instead, in 
your government I discover only the result of all the disorders to be encountered 
in the various kingdoms of Europe. Each individual, in your country, seeks to 
appear somehow larger than life-size; and as nobody has the qualities requisite to
acquiring wealth, fraud is substituted for them; dishonesty thus becomes 
ingrained, congenital, and foreigners can no longer have confidence in a nation 
that has none in itself.

“After having glanced at the nobility, I take a look at your common people. 
Without exception, I find them uncouth, stupid, indolent, thieving, bloodthirsty, 
insolent, and possessing not a single virtue to redeem any of those vices.

“Do I wish, joining the two halves of the picture together, to contemplate this 
society as a whole? I behold a confusion of economic conditions; the citizen 
lacking the necessities of life taken up with useless activities; each man serving 
as amusement or spectacle to some other; indigence itself putting on grandiose 
airs that are the more revolting since, while horses draw its carriages, its 
cupboard at home is bare. One of the disastrous effects of the Neapolitans’ taste 
for luxury is that, in order to have a coach and valets, three out of four of the 
best households avoid marrying their daughters; this frightful practice extends 
throughout all classes. Again, what happens? The population diminishes in direct 
proportion to the increase of luxury; and the State gradually sinks, the brighter 
the sheen it acquires by these vile means.

“But it is in your weddings and in your takings of the veil especially that this 
wastefulness becomes as preposterous as it is cruel. In the first case, you raid the
luckless bride’s dowry in order to embellish her for a day; in the second, you’d 
have enough to find her a husband if you did not spend it upon the ludicrous 
ceremony which is to deprive her of one for the rest of her life.

“Particularly, Ferdinand, it is that although your subjects are poor, you are rich.
And you would be a great deal richer had your predecessors not sold the State 
piecemeal for great sums of silver. A State that has reciprocal commercial 
interests can bargain past rainy days; but a people who borrows from anybody 
and lends to nobody, a people who, in the article of trade, plays a lone hand 
against the whole of Europe, must inevitably become poor. Such is the history of 
your nation, my dear prince; all the others, having industry, make you pay the 
price for their goods, and your industry, practically at a standstill, wins you no 
customers.

“The amusing thing is that your arts reflect the puffed-up character of your 
people. Not a city on earth surpasses yours in operatic decorations; Naples is all 
tinsel and frippery, like its population. Medicine, surgery, poetry, astronomy are 
still in the dark ages here; but your dancers are excellent; and nowhere do we 
have such droll Scaramouches. In other countries they go to all sorts of lengths to
become rich; all alone, the Neapolitan exerts himself only to look rich: his heart is
less set on owning a large fortune than in persuading others he enjoys one, and 
his search is far less for opulence than for outward signs thereof. That is the 
reason why in this country there are so many people stinting themselves on 
essentials in order to have the superfluous. Meanness reigns at the most lavish 
banquets; culinary refinements are unknown; apart from your macaroni, what do 
they eat here that’s good? Nothing: your countrymen are absolutely innocent of 
the voluptuous art of stimulating every passion by the delicious means of a subtle
cuisine Everything is subordinated to the absurd pleasure of having a handsome 
carriage, expensive livery; along with the pomp and magnificence of modern 
times you have retained the frugality of the ancients—the contrast is unsightly. 
Your women are imperious and dirty, demanding and shrewish, without style and 
without conversation. In other climates, their commerce, though it spoils the 
heart, may at least improve the mind; here, the men do not even derive that 
latter advantage from them; the vices contracted in their society are mitigated by 
nothing; with them it’s all loss, never any gain.

“However, one must be fair: there are some positive things to be said about 
your people. There is a basic goodness in them; the Neapolitan is 
quick-tempered, irascible, brusque, but his ill-humor doesn’t last, and his heart, 
grievances once forgotten, is warm and not without virtues. Almost all the crimes 
committed here are rather the products of a thoughtless first impulse than of 
premeditation, that this people is not spiteful is proven by the great number of 
the Neapolitans, which is maintained without police. This people loves you, 
Ferdinand: show your subjects you love them in return, be capable of a great 
sacrifice. Christine, Queen of Sweden, abjured her crown through philosophy: 
break your scepter out of benevolence, relinquish the reins of a so badly 
organized government that enriches nobody but you. Remind yourself that kings 
are nothing in today’s world, the common masses everything. Leave to this 
people the task of overhauling and refitting a ship which will never sail very far 
with you at its helm; let Naples live as a Republic: to the extent this race, and I 
have studied it well, makes for bad slaves, it will produce good citizens; liberate 
its energy by delivering it from the shackles of your power, that will be to 
accomplish two meritorious acts at one stroke: there will be a tyrant the less on 
the face of Europe, and one nation the more to admire there.”

Ferdinand, who had listened to me with his best attention, asked, when I had 
finished, whether all Frenchwomen thus reasoned about politics.

“No,” I replied, “and more’s the pity: the majority of them are better analysts 
of ruffles and flounces than of the structure of kingdoms: they weep when 
oppressed, they are insolent once unchained. As for me, frivolity is not my vice; 
I’ll not say the same for libertinage. … I am excessively addicted to it. But the 
pleasure of fucking does not blind me to the point of being unable to discuss the 
interests of the world’s populations. In strongly made souls the passions’ torch 
lights a Minerva as well as a Venus; burning with the latter’s fire, I fuck like your 
sister-in-law;(16) illuminated by the rays of the former, I think and discourse like 
Hobbes and Montesquieu. Is it then, in your opinion, such a difficult thing to 
manage, an empire? So assure the people’s welfare that nobody can envy you 
yours; then dedicate yourself unreservedly to this latter, which you can safely do, 
since human beings cease to be observant or restless when they are happy—that,
it seems to me, is the whole secret, and I would have put it into practice long ago
had I had, like you, the power and the foolishness to rule a nation. But mark you 
well, my friend, it is not despotism I forbid you, I am too familiar with its charms 
to deny it to you; I simply advise the suppression or the rectification of whatever 
jeopardizes or interferes with the maintenance of this despotism, if it is upon the 
throne you choose to stay. Render every sentient being happy if you wish to be so
yourself; for the moment the crowd’s enjoyments pale, be very certain of it, 
Ferdinand, the crowd will spoil your pleasures in its turn.”

“And by what means?”

“Institute the broadest freedom of thought, of belief, and of conduct. Do away 
with moral impediments: the man with an erection wishes to act as freely as a cat
or dog. If, as is done in France, you are going to appoint for him the altar upon 
which he must shed his fuck, employing absurdities to bend him under the yoke 
of a puerile morality, he will repay you in kind and with good measure. Such irons,
forged to your order by pedants and priests, will be yours to wear ere long, and it
may be that you’ll carry them to the scaffold, for your erstwhile victim will have 
his revenge.”(17)

“Your opinion, then, is that there must be no moral standards under a 
government?”

“None save those inspired by Nature. You will always render the human animal
unhappy when you seek to subject him to any others. To him who has suffered 
the outrage leave the problem of obtaining redress, he will handle the business 
better than do your laws, for his interests are more closely involved; your laws, 
moreover, are frequently eluded, but the object of just revenge rarely escapes.”

“Faith, all that is quite beyond me,” the great simpleton confessed with a sigh. 
“I fuck, I eat macaroni without cooks, I build houses without architects. I collect 
medallions without antiquarians, I play at billiards like a lackey, I exercise, my 
cadets like a drill-sergeant; but I don’t talk politics, religion, ethics, or 
government, because I know nothing about any of them.”

“And your kingdom?”

“Oh, it gets along, it gets along as best it can. Think you then that to be king 
one has to be so very wise?”

“Apparently not, for I must take you as proof,” I replied. “But that is not 
enough to convince me that a leader of men can dispense with reason and 
philosophy, nor that, deprived of the one and the other, a prince like you can 
avoid blunders which will one fine day see your subjects up in arms and ridding 
themselves of an idiotic master. And this will come very shortly to pass unless you
take every possible measure to prevent it.”

“I have cannons, fortresses.”

“Who mans them?”

“My people.”

“When they weary of you, they’ll turn the guns against your castle, take your 
fortresses and perhaps, who knows, drag you in the mire.”

“You terrify me, Madame! What must I do?”

“I have told you. Imitate the experienced horseman: rather than shorten the 
bit when the charger rears, go softly with him, loosen the reins, let him have his 
head. Nature, disseminating peoples over all the surface of the globe, gave them 
all the intelligence necessary to run their affairs; but it was only in a moment of 
wrath she suggested the idea of saddling themselves with kings. These are to the 
body politic as a doctor is to the physical body: you may call him when you are ill,
you must show him to the door once health returns, else he’ll prolong the malady 
so as to be of eternal aid, and while pretending to cure, he’ll bide with you to the 
grave.”(18)

“Juliette, you reason forcefully, I like your conversation, but … confound it all, 
you overawe me; you have more wit than I.”

“Which is to credit me with more than none at all. Never mind, Sire, since my 
wit frightens you, reason will yield for a moment to your pleasures. Come, what 
do you desire?”

“It is said that you have the world’s prettiest body, Juliette, I should like to see 
it. This, perhaps, is not quite the language I ought to be employing, considering 
the manners you displayed at the time of your arrival in our midst; but I am not 
taken in by façades, my dear. I have informed myself about your sisters and you; 
although exceedingly rich, you are, beyond any doubt, thoroughgoing whores, the
three of you.”

“Your information is highly inexact, fair my Lord,” I replied with vivacity, “your 
spies resemble your ministers, they steal your money without giving you service 
in return. You are in error; but no matter. For my part, I have no inclination to act
the vestal. The question is merely one of coming to terms. I shall not make the 
capitulation any harder for you than it was for your brother-in-law, that little Duke
of Tuscany. Now listen to me. While you are mistaken in considering us whores, if 
we are not so in fact, yet it is a certainty that for wickedness and corruption we 
cannot be easily outdone; you shall have the three of us, if you like.”

“Truly,” said the prince, “nothing pleases me more than to string beads an 
entire family at a time.”

“Well, you shall have that satisfaction, and we merely ask, in exchange, that 
you defray the expenses we shall be incurring in Naples over the coming six 
months, that you pay our debts if we contract any, and that you guarantee our 
total immunity, whatever may be the pranks we indulge in.”

“Pranks?” Ferdinand wondered. “What kind of pranks?”

“Numerous, violent, beyond anything imaginable: my sisters and I do not stint 
ourselves where it is a question of crime, we commit all sorts and we do not wish 
to be punished for any of them.”

“Granted,” Ferdinand replied; “but endeavor to keep your depradations from 
becoming unduly noticed, and let neither my government nor my person become 
the target of your attacks.”

“No, no,” I assured him, “they’d not amuse us. Good or bad, we leave regimes 
as they are; and to the underlying people we leave the task of settling matters 
with their kings.”

“All right,” said Ferdinand, “we can now discuss pleasures.”

“Did you not tell me you wanted to enjoy my sisters too?”

“Yes, but a beginning must be made somewhere. Let us therefore start with 
you.” And, guiding me into an adjoining chamber, “Juliette,” the Neapolitan went 
on, showing me a woman of twenty-seven or twenty-eight years, almost naked 
and lying upon a couch in an alcove paneled with mirrors, “they are this lady’s 
passions no less than mine that you shall have to satisfy.”

“Who is this person?”

“My wife.”

“Ah, ’tis you, Charlotte,” I say, “to be sure. I know you through your 
reputation: as whorish as your sisters, report has it, however, that you pay better.
We shall see.”

“Juliette,” Ferdinand interjected, “if you wish to have me favor your desires, 
you must, toward the Queen, show utmost consideration.”

“All she has to do is say what she wants: the resources of lewdness, I possess 
them every one, there are none I am not ready to employ.”

And that was when Charlotte of Lorraine, throwing her arms around my neck, 
gave me to understand, by a thousand kisses, how alive she already was to the 
pleasures I promised her. Ceremony was laid aside: Ferdinand undressed us both.
Then, there having been fetched in a page boy of some fifteen years, a delight to 
behold, whose clothes the King also removed, Charlotte and I frigged each other 
upon the couch while, from where he had a clear view of our doings, Ferdinand, 
polluted by the page, kissed the boy’s mouth ardently, at the same time fingering 
his behind.

Oh, my friends! What a woman that Charlotte was! Impudicity had established 
its hearth in that royal whore’s cunt; Charlotte, her thighs entwined with mine, 
rubbed her clitoris against my clitoris, frenziedly; her hands roved over my 
buttocks; one of her fingers tickled my asshole; her tongue, stuck far into my 
mouth, lapped thirstily at my saliva; the wench was all ablaze, fuck fairly leaked 
from her pores. I engage her to change positions; her head slips between my 
thighs, mine between hers, and we suck altogether at our ease. Oh, how willingly 
she repays me for what I yield to her mouth; if my cunt floods her throat with 
sperm, her frequent ejaculations send rivers of delight into mine. When we had 
shed our fuck to the last drop she besought me to piss into her mouth; I asked 
the same of her, we poured urine into each other, swallowing it as it flowed.

Charlotte is beautiful, her skin is very white, her breasts high and firm, her 
buttocks admirable, her thighs of marvelous proportion; ’tis plain that she has 
much fucked and in every conceivable manner, but she is well preserved all the 
same, and her openings are still very narrow.(19)

“Oh, my love,” I said to her, truly moved by her charms, “let us exchange more
serious blows.”

“Here is what you need for that,” spoke up the King, tossing us a pair of 
dildoes. And having each donned that equipment, we set to smiting each other 
with greatest energy. At one point in our capers my ass was directly in front of 
Ferdinand; he examines it, covets it, covers it with the most heated kisses.

“Stand where you are for a moment and steady your movements,” he says to 
me, “I mean to embugger you while you fuck my wife. You, Zerbi, frig my 
behind.”

The scene lasts several instants, at the end of which the prince, having his wife
exchange places with me, buggers her while she fucks me; a moment later, he 
has her sodomized by the youth, I tongue her cunt, and he at last discharges into 
the bowels of the page who is cuckolding him.

After a brief interval of rest employed in kissing, in fondling one another, we 
started in anew. Ferdinand fitted himself into my ass, he sucked Zerbi’s, had the 
boy shit into his mouth, and his wife beat him; a minute of this and he retired 
from my bum, took the switches and beat the three of us rather severely; the 
Queen then wielded them upon my hindquarters, flogging was one of her 
passions, she kept at it until my blood flowed; she sucked the page’s prick while 
her husband ass-fucked her and she kneaded my behind. A little while later we 
surrounded Ferdinand, I sucked him, his wife socratized him, palpated his balls, 
and the page, straddling his chest, gave the King of Naples his asshole to lick; he 
got up from that with a fierce erection.

“I don’t know why we shouldn’t wring that little bugger’s neck,” said he, 
collaring his page and squeezing shrill screams from him.

“Hang him,” said Charlotte.

“Dear girl,” said I, kissing that charming person, “would you have a fondness 
for cruelties too? Ah, I adore you, if ’tis so. Yes, I can see it, you would be capable
of that trick of the Chinese empress, who fed her goldfish on the genitals of the 
children of the poor.”

“Oh yes, I shall imitate that horror when called upon; and I am capable of 
worse yet. Infamies, Ferdinand, let’s perform infamies, this woman is delightful, 
she has wit, character, imagination; I believe she shares our tastes. Here, my 
friend, be Zerbi’s executioner, and let us all remember that an individual’s 
destruction is the most potent stimulant one can add to the charms of sensual 
debauchery. Hang Zerbi, dear husband, hang him short; Juliette will masturbate 
me while we observe the operation from close on.”

It is carried out: Ferdinand hangs the page up with such skill, dispatch, and 
violence that the boy expires before we have time to get properly started.

“Alas,” Charlotte grumbles, “unlucky creature that I am, I postponed my 
spasm until I could watch him die. Never mind, Ferdinand, cut him down; dead as
he is, guide his hand, I want to be frigged by it.”

“No,” says the King, “Juliette will undertake that chore; I shall embugger the 
cadaver in the meantime; they claim there is nothing better in the world, I must 
try it. Oh, sweet fuck!” he cries, once lodged in that ass, “this pleasure is 
everything it is reputed to be. What a grip to a dead anus! ’Tis divine.”

The scene goes forward; Zerbi does not come back to life, but his slayers die of
pleasure. Charlotte, for one last discharge stretched out naked upon the page’s 
already cold body, and while her husband frigged her, she had me shit in her 
mouth. Four thousand ounces(20) was my fee, and we separated with the 
promise to meet together soon in more numerous company.

Once home again, I tell my sisters about his Sicilian Majesty’s odd tastes.

“Wonderful, is it not,” Clairwil remarked, “always to find such passions lodged 
in the brains of those whom Nature has made outstanding through the gift of 
intelligence, wealth, or authority.”

“It strikes me as perfectly understandable,” said Olympia, whom we called by 
no other name, fearing lest her real one be recognized, “no, I tell you, I know of 
nothing more natural than that the most refined forms of pleasure-seeking be 
conceived by those endowed with the finest powers of discernment, or by those 
whom despotism or the favors of fortune place on a superior level. A man with 
much intellect, much power, or much money cannot possibly amuse himself the 
way everybody else does. Now, if he refines his pleasures he must inevitably 
arrive at murder, for murder is the ultimate excess of pleasure: voluptuousness 
dictates it, murder is a branch of erotic activity, one of its extravagances. The 
human being reaches the final paroxysm of delight only through an access of 
rage; he thunders, he swears, he loses all sense of proportion, all self-control, at 
this crucial moment he manifests all the symptoms of brutality; another step, and
he is barbaric; yet another, and he has killed; the more intelligent he is, the more 
he will refine his gestures and proceedings. One obstacle will nevertheless 
continue to impede him, he will fear either the extreme costliness of his 
pleasures, or the law; deliver him from these silly terrors by means of gold or 
authority, and you have launched him into a career of crime, because impunity 
reassures him, and because nothing daunts a man when along with the mind 
capable of conceiving anything there are combined the means to undertake 
everything.”

“Well,” said I to my friends, “we are all three in that enviable case; for over 
and above the immense wealth we possess, Ferdinand guarantees us the most 
entire impunity.”

“Fuck,” said Clairwil, “how that agreeable certitude inflames my passions! …” 
And the hussy drew up her skirts, spread her legs, inserted her fingers between 
her labia and offered us a vermilion and panting cunt which seemed to be calling 
all the pricks in Naples to combat.

“I hear the engines are superb in these parts,” she went on, “we must make 
some arrangements with Sbrigani in order not to miss any.”

“I finished attending to all that yesterday,” that charming man declared, “I 
have put twelve purveyors into the field and shall see to it that two dozen pretty 
lads between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five are regularly presented to you 
every morning; I shall also see to the verifications; if in spite of my rigorous 
specifications any shoddy specimens happened to be included in the deliveries, 
they would be weeded out, rejected—”

“What were the sizes you ordered?” asked Clairwil, whom Raimonde was now 
frigging.

“You will never be given anything under six inches in circumference by eight in 
length.”

“For shame, Sbrigani! Those dimensions may be good for Paris, but in Naples, 
where monsters grow…. For my part, I do not intend to accept anything less than 
eight inches around and a foot long.”

“Neither shall we,” Olympia and I declared, almost simultaneously; “we may 
end up with fewer, but we shall have better—”

“Fewer!” cried Clairwil. “I see no reason to reduce the number. To the contrary,
in addition to quality I demand quantity. Therefore, Sbrigani, I shall ask you to 
furnish us thirty men each morning, and with the proportions I cited a moment 
ago: that will give us ten apiece. Let’s say we get three fuckings out of 
each—that, surely, is not asking too much; and which is the one among us who is 
unable to ride ten mounts into the ground before drinking her breakfast 
chocolate? She who speaks assures you that getting off to an early start will not 
prevent her from accomplishing some startling little infamies in the course of the 
day; indeed, ’tis only by a good deal of fucking one puts oneself in proper fucking 
form; and for what else but to fuck did Nature create us?”

And, pronouncing these last words, the spirited creature discharged where she 
lay in Raimonde’s arms.

“While waiting for me to fill your prescription,” said Sbrigani, “see whether 
these six valets please you; I believe they exceed the measurements you have 
just indicated.”

Thereupon appeared six great strapping fellows nearly six feet tall, half-naked, 
and prick in fist.

“Bloody-fuck,” exclaimed Clairwil, her skirts still gathered up around her waist, 
“what members I see. Here, let me heft them”—but her two hands were not 
enough to encircle any of those bludgeons—; “they are bulky, my friends. Take 
your choice; these are the two I am keeping.”

“One moment!” cautioned Sbrigani. “Permit me to regulate your pleasures, 
they will be better directed by someone who is calm than by you, fuck-blinded 
already.”

“He’s right, he’s right,” Clairwil assented, nevertheless pulling off her clothes in
great haste, “let him arrange, let him organize. While he does, I shall be getting 
myself ready.”

“Clairwil, you shall begin,” said Sbrigani, “you seem in the greatest hurry.”

“That is only too true,” our companion confessed, “I don’t know what it is 
about the air in this city, but it makes me more libertine than ever.”

“Filled with nitrous, sulphorous, and bituminous particles,” I replied, “it must 
necessarily irritate the nerves and produce a greater than ordinary commotion in 
the animal spirits. I too feel that I am going to behave atrociously here in 
Naples.”

“Although I ought to be more accustomed to it than you,” said Olympia, 
“Naples and my native city lying not very far apart, even so, like you, I am 
dreadfully overwrought in this atmosphere.”

“Then make the most of it,” said Sbrigani, “fall to, whores, and count upon me 
to lend a helping hand. This then,” he continued, “is the arrangement I 
recommend for the opening scene: Clairwil, I repeat, will begin; though burning 
to be fucked, I want her sincerely to desire the engine that is to pierce her. 
Juliette, take this handsome prick your friend has already chosen, frig it in the 
near vicinity of her cunt, rub her clitoris with the tip, but don’t drive it in. You, 
Olympia, lightly tickle the entrance to the patient’s cunt; tease it, warm it, 
infuriate it, and when rage flames in her eyes, we’ll satisfy her, but she must be 
lying in one of these young gentlemen’s arms: the while he supports her, the 
brave fellow must frig her asshole with one hand, her nipples with the other, and 
he must kiss her in the meantime, lewdly. Further to arouse our friend’s senses, 
we shall have her, with either hand, stuff a prick into Raimonde’s cunt and into 
Elise’s, where they will merely gather heat for a moment; the two remaining 
youths will encunt the two of you before Clairwil’s eyes, to complete the tumult 
we wish to create in her soul.”

Indeed, five minutes of this was all the rascal could stand; she foams at the 
mouth, she curses, she raves, and seeing that it is becoming impossible to defer 
satisfying her any longer, the six valets, in the space of less than an hour, relay 
one another atop her body and almost kill her with pleasure. Directly it emerged 
from our friend’s cunt, Olympia and I would worry and squeeze each prick; Elise 
and Raimonde frigged us, flogged us, titillated us, licked us. Sbrigani orchestrated
all these movements, and we discharged like fieldpieces. Every manner of 
fucking, every species of debauchery, all imaginable refinements were put into 
practice; among them, the one we employed the most frequently and to best 
purpose was to receive three pricks simultaneously, two in the cunt, one in the 
ass. Few people realize the pleasure this can give, with adroit fuckers; there were
several times when everybody forgathered upon a single woman. Thrice did I 
withstand the weight of that general assault. I was lying upon one man who was 
embuggering me; Elise, squatting over my face, gave me her pretty little cunt to 
suck; another man embuggered her above me, while frigging my cunt; and 
Raimonde was stimulating that man’s asshole with her tongue. Within reach of my
two hands were Olympia to one side, on all fours, Clairwil to the other side: I 
introduced a prick into the asshole of each, and each of them sucked a prick 
belonging to the fifth and sixth man. The six valets, after having discharged eight 
times each, were finally received without difficulty. It was impossible to refuse 
them admission after such ordeals.

A week or so after this adventure a courier brought a new invitation from 
Ferdinand, who requested all three of us to come to visit him at Portici. The King, 
we saw, had intended that this be a far more brilliant scene than the first one. We
were led into magnificently decorated apartments, deliciously cool despite the 
heat outside. Charlotte, attired like Flora, was awaiting us in the company of 
Prince La Riccia, a handsome fop of twenty-four, who was the familiar of all the 
royal couple’s private pleasures. A quartet of pretty children, two little girls of ten 
and eleven, two little boys of twelve and thirteen, dressed as the Greeks were 
wont to costume their victims in ancient days, stood still and in respectful silence 
at a farther side of the room where the festivities were to be celebrated. Clairwil’s
noble and majestic figure, the classic regularity that distinguished her features 
although she was no longer in the first blush of youth, the excessive libertinage in
her eyes—the Queen of Naples was impressed by it all.

“There,” she affirmed, “is a beautiful woman indeed.”

And as with creatures of our libertine temper it is always but a single step from
encomiums to caresses, the two wenches were soon in each other’s arms. La 
Riccia lays hands on Olympia, and I continued to be the King’s favorite.

“Before acting in concert,” said Ferdinand, “my suggestion is that we first move
off two at a time, paired as we are, into the boudoirs adjoining this room. After a 
few minutes of intimate conversation we shall convene again.”

Charlotte sets the example;

followed by Clairwil and with one of the two little female victims in tow, she 
enclosets herself in a boudoir. La Riccia selects one of the little boys and 
disappears with Olympia; to Ferdinand remain two children, one of either sex, and
he shuts himself up in privacy with them and with me. And now the Neapolitan’s 
heavy-handed, dull-witted libertinage is revealed in all its energy. But just as a 
few rays of sunshine will sometimes pierce the gloomiest clouds, bringing cheer to
mortal hearts, so it was that some rather pretty nuances of lubricity made their 
way through the masses of awkwardness characterizing that oaf’s behavior.

After some brief preparatory horrors in which each of us indulged individually 
with the subjects taken along for that purpose, we all collected in a superb salon; 
and there, having heated one another’s imaginations with detailed accounts of our
late infamies, we plunged forthwith into a new ocean of lewd doings, and 
executed, unrestrictedly, everything that derangement could inspire in minds so 
libertine and mischievous as ours. Physical exhaustion alone brought these 
voluptuous orgies to an end, and we took leave of their Highnesses.

Upon our return we found Sbrigani wounded and in bed. Insults had been 
pronounced within his hearing, their object had been ourselves; the exchange had
taken place in a café, a Frenchman who claimed to know who we were had called 
us whores. Although in point of fact it would have been hard to say anything truer,
Sbrigani, out of attachment, had stoutly refused to admit it, and for his lies the 
foolish fellow had got himself two good sword-thrusts in the belly.

After having tended his cuts, our conversation had naturally to treat of dueling.

“Bah, sheer madness,” Clairwil opined, “to go and risk one’s life in single 
combat with someone who did decidedly wrong us. If this man,” our friend 
continued, asking our leave to put herself temporarily in the position of a sex 
whose functions she was so able to perform when called upon, “if, I say, this man 
has been essentially disrespectful toward me, how is it that I owe him such a 
favor as to consider him a fit adversary to measure myself against? And why must
I put myself in a position from which, injury added to insult, I may emerge hurt, 
crippled, nay, from which I may not emerge alive? After all, I am the one to whom
reparation is due, and to obtain it, what! I must endanger my life? If I adopt 
another comportment, or, going to fight with this man, since fight I absolutely 
must, I pad my chest and so ensure my safety that my opponent is obliged to 
give all his care to defending himself and must renounce any hope of insulting me
again, if, I say, I behave thus, I shall be called a scoundrel—and the logic that 
comes forth here, ah, I would be hard put to think of anything that so flies in the 
face of common sense.

“Let him who has done the insulting arrive naked at the dueling ground, and let
the insulted party come there in armor—that is what reason and the laws of good 
sense demand. The aggressor must obviously be placed at a disadvantage: 
through his acts he has, following the customs which prevail everywhere else on 
earth, earned himself assassination at the hands of the person he has slighted; 
hence, in such a situation, the frivolous rules of honor can be trimmed down to 
prescribing simply that the fight you so earnestly want take place, but with a 
prodigious inequality between the combatants; and that the offending party, 
instead of endeavoring to cause yet further damage, be prevented from 
concerning himself otherwise than with the problems of strict self-defense. For 
what right has he to attack a second time, after what he has already done? Our 
usages, in this article, are atrociously unjust, and make us the laughingstock of 
those other three-quarters of the world where they are wise enough to 
understand that, when you are finally driven to the point where you must avenge 
yourself, you should do it without imperiling your life.”

“Our views upon this matter concur,” I replied to Clairwil, “and I, who also hold
dueling both absurd and ridiculous, can but add to what you have just said. I find 
it odious that a man go and jeopardize his life because of an insult: in such 
instances, reason and Nature dictate only one course to us, which is to dispatch 
our enemy, not to expose ourselves to being killed by him, when it is reparation 
he owes us. Our forefathers, far wiser than we, fought by proxy; champions, in 
return for a fixed sum, came forward to settle the quarrel, and the might of the 
stronger made him right: that arrangement at least eliminated the unfairness of 
having to undergo risk oneself, and although to that usage no end of 
extravagance and nonsense attached, it was infinitely less unacceptable than the 
one we observe nowadays. But here is the ludicrous part: the professionals who 
used to fight on behalf of others were generally regarded as vile persons; we 
today have taken their place, and risk opprobrium, think of it! if we shun the role 
of despicable individuals. What furious inconsistencies are these! Going back to 
the origin of things, we see that, first of all, these champions were merely hired 
assassins, such as you still meet with in several cities in Spain and Italy, whom 
the offended man engaged to rid him of his enemy, and that, next, to mitigate the
kind of murder this custom seemed to authorize, the accused was allowed to 
defend himself against the assassin hired to kill him, and to employ an assassin of
his own, and send him into the lists. Such was dueling in its infancy, whose cradle 
was the wise law permitting any man mortal vengeance upon his enemy. That 
excellent practice has given way to license, has been replaced by a stupidity 
which distorts the ancient institution, and which makes common sense shudder. 
And so, let not the man who has an enemy and who has some intelligence rush 
off and fence with him on an equal footing, for it is perfectly ridiculous to stoop to 
the level of somebody who has lowered himself beneath you. If the offended 
party must absolutely fight, well and good; but let him, in advance, take every 
precaution to avoid sustaining further hurt; and if he wishes to use his head, let 
him use assassination which, as Molière says, is the safest way.

“As regards those who place the point of honor there, I find them at least as 
ridiculous as those who fancy it is to be placed in the virtue of their wives; both 
are barbarous prejudices and do not even deserve cool-headed discussion. Honor 
is a chimera, bred by certain human customs and conventions which have never 
had anything but absurdity for basis; it is just as false that a man acquire honor 
through assassinating his country’s enemies as it is false that he dishonor himself 
by massacring his compatriots; never can like proceedings warrant unlike 
consequences: if I do well in going forth to avenge my nation for the wrongs it 
has endured, I do better still when I avenge myself for those done to me. The 
State, which retains in its year-round hire some four or five hundred thousand 
assassins to serve its cause, can neither naturally nor legitimately punish me 
when I, following its example, pay one or two to revenge me for the infinitely 
more real insults I may receive from my adversary; for, after all, insults 
addressed to this nation never affect its members personally, whereas those I 
have received decidedly do touch me directly; and therein lies a very great 
difference. But let someone dare say such things aloud: society damns him 
straight off for a coward, a poltroon, and the reputation for wit or wisdom he has 
built up over the years is taken away from him in three minutes by a few 
miserable whippersnappers, humorless imbeciles whom a few prudes, fit to be 
spanked in the streets, have persuaded that there is nothing finer than to risk 
one’s life when one has the right to take the lives of others.”

“My position on dueling squares wonderfully with yours,” said Olympia; “and I 
do not believe I have given you grounds for mistaking me for one of those 
mentally deficient women whose opinion of a man is dependent upon his 
willingness, because of an alleged slight, to hie himself off to a corner of a 
meadow and ape the vile gladiator. I have only scorn for your bravoes and fellows
of fire. Combativeness may be delicious in a flunkey or a soldier, good for nothing 
but to be out bloodying noses all day long. But that a man of parts, of means … 
that he abandon his studies, his comfort, to go and bare his throat to a bully 
without any other talent than for plying a hanger, and who only insulted him 
because he knew he could run him through…. Stake one’s honor upon bravely 
bringing such rascals to heel…. What a contemptible fellow one must be to 
venture into such situations! Aye, contemptible: there is baseness in giving others
an advantage over oneself, and in risking the loss, for one instant and for nothing,
of all the amenities, of all the favors one has received from Nature. Let us leave 
this preposterous merit to the uncouth ages of knight errantry; it is not to play 
the ruffian like a vulgar trooper that gifted people are made, ’tis to honor and 
cultivate the arts, to encourage them, to serve the homeland when necessary, 
and to sacrifice for nothing less the blood that flows in their veins. When a man of
that condition has an enemy who is his inferior, let him have him assassinated: 
Nature hints at no other means for getting rid of such encumbrances; if he has 
been offended by someone of his own rank, let the two take their complaints 
before a lenient tribunal, set up for such arbitrations, and let the dispute be 
judged there: between people of the better sort there are no jars that cannot be 
settled amicably; he who is in the wrong must yield, ’tis the law. But blood … 
blood shed on account of a stray remark, a jealousy, a quarrel, a persiflage, a 
rebuke: revolting anachronism. The duel was unknown until the principles of 
honor displaced those of vengeance, and, consequently, was accepted only once 
men became civilized. Never did Nature grave it in the human heart to seek 
vengeance for an offense at the risk of one’s life; for it is in no wise just, neither 
is it natural to expose oneself to a second blow merely because one has been 
dealt a first. But it is very equitable, very commendable to wash the first away in 
the blood of the aggressor, without risking the loss of any of one’s own, if he is 
our inferior, and to reach a peaceful settlement with him if he is our better or our 
peer. There is no reason to be taken in by the courtesies of women touching this 
matter; it is not bravery in a man they desire, it’s the triumph their pride obtains 
from being able to say that such-and-such a lout has carved up rivals for their 
charms. Nor is it by means of legislation this odious usage is to be extirpated; 
once there are laws there is restlessness, opposition, bitterness, and nothing is 
gained. ’Tis beneath ridicule, this lamentable custom must be buried. All women 
must shut the door to a dueling scoundrel; he must be snubbed, jeered at, fingers
must be pointed when he goes by, at the sight of him everyone must cry, ‘Ho, 
there’s the wretched fellow base enough, craven enough, to adopt the vile part of 
a champion, and who was fool enough to think that words which the wind wafts 
away, or cuts which sting but for a moment, were to be acquitted at the price of a
life, which is to be enjoyed only once. Avoid him; he is mad.’”

“Olympia is right,” Clairwil said, “that infamous prejudice will be felled in no 
other way. The objection may be brought forward, that martial courage will fade 
out of hearts once its exercise ceases. This is quite possible; but I assert that 
courage is a dupe’s virtue, and declare that I prize it very little: I have never seen
anyone but fools being brave. The second Caesar was a very great man, no doubt
of it, yet he was afraid of his shadow; Frederick of Prussia had a good mind and 
many talents … and had a bout of fever whenever the time came to fight. All the 
illustrious men who trembled in their boots, the list would be endless; the Romans
even revered fear, they raised altars to it. Fear, in short, is in Nature, it is born of 
the innate concern for personal safety, that is, for self-preservation, a concern 
one cannot possibly not have, so deeply is it graved in us by the Prime Mover 
which cast us into the world. To disesteem a man because he fears danger, ’tis to 
hate him for loving life. For my part, I protest to you that I will always have the 
highest regard for a man who dreads death; that fact alone proves to me that he 
possesses a brain, an imagination, and a capacity for pleasure. The day the whole
of Paris castigated La Luzerne for having assassinated his adversary on the 
dueling grounds, that was the day I wanted him on my belly: I have beheld few 
more amiable mortals, and probably not one whose mind was so attractively 
organized.”

“Only they are appealing,” I put in; “the higher an individual rises above 
prejudice, the better his mind becomes: the man hemmed in by narrow moral 
principles, necessarily infertile and dull, will be as insipid as the maxims he 
professes, and since with the kind of imagination Nature gave us, we will derive 
nothing from his society, we should keep carefully away from him.”

After a few days, Sbrigani’s condition showed to be much improved.

“He has just fucked me,” Clairwil told me, “I took his pulse and I can assure 
you he is in good health: a throbbing prick is the best test of it, and I am still wet 
with his sperm. … So listen to me, Juliette,” that incredible personage continued, 
“is it true that this man exists in your affections?”

“He has rendered me many services.”

“He has only done his duty, you pay him for that. Is your soul beginning to 
open to the mighty principles of gratitude?”

“No, not yet, upon my honor.”

“Well, you see, I for one don’t like him, this Sbrigani; what’s more, I don’t trust
him. That man will end up robbing us.”

“Say rather that you are weary of him because he gave you a good fucking and
because you cannot abide a man once he has discharged in your cunt.”

“That one has never fucked me anywhere but in the ass—look at it, it’s still 
leaking what he pumped into it.”

“Out with it, silly, what are you driving at?”

“At ridding ourselves of that bugger.”

“Do you forget that he faced death for us?”

“I certainly do not forget it; and there’s one reason the more for detesting him,
since his act illustrates stupidity.”

“Again, what do you propose to do with him?”

“Tomorrow he will take a last spoonful of medicine; the day after that, we bury 
him.”

“Have you anything left of those charming drugs we bought together from 
Durand long ago?”

“A pinch of this, a pinch of that. … I’d like to have your Sbrigani taste a few of 
them.”

“Ah, Clairwil, your behavior gets no better with the years, you shall always be 
a great rogue. But what will sister Olympia say?”

“Whatever she pleases. When I have the urge to commit a crime, my heart is 
dominated by something else than concern for my reputation.”

I consented; could I coldly turn my back upon crime? So precious to me was 
anything bearing its stamp that I could not refrain from embracing it immediately.
I had used that Italian, more out of need than from love. Clairwil promised to take
care of all the details of day-to-day management that had been entrusted to him: 
Sbrigani’s usefulness came therewith to an end: I endorsed his destruction. 
Olympia made no fuss. On the following day, poisoned by Clairwil herself, Sbrigani
went off to inform all the demons in hell that the wicked spirits existing in a real 
woman’s body are a thousand times more dangerous than those with which 
priests and poets array Tartarus. This operation concluded, we set out on a tour of
the surroundings of Naples.

Nowhere in Europe does Nature attain such imposing expression, such 
splendor as in the environs of this city; ’tis something utterly different from that 
melancholy, uniform beauty of the Lombard Plain, which produces a certain torpor
in the imagination. Here, to the contrary, everything quickens it: the convulsions, 
the volcanoes, of this everlastingly criminal Nature engender restlessness in the 
spirit, rendering it capable of great deeds and tumultuous passions.

“This,” said I to my two companions, “all this is us, and virtuous folk resemble 
those flat stretches of Piedmont countryside whose mournful evenness depresses.
Carefully examining this extraordinary region, one feels it may have been all one 
volcano in the past; hardly a spot unmarked by the emblem of upheaval. And so 
this curious Nature is at times given also to unruliness … and we are not supposed
to imitate her! Crying injustice: the solfataras we have been roaming about seem 
to be the proof of what I say.”

With the most varied and picturesque scenery unfolding all along the way, we 
reached Pozzuoli. From there can be seen Nisida, the pretty little island to which 
Brutus retired after having killed Caesar. What a charming hideaway for the kind 
of joys we cherish; there, one would be as though at the farthest corner of the 
world; the secret horror one would be incited to commit there would be curtained 
from sight by impenetrable screens; and nothing needles the imagination, nothing
inflames it like silence and mystery. Off in the distance, beyond the Bay, the 
headlands of Sorrento and Massa can be made out, ruins, noble edifices, 
flowering hillsides, everything that is able to adorn the most smiling prospect and 
create the most agreeable mood.

Pozzuoli,(21) where we returned for dinner, does not today display any trace of
its ancient grandeur; but the site remains, it is one of the loveliest in the whole 
Kingdom of Naples. And yet, the crass population inhabiting the town is 
unconscious of its happiness; excessive idleness serves only to render it more 
barbarous and more insolent.

As soon as we appeared, a swarm of people crowded up, eager to show us the 
curiosities of the country.

“Children,” said Olympia, shutting the door after a dozen of those rascals had 
elbowed their way into our chambers, “we do not intend to enlist the services of 
anybody unprovided with an outstanding prick. Show us what you have; we shall 
do our own selecting.”

They all agree to the bargain; we lower breeches, we excite, we frig; six are 
judged worthy of the honors of a spasm, and the biggest, that is to say, a funny 
fellow all in rags and tatters, whose leviathan stretched itself thirteen inches in 
length and filled out to nine in circumference, alone obtained, after having fucked 
us all three, the privilege of becoming our cicerone. We dubbed him Raphael.

He took us first to the Temple of Serapis whose impressive debris caused us to 
presume that this structure had once been superb. We visited the neighboring 
antiquities, and wherever we looked, we beheld unequivocal evidence of the 
magnificence and the tastefulness of those Greek and Roman peoples who, after 
having been the light of the world for a brief hour, faded away, as shall vanish 
them who make the world tremble today.

The remains of a monument to pride and superstition next presented 
themselves to our eyes. Thrasyllus had prophesied that Caligula would not wear 
the purple until he had been from Baiae to Puteoli upon a bridge. The emperor 
had one built of boats for a distance of two leagues, and marched across it at the 
head of his army. ’Twas a piece of folly, no doubt, but one of a great man; and 
Caligula’s crimes, which were to make an epoch in history, demonstrate, it shall 
have to be admitted, at once the most unusual figure and the most impetuous 
imagination.

From Caligula’s bridge, Raphael guided us to Cumae; he pointed out to us, 
near the ruins of that town, those of a house that belonged to Lucullus. Gazing at 
them, we reflected upon the magnificence of that illustrious person.

“He is no more … and ere a little, a few months, a few years, we too shall have
come and gone: the shears of Fate spare no one, neither rich nor poor, neither 
the good man nor the wicked…. Let us gather flowers while we tread this path 
whose end we reach so soon, and let it at least be of gold and silk the Dark 
Whore spins the thread of our days.”

We penetrated into the ruins of Cumae, where our attention was directed 
mainly toward the vestiges of the Temple of Apollo built by Daedalus when, a 
refugee from the wrath of Minos, he wandered to this city.

Making our way thence to Baiae, we traversed the little locality of Bauli, where 
the poets situated the Elysian Fields; Acheron flows nearby.

“Let us pay a visit to the underworld,” said Clairwil upon seeing those waters; 
“let us go and muse upon the torments of the damned, and dwell upon the 
thought of adding to their sufferings. Would that Proserpina’s office were mine…. 
However, provided there is earthly woe for me to gaze upon, I shall always be the
happiest of living women.”

Eternal springtime reigns in that valley. Amidst the vineyards and the poplars 
are to be seen here and there the burial vaults where cinerary urns used to be 
placed, and Charon doubtless had his abode at Misenum. One likes to persuade 
oneself of such things when one has imagination. This brilliant part of our mind 
vivifies everything, and truth, always in arrears of illusion, becomes almost of no 
purpose to him who is able to create and embellish falsehood.

Close to the village of Bauli the visitor finds the traces of a hundred 
intercommunicating rooms; all this belongs to what they call Nero’s Prison: here 
one could once hear the groans of the victims of that villain’s lust and cruelty.

A little farther along one comes to the marvelous artificial lake Marcus Agrippa 
built for the fleet which ordinarily lay inside the bight of Cape Misenum. This cape 
forms a sheltered haven whose importance was recognized by the Roman 
admirals. It was there Pliny’s ships were anchored when Vesuvius’ eruption cost 
him his life. Some vestiges provide clues to this ancient city’s considerable size. 
From there you go down to Bauli, which boasts the tomb of Agrippina. ’Twas off 
the shore of this town that there broke asunder the vessel in the disaster whereby
Nero calculated to rid himself of his mother. However, the stratagem failed: 
returning from a festival at Baiae, Agrippina and her women leapt into the sea 
when the trap was sprung and the ship began to capsize; in the darkness the 
empress was able to swim away, and at length reached the shore and made her 
way home. Thus as it is given in Tacitus, the story lends no support to the legend 
that has grown up, that Bauli is the place where this celebrated woman was 
buried.

Reflecting upon the great emperor’s scheme, “I am much taken,” Clairwil said 
to me, “by the artfulness that entered into Nero’s efforts to slay his mother. They 
reveal a cruelty, a perfidy, a repudiation of every virtue which endears that 
personage to me. He had been very fond of Agrippina; Suetonius assures us that 
he often masturbated at the thought of her … and he finally kills her. O Nero, let 
me venerate they memory. Wert thou alive today, I would adore thee as a god, 
and to me thou wilt be an eternal model and an inspiration.”

After this amusing peroration from Clairwil, ever guided by Raphael whom 
Olympia caressed unceasingly while my friend and I were chatting together, we 
proceeded on along the coast, so renowned in olden days for the multitude of 
superb villas that lined it; only a few impoverished fishermen inhabit it at present.
The first important object one encounters there is the fortress which defends it at 
this end. By and by one comes to the beach, and one is now on the spot where 
famous Baiae once flourished, center of delights and of debauchery, whither the 
Romans used to repair for the lewdest and most heteroclite revelries. This must 
indeed have been a wonderful town to live in, shielded by mountains from the 
northern winds, and open toward the south, so that the sun, source of 
life-sustaining warmth and fuel to natural passions, might play its sacred and 
miracle-working rays upon this divine country’s lucky inhabitants. Despite all the 
convulsions which over the centuries have shaken the terrain, one still breathes 
here that mild and voluptuous air, poison to austerities and virtues, delicate 
aliment to vice and all the so-called crimes of lust. In this connection, my friends, 
you will recall Seneca’s invectives; but that severe moralist’s reproaches made no 
headway against Nature’s irresistible influences, and the while his contemporaries
read his philosophy, they were pleased to outrage his principles in the most 
flagrant manner possible.

A single fisherman’s rickety hut is all that survives today of once sumptuous 
Baiae; a few interesting bits of rubble—all that marks its erstwhile grandeur.

Venus had necessarily to be the favorite divinity of a town so corrupt. Vestiges 
of her temple still exist, but in such a state of dilapidation that it is difficult to 
judge of the past from this present evidence. It includes underground 
passageways, shadowy and mysterious corridors suggesting that these premises 
were used for very secret ceremonies. A subtle fire ignited in our veins the 
moment we entered them; Olympia bent close to me, and I saw fuck speak in her
eyes.

“Raphael,” Clairwil exclaimed, “we must perform our duties in this holy place.”

“You drained me dry,” our guide replied, “and gadding up and down this way 
has wearied me to the bone. However, I know four or five fishermen nearby who 
will ask no more than to content you.”

Having said that, he is not six minutes fetching back some very unseemly but 
also very numerous company.

Blinded by the libertinage consuming us all three, we had, without thinking, 
put ourselves in a perilous situation. For what, in this ill-lighted and secluded 
place, what could a trio of women do against the ten men advancing insolently 
toward them? Fortified by the inspirations of the goddess who protects vice, we 
held our ground.

“Friends,” Olympia said to that crew in Italian, “we have not wanted to 
conclude our tour of Venus’ sanctuary without making a sacrifice to her; will you 
act a while as her priests?”

“Why not?” said one of those bumpkins, snatching up the orator’s skirts.

“Come on, let’s fuck ’em,” said another, laying hands on me.

However, fancying they were to be left out, the seven who were not chosen fell
to grumbling, and knives were halfway drawn when I quickly endeavored to prove
that with a little dexterity, each of us could receive three of them at once. I offer 
the example: one encunts me, I present my behind to a second, and suck a third;
my companions follow suit. Raphael, exhausted, stands by and watches, and 
there we all are, fucking the crowd like hussies. One has no idea of the thickness 
of the Neapolitan prick: although we had promised to suck the third, we were 
reduced to frigging it instead, none of us being able to get it into our mouth. Once
they had spent a while rambling through one sector they would shift off into 
another, that is to say, each of them fucked us cuntwise and ass-wise, and all 
discharged three times at least. The dim light in this place, the mysteries that 
used to be celebrated here, the order of persons with whom we were dealing, 
perhaps even the dangers we were running, all had heated our brains, and the 
desire for horrors took hold of us. But, ours being the weaker side, how were we 
to contrive to execute them?

“Have you any candy?” I asked Clairwil in a whisper.

“Yes,” she replied, “I never go anywhere unsupplied.”

“Well then, offer some to our champions.”

Olympia, acquainted with our intentions, explains to our rustic fuckers that 
these sweetmeats will have a restorative effect upon them. I hand the medicine 
around—in such instances I always coveted the role of distributor; our rascals 
swallow the dose.

“Another fucking from each of them,” Clairwil murmured to me; “now that 
death is in their bloodstreams, let us wring from them the last measure of seed 
Nature will ever generate in their balls.”

“Excellent,” said I, “but might they not transmit to us the venom already 
circulating in their veins?”

“Keep them away from your mouth, let them have anything else. There is not 
the least danger,” Clairwil added; “I have performed such extravagances a 
hundred times over, and you see the blooming health I am in….”

That woman’s appalling character electrified me; I did as she—and in all my life
I had never tasted keener pleasures. The certainty that through my villainies the 
man I held in my arms would only retire out of my embrace to fall into death’s, 
this perfidious, this barbarous idea contributed such a potent spice to my fucking 
that I swooned away during its crisis.

“Hurry, let’s up and away,” I said to my friends as soon as I returned to my 
senses; “we do not wish to be in this cellar when their gripes begin.”

We ascended to daylight. Raphael, who had neither participated in the games 
nor been included in their cruel aftermath, continued to act as our guide; as for 
the nine men we left behind, although we were never to hear tell of them again, 
what befell them is certain, for the means we employed for our atrocity were too 
reliable to fail of grisly success.

“And so, my dear,” I said to Clairwil, “we are now to conclude that villainy has 
so far progressed in you that you are no longer capable of being fucked by a man 
without desiring his death?”

“’Tis only too true,” my friend acknowledged; “beloved Juliette, rare are they 
who understand what it means, to age in crime. Its roots reach so deep inside us,
it becomes to such a degree one with our existence, that, precisely, we breathe 
for it alone. Will you believe that I regret those instants in my life when I am not 
soiled by some horror? My desire is to do nothing else; I would that no idea enter 
my head but it tend toward crime, that my hands toil at nothing but to bring 
about what my brain has just conceived. Oh, Juliette! how mighty are the delights
of evil-doing, how the mind catches fire at the thought of violating, with impunity,
all the laughable prohibitions which hold men captive. What superiority one 
achieves over them by breaking, as we do, all the rules which confine them, by 
transgressing their laws, profaning their religion, by denying, insulting, jeering at 
their execrable God; by defying even the disgusting precepts which, as they dare 
say, comprise the primary duties Nature enjoins upon us. Ah, not to be able to 
find something hideous enough, of sufficient magnitude, that, I tell you, is the 
cause of my grief today; however frightful a given crime may be, still it falls short 
of what my mind strives toward. Could I set the planet ablaze, even so would I 
curse the Nature that had provided only one world for my desires to feast upon.”

Conversing in that strain, we strolled through the rest of the countryside 
around Baiae, where every twenty paces brings one to the remains of some 
precious monument; and at last, by an agreeable lane bordered by evergreen 
hedges, we came to the banks of Lake Avernus. Altogether disappeared was that 
noxious atmosphere which, in bygone days, used to cause overflying birds to fall 
dead into the lake; the quality of its waters and therefore of the air above has 
long since changed, ’tis today a very wholesome place, and in all the country one 
of those most congenial to a philosophic spirit. It was here that Aeneas sacrificed 
to the gods of the underworld before setting off along those tenebrous paths 
which the sibyl bade him take. And to the left is that sibyl’s grotto, still easy of 
access. ’Tis a cave, one hundred eighty feet long, eleven wide, nine high. Examine
the place with a little care, free yourself a little from the romantic notions the 
poets and the historians have handed down to us, and you speedily recognize this
sibyl for what she was, a procuress, and this lair of hers a whorehouse. That 
interpretation is only borne out by a more thorough survey of the premises; and 
if, when studying them, one refers oneself to Petronius’ ideas rather than to 
Virgil’s descriptions, one will not come away with any other opinion.

A cluster of orange trees, which, near the opposite shore, rises from within a 
Temple of Pluto, makes for a sight as picturesque as any in the world. We visited 
those ruins, plucked some oranges, and started back toward Pozzuoli, passing 
between the still existing tombs lining the Appian Way on both its sides. There, 
we could not keep from exclaiming against the ridiculous attitude the Romans 
observed toward the dead. We sat us down by Faustina’s tomb, and Olympia gave
voice to the observations which follow.

“Two things I have never understood, my friends,” that amiable and witty 
woman began, “they are respect for the dead, and respect for the wishes of the 
dead. Assuredly, both these superstitions relate to the notions people entertain 
touching the immortality of the soul; for were they convinced materialists, were 
they wholly persuaded that we are nought but an amalgam of mere material 
elements, that once smitten by death, our dissolution is complete, then respect 
shown to bits of decomposed matter would appear such palpable nonsense that 
nobody would think to espouse it. But our pride is loath to acknowledge this 
certitude of no longer existing; instead, we prefer to believe that the shades of 
the departed, yet hovering around his corpse, expect consideration to be shown 
to this derelict; one dreads offending them, and thus, without realizing it, one 
slips into the worst impiety and the most entire absurdity. So let us make 
thoroughly our own the doctrine that once we are dead, absolutely nothing of us 
exists anymore, and that this mortal coil we leave on earth is nothing else than 
what our excrements were, when we dropped them at the foot of a tree in those 
days when we were alive. Well-penetrated by this system, we would sense that to
a cadaver neither honor nor concern nor duties are owing; that the only 
treatment it merits, far less for its sake than for ours, is burial, incineration, or to 
be fed to scavengers; but that homages, sepulchers, prayers, memorials are not 
in any wise its due, and all of them nothing but the tributes stupidity pays to 
vanity, tributes which philosophy annihilates. To be sure, this that I advance 
clashes with all religious beliefs, ancient and modern, but ’tis not to you that it is 
necessary to prove that nothing is more absurd than religions, all based upon the 
loathsome fable of the soul’s eternal indestructibility and upon the ridiculous 
existence of a God. There is no stupidity religions have omitted to revere; and 
you know just as well as I, my friends, that when one examines a human 
institution, the first thing one must do is discard all religious notions. They are 
poison to lucidity.”

“I am perfectly of our companion’s mind,” said Clairwil, “although odd as it 
may seem, there are libertines who have constructed passions upon a foundation 
of those beliefs. In Paris I often saw one man pay its weight in gold for the body 
of any freshly interred adolescent, boy or girl, who had met with a violent death: 
he would have them brought to his house, and would commit no end of horrors 
upon those still well-preserved corpses.”

“It has been understood for a long time,” I pointed out, “that the enjoyment of 
a recently assassinated individual may be truly very voluptuous; the constriction 
of the anus is especially appreciated by men.”

“Also,” said Clairwil, “there is a kind of imaginary impiety therein to heat the 
mind, and for a certainty I would try it if my sex permitted.”

“This fantasy ought by all rights to lead to murder,” I proposed to my friends, 
“for once a cadaver becomes an agreeable plaything, one is already on the edge 
of a deed which would multiply one’s pleasures.”

“Probably,” Clairwil rejoined, “but that need not disturb us. If it is a great 
pleasure to kill, you will agree that it can hardly be a great evil.”

And as it was well on in the afternoon, we hastened to regain Pozzuoli, passing
by way of the ruins of Cicero’s handsome villa.

It was late when we returned; a crowd of lazzaroni stood waiting at our gate. 
Raphael explained that since report had gone out that we were friendly toward 
men, most of those in the neighborhood had come to offer their services.

“You have nothing to fear,” our guide continued, “they are decent people, they 
know that you pay well, they will fuck you accordingly. In my country we are 
straightforward about these matters; and you are not the first lady travelers to 
have felt our muscles.”

“Taxing as the day has been,” said Clairwil, “it would be wrong for us to turn 
away men of good will. I have always found that further exercise does more to 
relax the frame than mere repose: come, surrendering ourselves to the labors of 
Love, we shall forget those of Apollo….”

But as at this point Nature’s demands had all been met; as, sated on 
debauchery, we could indulge in nothing further save from libertinage, we flung 
ourselves into the nastiest excesses.

Thirty men culled from among better than a hundred, and whose members 
were gigantic, encloseted themselves with us; not one of them was over thirty 
years of age, not one had a weapon under thirteen inches in length by eight 
around; ten little peasant girls of between seven and twelve, whom we bought for
their weight in gold, were also included in those orgies. After a magnificent dinner
during which some three hundred bottles of Falerno were consumed, we opened 
by marshaling all the pricks in a row, lightly exciting them ourselves; next, we 
formed all those rascals in single file, so that they made up a long chaplet, each 
with his prick in the ass of the man ahead; the ten little girls, naked, frigged us in 
the meantime. We reviewed the formation, verified the introductions, fondled all 
the balls, and tongued all the mouths; turning, we retraced our steps, this time 
presenting our buttocks to be kissed by each of the chaplet’s thirty elements. 
They had all been severely warned against any careless discharging in one 
another’s behinds; as soon as they were at peak erection, they were, one by one,
to move forward out of line, place their foaming engine in the hands of a little girl 
who would promptly bring it over and stopper either one of our asses or one of 
our cunts. Thus were we had thirty times over; after that we each took five men 
upon the body, this making six teams, which fucked us team by team; there was 
a prick in each aperture, one in the mouth or else niched between the breasts 
when it was too big for oral accommodation, then one in either hand. Throughout 
this scene, the ten little girls, perched on chairs, formed a circle around us, with 
orders to sprinkle us with shit and urine. For my part, I can think of nothing which
arouses me more than one such inundation; I like to be bathed in it when I fuck; 
soon we were presenting asses only. Sprawled upon three little girls whose 
tongues were tickling us in the mouth, about the cunt, and thrilling upon the 
clitoris, we received three successive sodomizations from each of our thirty 
servants. That done, three of them cunt-sucked us, three sucked our mouths, we 
frigged one with each hand, and each of us was wet upon the belly or the nipples 
by a discharge wheedled from a prick by one of the little girls; the little girls then 
frigged all thirty upon our clitorises; one of them not engaged in frigging, wet, 
smeared, rubbed that delicate part with the sperm her companion made spurt, 
while a third, squatting over our faces, gave us an open cunt or asshole to lick.

A flagellation followed. We whipped the men who, at the same time, were 
doing the same to the children; next, we had ourselves bound, our hands were 
raised, our wrists tied to the bedposts, our ankles to the foot of the bed; and each
man administered us a hundred strokes: while being beaten we pissed on the 
faces of three little girls who placed themselves between our thighs for this 
ceremony; after that, we surrendered the ten minors to our thirty fuckers, who 
depucelated and ravaged all ten of them, before and behind. Then we gave those 
ten children a vigorous fustigation, while the men kicked our asses with all their 
might: incredibly irritated by this treatment, we had ourselves more soundly 
drubbed by them; it was only when they had beaten us to the floor that they 
obtained, through this triumph, the right to embugger us yet again, and while we 
were enduring this latest affront, four of them at a time would come forward and 
fart, piss, and shit all over our faces; we did the same sort of thing to the little 
girls, who were obliged to swallow what we ejected upon them; finally, we affixed 
silken ribbons to the ceiling and tied all the pricks up in the air this way, rubbed all
the balls with brandy, set fire to them and from this concluding rite we each of us 
obtained one last ejaculation in the womb or in the bowels, depending upon the 
individual assailant’s whim.

Foreigners in this town, although authorized by the King, whose patents of 
impunity were in our pocket, we desisted from further excesses so as not to 
arouse the populace; and having distributed much money to all that rabble and 
sent it contentedly on its way, we lay down for a few hours’ rest; then rose up 
and went forth to resume our interesting perambulations. We made a rapid tour 
of the isles, Procida and Ischia, and went back the next day to Naples, en route 
inspecting all sorts of wreckage fascinating for its antiquity, and many country 
villas, delightful through their location.

Ferdinand had sent out for news of us; we went to tell him of the powerful 
impression made upon us by the beauties of the region around his capital. He 
proposed to take us, several days later, to a supper at the residence of the Prince 
Francavilla, the richest lord in Naples, and at the same time the greatest bugger.

“They defy the imagination,” the King assured us, “the prodigies he acquits 
himself of in this kind. I shall ask him not to let our presence incommode him,” 
the monarch went on, “and explain that we are only paying a visit in order to 
examine philosophically his debauches.”

We accepted. The Queen was with us.

In all Italy, nothing equals Francavilla’s magnificence and grand spending; 
there are sixty places set at his table every day, his guests are waited upon by 
two hundred domestics, all of the very fairest mien. The Prince, to receive us, had
had a temple of Priapus raised in a grove in his garden. Mysterious pathways 
bordered by orange trees and myrtle led to this wondrously lighted sanctuary; 
columns wreathed with roses and lilacs were surmounted by a cupola beneath 
which stood an altar covered with soft grass, to the right; to the left, a table set 
for six; in the center, a great basket of flowers, whose shoots and festoons, laden 
with colored lampions, rose in garlands to the summit of the cupola. Different 
groups of practically naked youths, three hundred of them all told, were scattered
about wherever there was space available, and atop the altar of grass appeared 
Francavilla, standing underneath the emblem of Priapus, deity in whose shrine we
were forgathered; groups of children went forward by turns to bow down before 
the Prince.

“Most honored Lord,” the Queen said to him as she made her entrance, “we 
have come to this hallowed place to partake sympathetically of your pleasures, to 
meditate before your mysteries; proceed as you are wont to do; enjoy the 
multiple homages about to be rendered you; we wish but to contemplate them.”

Banks of flowers lay opposite the altar, we sat ourselves down upon them; the 
god descended, bent over the altar, and the ceremony began.

Francavilla offered the world’s most comely ass to our view; to two young 
children, stationed hard by that notable posterior, was entrusted the care of 
opening it, of wiping it, and of guiding toward the hole the monstrous members 
which, by the score, were shortly to fling into the sanctum sanctoris; twelve other
children readied the pricks. I had never in all my days seen any service more 
nimbly accomplished. Thus prepared, those splendid members moved from hand 
to hand until they arrived in those of the children appointed to introduce them; 
they disappeared then into the ass of the patient: they came back out again, they
were replaced by others; and all that with an effortlessness, a smoothness, a 
promptitude which compel wonder. In less than two hours, all the three hundred 
pricks had sped into Francavilla’s fundament, who, once everything had been 
gulped greedily down, turned our way, and spat, following a violent pollution by a 
pair of young Ganymedes, a few drops of watery whitish sperm, the emission 
whereof having occasioned him five or six piercing shrieks, restored him 
completely to calm.

He then addressed us. “My ass is in a calamitous state,” he declared, stepping 
toward us; “your wish was to see it treated unsparingly, I have satisfied you. I 
venture to say, by the by, that not one of you dear ladies has ever in her life been
fucked as I have just been.”

“Gracious, no,” said Clairwil, still deeply impressed by the demonstration we 
had witnessed, “but I am prepared to measure my endurance against yours 
whenever you like, Prince, and whether in the ass, whether in the cunt, I wager I 
can outfuck you.”

“Softly, dear heart, softly,” said Charlotte, “you have seen only a mild sample 
of what my cousin Francavilla is capable of; without flinching, he would stand up 
to ten battalions.”

“Let him bring his armies on,” Clairwil rejoined with her usual plainspokenness;
“but, Sire, does your Prince fancy we are going to be content with having watched
his display of prowess?”

“Here, most certainly,” the King replied, “for however beauteous you be, 
Mesdames, you must understand that among all these young men, there is not 
one who would be induced even to touch you.”

“Why, ’tis not as though we were without asses—”

“Not one,” Francavilla affirmed, “not one would be tempted thereby, and were 
bullying finally to sway him, I would never again accept to hold commerce with 
the weakling.”

“That is what they call cleaving to one’s faith,” said Clairwil, “and I don’t blame
them for it. So let us at least have some supper, since there is to be no fucking; 
let Comus recompense us, if he possibly can, for the cruel privations Cypris 
makes us endure.”

“You express it admirably,” said Francavilla.

The greatest supper ever seen by mortal eyes was therewith served by the 
Ganymedes, and the six places occupied by the King, the Queen, the Prince, my 
two sisters, and myself. There is no describing the delicacy and the magnificence 
of the fare: dishes and wines from all the countries of the world arrived in lavish 
profusion and uninterruptedly, and, mark of unheard-of luxury, nothing that was 
put on the table was taken off it: a viand or a wine was scarcely brought on when 
it was emptied into huge silver troughs, out of the bottom of which everything 
flowed away into the ground.

“The wretched might profit from these leavings,” said Olympia.

“Wretched? Our existence upon earth denies that of our inferiors,” Francavilla 
explained; “I loathe the mere idea that what is of no use to us could afford relief 
to someone else.”

“His heart is as hard as his ass is generous,” remarked Ferdinand.

“I have nowhere encountered such prodigality,” said Clairwil, “but I like it. That
arrangement whereby scraps are saved for the scullery has chilling effects upon 
the imagination. Such orgies owe part of their success to the delicious realization 
that nothing and no one else matters on earth.”

“Why, what do the underprivileged matter to me when I want for nothing,” said
the Prince; “their hardships add a further poignancy to my joys, I would not be so
happy if I did not know there was suffering nearby, and ’tis from this 
advantageous comparison half the pleasure in life is born.”

“That comparison,” I said, “is very cruel.”

“It is natural; nothing is crueler than Nature, and those who observe her 
instructions to the letter will always be murderers or villains.”(22)

“My friend,” said Ferdinand, “all those are sound precepts, but they are hurtful 
to your reputation: if you but knew what they say about you in Naples….”

“Oh, I am not one to take calumny very seriously,” was the Prince’s reply, “and
a reputation is such a little thing, an asset so meager, that I am not in the 
slightest put out if others amuse themselves gossiping about the things which 
procure me quite as much amusement from others.”

“Ah, my Lord,” I said to this distinguished libertine, affecting a dogmatic tone, 
“they are passions which have brought you to this degree of blindness, and the 
passions are not the means through which Nature expresses her will, as the 
corrupt likes of you are prone to claim. They are the products of God’s wrath; and
we can obtain deliverance from their imperious grip by imploring the mercy of the
Eternal, but that mercy we must earn. ’Tis not by having three or four hundred 
pricks thrust into your ass every day, ’tis not by permanent avoidance of holy 
confession, by never partaking of the treasured favors of the eucharist, ’tis not by
stiffening yourself against good intentions you will bathe in the glow of Grace. No,
Sire, no, ’tis not through such conduct you will blot out your sins or attain their 
remission. Ah, my Lord, how must I pity you if you persevere in this misbehavior;
think of the fate awaiting you in the next world: how can you, free to set a course
toward good or toward evil, imagine that the just God who has given you this free
will shall not punish you for the wicked use you have put it to? Do you believe, my
friend, that an eternity of sufferings does not warrant a little reflection, and that 
before the certainty of those sufferings it is not worth sacrificing a few miserable 
penchants, which, even in this life, for the very slender pleasure they bring you, 
cause you cares, worries, distress, regrets without end? In one word, is it to be 
fucked that the Supreme Being brought you into this world?”

Francavilla and the King gazed at me dumbfounded, and for a moment even 
imagined I had lost my wits.

Ferdinand finally broke the silence. “Juliette,” he said, “if you are preparing a 
second chapter to that sermon, tell us so in order that we can listen to it lying 
down.”

“I am now come to such a point of impiety and of abandon of all religious 
sentiment,” Francavilla declared, “that my calm is imperiled by the barest allusion
to this deific phantom, dreamt up by the priests who grub their livelihood from 
ministering to it; I shudder in horror merely at the mention of its name.

“Throughout every land,” the Prince continued, “we hear it announced that a 
God has revealed himself; what is his message to men? Does he demonstrate his 
evident existence to them? Does he teach them what he is? In what his essence 
consists? Does he clearly explain his intentions to them, his plans? That which we 
are told concerning what he has said about his plans, does it accord with the 
effects we observe? Why, no; he intimates to us only that he is the one who is, 
that he is a hidden God; that his ineffable ways surpass understanding, that he 
waxes wroth as soon as anyone has the temerity to pry into his secrets and to 
consult reason in order to evaluate him or judge of his works. Does the revealed 
comportment of this infamous God correspond to the lofty notions we are asked 
to entertain of his wisdom, of his goodness … of his justice … of his benevolence …
of his supreme power? Not at all: however we scan him, we see him everywhere 
and always partial, capricious, malignant, tyrannical, unjust, at the very most 
good for a people he happens to favor, the sworn enemy of everybody else; if he 
deigns to show himself to some men, he is careful to keep all others in darkest 
ignorance of his divine intentions. Is this not the picture all revelations give of 
your abominable God? Do the aims disclosed by this God bear the stamp of 
reason and wisdom? Do they conduce to the well-being of the people to whom 
this fabulous goblin declares himself? Upon examining these divine decrees, in no 
country do I find anything but bizarre ordinances, ridiculous injunctions, 
ceremonies whose purpose cannot be guessed, puerile practices, an etiquette 
unworthy of the monarch of Nature, offerings, sacrifices, expiations useful indeed 
to the ministers of this insipid illusion, but exceedingly burdensome to mankind. I 
find, moreover, that these regulations very often have for effect or design to 
render human beings unsociable, disdainful, intolerant, quarrelsome, unjust and 
inhuman toward all those who have not received the same revelation, nor the 
same laws, nor the same favors from heaven. And there’s the execrable God you 
preach to me, Juliette, and you would have me worship such a phantom!”

“I too would have you worship him,” said Ferdinand. “Kings always encourage 
religion, religion has since the very beginning lent sinews to tyranny. The day man
ceases to believe in God he will assassinate his rulers.”

“There is no telling which he may decide to destroy first,” I interjected; “but, 
be sure of it, once he has overthrown the one, it will not be long before he 
finishes off the other. And if you care to set aside your despot’s point of view for a
moment, and weigh the matter by philosophic standards, you will admit that the 
world would only be the better off if it had neither tyrants nor priests: they are 
monsters that fatten on the substance of nations, and that never render them any
services lest it be to impoverish or to blind them.”

“This woman here does not like kings,” said Ferdinand.

“Or gods either,” I replied. “In my eyes, the former are all tyrants, the latter all
spooks, and I hold that one must never despotize over men nor deceive them. 
Nature, when she cast us into the world, created us free and atheists. Force 
brought weakness to heel, and we got kings. Imposture overawed fools, we had 
gods. Well, in all that I see cunning scoundrels and phantoms aplenty, but not the
slightest hint of natural inspiration.”

“What would men do without kings or without gods?”

“They would become more free, more philosophical, and therefore more 
worthy of the intentions Nature has in their regard, Nature who created them 
neither to vegetate beneath the scepter of an individual no better endowed than 
they, nor to hobble in the fetters of a god who is nought but the contrivance of a 
few fanatic imaginations.”

“One moment,” said Francavilla, “I am won over to part of Juliette’s argument. 
No God—she is right, indubitably; but that curb gone, some other must be found 
for the people: the philosopher has no need of one, I know, but restraints are 
salutary for the rabble, and upon it alone royal authority must make itself felt, 
that is what I urge.”

“We are fully agreed,” I said, “like you, I yielded this point to Ferdinand when 
we first discussed these affairs together.”

“Then,” Francavilla resumed, “it is by the extremest terror religious chimeras 
must be replaced; deliver the people from the fear of a hell to come and they’ll go
berserk straightway; instead, for that superstitious dread substitute a prodigiously
more severe penal code, laws which are aimed exclusively at the people, since 
nobody else threatens the State, discontents always arising from that one class. 
The rich man will not fret at the idea of restraints which never affect him, since he
buys himself out of all objections of principle when, with his money, he acquires in
his turn the right to vex all those who live under his heel. You will never find a 
single member of the upper class resenting even the blackest shadow of tyranny 
when he is able to exercise real tyranny over his inferiors. These

bases established, it is therefore necessary that a suzerain rule with utmost 
harshness, and that to certify his right to do what he likes to the people, he leave 
his allies free in their turn to undertake, within their own provinces, whatever 
suits their pleasure; these latter he must cuirass with his influence, his might, his 
consideration; to them he must say, And you too, promulgate laws, but such only 
as will buttress mine; and in order that my blows be telling, in order that my 
throne be unshakable, support my power with all that portion of power I leave to 
you, and enjoy your privileges in a peaceful manner, in such sort that mine are 
never endangered. …”

“That,” said Olympia, “is the pact which kings once made with the clergy.”

“Yes; but the clergy, basing its power upon the omnipotence of a fantastic God,
became stronger than the royalty; the priests assassinated kings instead of 
supporting them, and that is not what I am asking for: I wish final authority to 
remain with the government, while the authority it leaves to the upper class and 
to philosophers would be utilized by them only in the interests of their individual 
passions, upon condition these at all times and in every sense promote the 
interests of the State; for the State can never be governed uniquely either by 
theocrat or by despot; the chief agent of that State must annihilate the first rival 
to pose a threat to his power, some of which he must share with those who, 
seeing themselves standing to gain from his pre-eminence over them, agree to 
come now and then to his aid with those forces which he allows them to enjoy in 
peace when he is himself at peace, everyone, chief and vassals, joining forces to 
combat, to subdue, to fetter the popular hydra, the sole aim of whose strivings is 
always to burst the chains that keep it in subservience.”

“Pursuant to this line of reasoning, it is certain,” said Clairwil, “that the laws 
enacted against the population cannot be too repressive.”

“They must be modeled upon those of Draco,” said Francavilla, “they must be 
written out in blood, must be revitalized by blood, must cause it to flow every day,
must, above all, keep the people in the most deplorable poverty; the people are 
never dangerous save when comfortable—”

“And when educated?”

“And when educated, to be sure: they must hence be kept in the profoundest 
ignorance as well; their slavery must be perpetual and grinding, and every 
possible means of escape from it must be denied them, as will assuredly be the 
case when the figures who support and surround the government are there to 
prevent the people from breaking loose from irons which it is in the upper class’ 
interests to tighten day and night. You cannot imagine how far such tyranny is 
able to extend.”

“I sense it,” said Clairwil; “yes, I sense that it would reach the point where 
those rogues depended utterly upon the tyrant, or upon those near him, for the 
very right to breathe.”

“That’s it,” said the Prince, seizing enthusiastically at this idea, “the 
government itself must regulate the population, must command all the means for 
snuffing it out if it becomes troublesome, for increasing it if that is esteemed 
advantageous; its justice must never be weighed elsewhere than in the scales of 
the ruler’s interests or passions, combined solely with the passions and interests 
of those who, as we have just said, have obtained from him all the allotments of 
authority necessary to multiply his own a hundredfold when they are 
conjugated.(23) Glance at the governments of Africa and Asia: all of them are 
organized in accordance with these principles, and all invariably maintain 
themselves thereby.”

“In many of them,” said Charlotte, “the people are not reduced to what you 
seem to consider their appropriate condition.”

“True,” Francavilla admitted, “there have been stirrings in a few outlying 
districts, and there is work yet to be done before the masses are in such a state 
of dread and exhaustion that they cease even to be able to conceive of revolt.”

“It is to that end,” said Ferdinand, “I would like to see priests among them.”

“Beware of that expedient, since, as you have just been told, it is the surest 
way to raise up a power that will soon eclipse your own by dint of the deific 
machinery which; in the clergy’s hands, serves only to forge weapons for the 
destruction of governments, and which is never used for any other purpose; 
atheize and incessantly demoralize the people whom you wish to subjugate; so 
long as they cringe before no god but you, so long as there are no morals except 
yours, you will always be their sovereign.”

“An immoral man is dangerous,” said Ferdinand.

“Yes, when he has some authority, because he then feels the urge to abuse it; 
never, when he is a slave. It matters very little that a man believe or not believe 
there is wrong in killing me, once I have so thoroughly shackled him that he has 
not the means to harm a fly; and when moral depravity has softened him, he will 
be that much less loath to wear the collar I rivet round his neck.”

“But,” asked Charlotte, “how is he to become soft under the yoke? Rather, it 
would seem to me, only luxury and easy living have that effect upon man.”

“His fiber rots in the thick of crime,” the Prince rejoined. “Now, leave him the 
broadest outlets for his criminal capacities; never punish him save when his darts 
are directed against you; so proceed and you will obtain two excellent results: the
immorality that you require, and depopulation, which may often be of even 
greater usefulness to you. Allow incest, rape, murder among your subjects; forbid
them marriage, authorize sodomy, prohibit them worship of any sort, and you will
soon have them reduced to the abjection your policy demands.

“And how do you multiply punishments when you tolerate everything meriting 
them?” I wondered, with some appearance of logic.

“Why,” said Francavilla, “it’s virtues you then hammer, or revolts against your 
power; and, never fear, you have a thousand times more of them than you need 
in order to be busy striking off heads all day long. Besides, are motives so 
indispensable? The despot obtains blood whenever he likes, his will alone is 
enough to cause it to flow: conspiracies may be supposed at any time; you 
foment them, you occasion them; the scaffolds go up, and in the twinkle of an 
eye, there’s a carnage.”

“If Ferdinand cares to leave these matters in my hands,” said Charlotte, “I 
guarantee him I shall provide legitimate pretexts every day: let him sharpen the 
blade and I shall furnish the victims.”

“Cousin,” said the King, “my wife is becoming fidgety.”

“I am not surprised,” said Clairwil, “for I am myself fearfully on edge. To watch
fuck and fuck not is cruel when you have a warm constitution.”

“Let us then go out for a breath of air,” said the Prince; “in these wooded 
bowers we may perhaps find the wherewithal to appease these ladies’ ardors.”

All the gardens were illuminated: from orange trees, peach trees, apricot trees,
fig trees we plucked fruit cooled by the evening dews as we strolled along the 
delightful pathways that brought us to the Temple of Ganymede. This temple was 
softly lit by tapers set high under the ceiling, which reflected light enough for 
pleasures but not so much as to tire the eye. Green and rose-colored columns 
supported this edifice, garlands of myrtle and lilac twined around them and 
formed agreeable festoons between one column and the next.

No sooner were we arrived there than subdued music filled the air with 
sweetness. Charlotte, drunk with lust and very hot from wine and spirits, 
proceeded straight to the nearest couch, and we others did the same.

“’Tis their turn now,” Francavilla said to the King, “they must be left to show 
what they can do, with the essential recommendation, nevertheless, to offer 
nothing but their asses, for this is a place of worship consecrated to the adoration 
of asses only; any deviation from these laws would be a sin warranting expulsion 
from the temple. Moreover, the agents that will be furnished to them would 
consent to no infidelity.”

“Little do we care,” said Clairwil, the first of us to have stripped off her clothes.
“We much prefer having our asses used than our cunts, and provided we receive 
friggings meanwhile, there will be no regrets heard from us.”

Francavilla now drew away the pink satin spread covering what we supposed 
was an ottoman. Ah, what an extraordinary article that drapery had been 
concealing! Imagine a long couch with separate places, or rather stalls, for four; 
each woman was to enter the stall and kneel on the seat reserved for her, her 
rump raised high, her thighs spread wide; her elbows rested on chair-arms 
padded with cotton and covered with black satin, as was the rest of this 
uncommon piece of furniture. By her hands and within easy reach were the loins 
of two men, one on either side, who to her manipulation provided each a 
gigantean member, the only part of them that was visible, their bodies being 
otherwise hidden underneath black shrouds. Cunningly disposed platforms 
supported those recumbent bodies, and a mechanism ensured that once those 
pricks had discharged, they disappeared in a trice and were replaced by new ones
the next instant.

Yet another and still” more unusual fixture operated beneath the woman’s 
belly. By taking her position in the stall, that woman lowered herself over, and 
engulfed, unavoidably and, as it were, involuntarily, a soft and flexible dildo 
which, through a system of springs and clockwork, filed away automatically and 
without cease, every fifteen minutes squirting a given measure of warm and 
sticky fluid into her vagina, that fluid possessing an odor and a viscosity which 
would have led anyone to mistake it for the purest, the freshest sperm. A very 
pretty girl, of whom nothing but the head was visible, with her chin pressed 
against the dildo, frigged, lingually, the clitoris of the woman, and was likewise 
relayed by another, by means of a trap-door arrangement, as soon as she began 
to tire. Ahead of the woman placed as I have described there were to be seen, 
upon round stools, other objects, which were varied or replaced when the woman 
so desired; upon those stools, I say, one saw cunts or pricks; in a manner that 
this woman had at the level of her mouth, and could conveniently suck, either a 
penis or a clitoris. In sum, it resulted that the woman, kneeling upon the 
cushioned seat containing the levers which set everything in motion, and 
comfortably resting upon her elbows, was tupped by a dildo, mouthed by a girl, 
while frigging a prick with each hand, presenting her ass to the very genuine prick
which was to come up and sodomize her, and alternately sucking, according to 
her tastes, now a prick, now a cunt, even an asshole.

“I do not believe,” said Clairwil, setting herself, stark naked, in one of the 
stalls, “that anything more extraordinarily lubricious could possibly be invented; 
simply to adopt this posture,” she continued, “puts me fairly in a frenzy, simply to
take my place here is making me discharge.”

Olympia, Charlotte, and I took our places beside Clairwil. Four girls of sixteen, 
naked and fair as angels, helped situate us; they oiled the dildoes to facilitate 
their entry; they adjusted our positions; then, parting our buttocks, they likewise 
anointed our assholes, and stood by to attend to us during the operation.

Francavilla then gave the signal. Four maids of fifteen led in, by the prick, a 
like number of superb boys whose members were without delay introduced into 
our fundaments; exhausted, this quadrille was replaced in short order by 
succeeding ones. Our stewardesses remained the same, but the fresh batteries of
pricks were each time brought in by four new girls who, having handed the pricks 
over to the stewardesses, formed a voluptuous group around us and danced to 
the enchanting sounds of music coming, so it seemed, from far away. While 
dancing they sprinkled our bodies with some unidentifiable elixir, each drop of 
which stung the skin sharply and had an incredibly active effect upon our 
passions: its scent was that of jasmine; we were covered with it from head to toe.

All the variations of this scene, what is more, were executed with astonishing 
address and celerity; never were we kept waiting for so much as a moment. 
Before our mouths, cunts and pricks and asses succeeded one another as swiftly 
as our desires; elsewhere, the engines we frigged had but to discharge and new 
ones materialized between our fingers; our clitoris-suckers rotated with the same 
speed, and our asses were never deserted; in less than three hours, during which
we swam in unending delirium, we were ass-fucked one hundred times apiece, 
and polluted the whole time by the dildo constantly belaboring our cunt. I was 
nigh to slain by it all. Olympia had collapsed, they had been obliged to lift her off 
her dildo; only Clairwil and Charlotte had stood up unwaveringly to the assault. 
Fuck, the liquid ejaculated by the dildoes, sweat, and blood drenched us all over. 
Ferdinand and Francavilla, who had been amusing themselves with thirty-odd 
charming bardashes while watching the spectacle, invited us to pursue the 
promenade; four pretty girls offered us their arms to lean upon, and we moved 
into a spacious summerhouse.

It was decorated thus: to the right was a wide semicircular platform raised 
three feet above the floor, an amphitheater garnished with thick mattresses 
covered in flaming red satin; opposite stood another platform, a foot higher, of 
the same shape, entirely carpeted in velvet of the same color.

“Let us lie down and wallow here for a while,” said the Prince, guiding us to the
amphitheater, “and we shall see what there is to see.”

We settled ourselves, and very soon into the center of the hall entered a dozen
exquisitely lovely girls of between sixteen and eighteen. They were arrayed in 
simple shifts worn in the Greek manner, and leaving their bosoms bare; and at 
her breast, firm and white as alabaster, each bore a naked infant, her own 
offspring, and ranging in age from six to eighteen months. At the same time, six 
handsome men, prick in hand, slipped into our midst; two embuggered Ferdinand 
and Francavilla forthwith; the four others proposed us their services, in such 
manner that we were pleased to accept them.

Once we were all six fucked, the twelve young women formed a half-circle 
around us, their shifts were raised by a similar number of little girls dressed in 
Tartar style; and these children, kneeling beside the women whose behinds they 
had unveiled, exposed to our view, in agreeably struck attitudes, the most superb
collection of buttocks you could ever hope to see.

“Those are superior asses, yes,” said Francavilla under the monstrous prick 
that was sodomizing him; “but, unfortunately, they are destined to our 
condemnation, and I should be sorry, Mesdames, to see you take a too lively 
interest in them…. Yet, notice, if you will, how nicely they are cleft, those asses, 
what a snowy whiteness is theirs. What a shame to treat them as they are now 
going to be.”

Exeunt the shift-raisers; enter a dozen men of about thirty-five, of very male 
and fierce mien, and costumed as satyrs. Their arms are bare, each comes in 
brandishing a different sort of instrument for flagellation: they snatch the 
nurselings out of their young mothers’ arms, toss the little creatures into a heap 
at our feet, seize the mothers, drag them by the hair up onto the platform 
opposite us and, mercilessly ripping off the thin garments they are wearing, they 
immobilize them with one hand and set to whipping them with the other, in a 
manner so cruel and for such a length of time that jets of blood and bits of flesh 
fly across the whole width of the summerhouse, even to where we are.

Never in my life had I seen such a flogging … neither one so ferocious nor so 
thorough, since from the nape of the neck down to the heel not an inch was left 
untouched; those wretches’ shrieks could have been heard a league away, and 
crime was performed so openly here that no precaution was taken to muffle 
them; four of those women fainted, fell, and were then whipped back upon their 
feet again. When, seen from the rear, they were but one great wound, they were 
suddenly let loose.

A general commotion then occurs, flagellators and flagellated collide, push, 
pull; the ones hurry to replace, in pairs, the first six individuals we have been 
enjoying; the others scurry anxiously about in quest of their progeny. Tangled up 
as the babes are, their mothers identify them, sort them out, press them to their 
trembling lips, hug them to their palpitating breasts; along with the thickened 
milk they feed them, they wash them with the burning tears flowing down their 
cheeks. ’Tis to my shame I confess it, good friends, but this effervescence, in 
contrast with the radically different emotions we were being gripped by, caused 
me two successive spasms as I squirmed under the shaft sounding my anus. The 
moment of calm was not long; another twelve men, of more awesome aspect 
then the first platoon and garbed as savages, arrive, blasphemy in mouths, 
martinets in fists. They wrest the infants away from those poor souls again, throw
them our way with greater force than they had been thrown before, in so doing 
shattering several little skulls upon the plank floor of our amphitheater, drag the 
women upon the platform opposite, and this time it is upon the front of the bodies
of those tender mothers, and especially upon their delicate breasts, that the 
storm descends. Those sweet, sensitive, and voluptuous globes, crisscrossed by 
lashes biting furiously into flesh, soon yield a horrid mixture of milk and blood, 
geysers of which leap forth in answer to the blows. The barbarians, aiming lower 
down, with the same violence soon lacerate the belly, the sex, the inside of the 
vagina and the thighs and, in an instant, these parts, treated as unsparingly as 
the others, disappear behind a mist of blood. And in the meantime we were 
fucking, and we were tasting that supreme pleasure which results from the 
impact, upon stern souls like ours, of the sight of the pain of others. The same 
frantic rush on the part of the women the moment their tormentors release them 
in order to substitute their rigid and foaming pricks for their dozen predecessors’ 
limp and drained engines. The mothers scramble toward their babes, pick them 
up, bruised and battered as they are, warm them with their anguished kisses, wet
them with their tears, console them with tender words and in their joy at 
recovering these cherished objects, are almost at the point of forgetting what 
they have undergone, when twelve other villains, of a countenance a thousand 
times more dreadful to behold than anything seen hitherto, stride in to accomplish
further atrocities.

This new horde of monsters, dressed like the satellites of Pluto, grab the 
luckless mothers’ offspring one last and most terrible time, hack them to shreds 
with the poniard each wields, fling their remains at our feet, leap upon the 
women, whereof, in the center of the arena, they make the promptest and 
bloodiest slaughter; then, all covered with gore, spring into our midst, stab the 
fuckers lying in our arms, and themselves embugger us, roaring with pleasure.

“What a scene!” I say to Francavilla when, exhausted by fucking and horrors, 
we retire out of that charnel house; “what a rare and stirring spectacle!”

“Your friend seems not to have had her fill of it,” said the Prince, glancing back 
at Clairwil who was poking about the corpses heaping the battlefield, inspecting 
their wounds.

“Fuck!” replied that woman of character, “think you one ever tires of the sight 
of death? Ever has enough of it? It was, to be sure, one of the most delicious 
horrors I’ve witnessed in all my days, but it is certain to leave me with an 
enduring sadness. For, alack, one cannot enjoy a massacre every fifteen minutes 
the whole length of one’s life.”

And there the festive evening came to its close. Coaches were awaiting us. 
They conveyed us back to the Prince’s palace; we had hardly strength enough to 
hold ourselves upright; aromatic baths were ready, we slipped into them; hot 
broths were offered to us, and beds, and twelve hours later we were all three 
prepared, if need be, to begin again.

Rested from those mighty fatigues, we thought to pursue our circuit of outlying
Naples, and to go down the easterly coast. If these descriptions do not please 
you, in amongst them I shall intersperse those of my lewd accomplishments; this 
variety amuses, it stimulates. Were these tales ever to be printed, the reader, his 
imagination heated by the lubricious details strewn throughout, would be 
enchanted, would he not, to be able to pause from time to time and dwell upon 
milder, more restful descriptions, framed nonetheless within the bounds of the 
strictest truth?

The traveler’s eye, wearied by the grandiose scenery that gives him 
unremitting occupation while crossing the Alps, likes to linger upon the fertile 
plains into which he descends, gentle prospects where agreeable configurations of
vine and elm seem everywhere to suggest Nature in a festive spirit.

And so, a week after our rout at the Prince’s, we set forth upon this second 
tour, with a guide provided by the King and all possible letters to ensure our 
kindly reception in the country we were going to traverse.

The first house we inspected with some thoroughness was Ferdinand’s castle of
Portici. Hitherto, we had seen only its boudoirs. But it contained a museum; 
Ferdinand himself escorted us through it. Fourteen rooms all on one floor lodge 
this enormous collection, the world’s most curious and finest, I dare say. Nothing 
so tiring as an examination of its components; constantly on my feet, my mind 
straining, my eyes staring, it was all a blur by the time we had seen everything.

In another part of the same castle we found greater enjoyment in the 
assortment of paintings recovered from Herculaneum and other towns buried by 
the lava of Vesuvius.

Generally speaking, in all these paintings one remarks a wealth of postures 
and attitudes which almost defy natural possibilities, and which testify either to 
great muscular suppleness in the inhabitants of those countries, or a great 
disorder of the imagination. Amongst other masterpieces I quickly distinguished a
superb effort representing a satyr coupling with a goat: an astonishing work of 
art, beautiful in its conception, striking in its precision of detail.

“That fantasy is quite as agreeable as it is alleged to be extraordinary,” 
Ferdinand commented. “It is,” he went on to say, “much in usage hereabouts; as 
a Neapolitan, I was eager to experience it, and I do not hide from you that it gave
me the very rarest pleasure.”

“I can believe it,” said Clairwil; “many and many a time in my life I have 
thought of the idea, and I have never desired to be a man except to enact it.”

“But, you know, a woman can perfectly well surrender herself to a large dog,” 
the King reminded us.

“Certainly,” I rejoined, in such a way as to suggest I was not totally 
unacquainted with that practice.

“Charlotte,” pursued Ferdinand, “was of a mind to try it. It suited her to 
perfection.”

“Sire,” said I, speaking so as to be heard by Ferdinand only, but with my 
customary frankness, “if all the princes of the House of Austria had but confined 
themselves to fucking goats, and if all the women of that House had conversed 
with bulldogs alone, the earth today would not be plagued with this accursed 
race, whereof its populations shall never be rid save through a general 
revolution.”

Ferdinand agreed that I was quite right, and we moved on. Of Herculaneum’s 
thoroughly raided ruins there is little worth looking at today, and the site has been
covered over to protect the ground Portici stands upon; one cannot well judge of 
the ancient theater, much disturbed by the diggings. When we returned to Portici, 
Ferdinand put us into the hands of the knowledgeable guide he had himself 
selected for us, and the amiable man wished us a fair journey, urging us to call 
upon his friend Vespoli, of Salerno, to whom he had given us letters of 
recommendation and under whose roof, he assured us, we would find capital 
entertainment.

We went to Resina and thence took the road to Pompeii. Like Herculaneum, 
that city had been overwhelmed by ashes and lava, and in the course of the same
great eruption. We noticed that Pompeii was itself built upon two more ancient 
towns, which had been visited by previous catastrophes. Vesuvius, as you see, is 
forever absorbing, destroying all that man has built in these parts, and yet man, 
undiscouraged, rebuilds again: but for this cruel enemy, the country surrounding 
Naples would be the most agreeable on earth.

From Pompeii we reached Salerno and lay overnight at the famous house of 
correction situated two miles outside that city, and in which Vespoli exercises his 
redoubtable superintendency.

Vespoli, scion of one of the great families in the Kingdom of Naples, used once 
to be First Almoner at the Court. The King, whose pleasures he had served and 
whose conscience he had directed,(24) had accorded him the despotic 
administration of the asylum where we found him. There, guaranteed by royal 
protection, the libertine was free to indulge in everything his criminal passions 
might dictate. Atrocities being the warden’s specialty, Ferdinand was eager to 
have us be Vespoli’s guests.

He was fifty years of age at the time, with an imposing and harsh 
physiognomy, tall, strong as a bull; he greeted us with marks of extremest 
consideration. He read the letters we presented and, since the hour was very 
advanced, promptly gave orders to have a supper and beds readied for us. It was 
Vespoli himself who brought us breakfast the next morning; and then, we having 
made known our wish to visit it, he led us on a tour of his establishment.

Each of the rooms we were shown provided us infinite matter for criminally 
lewd reflections, and we were already horribly aroused by the time we reached 
the cages in which the crazed were kept.

The superintendent, who up until now had done nothing but grow steadily 
warmer, was wearing an incredible erection when we stepped into this courtyard, 
and as fucking witless victims was what he most enjoyed, he asked us whether 
we cared to see him in action.

“By all means,” we replied.

“I ask,” he said, “because my transports with these creatures are so 
prodigious, my proceedings so bizarre, my cruelties so appalling, that it does 
rather embarrass me to have my behavior in this place observed.”

“Nonsense,” said Clairwil, “were your caprices a thousand times more 
incongruous, we would still wish to watch, and indeed we entreat you to act your 
wonted role as though you were all by yourself; and especially to deprive us of 
none of the precious idiosyncrasies without which we can obtain no true insights 
into your tastes and your soul.”

“You merely intend to look on?” he inquired, rubbing his prick with emotion as 
he posed the question.

“And why should we not also enjoy fucking these madmen?” Clairwil asked. 
“Your fantasies electrify us, we are eager to imitate all of them. I trust these 
subjects are not dangerous? No? Then we shall sport with them like you. But do 
not make us wait any longer, dear sir, I am burning to see you at work.”

The cages were disposed around a large open court planted with tall cypresses 
through whose foliage there came a lugubrious green light, giving the place a 
graveyard look. In its center stood a cross studded with nails on one side; it was 
there the wicked Vespoli had his victims exposed. Four jailers, carrying 
spike-studded clubs a single blow of which could have slain an ox, escorted us 
watchfully. Vespoli, accustomed to having them as onlookers during his 
amusements, felt no awkwardness in their presence, and instructed two of them 
to stand by us while we witnessed the scene seated upon a bench at one side of 
the courtyard; the two other jailers were to loose from their cages those 
playthings the superintendent felt a need for.

First to be set at large was a handsome young man, naked, a veritable 
Hercules, who cut a thousand strange capers as he came forth. One of the first of 
his extravagances was to squat before our feet and shit, and Vespoli came over to
be on hand for this operation, which he studied with care. He frigged himself, 
retrieved the turd, rubbed his prick upon it, and then falling to dancing about like 
the madman, to gamboling and frisking in the same way, he caught him from 
behind, pushed him up against the cross, and the guards tied him fast to it in an 
instant. Immediately the fellow is secured, Vespoli, ecstatic, kneels down before 
his ass, opens it, pants into it, tongues it, caresses it lovingly, then, getting 
quickly to his feet, takes a whip and for a long hour flays the unhappy and loudly 
screaming lunatic. Once his buttocks are in tatters, the lecher embuggers, and in 
his drunken condition, raves in tune with his victim.

“Holy God Almighty,” the former almoner shrieks now and again, “what are the
joys to be known in the asshole of a madman! And I too, I am mad, 
double-fucked Divinity; I bugger madmen, I discharge in madmen, I care for 
nought but them, I want to fuck nobody else in the world.” However, loath to 
squander his forces, Vespoli has the youth unbound. Another one rushes into the 
lists, this one fancies he is God.

“I am going to fuck God,” Vespoli announces to us, “observe me; but I must 
give God a thrashing before giving Him an embuggering. Hither,” he continues, 
“this way, Bugger-God, bring Your ass around, Your ass, I say.”

And God, attached to the stake by the jailers, is soon bested by His puny 
creature who embuggers Him once His buttocks are reduced to marmalade. A 
lovely girl of eighteen succeeds God; this one takes herself for the Virgin. Further 
subject for the blasphemies of Vespoli, who lashes the skin off the Blessed Mother
of God, and who afterward sodomizes her for a quarter of an hour.

Clairwil arises, all afire.

“This spectacle inspires me,” she says to us, “imitate me, my friends, and you, 
villain, have your jailers unclothe us and then lock us into those cages; treat us as
though we were mad also, we shall feign lunacy; you will have us tied to the 
unspiked side of the cross, your madmen will whip us and then ass-fuck us.”

The idea appeals to us all. Vespoli carries it out. Ten madmen are unleashed 
against us; some of them flog us, others are hacked fairly to pieces for refusing to
do so; but they all fuck us, and all, guided by Vespoli, fit themselves into our 
behinds. The guards, the warden, everybody has his turn, we are daunted by 
none of them.

“So now discharge,” Clairwil says to the master of the house, “we have done 
everything you asked, show us how you behave during the dramatic moment.”

“All in good time, in good time,” our man says, “there’s one here that puts me 
in seventh heaven; I never leave the house in the morning without first fucking 
him.”

Upon a signal to one of his jailers, he is brought an old man of nearly eighty 
with a white beard growing down to his navel.

“Come along, John,” Vespoli says, catching him by the beard and towing him 
the length of the courtyard, “pick up your feet, John, I am going to put my prick 
in your ass.”

The venerable old man is bound and fustigated mercilessly; his ass, his 
ancient, wrinkled ass is kissed, licked, embuggered; and withdrawing, very near 
to ejaculation, “Ah,” says Vespoli, “you want to see me discharge? But do you 
realize I never attain my crisis without it costing two or three of these unfortunate
persons their lives?”

“So much the better,” say I, “but I trust that in your massacres you will 
overlook neither God nor Mary, for I confess that I’d indeed discharge pleasantly 
seeing you assassinate the Good Lord with one hand and His daughter-in-law with
the other.”

“I ought then to be embuggering Jesus Christ in the meantime,” said the 
infamous man. “And Christ, we have him here: all paradise is in this hell.”

The jailers lead forth a handsome young man of some thirty years who called 
himself the Son of God, and whom Vespoli has affixed to the cross at once. He 
flogs him with might and main.

“Courage, good Romans,” the victim cries, “ever did I say unto you I came only
to suffer on earth; spare me not, I implore you; well I know I must die upon the 
cross; but I shall have saved mankind.”

At that, unable to restrain himself any longer, Vespoli puts prick to Jesus’ 
asshole, and takes a stiletto in either hand, therewith to regale the Holy Virgin 
and God the Father.

“You others,” he calls to us, “come forward, stand near me, show me your 
asses, and since you are curious about my discharge, you shall soon see how I 
proceed with it.”

He files away; never was the Son of God so stoutly fucked; but each heave of 
Vespoli’s flanks is accompanied by a slash dealt to some part or another of the 
two bodies posted one to the left, the other to the right. First, they are arms, 
armpits, shoulders, flanks he stabs; as the crisis approaches, the barbarian aims 
his blows at more delicate parts; the Virgin’s bosom is covered with blood; 
striking now with one hand, now with the other, his arms move like a pendulum; 
the nearness of the spasm may be gauged by the sensitivity of the areas he 
brings under attack. Frightful oaths at last declare the onset of this frenetic’s final 
transports. His rage now singles out faces for its targets, he rips them with his 
knives, and when the last drops of sperm have left him, they are eyeballs he 
pierces. Is there any possible expressing to what degree we are animated by this 
spectacle? We are bent on imitating the monster; victims are furnished us in 
abundance; we each immolate three. Clairwil, gone wild with lust, leaps to the 
center of the courtyard, drawing Vespoli after her.

“Fuck me, knave,” she says to him; “in consideration of the cunt belonging to a
woman of your own breed, perform an act of infidelity to your faith.”

“I cannot,” said the Italian.

“I demand it.”

We excite Vespoli, his device rises; we force it into Clairwil’s womb. We exhibit 
our asses to him, the capricious fellow asks for madmen, and it is only by having 
one of them shit upon his face that the scoundrel, prodded and wrought upon by 
Olympia and me, at last sprays fuck into Clairwil. And we retire from that 
execrable den, where, hardly noticing the passage of time, we had spent thirteen 
whole hours wallowing in infamies.

We tarried several days in Vespoli’s institution of crime and debauchery, and 
then, wishing the superintendent every kind of prosperity, resumed our way 
toward the famous temples of Paestum.

Before going to inspect those monuments we first arranged for lodgings at a 
superb farm to which Ferdinand had addressed us. Graciousness, gentility 
characterized the persons we found upon this idyllic estate; it was owned by a 
widow of forty and her three daughters, who in age ranged from fifteen to 
eighteen. Here ’twas as though wickedness and crime did not exist: had virtue 
somehow been banished out of the world, it would have chosen this place for its 
retreat, and to be immortalized in the right-thinking and generous Rosalba. 
Wonderfully well preserved was she, and pretty beyond words were her 
daughters.

“Ha,” I whispered to Clairwil, “did I not tell you I had a feeling we were soon to
come upon an asylum where virtue in its purest colors would unfailingly provoke 
us to vice? Just look at those heavenly girls! they are flowers Nature presents for 
our plucking. Oh, Clairwil, it must be that thanks to us, trouble and desolation 
swiftly replace the innocence and the sweet peace reigning in this delicious place.”

“My cunt throbs to hear you,” said Clairwil; “these are, as you say, affecting 
victims.” Then, after kissing me: “But their sufferings will not be mild…. However, 
let us first dine, then go to see the relics, and afterward devote ourselves to 
atrocity.”

Traveling with a cook of our own we were assured of good fare wherever we 
stopped. After an ample meal, served us by the daughters of the house, we were 
shown the way to the temples. Those superb edifices are in a state of such 
excellent preservation that they do not appear to have been built more than three
or four centuries ago. In number they are three, one of them being a good deal 
larger than the other two. After having contemplated these masterpieces, after 
having regretted that in every country of the world superstition has been 
responsible for the wasting of huge sums and efforts upon gods which, however 
recognized, have never existed save in the imaginations of fools, we turned back 
and headed for our farm, whither we were beckoned by equally interesting affairs.

There, Clairwil accosted the mother and gave her to understand that we were 
afraid of sleeping alone in a so prodigiously isolated countryside. “Your 
daughters,” the rascal wanted to know, “dare we hope that they will 
accommodate us by sharing our beds?”

“Of course, dear lady,” the good woman replied, “my daughters are only too 
flattered by the honor you deign to show them.”

And Clairwil having hastened to report to us this becoming reply, each of us 
selected the maiden we desired, and we retired for the night.

The fifteen-year-old had fallen to me; nothing prettier, nothing sweeter ever 
graced the world. No sooner were we underneath the same sheet than I set to 
plying her with caresses, and the poor little thing responded with a candor, an 
ingenuousness that might have disarmed anyone but a libertine of my stamp. I 
began by questions. Alas, the innocent understood not one word; nor yet, warm 
though the latitude was, had Nature begun to speak in her, and the most entire 
simplicity alone dictated that angel’s artless replies. When my impure fingers 
touched the petals of the rose, she quivered; I kissed her, she kissed me in 
return, but with a simplicity unknown to worldly folk, and to be encountered 
nowhere but in the bowers of modesty and chaste inexperience.

There was nothing I might not have got her to do, nothing I might not myself 
have done with that pretty little creature when my companions, already up and 
stirring, came to find out how I had spent my night.

“What am I to tell you? I venture to say that the tale of my pleasures would be
an exact recounting of yours.”

“Ah, fuck my soul,” said Clairwil, “I don’t believe I have ever discharged so 
heavily. But, Juliette, up with you, send that child away, there are things we must 
discuss.”

Looking her hard in the eye, “Slut,” I said to her, “your soul stands revealed in 
your stare … crime lurks there.”

“I am resolved to commit one, dreadful, hideous…. You know, the welcome we 
have had from these good people, the pleasure the girls have given us….”

“Well?”

“I want to butcher them all, rob, plunder, burn down their house, and frig 
myself over its ruins once the corpses are buried underneath them.”

“I find that a delightful idea,” said I. “But first let us spend an evening with the 
family: the mother and her daughters are alone, all the help have gone off to 
Naples, there is not another house for miles around … let us perform some 
infamies, afterward we shall do our killing.”

“So you are weary of yours?”

“Mortally.”

“For my part, I am ready to see mine in hell,” Borghese admitted.

“One ought never go too far with a pleasure-providing individual,” said Clairwil,
“unless one has poison in one’s pocket.”

“Minx! But before we settle down to business let us first have a quiet lunch.”

As escort we had four strapping valets membered like jackasses, who fucked 
us when we were in need of fucking and who, paid exorbitantly, would not have 
dreamed of disputing our instructions: once told of our plan, they could hardly 
wait to put it into execution. Night had no sooner fallen than we took command of
the house. But it is essential that I depict the actors to you, before detailing the 
scenes. Having already acquainted you with the mother, and described Rosalba’s 
unimpaired freshness and beauty, I have only to say a few words about her 
children. Isabella was the youngest, ’twas with her I had spent the previous night;
the second was called Mathilda, she was sixteen, lovely features, evenness and 
languor in her gaze, the look of a Raphael virgin; and Ernesilla was the name of 
the eldest: Venus’ own bearing and body and face, impossible to be more 
beautiful: she was the one with whom Clairwil had just soiled herself in horrors 
and impudicities. Roger, Victor, Agostino, and Vanini were our lackeys’ names. The
first of them belonged to me, he was from Paris, twenty-two, and his device was a
marvel; Victor, also French and eighteen years old, belonged to Clairwil; his occult
qualities were in no sense inferior to Roger’s. Agostino and Vanini, both 
Florentines, belonged to Borghese, they were both youthful, with charming faces, 
and superiorly membered.

The gentle mother of those three Graces, a little surprised by the 
precautionary measures she sees us taking, asks what this activity might mean.

“You shall now find out, whore,” says Agostino, ordering her, his pistol leveled 
at her heart, to remove her clothes. In the meantime our three other valets, each
taking charge of one of the daughters, address to them compliments in the same 
kind. A few minutes later and the naked mother and daughters, their hands tied 
behind their backs, appear before us in the helpless situation of victims. Clairwil 
steps up to Rosalba.

“Why, to look at this slut makes one’s mouth water,” says she, fondling 
Rosalba’s buttocks, squeezing her breasts. “And these over here,” and she turns 
toward the girls again; “they are perfect angels, I have never set eyes on the like.
Rascal!” she says to me, caressing my Isabella, “you got the best of the lot, what 
pleasures you must have had last night with this exquisite object! Well now, my 
friends, you’ll entrust the direction of the ceremonies to me?”

“Surely, for our interests could not be placed under more capable 
management.”

“My suggestion then is that one after another we go into an adjoining chamber 
with the mother and her three daughters, and prepare the material for use.”

“Shall we accompany ourselves by a man?” Borghese asked.

“No men at the beginning; they will be included in later arrangements.”

As I do not know what my companions did I shall tell you only of the pranks I 
played upon those four unfortunate creatures. I took a strap to the mother, held 
by her daughters; then to one of the latter, while the two others frigged their 
mother in front of me; I inserted needles in all their breasts, bit the clitoris and 
the tongue of each, and broke the little finger on everybody’s right hand. The 
blood streaming down their bodies when, later, my friends brought them back in 
seemed to indicate that Clairwil and the Princess had been just as severe as I. 
The preliminary exercises completed, we assembled our victims. They all wept.

“Is this the reward for our politeness to you,” they sobbed, “for the things we 
have done in your behalf?”

And the mother, in great distress, drew her daughters to her, kissed them, 
sought to console them; they nestled close to her, dropped their tears upon her 
bosom: the four composed a touching, a heart-rending tableau of sorrow and 
woe. But souls like ours, you know, do not readily melt, every appeal to their 
sensibility acts as further fuel to their rage: the whey ran down our thighs.

“We shall now have them fuck,” Clairwil pronounced, “and for that, untie their 
hands.”

With those words she places Rosalba upon a bed, then bids the youngest girl 
prepare our four valets’ pricks for her mother. Goaded by our threats, the poor 
child was obliged to stroke, to suck, generally to put in fettle the engines that 
were to sound her mother; while she was engaged at these chores, we frolicked 
with her sisters. Our men were warned against any intempestive discharging. We 
presented the eldest girl to them, and then ’twas the mother who had to prepare 
the pricks. This second attack was another great success: Rosalba’s children were
one by one fucked by pricks formed for that purpose by her. One of our men, 
Agostino, weakened, however, and gasped forth his seed into Isabella’s cunt.

“Don’t be upset,” said Clairwil, taking him promptly in hand, “three minutes, 
my boy, and I shall have you as erect as you were a short while ago.”

Asses are now brought to the fore, the sodomy begins with the mother, her 
daughters are compelled to dart the pricks into her anus; a little while later, she 
renders them the same service. Roger, the best-membered of the quartet, is 
appointed to depucelate young Isabella … he nigh cleaves her in two; we 
discharge, lubriciously frigged by the other girls and bum-fucked by the men. 
Here it was Vanini who lost his self-control, vanquished by the effects of 
Ernesilla’s splendid posterior: he filled her bowels with fuck, and Clairwil, with her 
unique skill for rehoisting fallen pricks, soon had that pretty fellow’s as hard as if 
it had been deprived of exercise for six weeks.

At this point the true punishment began. Clairwil had the idea of tying a girl on 
top of each one of us, and the mother, threatened, constrained by the valets, was 
to torment them as they lay upon our bodies. I had requested Ernesilla; Mathilda 
was upon Clairwil, Isabella upon Borghese. Our men had all kinds of trouble 
getting obedience from Rosalba. When one must cajole Nature, when one must 
force a mother to whip, slap, cuff, pinch, burn, bite her own children, ’tis not, of 
course, an easy task. By it, however, we were not to be daunted. The whore 
required a great deal of pummeling but she complied, and we relished the 
ferocious pleasure of frigging, of kissing those three hapless creatures, fastened 
to us, while their mother beat them to a pulp.

These were succeeded by more serious games. We attached the mother to a 
pillar and obliged, at pistol-point, each of the daughters to thrust a sharp needle 
into Rosalba’s breasts; they did so. Then we tied them, and it was the mother’s 
turn: there was no way out for her, she had to drive a dagger into each of their 
gaping cunts, and while she was carving we caressed her buttocks with firmly 
held stilettoes. Those four bodies were approaching the state which distills that 
delicious horror engendered by the furtive crimes lewdness is the cause of, and 
which is not of the sort the ordinary sensibility can be expected to appreciate. 
Weary from work and pleasure, we had ourselves sodomized as we contemplated 
the ghastly condition of our victims, and while Roger, who had no woman to 
skewer, swung a steel-tipped martinet against those creatures, all four bound 
tight together in a solid mass.

“Very well, by God, by bugger-fucking God, very well, let’s kill them now,” said 
Clairwil, whose homicidal eyes stared rage and lust; “let’s assassinate, let’s 
destroy, let’s drink their tears to drunkenness. I have waited long enough to see 
these whores expire, I am burning from the need to hear their death-cries, from a
thirst for their accursed blood. I’d like to devour them piecemeal, to feed my guts 
on their rotten flesh….”

Thus spoke she; and the buggeress stabbed with one hand, worried her clitoris
with the other. We imitated her; and those screams, those screams we so longed 
to hear, rose like a hymn in our ears. We were there, watching from close on; our 
valets socratized us during the operation; all our senses were thrilled 
simultaneously by the divine spectacle of our infamies.

I was at Clairwil’s side; frigged by Agostino, the slut was in the midst of 
discharging. She leaned toward me. “Oh, Juliette,” she exclaimed, redoubling her 
habitual blasphemies, “oh, beloved soul, how crime doth delight, how puissant are
its effects! what a mighty grip hath its charms upon a sensitive spirit!”

And the howls of Borghese, who for her part was discharging like a Messalina, 
precipitated our ejaculations and those of our lackeys, being briskly frigged by us.

Our agitation having subsided, we devoted the ensuing moment of repose to 
verifying the results of our criminal acts: the whores were sighing their last … and
cruel death robbed us of the pleasure of torturing them some more. Hardly 
satisfied by the havoc we had just wrought, we turned our hands to pillaging the 
house, then we destroyed it. There are times in life when the desire to wallow in 
disorder is such as not to be sated by anything, and when execrations, even the 
most pronounced, only faintly fulfill an excessive inclination to evil.

We walked away into the night, under a sky filled with stars. We had 
abandoned the plunder to our lackeys who were thereby to earn some thirty 
thousand francs from its resale.

From Paestum we retraced our steps to Vietri, where we boarded a small 
vessel for Capri. It sailed an easy course, tacking frequently close in to the land, 
and enabling us to miss none of the picturesque sites along the sublime coast of 
that peninsula. We put in for lunch at Amalfi, ancient Etruscan town enjoying an 
incomparable location. After that we landed again at Point Campanella, having 
followed a shore that remained extraordinary every mile. Of the Surrentines who 
lived here long ago we found only the remains of a temple of Minerva. The 
weather being fair, we set sail and in two short hours, passing the three little 
islands in the Galli group, we entered the port of Capri.

The island of Capri, which must measure some ten miles around, is girt on all 
sides by the highest crags. The one harbor is the little port on the landward side, 
facing the Bay of Naples. In shape the island describes an ellipse four miles long 
by two at its greatest width; it is divided into two parts, upper and lower Capri. A 
prodigiously high mountain makes for the division, acting as the Apennines do in 
Italy. Communication between the two parts is by a stairway of one hundred and 
fifty steps hewn in the face of sheer rock.

Tiberius seldom climbed them; it was the lower part he preferred, where the 
weather is more temperate, and it was there he built his pleasure domes and his 
palaces, one of which is, however, perched on the tip of a rock rising so far above 
the water that the eye can barely discern the fishermen’s boats moored below. 
That particular palace served as the theater for his most piquant lewd revels. 
’Twas from the summit of a tower poised on a spur of rock, and whose vestiges 
are still to be seen, that fierce Tiberius used to have children of both sexes flung 
to their death, once they were of no further use to his lust.

“Fuck the devil,” Clairwil muttered, “how he must have discharged watching 
the victims of his libertinage plummet from these heights. Oh, dear angel,” she 
went on, hugging me to her, “he was a voluptuous rascal, that Tiberius. What if 
we were to look for something to throw off this precipice as the Emperor used to 
do?”

And it was then that Borghese, guessing what was on our minds, pointed to a 
little girl of nine or ten who was tending a she-goat a short distance away.

“Just what we want,” said Clairwil. “But our guides?”

“They may be sent home. We need simply tell them that we have decided to 
take a nap here.”

No sooner said than done; we find ourselves alone. Borghese herself fetches 
over the child.

“Who are you?” we ask her.

“Poor and destitute,” the little darling replies humbly. “This goat is all we have 
and mother is sick and always in bed and if it weren’t for the goat and for me, she
would surely die.”

“Why, this is a rare stroke of good luck,” said the infernal Clairwil. “We must tie
the two of them together, goat and girl, and send them over the edge.”

“Quite right, but not before we amuse ourselves,” said I. “I for one am 
dreadfully curious to find out how this child is made; health, freshness, innocence 
glow in her young charms: it would be ridiculous not to divert ourselves with 
them.”

And will you believe it, my friends? Yes, we had the cruelty to take that child’s 
maidenhead, which was accomplished with a pointed stone; to flay her with 
brambles which we found growing near at hand; next, to bind her to her nanny 
and to push them both over the edge of the precipice, and to watch them fall and 
disappear into the sea; and what lent their acuteness to our three discharges was 
the knowledge that the murder was twofold, since we were also causing the death
of the child’s infirm mother who, deprived of the resources represented by the 
two objects we had just destroyed, would surely not fail to perish in her turn.

“That is how I like my horrors,” I declared to my friends; “either make them 
thorough and extensive, or refrain from undertaking them at all.”

“Yes,” Clairwil agreed, “but it would have been good to have asked the child 
where her mother lives. For it would have been delightful to see her expire from 
want.”

“Roguish thing!” I said to my friend, “I wager there is not a person on earth 
able to boast of your capacities for refining a crime.”

And we continued our promenade.

Most eager to learn whether the happy inhabitants of this island resembled, 
through vigor as regarded the men, through charms as regarded the women, 
Naples’ divine breed, we betook ourselves to see the Governor, and delivered to 
him a personal letter from Ferdinand.

Having read it, “I am surprised,” said he, “that the King could have thought to 
issue me such instructions. Can he be unaware that my position here is more that
of a spy set to watch these people than of a representative of the Crown? Capri is 
a republic of which the royally appointed governor is merely the president. By 
what right would His Majesty have me compel these citizens, men and women, to 
surrender themselves to you? A despot’s orders, these, and. Ferdinand knows full 
well he is not the despot here. I too am fond of all such things, but find little 
opportunity to indulge in them hereabouts, where there are no public whores and 
precious few idlers or valets; nevertheless, as, according to what Ferdinand 
writes, you pay liberally, I am going to propose to a merchant’s widow of my 
acquaintance that she let you have her three daughters. She likes money and I do
not doubt but that she will be seduced by yours. These daughters, born on Capri, 
are one of them sixteen years of age, another seventeen, the eldest twenty; we 
have nothing more beautiful upon the entire island; what is your offer?”

“A thousand ounces a head,” said my friend, “funds disbursed for our 
pleasures’ sake do not come out of our own pockets, and to you, Governor, we 
promise an equal sum. But in addition we must get us three males.”

“Shall I receive the same fee for them?” asked the greedy public officer.

“Certainly. We are not people to higgle over such matters.”

And the dear man having readied everything for the lewd scene in the offing, 
asked nothing more in the way of favors save leave to watch it.

The girls were in truth splendid; the boys, healthy, vigorous, and endowed with
magnificent pricks. After having had our thorough fill of them, we mated them 
with our three virgins; we assisted in the deflowerings; however, the plucking of 
the rose was all we allowed them; they were then obliged to take refuge in our 
asses, they had permission to discharge nowhere else. The spectacle had the poor
Governor in an ecstasy, and he applauded it by masturbating nearly to 
unconsciousness: for these orgies were prolonged throughout the entire night, 
and in such a country we dared not pass the time otherwise than in anodyne 
ceremonies. We left without going to bed, after having paid the Governor 
handsomely, and promised to present his excuses to Ferdinand for not having 
done more for us, restricted as he was by the islanders’ mode of government.

Sailing back to Naples, our vessel coasted close to the land, for we remained 
spellbound by the sights along those wonderful shores. We discovered Massa, 
Sorrento, Torquato Tasso’s home, the lovely grotto of Lila de Rico, and finally 
Castellammare. There we put in to port to visit Stabiae, buried like Herculaneum, 
where Pliny the Elder used to go to see his friend Pompeianus, in whose house he 
was lying the night of the famous eruption which submerged that town along with
the others round about. The workmen excavating this one are proceeding slowly: 
when we were there, they had unearthed only a handful of buildings.

It was a rapid tour we made, weary as we were; and very eager to rest and 
refresh ourselves, we returned at last to our princely quarters, sending word to 
the King notifying him we were in the city again, and thanking him for all he had 
done to make our journey such a success.


Part Six

A few days later we received a message from His Neapolitan Highness, inviting 
us to be among his guests on the balcony of the royal palace to witness one of his
kingdom’s most unusual festivals. It was the one known as The Treat. I had 
frequently heard tell of this extravagance; but the actual thing was unlike 
anything I could have expected.

Charlotte and Ferdinand were awaiting us in a boudoir whose windows looked 
out upon the square where the holiday tumults were to occur. Among us were two
other personages, La Riccia and the Duc Gravines, a man of fifty, very libertine.

“If you are not familiar with this entertainment,” said the King after we had 
finished dinner, “you are apt to find it rather primitive.”

“That, Sire, and barbarous is how we like our entertainments,” I replied; “and I
shall add that I have long favored reviving rough sports and gladiatorial combats 
in France: a nation’s tone is maintained by bloody spectacles; where these lack, 
you are heading for decadence. When a thoughtless emperor, placing stupid 
Christianity on the throne of the Caesars, closed the circuses at Rome, what did 
the masters of the world turn into, eh? Abbots, monks, or dukes.”

“I feel just as you do,” said Ferdinand. “My aim is to revive contests between 
men and animals, and even those pitting men against men; it is in that direction I
have been moving; Gravines and La Riccia support me, and I hope we shall 
succeed.”

“And of what account can the lives of all that trash be,” Charlotte wondered, 
“when our pleasures are at stake? If we have the right to have their throats cut 
for our interests’ sake, I see no reason why we cannot do the same for the sake 
of our delights.”

“Very well, gentle ladies,” Ferdinand said to us, “issue your orders. Depending 
upon the greater or lesser degree of rigor, upon the larger or smaller number of 
police I introduce into these orgies, I can have six hundred more or fewer people 
killed: therefore indicate what your desires are in this regard.”

“The worst, the worst,” Clairwil was prompt to answer; “the more of those 
rascals you have dispatched, the better you will divert us.”

Ferdinand then murmured some instructions to one of his officers.

A cannon boomed; and we proceeded out onto the balcony. There was an 
excessively numerous crowd collected upon the square; from our vantage point 
we had the clearest view of everything.

Upon a huge scaffolding decorated with rustic ornaments is heaped a 
tremendous quantity of victuals so disposed as to compose a part of the 
decoration. Inhumanely crucified there are geese, chickens, turkeys, which, 
suspended alive and held by a single nail, amuse the people by their twitchings 
and flutterings; loaves of bread, dried cod, quarters of beef; sheep, grazing on an
artificial pasture, tended by pasteboard shepherds; upon a sea made of canvas, a 
vessel laden with food or useful articles intended for the populace. Such, laid out 
with much artistry and tastefulness, is the bait prepared for this savage nation, all
in order to commemorate and to perpetuate its voraciousness and its excessive 
propensity for theft. For, after having witnessed this sight, it would be difficult not 
to agree that it is more an exercise in pillage than a veritable festival.

We had hardly time to consider the theater for the forthcoming events when a 
second shot was heard. At this signal, the cordon of troops that has been holding 
the crowd back suddenly gives way; the people rush forward and, in the twinkling
of an eye, everything is made off with, snatched up, grabbed away, with a 
swiftness, with a frenzy impossible to describe. This terrifying scene, resembling 
the fleshing of a pack of hounds, regularly ends more or less tragically because 
disputes break out, everybody covets what his neighbor has just got his hands 
upon; and, in Naples, such differences are always settled with drawn knives, But 
this time, in accordance with our desires and thanks to Ferdinand’s foresight, 
once the scaffoldings were black with people, once they looked to be covered with
a good seven or eight hundred struggling human beings, the structure abruptly 
collapsed, and over four hundred people were crushed.

“Ah, fuck!” exclaimed Clairwil, sinking giddily upon a sofa, “ah, my friends, you
gave me no warning of this—I am dying—” and it was to La Riccia the whore 
appealed, “—fuck me, my angel, fuck me,” she sighed, “I am discharging; in all 
my life nothing I have ever been witness to has given me such pleasure.”

We re-entered the boudoir; windows and doors were shut, and the most 
delicious of all lubricious scenes was enacted, as it were, upon the ashes of the 
unfortunate plebeians sacrificed by high wickedness.

Four girls, fifteen or sixteen years old, lovely as daylight and dressed in the 
black crepe of mourning, naked underneath it, were awaiting us, standing, and in 
silence. In another part of the room, four other women, between twenty and 
thirty, each pregnant, each stark naked, silent also, and wearing grave 
expressions, seemed eager to hear our instructions. Reclining upon a couch at the
room’s far end were four young men, between eighteen and twenty years old, 
and in their hands they held their threatening pricks, and those pricks, good 
friends, those pricks were monsters: twelve whole inches in circumference, yes, 
and eighteen inches long. Not in all our lives had we beheld the like of those 
objects; and the four of us discharged merely at catching sight of them.

“These four women and these four girls,” Ferdinand explained to us, “are the 
daughters and the widows of some of the ill-starred individuals who perished a 
short while ago before our eyes. Those individuals were, I can affirm, in positions 
of particular danger when the disaster was produced, and of their deaths I am 
certain. I had these eight women summoned here well before today’s Treat began
and, locked inside a room, through a window they were able to witness the fate of
their fathers and husbands. I turn them over to you now, with them conclude 
your holiday. Out there,” the monarch continued, opening a door giving out upon 
a little garden, “out there is the pit dug for their remains when they have at last, 
after hideous sufferings, earned the right to rest in peace. Their grave…. Women, 
step this way, you must see it too.”

And the cruel man obliged them to climb down into the trench, made them lie 
down in it, then, satisfied with its dimensions, he directed our attentions back to 
the four youths.

“I am certain, Mesdames,” said he, “that you have not often beheld such 
articles.” And he took hold of those awesome pricks, hard as iron bars, and had 
us feel them, heft them, kiss them, dally with them. “The vigor of these men,” the
King went on, “at least equals their superiority of member; every one of them is 
the guarantee of fifteen or sixteen discharges, and not one yields less than twelve
ounces of sperm per ejaculation: they are the élite in my realm. They are 
Calabrians all four, and there is no province in Europe that furnishes members of 
this size. Let us enjoy them without stint.

“Four boudoirs adjoin this one; they are outfitted with everything that can 
serve lustful purposes: so let us be off, let us fuck and be fucked, let us vex, 
torment, torture to our hearts’ content, and may our imaginations, fired by the 
spectacle that has just been staged for us, ensure the thoroughness of cruelties 
and the refinement of our joys.”

“Bugger-fuck!” I said to Ferdinand, “how nicely you have the art of entertaining
persons of our temper.”

Dresses, petticoats, breeches fell quickly to the floor, and before proceeding to 
collective scenes, it appeared to be everybody’s intention to repair singly into the 
neighboring rooms for a short moment. La Riccia took with him one of the girls, a 
pregnant woman, and a fucker; Gravines encloseted himself with Olympia and an 
expectant mother; and Ferdinand took Clairwil, a fucker, another expectant 
mother, and two little girls; Charlotte chose me, and wanted to have a pair of 
fuckers with us, one of the girls, and a woman as well.

“Juliette,” the Queen of Naples addressed me as soon as we were inside our 
boudoir, “I can no longer keep to myself the emotions you have engendered in 
me: I adore you. I am too much a whore to promise you fidelity; but that 
romantic sentiment is of course valueless amongst such persons as ourselves: ’tis
not a heart I offer you, ’tis a cunt, a cunt which pours fuck whenever your hand 
touches it. In you I see someone of my own mind, of my own way of thinking, 
and, incontestably, I prefer you to either of your sisters. Your Olympia is a clod, 
she shows some mettle occasionally, but the rest of the time she is timorous and 
at bottom she is a coward; a clap of thunder would suffice to convert such a 
woman. Clairwil, yes, she is a superb creature, with infinite wit, I don’t deny it, 
but her tastes and mine are not at all the same: for exercising her cruelties she 
likes men only, and while I am willing enough to sacrifice that sex, it is however 
the blood of mine I most enjoy shedding. She adopts, besides, an overbearing 
and superior manner toward us all, and it is prodigiously hurtful to my pride. With
no fewer resources and perhaps with many more than she, you, Juliette, do not 
affect so much vanity; that comforts; I believe there is more sweetness in your 
character, just as much wickedness in your head, but in your heart a greater 
capacity for loyalty toward your friends. In short, I like you best, and this 
diamond, worth fifty thousand crowns, which I beg you to accept, may persuade 
you it is so.”

“Charlotte,” said I, declining to take the gem, “you are a woman to whom one 
may confess having vices; I am touched by your feelings in my regard, and mine 
for you, be sure of it, are the same. But I shall own to you, my dear, and it is one 
of my idiosyncrasies, I accord no importance whatever to gifts, only what I take 
counts in my eyes. And if you care to satisfy me on that head, why, you can do so
very easily.”

“How?”

“Before anything else, swear by your love for me that you will never tell 
anyone of the imperious desire that devours me.”

“I swear to it.”

“I want to steal your husband’s treasures, to that end I want you to provide 
me the means.”

“Lower your voice,” said the Queen, “these people could overhear us. One 
moment, I shall send them into the next room.

“Now,” Charlotte continued once we were alone, “we may chat in security. I 
have a proposal to make to you; accept it, there is no other way for you to 
convince me of the sincerity of your feelings in my regard. Oh, Juliette!” she 
added, “the trust you place in me demands that I in return place mine in you. And
I too, my dear, I am meditating a crime; will you help me?”

“Even were it at the risk of a thousand lives. Speak.”

“If you but knew how bored I am with my husband!”

“Despite his indulgence?”

“Is it for my sake he behaves as he does? He prostitutes me out of libertinage, 
out of jealousy; thus appeasing my passions, he reckons to forestall the birth of 
desires in me, and he prefers that it be through his will and choice I am fucked 
rather than through my own.”

“A droll policy.”

“It is the one he practices, it is that of an Italianized Spaniard, and there is 
nothing worse on the face of the earth.”

“And you desire….”

“To poison this tiresome man, to become regent once he is out of the way. The 
people prefer me to him, they adore my children; and I shall rule alone; you shall 
become my favorite, and your fortune is made.”

“No, Charlotte, I shall not live with you, I am not attracted by the role you 
offer me; in addition, I am fond of my own country and am eager to return there 
soon. But you may rely upon my aid, since Ferdinand, who has a store of poisons 
of every sort, doubtless keeps them out of your reach. From me you shall have 
what you need; but a good turn in exchange for a good turn, Charlotte, bear in 
mind that what I promise is yours only provided I get your husband’s treasure. 
What does it amount to?”

“It cannot exceed eighty million.”

“In currencies?”

“In ingots as well as in piasters, ounces, and sequins.”

“How do we proceed?”

“You see that window,” said Charlotte, pointing to a casement window not far 
from the one at which we were standing, “have a wagon with some good horses 
underneath it the day after tomorrow; I shall steal the key and hand everything 
down to you in sacks.”

“And the watch?”

“No sentinels are posted on this side.”

“Listen,” I said to Charlotte, whose undoing I was excitedly plotting at that 
very moment, “there are steps I must take in order to obtain the poison you 
require, and I do not care to venture into this delicate matter unless I am sure of 
where I stand. Sign this paper,” said I, writing it out on the spot, “I shall then feel
safe in acting, and neither of us will have anything further to worry about.”

Blinded by her love for me, pressed by the extreme desire to be rid of her 
husband, Charlotte signed; and, signing, proved that prudence is rarely the 
consort of great passions. Herein as follows is the text she ratified:

I shall steal all my husband’s treasure, and give it in payment to her who 
supplies me the poison necessary to send him to the next world.

C. de L., Reg. N.

“Excellent,” said I, “that puts me entirely at ease. The day after tomorrow, at 
the hour fixed, you may count upon the wagon. Serve me well, Charlotte; and so 
shall you be served in return. Now let us turn to play.”

“Ah, dearest friend,” cried the Queen, overwhelming me with kisses, “what 
services you render me and how I adore you!”

The fool! how far from reciprocal were my feelings. Oh, it was no longer 
possible to maintain the illusion, we had shed overmuch fuck together; I delighted
only in the thought of her doom, and the document to which she had 
thoughtlessly put her name guaranteed it.

“Shall we frig each other,” she said, “before calling in the accessories to our 
debauchery?”

And without waiting for me to answer, the whore pushes me upon a bed, 
kneels between my thighs and sucks me, the while tickling my cunt and my 
asshole both at once. ’Twas then I availed myself of the faculty women have for 
mental infidelities; it was from Charlotte I was receiving voluptuous sensations, I 
was covered by her pollutions, her kisses, and yet no thought absorbed me save 
that of betraying Charlotte.

Adulterous wives, there is your portrait: lying in your husbands’ arms, to your 
master you abandon only the bodily part of yourselves, and the sensations that 
arise in you are never but a response to your lover. The cuckolds delude 
themselves, supposing they are the cause of the raptures into which their motions
plunge you, when actually, rub as much as they please, they are incapable of 
igniting even a spark. Bewitching sex, continue this deceit, it is natural; proof 
thereof resides in the suppleness of your imaginations; compensate yourselves 
thus, when you cannot do otherwise, for the preposterous chains of chastity and 
of wedlock, and never lose sight of the fact that if Nature made you a cunt for 
men to fuck, her hand at the very same instant created you the heart needed to 
betray them.

Charlotte waxed drunk on my sperm, and I must honestly avow that it spilled 
forth in floods at the idea, delicious for a mind like mine, of forever ruining her 
who was responsible for its outpouring. She flings herself upon my breast, we 
pollute each other with ardor, she sucks my mouth, my nipples, and as I frig her 
to perfection, the tribade is shaken by twenty spasms in a row. We entwine 
ourselves, each buries her face between the other’s legs; tongue to clitoris, 
libertine finger in asshole and cunt, we sot ourselves upon each other’s fuck, all 
the while preoccupied by very dissimilar thoughts.

Finally, Charlotte, all afire, is in a mood for libertinage, she rings, she would 
have me be the center of everything at first; the pregnant woman, within reach of
my right hand, is offered to my vexations; the girl, straddling my chest, 
simultaneously offers me the sweetest cunt to lick and the most charming ass. 
Charlotte excites the pricks and herself pilots them into me.

“I am infatuated by the idea of having a queen for my bawd,” I declare to 
Charlotte; “go to it, whore, ply your trade.”

But engines of the size of those Ferdinand has procured for us are not easy to 
accommodate; and however veteran may be my charms, I am unable to endure, 
without preparation, such monstrous attacks. Charlotte therefore moistens the 
thoroughfares; to the entrance of my cunt and to the fucker’s gargantuan 
member she applies an ointment thanks to which, at the first lunge, the monster 
is able to pass to the midway mark. However, the pain is so sharp that, expelling 
a furious cry, I send flying the little girl who has been perched above my chest; I 
struggle, thrash, seek to rid myself of the shaft. My efforts are countered by 
Charlotte, she pushes us together, my fucker and me, and thus aided, the hero 
thunders to the farthermost depths of my womb: I had never suffered so much. 
But these thorns are soon transformed into roses; such is my rider’s skillfulness, 
such the power of his strokes, that at the fourth heave of his loins my fuck 
answers, and from then on everything moves smoothly. Charlotte, favoring the 
act, stimulating the organs and the asshole of my fucker, to my left hand offers 
her buttocks, which I molest with quite as much violence as I do those of the 
pregnant woman, and the little girl, tongued by me, splashes her dulcet 
ejaculation upon my face. What energy in that Calabrian! He saws me for twenty 
minutes, finally erupts, and refucks me three more times without retiring from the
lists; I put him aside after an hour of this. His comrade replaces him. While I am 
fucking with this second one, Charlotte decides she would like to see both of them
in my body. She arranges our positions. I am in the second fucker’s arms, 
stretched out on top of him, ’tis I who do the fucking while he lies quietly still; I 
handle, I maltreat a cunt with my right hand, my left is socratizing an ass, my 
tongue is licking a clitoris. The first man, assisted by the Queen, presents himself 
at my asshole; but habituated though I am to this mode of pleasure-taking, we 
battle for a quarter of an hour, without his succeeding in making the least 
headway into the breach. These multiple efforts cause me an incredible agitation: 
I gnash my teeth, foam at the mouth, I bite everything I can get at, I drench with
fuck the prick ploughing my cunt, ’tis upon that prick I vent my wrath at being 
unable to incorporate another one anally. By dint of perseverance and cunning, it 
is nevertheless beginning to progress, I feel it; my encunter stirs from his 
passivity, contributing a heave of the loins to facilitate his comrade’s task. I utter 
a piercing scream, I am embuggered. … It beggared comparison with anything I 
had ever experienced previously.

“What a divine spectacle!” cried Charlotte, masturbating smartly in front of us, 
and sometimes b

ending near to kiss me. “Christ! what an aperture! Happy Juliette!”

And I discharged, and I was like one run amuck, I lost sight of everything, was 
deaf to everything, all my powers of sensation had concentrated in my erotic 
regions; I belonged uniquely to joy.

Both my men, without withdrawing, simultaneously fought another fierce bout,
and when I dislodged them, fuck covered me down to the heels, it seeped from 
my pores.

“Your turn, slut,” I say to Charlotte, “duplicate what I have just done if you 
care to know the meaning of pleasure.”

She requires little urging; promptly stuffed before and behind, the jade proves 
to me that if her husband has been allowing her a few amusements, with a view 
to placating a libertinage which might pose dangers to his own safety, he has not 
been entirely wrong. Like us cruel in her voluptuous moments, the bitch asks me, 
while she cunt-sucks the little girl and is being fucked in cunt and ass, to tease 
the pregnant woman. That poor soul implores my mercy; I am not to be moved. 
Angered and heated by lewdness, I bring my knee up against her stomach, she 
totters backward and falls, I leap and stamp upon her belly; then I beat her, I 
throttle her; watching it all, Charlotte eggs me on, stammering forth horrors. 
Having got herself double-fucked twice, the whore at last dismisses the men, and 
rises. We quaff off two bottle of champagne and pass back into the salon where 
we find all the company already gathered. Everybody was relating his prowesses; 
it was easy to deduce that it had not been in our boudoir alone that pregnant 
women had met with abuse: not one of them was able to hold herself upright; 
Gravines’ especially … she was about to enter labor; and the villain had flogged 
her half to death.

Dinner was magnificent in the extreme; the girls waited upon us at table, and 
the pregnant women, lying on the floor beneath our feet, were the targets of all 
kinds of hard treatment. Seated next to Clairwil, I found the opportunity to 
mention to her the trick for which I had laid the groundwork; although I could 
give her only one or two details, she perfectly grasped my design, congratulated 
me, affirmed that I was the cleverest and the most venturesome woman she 
knew.

Electrified by the delicate fare and the exquisite wines, we removed, tipsily, to 
a superb hall readied for the orgies that we needed to celebrate. There, the 
agents were Ferdinand, Gravines, La Riccia, Clairwil, Charlotte, Olympia, and 
myself. The victims: the four pregnant women, the four young girls who had 
waited upon us at dinner, and the eight comely children in the one sex and the 
other whose asses had dispensed the brandies which followed coffee. Fourteen 
stout warriors, at least as grandly proportioned, as high-strung as those we had 
drained in the morning, appeared, their lances couched; they were all naked, 
quivering, and respectfully, with bated breath, awaiting the laws it would please 
us to decree in their regard. The stage required to be lit, since we had tarried 
long at table and the hour was advanced: five hundred candles, hid by green 
gauze shades, produced a soft and most agreeable light throughout that hall.

“No more privacy, no more intimate conversation,” said the King; “henceforth 
we must operate within full view of one another.”

Thereupon, in the most anarchical fashion, we fling ourselves at the nearest 
object to hand: we fuck, have fucked, are fucked; but cruelty always presides 
over lewd doings as disorderly as ours. Here, breasts were being kneaded and 
wrung; there, asses were being lashed; to the right cunts were being stretched, 
gravid women were being martyrized to the left, and moans and sighs of pain or 
of pleasure, mingled with lamentations to one side, with awful blasphemies to the 
other side, were for a good while the only sounds to be heard. Little by little, 
however, the more energetic outbursts heralding discharges began to ring forth; 
Gravines was the first to utter his yell. Alas! no sooner had he pronounced the 
expressions announcing his delirium than we saw fall at his feet, in the middle of 
the swirling groups surrounding him, a woman, her throat cut, the fruit torn from 
her womb, and mother and child bathed both in blood.

“That is not my way of going about it,” said La Riccia, ordering one of those 
swollen sows to be tied fast to the wall. “Your attention, if you please,” said he, 
“kindly watch.”

He dons a pair of hobnailed boots, places his hands on the shoulders of two 
men and catapults himself feet first at the belly of the would-be mother who, her 
seams split, rent, bloodied, faints in her bonds and looses her worthless fruit, 
upon which the lustful nobleman straightway sprays his foaming seed. Very close 
to the spot where this occurred, being fucked at once frontwise and from behind, 
sucking the device of a youth who chose this moment to discharge into my 
mouth, frigging a cunt with either hand, I could not help but share the Prince’s 
pleasures, and after his example I surrendered my sperm. Doing so, I cast a 
glance at Clairwil: someone was embuggering her; a young girl was sucking her 
cunt and the slut was flogging a little boy; she too discharges. Charlotte, 
en-cunted, was sucking a little boy, frigging a couple of girls, and was having a 
pregnant woman flogged upon the belly. Ferdinand was operating upon a girl: he 
was plucking at her parts with red-hot pincers; he was being sucked apace, and 
when he sensed his discharge near, the villain, armed with a scalpel, sliced off his 
victim’s nipples and tossed them at us. Such, roughly speaking, were our 
pleasures when Ferdinand suggested that we move into an adjoining chamber 
where an ingenious machine, said he, was ready to put the pregnant women to 
an interesting death. The two of them who are left are in consequence affixed to 
large steel plates, one woman facing upward, the other facing downward, in such 
sort that their bellies are in exact perpendicular line: the upper plate is elevated 
ten feet above the lower.

“All right,” says the King, “make ready for pleasure.”

Everyone presses around, and several minutes later Ferdinand touches a lever, 
and the two plates, one rising, the other descending, come together with such 
force that the two creatures, colliding, are, they and their fruit, shortly squashed 
to a pulp. You will, I trust, have no trouble understanding that not one of those 
present was able to resist this spectacle, not one who did not salute it with a fuck 
and other expressions of divine praise.

“Shall we move on to another room?” said our amiable host. “Other joys may 
be awaiting us elsewhere.”

This enormous hall was occupied by a vast theater; seven different sets of 
equipment for inflicting that many varieties of death were in a state of readiness 
there; four torturers, each naked and handsome as Mars, stood by to administer 
each torture, the first of these being fire; the second, the whip; the third, the 
rope; the fourth, the wheel; the fifth, the pale; the sixth, decapitation; the 
seventh, general dissection. Each guest was provided with a separate loge 
containing a gallery of fifty portraits of children, boys and girls, all as pretty as 
one could hope to see. We assumed our individual places, each accompanied by a
fucker, a little girl, and a little boy, whose functions were to minister to our 
pleasures during the executions. Next to each portrait hung a silken cord 
activating a bell.

“Each shall, in his turn, select a victim from among the fifty representations 
surrounding him,” Ferdinand announced; “he shall ring the bell corresponding to 
the object of his choice, his victim shall appear immediately in his loge; he shall 
dally with that victim for a moment. You will notice that from each loge a 
staircase leads up to the stage; preliminaries over, the guest shall march his 
victim up, direct him to the torture he deems most arousing, then inflict it himself,
if he cares to; otherwise, he shall signal to the torturer in charge, and the victim, 
taken promptly in hand by that officer, shall be sacrificed before his eyes. But for 
your pleasures’ sake I urge you not to act save one by one: we have no need to 
hurry, dear guests, and life’s best spent hours are always those one spends 
wresting life away from others.”

“Damn me,” Clairwil said to the King, “if I have often encountered an 
imagination so fertile as yours.”

“Oh,” rejoined the Neapolitan, “mine is a claim to only very modest glory. All 
these fantasies used to raise the pricks of my forebears, those tyrants of ancient 
Syracuse. In my archives I uncovered traces of these horrors, studied them, for 
they impressed me in the most favorable sense; I enjoy reviving tradition with my
friends.”

Gravines rings first; his choice falls upon a youth of sixteen, superb to see. The
boy appears, and Gravines, who has sole rights to the use of him, whips him, 
sucks him, bites his member, crushes one of his testicles, embuggers him, and 
finally sends him off to be burned: as a sodomite, the sarcastic Duke declares, it 
is only fitting that he perish by fire. Clairwil rings next and, needless to say, her 
choice also settles upon a male: he was scarcely eighteen years old, he was as 
fair as Adonis; the wicked soul sucks, frigs, fustigates him, has him lick her cunt 
and ass; then, springing up to the stage with him, the buggeress impales him 
with her own hands, having herself embuggered by one of the torturers in the 
meantime.

Olympia’s turn follows; a thirteen-year-old girl is the object she chooses. She 
caresses her, and has her hanged.

After her comes Ferdinand. Like Clairwil, he chooses a youth. “I am fond of 
torturing women,” he explains, “but I take even greater pleasure in killing 
individuals of my sex.”

The adolescent appears: twenty years of age, membered like Hercules, with 
the face of Love. Ferdinand has himself tupped, tups in return, flagellates his 
victim, conducts him to the apparatus upon which he is to be broken. Broken, the 
victim is strapped to a wheel and left to expire there, at the rear of the stage.

La Riccia’s fancy is caught by a maid of sixteen, lovely as the Goddess of 
Youth, and after having subjected her to all manner of abominations, he has her 
chopped up into small pieces.

Charlotte rings for a little girl of twelve, and once she is done frolicking with 
her, the Queen, while being fucked by two men, has the child beheaded.

I summon an eighteen-year-old girl, superb; never in my life had I feasted my 
eyes on a more beautiful body. After having kissed, fondled, licked every part of 
it, I lead her upon the stage; and working in concert with the executioners, I give 
her the whip. ’Tis no commonplace whip, but a formidable bullwhip, each stroke 
brings away a chunk of flesh the size of your hand; she expires, and her torturers 
fuck me as I lie upon her corpse.

So pleasant did we find this game that it had inevitably to be played for a very 
long time. All told, we immolated eleven hundred and seventy-six victims, which 
made one hundred sixty-eight apiece, among them six hundred girls and five 
hundred seventy-six boys. Charlotte and Princess Borghese were the only ones 
who sacrificed none but girls. The individuals for whose destruction I was 
responsible included an equal number of males and females; the same held true 
for La Riccia; but Clairwil, Gravines, and King Ferdinand immolated strictly 
nothing but men, and in the great majority of cases, did their killing personally. 
Throughout the entire exercise we were fucked incessantly, and our athletes had 
to be replaced several times over. We retired at the end of forty-five consecutive 
hours of rare riot and divine pleasures.

“Madame,” I whispered to Charlotte as I took leave of her, “do not forget the 
little paper you signed for me….”

“And you,” was Charlotte’s reply, “don’t forget our appointment. Be as faithful 
as I in abiding by our bargain, I ask no more of you than that.”

Once home, I explained to Clairwil in full what I had only been able to hint at 
before.

“O delightful project!” she said.

“And you see, of course, where I want it to lead.”

“What do you mean?”

“I loathe Charlotte.”

“My darling! Kiss me … how I share your feelings!”

“Dear Clairwil, that woman is mad about me, she is forever chasing after me 
with requests to make her discharge. And nothing bores me so much as these 
performances. Only you, my angel, in all the world there is no one but you whom 
I am willing to forgive for loving me.”

“What a mind you have, Juliette!”

“It is more than a little like yours.”

“Oh, indeed it is, my precious. … So then, tell me, what do you plan to do with 
this Charlotte?”

“The day after I have the contents of the royal exchequer, I send this note of 
hers to the robbed Ferdinand: ‘I shall steal all my husband’s treasure, and give it 
in payment to her who supplies me the poison necessary to send him to the next 
world’—when the dear man reads that he will, I should hope, condemn Charlotte 
to death or at least to some frightful prison.”

“Yes, but an accused Charlotte will reveal her accomplices; she will say that it 
was to us she turned over his riches.”

“Will it be presumable that, if we were Charlotte’s correspondents, we would 
send the note to the King?”

“Presumable or not, Ferdinand will have searches conducted.”

“I shall see to it that they are fruitless. Everything shall be buried in our 
garden. As for the King, I shall go to see him myself. If his suspicions fasten too 
firmly upon us, I shall threaten to make public the ghastly joke he played the day 
before yesterday during The Treat. Ferdinand, being weak and stupid, will be 
frightened, and that will be an end to the matter. And then, too, ’Tis an inglorious 
triumph earned from a victory achieved without peril.

Gaining wealth means taking risks: is it your opinion that fifty or sixty million 
are not worth going to some trouble to acquire?”

“If caught, it will mean death for us.”

“What is that to me? There is nothing I fear less in this world than the noose. 
Is it not common knowledge that death upon the gallows is accompanied by a 
discharge? And discharging is something that will never hold terrors for me. If 
ever a judge sends me to the scaffold, you will see me go forward with light and 
impudent step…. But calm yourself, Clairwil, crime is our friend, we are its 
favorites. In such enterprises as this we cannot fail.”

“Are you thinking of including Borghese in our scheme?”

“No, I don’t like that woman anymore.”

“Fuck! for my part I detest her.”

“She should be got rid of as soon as possible.”

“There is the trip we are to make to Vesuvius tomorrow….”

“Indeed there is; that volcano’s deeps must serve as her grave. What a way to 
die!”

“I imagine it as horrible. Otherwise it would not have occurred to me.”

“I should like something still more cruel.”

“When the two of us hate, Juliette, oh, we do our hating well!”

“We must dine with her as usual.”

“And even fawn upon her.”

“Let me manage that, you know that my features and my character are well 
suited to treachery.”

“We must frig her tonight.”

“Of course.”

“Oh, my angel, we are going to be very rich!”

“This stroke once accomplished, there will be no further tarrying in Naples.”

“Nor in Italy. We must get us back to France, buy properties, and spend our 
remaining days together … what delights await us! Nothing will restrict them but 
the laws of our desires.”

“The instantaneous satisfaction of them all—oh, dear heart, what happiness 
money brings! What a fool is he who abstains from employing every means, 
legitimate and otherwise, for procuring it. Clairwil, they will sooner put me a 
thousand times to death than deprive me of my taste for theft; it is among my 
greatest pleasures; ’tis one of the fundamental needs of my existence. When I 
steal I experience the sensation an ordinary woman feels when she is frigged. In 
my case, all crimes chafe the nerve endings in the zones of pleasure, just as do 
fingers or pricks; I discharge merely from plotting a felony. Why, here’s an 
example, this diamond: Charlotte offered it to me, it is worth fifty thousand 
crowns. I declined it. As a gift, it displeased me. Stolen, I delight in it.”

“You took it from her?”

“I did. It is no wonder to me that some people have surrendered to this 
passion solely for the voluptuous effects it produces; I would willingly steal for the
rest of my life, and I declare to you, that had I an income of two million a year, 
you would still see me a thief out of libertinage.”

“Ah, my love,” said Clairwil, “how certain it is that Nature created us for each 
other. Never fear, we shall not part.”

We dined with Borghese, the three of us discussed plans for the following day’s
excursion to Vesuvius. That evening we were at the Opera; the King came to our 
box to pay us his respects, all eyes were turned our way. Home again, we 
proposed to Borghese that a part of the night be given over to eating roasts with 
Cyprian wine; she took gladly to the idea; and we, Clairwil and I, carried 
deceitfulness to the point of wringing seven or eight discharges from the woman 
our villainy had already doomed, and of discharging almost as many times in her 
embrace. After that we let her go to bed, and the two of us spent the remainder 
of the night together; and before it was over, we owed another three or four 
spasms to the enchanting thought that on the morrow we were to make a 
mockery of every sentiment of trust and friendship. Such mischief, I realize, is 
inconceivable except to special mentalities like ours; but he is deserving of pity 
who lacks the capacity for it, great pleasures are denied him; I venture to affirm 
that he ignores what true happiness is.

We rose at an early hour. Criminal projects prevent sleep, they sow tumult in 
the senses; the mind revolves them, explores them from all sides, savors all their 
ramifications, and through anticipation you delight unendingly in the pleasure with
which you know you are going to overflow upon actually committing the atrocity.

A coach-and-six conveyed us to the base of Vesuvius. There, we found guides 
who provide the rigs and the ropes whereby visitors are helped to climb the 
volcano: it takes two hours to attain the summit. The ascent, before it is over, will
have ruined a pair of new shoes. We set out in merry spirits; we poked fun at 
Olympia; and the poor creature was far from grasping the double meaning of our 
persiflage, from divining what lay behind our playful teasing.

It is a dreadful task, struggling up that mountain: ankle-deep in ashes the 
whole time, if you advance four paces, you slip back six; and there is the 
perpetual fear lest you break through some thin crust and drop into molten lava. 
We arrived exhausted and sat down to rest once we were at the lip of the crater. 
’Twas from there we gazed with prodigious interest into the throat of this volcano 
which, in its moments of wrath, makes all the Kingdom of Naples tremble.

“Do you think there is anything to fear today?” we asked our guides.

“No,” they replied, “some brimstone, some sulphur, a few bits of pumice may 
perhaps come up, but it’s not likely that there will be an eruption.”

“Well then, my friends,” said Clairwil, “give us the basket containing our 
refreshments and have the kindness to go back to the village. We are going to 
spend the day here, our intention is to do some sketching.”

“But if something were to happen?”

“Did you not say that nothing will happen?”

“We cannot be altogether sure.”

“Why, when something happens, we will make our way down to the village 
where we hired you, we can see it from here.”

And with the distribution of three or four gold coins the conversation was 
brought quickly to an end.

As soon as they were some four hundred yards away, Clairwil and I exchanged 
glances. “Shall it be ruse?” I murmured to my friend.

“No, force,” she answered.

We leapt upon Olympia the next instant.

“Slut,” she was told, “we are tired of you; we led you to this place with a view 
to your destruction. There is a volcano below: you are going to be thrown into it 
alive.”

“Oh, my friends!” she gasped. “What have I done?”

“Nothing at all. We are tired of you. Is that not quite enough?”

So saying, we stuffed a pocket-handkerchief into her mouth, to avoid her 
screams and jeremiads. Clairwil then tied her hands with scarves we had brought 
for this purpose; I tied her feet; and When we had reduced her to helplessness, 
we contemplated her and laughed. Tears flowed from her beautiful eyes, splashed
down in pearly drops upon her beautiful bosom. We undressed her, we laid hands 
on her, stroked and molested every part of her body; we mistreated her snowy 
breasts, we spanked her charming ass, we pricked her buttocks with hatpins, we 
plucked hairs from her bush; and I bit her clitoris almost in two.

At length, after two hours of unremitting vexations, we picked her up by her 
bound hands and feet, carried her to the brink, and let her fall. Down she went 
into the volcano, and for several minutes we listened to the sounds of her body 
crashing from ledge to ledge, being torn by the sharp outcropping rocks: 
gradually the sounds subsided, and then we heard nothing more.

“That is that,” said Clairwil, who had been frigging herself with both hands ever
since letting go of Olympia’s body. “Ah, fuck, my love, let’s both lie down on the 
edge of this volcano and discharge now; we have just committed a crime, one of 
those heavenly deeds which mortals deem atrocious. Well, I say, if what we have 
done is a true outrage to Nature, then let her avenge herself, for she can if she 
wishes; let an eruption occur, let lava boil up from that inferno down there, let a 
cataclysm snuff out our lives this very instant….”

I was in no state to speak. My head reeling already, my only reply was to my 
friend’s pollutions, which I paid back tenfold. She too fell silent. Hugged tight in 
each other’s arms, writhing with joy, frigging each other like frenzied tribades, we
seemed bent on exchanging souls through the medium of our panted sighs. A few
lewd words, a few blasphemies, no other utterances came from us. Through our 
deed we were insulting Nature, defying her, baiting her; and triumphant in the 
impunity in which her unconcern left us, we looked to be profiting from her 
indulgence only in order to irritate her the more grievously.

“And so,” said Clairwil, the first to be restored to reason, “you see, Juliette, 
how little Nature is disturbed by mankind’s alleged crimes; she does not want the 
power to swallow us up, she could destroy us even if it were in the depths of 
delight. Has she done so? Ah, be easy, there is no crime on earth capable of 
drawing Nature’s wrath down upon us; rather, all crimes are to her advantage, all 
are useful to her, and whenever she inspires it in us, be certain that it is because 
she has need of crime.”

Clairwil had no sooner finished than a shower of stones shot up out of the 
volcano and rained down around us.

“Ah ha!” said I, not even deigning to get to my feet, “Olympia’s revenge! These
bits of sulphur, these pebbles are her farewell to us, she notifies us that she is 
already in the entrails of the earth.”

“Nothing more readily explained than this phenomenon,” Clairwil remarked. 
“Whenever a weighty body falls into the volcano, by agitating the matter eternally
boiling in its depths, it provokes a slight eruption.”

“Come, let us have our lunch, and be assured when I tell you that the rain of 
stones which we have just witnessed is nothing else, my dear, than Olympia’s 
request for her clothes; we must not refuse it.”

And after having sorted out the gold and precious stones, we made the rest 
into a bundle and threw the telltale evidence into the same crater which had just 
received our friend. Then we opened our lunch-basket. No further sound came 
from below; the crime had been consummated, Nature was content. We made our
descent and found our guides again at the foot of the mountain.

“A perfectly frightful misfortune has befallen us,” we said, going up to them 
with tears in our eyes, “our unlucky companion ventured too near to the edge and
… alas! she tumbled over it. Oh, good people, is there anything to be done?”

“Nothing,” they all said; “you ought to have let us remain with you, this would 
not have happened. She is lost. You will never see her again.”

Upon hearing that cruel announcement our feigned tears flowed the faster and,
wringing our hands, we stepped into our coach. Three-quarters of an hour later 
we were in Naples.

We published our misfortune the very same day; Ferdinand came in person to 
console us, believing we were truly sisters and devoted to one another. Depraved 
though he was, the thought never entered his mind that foul play might have 
overtaken Olympia; we did not disturb his illusions. We sent the Princess’ retinue 
back to Rome with certificates of her accident, and we sent to inquire of her 
family what disposition it wished to have made of her jewelry, valued, we wrote, 
at thirty thousand francs, although in fact she left behind better than one hundred
thousand francs worth of spoils, seven-tenths of which we had appropriated, you 
understand; but we had left Naples by the time the family’s answer arrived there, 
and were able to assume undisputed possession of the entirety of our friend’s 
property.

Olympia, Princess Borghese, was a gentle, trusting, affectionate woman, willful
in her pleasures, libertine by temperament, with imagination, but who lacked 
depth and rigor in her principles; timorous, still in prejudice’s grip, apt at any 
moment to give way before a reverse, and who, owing to nothing more than this 
one weakness, was unsuitable company for a pair of women as corrupt as 
ourselves.

A more important affair lay before us. The next day was the one I had chosen 
with Charlotte for the attack upon her husband’s treasure. Clairwil and I therefore
spent the rest of the evening preparing a dozen big chests and trunks, and having
a large hole dug in our garden: this was done in utmost secrecy and the 
workman, whose brains we scrupulously blew out once he had completed his task,
was the first object buried in that pit: “Either have no accomplices,” Machiavelli 
advises, “or get rid of them as soon as they have served their purpose.”

Then came the moment to appear with the wagon beneath the specified 
windows. Clairwil and I, disguised as men, drove the vehicle ourselves; for we 
had dismissed our servants for the night, and sent them out to a party in the 
countryside. Charlotte was at her post and waiting: in her eagerness for the 
promised poison, her reward if all went well, she did not wish to be guilty of the 
slightest negligence. For four hours she lowered out bags which, as fast as they 
came down, we stowed into our chests; and finally we heard her say that there 
was nothing more left.

“Until tomorrow,” we replied.

And we drove quickly to our mansion, lucky enough not to have met with a 
living soul during the whole time the operation lasted. A second man helped us 
unload and bury the trunks and chests, and he was buried on top of them when 
his usefulness was at an end.

Weary, fretful, anxious now that we were so rich, we went to bed this one time
without thinking of pleasures. We woke the next morning to find all the town 
talking about the robbery that had been committed at the Royal Palace; this 
seemed the propitious moment to have the Queen’s note delivered to Ferdinand, 
and it was brought to him by an anonymous hand. No sooner had he read it than,
flying into a mighty rage, he himself placed his wife under arrest, turned her over 
to the captain of his guard with orders to take her to Sant’ Elmo, where she was 
given the coarsest raiment to wear, the simplest fare to eat, and placed in solitary
confinement. A week passes without his going to see her. She beseeches him to 
come. At last he appears. The villainous creature blurts out everything and 
compromises us in the most thorough manner. Ferdinand rushes to our address, 
furious; and as the conversation we had with him is interesting, I shall give it in 
dialogue form.

FERDINAND: You are guilty of a horrible deed; how could I have expected such
a thing from persons whom I took to be my friends!

CLAIRWIL: What is the matter?

FERDINAND: The Queen accuses you of having stolen my treasure.

JULIETTE: Us?

FERDINAND: You.

CLAIRWIL: Likely story!

FERDINAND: She admits to having momentarily entertained the thought of 
taking my life, and she affirms that you promised to supply her the poison 
necessary to that end, my treasure being the payment you demanded of her in 
return.

CLAIRWIL: You have found the poison she claims she bought for that 
exceedingly high price?

FERDINAND: No.

JULIETTE: How is it possible in that case that she consent to turn over her 
fortune before obtaining the promised poison?

FERDINAND: I have wondered about that myself.

CLAIRWIL: Sire, your wife is a rascal, but a very clumsy one; knowing that we 
were your intimates, she has thought to disguise her infamy by shifting the 
responsibility for her execrable scheme upon our shoulders, but it’s a flimsy and 
ill-contrived plot.

FERDINAND: Who could have sent me that note?

JULIETTE: Those who have your treasure, no doubt: but, be certain of it, they 
are already far away. That note’s senders would not have informed you had it 
meant jeopardizing their own safety, and it is to put you off the scent that the 
Queen names us.

FERDINAND: But how is it to Charlotte’s interest to protect those who have 
just betrayed her?

CLAIRWIL: She has the poison, she does not want you to know she has it; 
hence, she brings suspicion to bear upon two people who cannot affirm that they 
gave it to her. Nevertheless, she has it, and but for the steps you have taken, you
were a doomed man.

FERDINAND: In your opinion, then, I have done the right thing?

JULIETTE: It would have been difficult to do any better.

FERDINAND: Do you think she is the culprit? (Here Clairwil puts on a malicious 
smile.) Ah, I see it from your expression! Turn the knife in the wound: is there 
something else you know?

CLAIRWIL: Only that your wife is a monster; she has acted out of hatred for 
you, and you would be very wise to see to it that she is punished to the fullest 
extent of the law.

FERDINAND: Oh, speak out, my friends, have you really no knowledge of who 
has stolen my treasure?

JULIETTE and CLAIRWIL: None, we swear it.

FERDINAND: Then let her perish in her dungeon, let her die of hunger and 
despair there … and you, dear friends, forgive me for having formed suspicions in 
your regard. They were unjust; I ask you to pardon me.

JULIETTE: Sire, those suspicions did however exist, and with your leave we 
must therefore take our immediate departure out of your realm.

FERDINAND: Departure? No, I implore you, now that I am free of the 
encumbrance of that vicious wife … I feel infinitely more at ease, and there are 
marvelous things for us all to do together—

JULIETTE: Your peace of mind, my Lord, does not establish ours. Comfort is 
irrevocably gone for decent women upon whose honor the merest aspersion has 
been once cast.

FERDINAND: Ah, but I no longer suspect either one of you. (He falls upon his 
knees.) Never abandon me; I shall not be able to get on without you, I shall 
never console myself if I lose you too.

CLAIRWIL: And what was the sum the thieves took from you?

FERDINAND: Forty million, half of all I owned. The criminal admits that she 
promised the whole of my fortune, but she did not dare strip me of everything.

“The infamous creature,” said I, but animated by feelings in which the King 
could not have followed me, those of rage at having been cheated by Charlotte, 
“the monster! what audacity! and what impudence! Thus to deceive the very best 
of husbands! A man who was so fond of her, who toiled selflessly in behalf of her 
pleasures! Oh, blackest ingratitude! For which the most fiendish punishment 
would be far too mild.”

At that point Elise and Raimonde, decked out like goddesses, made their 
entrance, bearing chocolate for His Majesty. Until now Ferdinand had not clapped 
eyes on the two girls.

“What beauties are these?” he asked, all atremble.

“Our handmaidens,” I answered.

“Why have they not been presented to me hitherto?”

“Could we have supposed they might please you?”

And with singular promptness forgetting both his prisoner and his robbery, the 
rake wants those two creatures surrendered to him on the spot. Such desires, in 
view of the circumstances, required speedy satisfaction. A boudoir opens before 
Ferdinand, into it he goes with our women and does not emerge until two hour 
later, after having worked the pair to exhaustion.

“Most generous friends,” says he upon reappearing in our midst, “I beg you not
to desert my city and me. Only let all reproaches be forgotten, and I protest to 
you that henceforth I shall behold you as paragons of innocence and probity.”

And he left our house.

Had the sovereign of Naples not been such a weak-spirited caitiff, Queen 
Charlotte would have been poisoned inside a day; we had given Ferdinand 
plentiful motives for the deed; but that unforceful and characterless man, was he 
capable of a vigorous action? No; and he took none at all. News of the Queen’s 
detention and of its brevity was to reach the whole of Europe, but the reasons for 
both her imprisonment and her release were to remain unexplained. As for 
ourselves, not caring to wait to learn the outcome of this adventure, we turned at 
once to organizing our retreat. Our loot proved voluminous and heavy. As we had 
bought a quantity of busts, mosaics, antique marbles, and samples of stone from 
Vesuvius, we cached our gold in false bottoms built into the packing cases 
ordered for shipping our purchases, and this stratagem succeeded to perfection. 
Before closing up the cases we sent a request to the King, asking him to inspect 
our baggage; he declined; we nailed everything shut. Ten wagons bore it all away,
and we followed after in two coaches, one for our suite, one for ourselves. Just 
before leaving we went to say goodbye to Ferdinand, who again did all he possibly
could to change our minds, and who then, having had to accept the inevitable, 
himself handed us the passports necessary to cross the borders of his states.

That evening we lay over at Capua; a week later, at Rome, where we arrived 
without having encountered the least difficulty on the road. Not until then did 
Clairwil notify her brother of her design to accompany me on to Paris, where it 
was her intention to settle for the rest of her life. She besought him to come to 
Paris too; but Brisatesta could not take it upon himself to quit his profession, and 
despite the wealth he had already amassed from outlawry, he solemnly declared 
that his unalterable decision was to die pistol in hand.

“So be it,” said Clairwil. “My preference goes to you, Juliette. We shall never 
separate again, that is my wish.”

I hugged my friend in my arms and swore to her she would never have cause 
to repent her decision. Ah! Making that promise, how little was I aware of the 
destiny that had already been spelled out by our stars, Clairwil’s and mine.

We continued our journey, which was uneventful until we reached Ancona. 
There, taking advantage of the fairest weather, we were strolling along the port 
when we perceived a tall woman of some forty-five years gazing at us fixedly.

“Do you recognize that person?” Clairwil asked me.

I turn, I scrutinize her. “Bless me, Clairwil! She is no other than our Parisian 
sorceress. It’s Durand.”

Her name was yet on my lips when its owner came up and greeted us 
rapturously.

“Ah,” said Clairwil, somewhat startled to see again the woman who five years 
before had predicted she had only that interval to live, “by what stroke of chance 
do we meet in this city?”

“Come with me to my lodgings,” said Durand, still beautiful with the passing of 
time; “although these people do not understand our tongue, we have nothing to 
gain from conversing in their presence.”

We accompany her; and after having ushered us into the luxurious quarters 
she occupied at the inn, “How pleased I am,” she told us as soon as we were 
seated, “to be able to procure you the acquaintance of a most outstanding 
woman, one of the most unusual and the most like yourselves Nature has yet 
created.”

“To whom do you refer?” Clairwil asked.

“To a sister of the Empress, an aunt of Naples’ Queen, a figure completely 
unknown to the world. As a very young child, Princess Christine evidenced 
propensities to libertinage of such violence that her father sensed she would 
become absolutely unmanageable. Seeing her bad habits grow steadily worse 
with age, he thought best to buy an island for her in Dalmatia, at the head of the 
Adriatic; he assigned her an income of three million a year, and put her under the 
protec

tion of the Venetians, who by treaty recognized her sovereignty over the island
and her right to do there whatever she liked. Christine, relegated to her little 
kingdom sixteen years ago, is at present forty years of age, and leads a life of 
delicious indulgence in everything the extremest lubricity can inspire. But it will 
spoil the adventure if I tell you more about her;

we shall cross the gulf in one of her barks, it is at my permanent disposition. 
The voyage lasts a day and a night; have you decided?”

“We certainly have,” I answered, “since I am confident I can speak for Clairwil 
too: the object of our travels being to study the manners and morals of mankind 
and to see extraordinary things, we would not be living up to our purpose if we 
were to forego such an opportunity out of half-heartedness.”

“By God, yes,” said my friend, “we shall do some fine fucking on Christine’s 
isle.”

“Never,” said Durand, “never shall you have such pleasure.”

“And upon that island of hers,” I said, “does she have—”

“No,” Durand interrupted me, “not another word. I want everything to be a 
surprise for you.”

And as she seemed unwilling to pursue the subject farther, I introduced 
another. “Now that I have found you again,” I said to the sorceress, “you must 
account for your sudden disappearance from Paris. Why were you not at the 
rendezvous arranged by that Comte de Belmor with whom I put you into touch?”

“Indeed,” Durand replied, “I failed to come to that appointment, and it was for 
the very best of reasons: that was the day they hanged me.”

“What!”

“Hanged me, I say. It was simple enough: I had furnished poison to the young 
Due ***, he needed some to put his mother out of the way. Compunction upset 
the little fool’s scheme; he betrayed me; I was arrested, brought to trial within 
the space of a day. But, wonderfully connected with the Samson who presided, we
found a compromise whereby I would be hanged merely for form’s sake. I held 
them off by eleventh-hour recriminations, and it was not until after night had 
fallen I was finally led down from the Hotel de Ville. Samson himself tied the 
noose, directed the mummery. I was carted to the graveyard, one of his valets, 
acting upon instructions, bought my body, and I was able to leave Paris before 
dawn. I went back the following year, to another quarter of town and under a 
different name; there has been no further fuss from anybody, and business has 
been steady and good ever since. There is truth in the saying that the hangman’s 
rope brings good luck. My income is today sixty thousand pounds, and I have 
been adding to my capital every year. I make an annual journey to Italy, where I 
replenish my stock of materials and compound the poisons I then distribute 
throughout all Europe. I find that preferable to preparing them at home. Actually, 
this kind of murdering is nowadays so much in style that it is all I can do to keep 
up with the demand. At Christine’s you will have occasion to see the very piquant 
effects of the venoms I have developed.”

“You sell some to her?”

“My God, a hundred thousand crowns’ worth every year.”

“She is cruel, I take it?”

“Incredibly so.”

“Ah, I adore her already!” Clairwil exclaimed. “Whenever you wish, Durand, let 
us sail for Dalmatia.”

“Charming woman,” I put in, “before anything else you must answer some 
more questions. I insist that you tell me who those curious individuals were, by 
whom you had us beaten, flogged; and who, in short, performed so many 
uncommon things before us when we were with you last.”

“One of them,” said Durand, “was that same Due ***, Beaujeon was the other,
the famous millionaire. For four years both had been feeing me enormously for 
services of a similar kind, and there is no counting the number of women and girls
I deceived for them in the very same way. But, while I think of it,” said Durand, 
ringing for a servant, “you must not suppose that I am going to allow you to leave
without having dinner. I would be heartbroken not to have you as my guests; I 
shall hear no refusals ….”

And the most splendid meal was brought in almost immediately.

“Durand,” said Clairwil when we reached dessert, “you promise us great 
pleasures for tomorrow. But what of today’s? It seems to me that among your 
valets I detected three or four strapping fellows with a very stiff-pricked look 
about them.”

“Do you care to test their mettle?”

“Why not! And you, Juliette, what say you?”

“No,” I demurred, preoccupied with a thought I could not drive out of my head,
an ill-defined premonition, “no, I believe I will drink a glass and talk with Durand 
rather than fuck. Besides, I am menstruating, and feel a little out of sorts.”

“Until now I have never known you to refuse a prick,” said Clairwil, and for the 
briefest instant there showed upon her face a shadow of concern whose cause I 
was far from apprehending. “Come, my angel,” she resumed, brightening again, 
“when one cannot fuck in front, one fucks behind. Come, I say, join me: well you 
know that I taste no real pleasures save they be shared with you.”

“No,” I repeated, still in the grip of that unknown foreboding, “I don’t feel at all
in a mood for it … I simply wish to chat.”

Clairwil walked toward the chamber that had been designated to her and, just 
before she entered it, I distinctly saw, in a mirror, the emphatic sign she made to 
the sorceress, a sign which I could interpret as nothing else than an injunction to 
silence. The door to the chamber closed; I remained sitting with Durand.

“Oh, Juliette,” that woman said to me as soon as we had been left alone, 
“thank your lucky stars for all the sentiments you inspire in me. Charming girl,” 
she continued, taking me in her arms, “no, you shall not be the victim of that 
monster. … In every respect preferable to her, you shall be warned in time and 
your life saved.”

“What are you saying to me, Madame! Such words freeze me with terror!”

“Listen to me, Juliette; and having heard me, reveal nothing. This island in 
Dalmatia … this Princess Christine, this voyage … dear girl, had you taken it you 
were doomed. ’Twas all a trap set by a woman whom you believed to be your 
dearest friend.”

“Clairwil!”

“She plotted your death. She covets your wealth; in her pocket she has a piece
of paper, a document in which you each name the other her sole heir. She was to 
assassinate you to come into possession of that legacy—”

“The infernal creature!” I gasped, breathless with fury.

“Steady, Juliette; a careless word could still be your undoing; sit where you are
and hear me out. The vessel we were to embark upon, it sinks, we escape the 
wreck, you perish in it…. Take your revenge; take this packet I have here … it 
contains fulminant powder; among our poisons none acts more rapidly. Let her 
absorb a little and the next instant she will lie at your feet, as if thunderstruck. In 
return for this service I am rendering you I demand nothing; consider it as 
flowing from an excessive fondness for you.”

“O my benefactress!” I cried, tears springing to my eyes, “you save me from 
the very direst danger! But much mystery yet clings to all this. How is it that you 
are in Ancona? How did Clairwil enter into contact with you?”

“I have been following a step behind you ever since you left Naples, where I 
myself had gone to buy poisons. Clairwil met me there, laid out her scheme 
before me; at Loreto I hastened on ahead, and reached Ancona before you did, to
set the stage for a scene to which I lent myself only because of the deepest desire
to save your life. Had I refused Clairwil my collaboration, she would without 
question have had recourse to other means, and you would not be alive today.”

“But once Clairwil decided to get rid of me, what need had she to wait so 
long?”

“That document had not yet been drawn up, your money was not yet invested, 
nothing could be done until you were out of Rome; and she knew that, once you 
had left that city, your first stop would not come until Loreto. ’Twas for the day 
after she ordered me to have everything in readiness.”

“Infamous creature! Thou whom I lov

ed so sincerely, in whose arms I surrendered myself in such candid good faith!”

“She is a monster of perfidy and deceit,” Durand rejoined; “trust her under no 
circumstances. Just when you think you have the least to fear from her, that is 
the very instant when you must be most on your guard. Hark. I hear sounds. She 
may be about to return; the fact we are having this conversation together is not 
to her liking. Compose yourself, and when you strike, do not miss the mark; 
godspeed.”

Clairwil was indeed upset when she returned; she had had an unsatisfactory 
fucking, said she, the two men given her had held their erections poorly. And over
and above the rest, she was not accustomed to tasting pleasures in which her 
dear Juliette did not take an active part.

“I would discharge better with you,” she went on, “were you disposed to a little
masturbating.”

“Tonight,” I replied, disguising my cruel state as best I could, “yes, tonight. At 
the moment, my dear, Adonis himself would leave me cold.”

“Very well,” said she, “let us go to our inn. I too feel out of sorts, I don’t think 
I’d mind being in bed early. Goodbye, Durand,” she added, “and until tomorrow. 
Endeavor to have musicians, good food, and, above all, some good fuckers 
aboard that boat; without them I find travel by sea unendurably boring.”

We repaired to our lodgings.

“A strange woman, that Durand,” Clairwil said to me once we were alone 
together; “she is someone to be very wary of, my dearest. Were I not so devoted 
to you…. Would you believe, Juliette, that while you were off in the privy for a few
minutes, the villain offered to poison you for two thousand louis?”

This sally did not catch me off balance; in it I saw nothing but a wicked snare, 
which I had no trouble eluding. However, I deemed best to feign credulity.

“Great God,” I said, “that woman is a monster! I now understand why I felt so 
distrustful of her the whole while we were talking.”

“Your instincts warned you, and rightly: she had worked out a scheme for 
killing you, Juliette. The thought of your death entertained her.”

“Ah,” said I, looking hard at Clairwil, “the stroke was perhaps to have been 
brought off during the voyage to the island….”

“No,” said Clairwil, without the flutter of an eyelash, “it was to have been this 
evening, at supper, and that is the reason I dragged you home so early.”

“But this voyage,” I said, “it worries me now; are you sure there is no 
danger?”

“None in the least: I completely changed her mind, and I guarantee you that 
she has forgotten the idea. Let us have supper.”

The meal was served us; I had taken my decision. To be the dupe of Clairwil’s 
tales, this was absolutely impossible; and Durand’s avowals, their frankness, their
warmth had so impressed me…. Into the first dish I handed Clairwil I slipped the 
poison hidden between my fingers; she took a mouthful, swallowed, swayed in 
her chair, and fell, emitting a single furious scream.

“Behold my revenge,” I said to my women, both bewildered by Clairwil’s 
sudden collapse.

And I related the adventure to them.

“Fuck!” I cried, “let us savor the sweet charms of vengeance, my dears, and 
acquit ourselves of a few horrors; the two of you, frig me as I lie upon that 
whore’s dead body, and may her example teach you never to betray your best 
friend.”

We stripped off Clairwil’s clothes, we stretched her naked corpse upon a bed. …
I put my hand to her cunt, it was still warm, I frigged her; donning a dildo, I 
fucked her. Elise gave me her ass to kiss; and in the meantime I tickled 
Raimonde’s cunt. I spoke to Clairwil as though she were ever alive, I addressed 
reproaches to her, invectives, as though she were able to hear me; I took up 
some withes, I lashed her unmoving body … I embuggered it. It never stirred, it 
was utterly without feeling; and at last I saw that there was no hope left, and I 
had that body put into a sack. And Clairwil’s own valets, who had hated her and 
who were as grateful to me as could be for having delivered them from such a 
wicked mistress, they agreed, once night had come, to go secretly with her body 
and drop it into the sea.

I wrote forthwith to my banker in Rome to advise him that by virtue of the 
contract we had entered into, Clairwil and I, through which the moneys we had 
invested with him belonged to the one of us who might chance to survive the 
other, he could henceforth remit all revenues to me; whence it resulted that by 
merging the two fortunes, I secured myself an annual income of two million. In 
Italy, nothing is more quickly straightened out than a murder: I had two hundred 
sequins transmitted to the justice of Ancona, and there was not so much as an 
inquest.

“And so, my fine friend,” I said to Durand when, the next day, I went to dine 
with her, “you thought to outwit me, did you? Clairwil let the cat out of the bag: 
how you meant to poison me last night, and would have had she not stood in the 
way.”

“Treacherous to the last,” said Durand gravely, shaking her head. “Oh, Juliette, 
I told you the truth, believe it: I love you far too much to deceive you upon such 
serious matters. There is much of the scoundrel in me, perhaps more than in 
most others, but when I love a woman, I never play her false…. The blow, then, 
has not been struck?”

“No; Clairwil breathes, she and I are about to resume our journey. I came to 
bid you farewell. And now I shall go—”

“Oh, Juliette! I am poorly rewarded for all I have done—”

“Better than you think, Durand,” I interrupted, with one hand tendering her a 
pocketbook containing one hundred thousand crowns, with the other exhibiting to
her the tresses I had shorn from Clairwil. “Here are the ornaments of the head 
you proscribed, and here is the recompense for your generous friendship.”

“Keep these things, keep them all,” Durand replied. “Juliette, I adore you. For 
what I have done I wish no reward other than the happiness of being able to give 
you my unrivaled affection: I was jealous of Clairwil, I do not hide it, but I might 
nevertheless have spared her had it not been for her terrible designs in your 
regard: I could not forgive her for having meditated the destruction of someone 
whose life meant more to me even than my own. I am far less wealthy than you, 
admittedly, but I have the means to live in magnificence, and can afford to decline
the gift you offer me: with such professional skills as I possess I shall never lack 
for money, and I do not want to be paid for a service performed at my heart’s 
demand.”

“No further separation between us ever again,” said I to Durand, “leave your 
inn, come join me in mine; you will take Clairwil’s domestics, her carriage, and we
shall set off for Paris in two or three days.”

The new arrangements were quickly completed; Durand retained but one of 
her chambermaids, to whom she was especially attached, dismissed all the rest of
her household, and came to install herself in what had formerly been Clairwil’s 
quarters.

It was easy to see, from the way that woman devoured me with her eyes, that 
she was on tenterhooks for the moment when my favors would reward her for her
efforts in my behalf. I did not allow her to pine away for long; after the most 
sumptuous and elegant repast, I stretch forth my arms to her, she leaps into 
them, we dash to my bedchamber, lock the door, draw the shutters, and I 
surrender, with inexpressible delight, to the most libertine and the most lustful of 
women. Durand, in her fiftieth year, was not by any means devoid of merit; her 
forms were full, shapely, and well preserved; her mouth fresh, her skin soft and 
showing scarcely a wrinkle; a superb posterior, breasts still firm and very fair, 
very lively eyes, very fine features; and an energy in her pleasure-taking, tastes 
so bizarre…. Capricious Nature had created her with a deformity neither Clairwil 
nor I had ever noticed: Durand was unable, had never been able, to enjoy 
pleasure in the conventional manner. Her vagina was obstructed, but (and you will
doubtless recall this detail) her clitoris, as long as a finger, gave her the most 
ardent liking for women. She would flog them, she would embugger them; she 
held commerce with boys also: I shortly discovered, from the inordinate size of 
her asshole, that, as regarded intromissions, she was wont to receive there what 
she was denied elsewhere. The initial advances were made by me, and I thought 
she was going to swoon from pleasure the moment she felt my hands upon her 
flesh.

“Let’s undress,” said she, “one cannot enjoy oneself properly save when naked.
I have, moreover, the keenest desire to look again upon your charms, Juliette, I 
burn to feast upon them.”

Everything is removed in a trice. My kisses explore that beautiful body; and I 
am bound to say that perhaps, had Durand been younger, yes, I might not have 
found her anything like so interesting. My tastes were beginning to turn to 
depravation, and entering into my riper years, Nature was providing me with 
sensations far more intense than anything I had known in my springtime. The 
unique object of that woman’s fiery caresses, great tides of lust boiled up in me; 
my partner deployed a science and an art that are positively not to be described. 
Oh, how voluptuous are women seasoned in crime! what dimensions are revealed
in their lubricities!

You listless and uninspired prudes, insufferable creatures who dare not even 
touch the member perforating you, and who would blush to answer fuck with fuck
when fucking, cast your eyes this way, come hither for some examples: come 
take a few lessons from Madame Durand, and learn the extent of your 
ineptitudes.

After the initial caresses, Durand, less inhibited than when in the past Clairwil 
had been a party to our affairs, made declaration of her fancies and besought me 
to submit to them. As she knelt before me, I had, while heaping abuse upon her, 
to rub her nose now in my cunt, now in my ass; while rubbing my front against 
her, I had to piss upon her face. That done, I had to strike her all about the body 
with my fists and kick her everywhere, take up some nettles and flog her till she 
bled. When by dint of mistreatments I had beaten her down to the floor, I had, 
with my head between her thighs, to cunt-suck her for fifteen minutes while 
socratizing her with one hand and exciting her nipples with the other; next, once 
she was thoroughly heated, I was to let her embugger me with her clitoris the 
while she tickled mine.

“I apologize for having to ask so much, Juliette,” the libertine said, once she 
had finished outlining the program, “but you know to what satiety can lead us.”

“After thirty-five years of sustained libertinage one must offer no excuses for 
one’s tastes,” was my reply; “whatever it may be, it is deserving of respect, for it 
is in Nature; the best of all is the one that pleases us most.”

And starting in upon the operation, so amply did I satisfy her that she was nigh
to perishing from delight. Durand’s voluptuous crises were without parallel. In all 
my life I had never seen a woman discharge thus: not only would she shoot her 
fuck forth like a man, but she accompanied that ejaculation by shrieks so loud, by
blasphemies so energetic, and by spasms so violent that one could have mistaken
her performance for an epileptic attack. I was buggered as solidly as if I had been
dealing with a man, and from it experienced the same pleasure.

“Well,” said she when she rose to her feet, “how do I strike you?”

“Oh, fuck!” I cried, “you are delightful, you are a very model of lubricity; your 
passions set me ablaze, do to me everything I have just done to you.”

“What! You wish a beating?”

“Beat me, yes.”

“And a slapping, a whipping?”

“Make haste.”

“Do you want me to piss upon your face?”

“Of course, my darling, be quick, I say, for I’m very hot and I have a discharge
pressing.”

La Durand, with a longer experience than I in the rendering of these services, 
proceeds with such consummate skill that the explosion supervenes almost 
instantaneously, thanks to the heavenly titillations of her voluptuous tongue.

“How you do discharge, my beloved,” she said to me; “how vehemently you 
respond to pleasure! How marvelously we get on!”

“There is no denying it, Durand,” I answered her, “you have an astonishing 
effect upon my imagination: I am overjoyed to be connected with a woman like 
you. Mistresses of all a universe we shall be; through our alliance I feel we shall 
become the superiors of Nature herself. Oh, dear Durand, the crimes we are going
to commit! the infamies we are going to achieve!”

“Do you regret Clairwil?”

“Can I when I possess you?”

“And if I had invented the whole story merely in order to rid myself of a rival?”

“A rare piece of villainy!”

“And what if I had accomplished it?”

“But, Durand, Clairwil told me that you had proposed to poison me for two 
thousand louis.”

“I knew she would repeat that to you; neither did I have the slightest doubt 
but that, instead of being taken in by this confidence, you would simply perceive it
for a clumsily mounted snare on her part, and subtle as I knew you to be, judge 
that the time had come for the crime which I was eager to have you commit.”

“And why had the thing to be done by me? Could you not have executed it by 
yourself?”

“I much preferred that my rival die by your hand; my pleasure, to be 
complete, required that the act be undertaken by you.”

“Good heaven, what a woman you are! But she was ill at ease the other day, 
when we were your guests at dinner, she was unable to relish the pleasures you 
had readied for her; our conversation, she seemed apprehensive about it … she 
made a sign to you.”

“I had created the conditions for that uneasiness, calculating what its 
repercussions would be upon you; and I estimated exactly, as you see, for her 
unquiet manner shortly rendered her guiltier in your eyes. Telling her I was willing
to poison you for two thousand louis, I bred in her the suspicion that I might 
make a like proposition to you. Therein lies the explanation for her gesture, 
therein the reason why she dreaded our tête-à-tête, and her trembling, 
expression of the fear I engendered in her, produced upon your mind the precise 
effect I anticipated: two hours later, Clairwil was dead.”

“Am I then to understand that she was innocent?”

“She adored you … and so did I, and I could not bear having a rival.”

“Gloat over your triumph, scoundrel,” I say, casting myself into Durand’s arms,
“and, now, your triumph is entire: I worship you to the point where, had this 
crime to be committed all over again, I would commit it unprompted, without any 
of the motivations you created to facilitate it…. Why did you not declare your love 
for me from the very first in Paris?”

“I dared not because of Clairwil’s presence; and when later you came back to 
see me, it was with a man, and then it was he who hindered me. And after that 
came my arrest. But I followed you, dearest and sweetest friend, never once did I
let you out of my sight, I followed you to Angers, throughout Italy, all the while I 
carried on my trade I kept my eyes upon you. My hope sank as I watched your 
successive liaisons—Donis, Grillo, Borghese—and it dwindled almost to nothing 
when I learned that you had become reunited with Clairwil. Still, I followed you 
from Rome to here, and at last, tired of having been thwarted so long, I resolved 
to bring about the denouement: and the rest you know.”

“Inexplicable and delightful creature! Who has ever provided such examples of 
treachery, sleight, spitefulness, villainy, jealousy!”

“’Tis because no one has ever had either passions or a heart like mine. ’Tis 
because no one has ever loved you as I do.”

“But when the fires die down in you, Durand, you will deal with me as you have
just done with Clairwil; will I have time to protect myself?”

“I am going to set you at ease, my angel, and reply strongly to your 
groundless suspicions; listen to me. You shall, I demand it, keep for yourself, and 
forever, one of your women, Elise or Raimonde. Choose which of the two it is to 
be, I shall not let you have the other, I tell you so in advance.”

“Raimonde shall be mine.”

“Very well. If ever Raimonde meets with a tragic and unaccountable end, let 
the blame fall nowhere but upon me. And now,” Durand continued, “I demand 
that you put a paper into this girl’s keeping, which authorizes her to denounce me
as your assassin in the event you perish in some unhappy way at any moment 
during the course of our relations.”

“No, I object to such precautions, I entrust myself to you, I do so gladly; I like 
the idea of placing my life in your hands. Leave Elise to me, leave everybody to 
me, don’t hinder my practices or contest my tastes. I am a libertine, I will not 
promise you good behavior, but I shall swear an oath to adore you everlastingly.”

“I have no wish to tyrannize over you, Juliette; to the contrary, I shall myself 
serve your pleasures, I shall move heaven and earth for the sake of your physical 
enjoyments. But were your conduct ever to become ethical, I’d abandon you 
there and then. I am aware of the impossibility of captivating such a woman as 
yourself, a whore by temperament and on principle: ’twould, I realize, be to seek 
to set dikes to the sea. But I can always be the mistress of your heart, and that is
what I ask … I insist that it belong to nobody but me.”

“I swear that it shall be so.”

“Ah, great pleasures are then in store for us; libertinage, to remain pure, must 
be kept free of sentiment: one must have but one friend only, sincerely love no 
one but her, and fuck with the whole wide world. Juliette, my best advice, if you 
care to hear it, is to dispense with this glittering entourage you move with; I 
myself plan to dismiss half my suite; we shall manage just as comfortably when 
we are fewer, and it serves no purpose to attract universal notice. Moreover, I 
wish to pursue my calling, and no one is apt to buy anything from a woman who 
goes traveling about like a queen.”

“And I too,” I replied, “I wish to satisfy my tastes, I wish to steal, I wish to 
prostitute myself, and, you are quite right, such exhibition will interfere with my 
objectives.”

“It ought, I believe, to be given out that I am your mother, with this title I shall
be able to prostitute you myself; Elise and Raimonde, let them be your cousins. 
We shall market their charms too, and be sure of it, with one such harem we shall
make money in Italy.”

“And your poisons?”

“I shall sell them in greater quantity, I shall sell them more dearly. We must, 
when we return to France, have spent not one penny of our own, and reach home
with a clear profit of two million at least.”

“What route shall we take?”

“I am powerfully inclined to go south again. Calabrian and Sicilian depravity, 
Juliette, is something that exceeds even your fondest dreams; I know those 
regions well, there are mines of gold to be earned down there. Last year I sold 
five hundred thousand francs worth of poison in the mezzogiorno, and would have
done far better had I been able to keep abreast of my orders. The Southerners 
are credulous, like all other lying people; telling their fortunes, I was able to 
persuade them of whatever I wished…. It’s a fine country, Juliette.”

“I for my part am anxious to return to Paris again,” said I; “established there, 
would we not lead a better life than roaming about in such a way? Could we not 
do the same things there?”

“We must at least visit Venice, whence we can proceed to Milan and then to 
Lyon.”

To this I gave my agreement. We dined. Durand told me that she wanted to 
pay all our expenses. She would, to be sure, reimburse herself from our jointly 
earned profits; but she entreated me to accept the appearance of being kept by 
her. To that too I agreed. I was, I must tell you, as tactful in receiving her 
attentions as she was in showing them to me. Delicacy also matters in the sphere 
of crime; failure to understand this points to a woeful ignorance of human nature.

“Is it true,” I asked my new companion, “that you possess the balm that 
ensures longevity?”

“No such balm exists,” Durand replied, “those who distribute it are all quacks. 
The true secret to a long life is a sober and temperate life; sobriety and 
temperance not being among our virtues, we cannot, you and I, hope for 
miracles. And why should we, my dear? Better to live a little less long and to 
enjoy oneself: what would a life be divested of its pleasures? If death meant the 
onset of pain, then I would urge you to stretch your life out to the utmost; but 
since the worst that can happen to us is to slip back into the nothingness where 
we were before we were born, ’tis on the wing of pleasures we must fly through 
our apportioned term.”

“My love, are you then without belief in another life?”

“I would be greatly ashamed to have to own to belief in such nonsense. But, 
fully enlightened as you are upon that and related questions, I doubt whether I 
have much to teach you thereanent, and I am confident that, imbued with the 
basic principles of philosophy, both the immortality of the soul and the existence 
of God are to your consideration extravagances not worth a minute’s thought. The
falsity of all those doctrines being manifest, there is one which I construct upon 
their wreckage and it may perhaps claim to a certain originality. I base it upon a 
multitude of experiences. I maintain that what is taken for a naturally inspired 
horror of death is merely the fruit of the absurd fears which we, starting in 
childhood, develop regarding this total annihilation, fears initiated by the religious 
notions our elders stupidly cram into our young heads. Once cured of these fears 
and reassured concerning our fate, not only do we cease to behold death with 
alarm and repugnance, but it becomes easy to prove that death is in reality 
nothing more nor less than a voluptuous pleasure. You will admit, first, that one 
cannot help but be certain that death is one of the necessities of Nature, who 
does not create us save to die; if we begin, it is in order to end; each instant 
advances us nowhere but toward that terminal point; everything indicates that 
death is Nature’s final and sole aim. Now, I ask how it is possible to doubt, in the 
light of acquired experience, that death, as a natural necessity and as something 
needed by Nature, can be anything else than a pleasure, since all palpable 
evidence proves convincingly that every one of life’s necessities is 
pleasure-producing. Therefore, I reason, there is pleasure in dying; it is therefore 
possible to conceive that, with reflection and with philosophy, one may convert 
into very voluptuous ideas all death’s ridiculous frights, and that sensual 
excitement may even bring on thoughts of death and induce in one an eager 
expectancy of death.”

“That doctrine, entirely new, and not without plausibility,” I said to my friend, 
“would be dangerous to publish. Think of how many people are held in check by 
nothing except fear of death and who, once liberated from that dread, could 
calmly—”

“One moment,” said my delightful friend, “I have never sought to discourage 
anyone from crime; rather, I have always toiled to remove all the obstacles 
stupidity has strewn in its path. Crime is my element; Nature brought me into the
world to advance its cause, and my task and ambition are to multiply to infinity all
the means to commit it.

“The trade I have elected and which I exercise more out of libertinage than 
from material necessity, proves my extreme desire to promote crime; I have no 
more ardent passion than that of propagating it generally, and if I could envelop 
the whole world within my toils, I would blast it to dust without hesitation or 
remorse.”

“And against which sex does your libertine fury plot with greater delight?”

“It is not a person’s sex that arouses me, it is his age, his ties with others, his 
condition. When the suitable factors are found in a man, I extract greater 
enjoyment from immolating him than a woman; when they converge in a woman,
the preference goes automatically to her.”

“And what are these standards of suitability?” I inquired.

“I ought not tell you.”

“Why not?”

“From these confessions you will draw no end of fallacious inferences, likely, 
subsequently, to have a damaging effect upon our relationship.”

“Ah, my dear, you have already said enough: I am then to assume that your 
favors are so many condemnations to death?”

“Certainly; have I not told you so? Listen to me, Juliette, and put your fears 
away. Far be it from me to disguise the fact that any object I use for the simple 
and unique purpose of consumption, and with which I enter into no other 
relationship, must undergo the fate of any other commodity. But if, on the other 
hand, in that object I encounter sympathetic intellectual traits, imaginative 
qualities such as those I have found in you, then, be assured of it, rather than 
severing connections with such an object, I do but tighten them by every means 
at my command. In the name of the most tender affection, cease, my love, to 
harbor doubts; I offered you the surest guarantee of my good faith, you decline it 
out of tact, do not leave me to suppose now that your mind is at odds with your 
heart. Besides, have I any powers you yourself do not dispose of?”

“Most assuredly you do,” I answered, “and I am far from knowing the whole 
range or subtlety of your capacities.”

“As you like,” my friend said, smiling, “but be persuaded that this art of mine 
shall, with you, be put to no other use than to constrain you to love me.”

“Ah, count upon it; I realize that between villains there is never any conflict, 
and believe me, but for the awful suspicions you stirred up in me, I would never 
have sacrificed Clairwil.”

“Do I detect a note of regret behind that avowal, Juliette?”

“Not at all, not at all,” said I, showering kisses upon my friend, “let us have an 
end to the discussion thereupon; I give myself into your keeping, I repeat it, you 
can place your trust in my heart as I put my reliance in yours; our strength is in 
our union, and nothing will dissolve it. Now tell me the rest of what I am eager to 
hear about the factors which incite you to the consummation of crime: I am 
anxious to find out whether they concur with mine, and so far I notice great 
similarities.”

“I told you that age had a great deal to do with it: I love to wither the plant at 
the noon of its perfection: between fifteen and seventeen years old, that is the 
stage at which I consider roses fittest for gathering, especially when they are in 
flawless health and when Nature, whose purposes I know how to cross, seems to 
have designed the object to live in exuberant well-being to the end of a long and 
happy life. Ah, Juliette, how I enjoy performing such interventions! Ties irritate 
me also: I delight in depriving a father of his child, a lover of his mistress.”

“A tribade of her handmaid?”

“Why yes, little minx; is it my fault if unfathomable Nature made me the rascal
I am? If it is to me the object belongs, then the pleasure is twofold. I also said 
that the person’s condition contributes significantly to the excitement of my 
imagination: here, I am partial to the two extremes, wealth and high estate, or 
obscurity and misfortune. Generally speaking, I aim, when striking, to produce as 
many disastrous aftereffects and melancholy repercussions as possible, I like it to 
cause much weeping, I discharge at the sight of those tears. Their abundance or 
bitterness brings forth my fuck, the harder and more copiously they flow, the 
more powerful my spasm.”

“Oh, gentlest, most charming friend,” said I, my head beginning to reel, “frig 
me, I beseech you; you see what your words are doing to me; I have never 
known anyone whose attitudes were in closer harmony with my own. Next to you,
Clairwil was a mere child; you are what my happiness demands, you are the 
woman I have been seeking, never leave me again.”

And Durand, to take fullest advantage of my ecstasy, having helped me to a 
couch, frigged me with three fingers as I had never in my life been frigged before.
I replied in kind; I sucked her clitoris; and when I spied her asshole opening and 
closing like a flower thirstily responding to the sweetly descending dew, I put on a
dildo and flung into her bum, frigging her still while I embuggered her. That vent 
was of unprecedented diameter. My instrument had a girth of eight inches, a 
length of twelve; I but brought it up and it vanished out of sight. And when it was 
gone, then the whore let loose oaths, she shuddered and shook like a lunatic; and
well I saw that if Nature had excluded her from knowledge of the common kind of
pleasures, she had richly compensated Durand in bestowing upon her the 
extremest sensitivity to these. One of my new friend’s outstanding talents lay in 
her ability to give pleasure while receiving it; she was so supple, so elastic, that 
even as I embuggered her, she wound herself like a vine around my body, 
succeeded in kissing my mouth, and in inserting fingers into my fundament. 
Sometimes forgetting everything else in order to concentrate upon her sensations
alone, she would then curse with greater vigor than I had ever known in a 
person; and from whatever angle one considered this remarkable woman, one 
discovered that, child of crime, of lust, and of infamy, every last one of her 
physical and moral qualities contributed to making her the most exceptional 
libertine of her century. Durand wanted to do for me all I had done for her. She 
embuggered me and, lewdly frigged by her, I comfortably withstood the same 
dildo, I discharged thrice in response to its blows; and, I say again, I had never 
had dealings with a woman who so grasped the art of giving pleasure.

From there we returned to drinking, and when we were very high, “Come,” 
Durand said to me, “let us go out into the streets and befoul ourselves with a little
libertinage. Let us go and see the funeral preparations that have been made for 
the fifteen-year-old girl, a lovely creature, whom I poisoned yesterday at the 
solicitation of her father who, after having nicely fucked her, wanted to be 
revenged for an indiscretion she then committed.”

We went out costumed in the manner of the courtesans of the country; night 
had fallen.

“Before anything else,” said my friend, “I suggest that we betake ourselves 
down to the harbor and frig a few sailors; we ought to be able to uncover some 
monsters. You simply would not believe the pleasure I find in squeezing the juice 
out of those sausages….”

“For shame, whore,” said I, kissing her, “you are tipsy.”

“A little, perhaps; but do not conclude that Bacchus’ aid is necessary to light 
the fires of libertinage in me. Divine powers are ascribed to that rascal, I know, 
and I never undertake lewd exercises in a better mood than when I have stuffed 
myself upon delicate cooking and fine wines; but without those stimulants I am 
perfectly capable of overstepping the last limits of decency and modesty—you 
shall see.”

No sooner did we reach the port than a host of sailors and stevedores crowded
around us.

“Holla, good friends,” Durand cries, “no hurly-burly, behave yourselves and fret
not, we are going to satisfy you, every last one. Here, look at this girl: she is 
French.(1) She entered the business only yesterday; and now she is going to sit 
down on that bollard, she is going to lift her skirts, and she is going to offer you 
whichever side best suits your tastes; and I am going to frig you upon her 
charms.”

This speech was applauded by the throng. The first of at least fifteen suitors 
wants to see my bare bosom: his uncouth attentions might have spoiled its 
appearance had not my companion forbidden him any gestures; he had therefore 
to restrict himself to covering my breasts with fuck; they were shortly awash. The
second wants me, sitting on the bollard, to spread my thighs as far apart as 
possible, in order that he can be frigged against my clitoris. I prove unable to 
resist the massiveness of the member whose tip, guided by Durand, nuzzles the 
approaches to my vagina; impelled by an involuntary reflex, I leap forward and 
incorporate it up to the height of the balls. No sooner does the funny chap feel 
himself caught than he clutches me in his arms, lifts me up, lifts up my skirts and 
exhibits my ass to the whole assembly. One of those frenetics advances, claps his 
hands to my bum, palpates it, spears it, and there am I, carried by two partners, 
the object of both their caresses and homages.

“Hold,” says Durand, “give her something firm to take purchase upon”—and, 
with those words, she puts an enormous member into each of my hands. “What 
an engaging group,” the bawd observes, presenting her behind to a fifth seaman. 
“Here, my friend, here is my ass, let us include ourselves in the scene, form one 
of its episodes; I cannot, alas, propose you anything else, Nature is to blame for 
my disability; but reassure yourself, the heat of my asshole and its narrowness 
will make you forget any craving you may have for my cunt.”

Other postures were struck betimes. I dealt with better than fifty of those low 
fellows. My companion rubbed them with a water just prior to penetration, and by
that means I was able to receive them all without fear: I was fucked forty-five 
times in less than three hours. Durand did nought but essay them; she fetched 
them up to me afterward, and they terminated, according to their choice, either in
my ass or in my cunt. The lewd thing sucked practically everything she could get 
her hands upon, since she had a palate for pricks, and was not, need I remind 
you, a woman to curb her tastes. Our bandits once satisfied, we must drink with 
them, for that was the custom.

“And it is one of the best parts of all,” Durand murmured to me, “you have no 
idea how, in vile company, I relish plunging into whatever is characterized by 
swinish intemperance, filthiest debauchery.”

When we were done feeding it was because neither of us could swallow 
another mouthful. We had devoured not one, but two huge meals, paid for by 
those scoundrels, twenty of whom had contributed two sequins apiece, which 
came, all told, to nearly five hundred francs. During that banquet we drank, we 
ate, we let ourselves be handled, pawed, fucked, and we besotted ourselves, in 
fine, to the point where, the two of us sprawled on the floor in the center of the 
tavern, we gave ourselves to that mob upon strict condition that they first vomit, 
piss, and shit all over our faces, before sticking us. They all consented to those 
terms, and by the time our nasty orgy was ended, we were half-drowned in urine,
ordures, and sperm.

“Children,” said my companion once order had been restored, “it now 
behooves us to make ourselves known to you and, in recognition of the fine 
supper you have given us, to make some samples of our merchandise available to
you. Among you would there be anyone with a personal grudge to settle, or some
vindictiveness to express? We are going to supply him the means. Purveyors of 
the best poisons in Italy, specify your requirements to us, and upon whom the 
product is to be used.”

Would you believe it, my friends? (for, oh, just heavens, what progress 
humankind has made in depravity) a clamor rose up, and with one voice they 
begged us to be liberal in the distribution of our baneful gifts; and there was not a
single one who lacked, so he claimed, a most excellent purpose to put them to. All
were provided for; and that libidinous soiree may perhaps have rendered us the 
cause of sixty murders.

“Come,” Durand said to me, “the hour is not late, further adventures may be 
awaiting us. And I have the most positive urge to go and verify the success of my 
pretty little fifteen-year-old’s death.”

And so we bade our hosts farewell after having embraced them warmly.

Reaching the square in front of the cathedral we came at once upon a funeral 
procession. In Italy it being the tradition to expose the dead in their caskets, 
Durand had no trouble identifying the features of the lovely child upon whom her 
venom had done its work.

“There she is, there she is,” she whispered excitedly, “oh, fuck my soul! let’s 
stand over here in the shadows and frig each other as she goes by.”

“Rather than that,” I said, “let’s precede her into the cathedral; we will station 
ourselves in a chapel and do what you suggest while watching the burial.”

“The final is the better moment, you are right,” said Durand; “quick, let’s go 
in.”

We were fortunate enough to find a secluded spot directly behind the 
confessional in the very chapel where the young body was to be laid to rest. We 
shrank back against the wall, and there we stood, fingering each other’s organs 
while the ceremony went forward, and timing our movements in such a way that 
no fuck would escape us until, the casket having been lowered into the vault, our 
discharge could, after a fashion, serve as holy water unto the deceased. All was 
soon over, the priests and mourners withdrew; but the work of sealing the tomb 
was left incomplete, and we saw that the gravedigger either had intentions we 
could not yet divine, or preferred, in view of the late hour, to come back and finish
his masonry the next day.

“Ha!” said Durand, “let us linger here, an incredible whim has just entered my 
head. ’Twas a pretty creature they buried, eh?”

“Well?”

“We’ll pluck her out of that tomb, my dear, you’ll frig me upon that delicious 
face, beautiful still despite the funereal darkness gathering upon the brows. Say, 
are you afraid?”

“No.”

“Then let us stay.”

By and by the church is closed. We are alone in it.

“How I like this lugubrious silence,” said Durand; “how it invites to crime, how 
it quickens the passions—it reflects the stillness of the grave. And, I tell you so, 
death puts the thrill of lust in me. To work.”

“Stay,” I murmured. “I believe I hear sounds.”

And we hasten back to our niche. Ye gods! what did we perceive? Someone 
else was beating us to the treasure; and who? Heavens above, what execrable 
depravation! The father himself was coming to gloat over his abominable deed, he
was coming to consummate it; the gravedigger preceded him, a lantern in his 
hand.

“Lift her forth,” he was told by the father, “so great is my grief that I must 
once again take her in my arms before losing her forever.”

The casket reappears, from it the body is removed, then laid out by the 
gravedigger upon the steps of the altar.

“Very good, my friend, that will do; leave me for a time,” says the incestuous 
and barbaric author of that charming girl’s days, “I wish to weep undisturbed. Let 
me shed my tears at my ease, you may return in two hours’ time, and I shall 
reward you for your zeal.”

The doors are closed again.

Oh, my friends, how am I to describe the horrors we witnessed? Describe them
I must, however: they are aberrances of the human heart I am exposing, and I 
am bound to unveil its every nook and cranny.

Although the church had been locked shut, for added safety the rascal 
barricades himself inside the chapel, lights four tapers, places two at the head, 
two at the feet of his daughter, then draws away the shroud; and she lies naked 
before him. Unspeakable quiverings of pleasure then take possession of him; his 
twitching muscles, his hoarse respiration, the upstanding prick he trundles into 
sight, everything paints the ignited state of his soul.

“Damn my eyes!” he cries, “there it is, the thing I did … I repent me not…. Go, 
’twas not your waggling tongue I punished, but my villainy I contented; the idea 
of killing you stiffened my prick, I’d fucked you a little too often, now I am 
pleased.”

Wherewith he approaches the corpse; he fondles its breasts, he jabs them with
a pin.

“Bah, she feels nothing anymore,” he mutters; “a pity, she feels nothing. Was I
in too great a hurry? Bitch, how many other torments I’d inflict upon you were 
you yet alive!”

He spreads her thighs wide apart, he pinches her labia, he pricks the interior of
her womb and, feeling his erection at its peak, the villain encunts her, lies down 
flat upon her, kisses her mouth, does what he can to thrust his tongue inside it, 
but cannot, for the contractions induced by the poison have locked tight the 
child’s jaw. He withdraws, turns the corpse over upon its belly and allows us a 
sight of the loveliest buttocks one can hope to behold. Ardently he kisses those 
hindquarters, vigorously he frigs himself. “Ah,” he exclaims, “how often have I 
fucked this celestial ass, how many various pleasures has it procured me over the
past four years!”

He then steps back, gazes down at the body meditatively, circles it two or 
three times, repeating the words, “Beautiful corpse! Beautiful corpse!”

And as the uttering of that phrase lifted his prick afresh and caused it horribly 
to swell, we concluded that corpse-fucking must be his passion. Again he kneels 
down between his daughter’s wide-flung legs, he rekisses her lovely ass a 
thousand times over, pricks it, bites it, applies furious slaps to it, even tears away 
a piece of flesh with his teeth, and sodomizes. Here, as it appeared to us, his 
delirium reaches its culminating point; he gnashes his teeth, he foams; and, 
drawing a long knife from his pocket, while he discharges he cuts off the head of 
this cadaver, then readjusts himself.

We observed there, philosophically, the state of the man of firm principle when 
he has just completed the satisfaction of his ruling passion. A fool, with before 
him nothing but the object of his rage and his lubricity, obliged to wait amidst the 
silence and the horror of the tombs, would have shuddered, infallibly. Our villain, 
calm, gathers up the battered debris of his daughter; he packs the pieces back 
into the casket; he even remains a short while down in the vault, doing we have 
no idea what. ’Twas then that Durand, who throughout the whole of this 
performance has not ceased to frig herself or to frig me, suggests that we push 
the stone slab into place over the vault and entomb this man along with his 
victim.

“No,” I say, “he is a villain, and we owe all villains our respect and protection.”

“Yes, to be sure,” she agreed; “but we may at least give him a scare. Quickly, 
lie down on the exact spot his daughter occupied a moment ago, and in the same 
attitude; let that be the sight greeting him when he emerges from below. 
Powerfully impressed he will be, the effect should about drive him to distraction.”

Its unusualness seemed to me to require that the prank be played.

The libertine reappears, and the first thing his eyes light upon is my 
well-exposed ass. So startled was he that he staggered backward, and all but 
toppled into the vault whence he had arisen; and, indeed, he was saved from 
doing so only by my friend, who caught his arm; and at her touch he almost 
swooned away from terror.

“Cordelli,” Durand said to the libertine, who was trembling from head to foot, 
“be not alarmed, you are amidst friends: I am she who sold you the poison you 
employed so successfully, and in this pretty girl behold someone of the most 
amiable disposition and ready to give you all manner of delights, providing that 
they differ from those we have just watched you procure yourself.”

“You have taken me strangely by surprise,” the tradesman said.

“Never mind, my friend, compose yourself: we saw you and we admired you. I 
ask you to admire this splendid ass, it is there to serve you: five hundred sequins 
and it is yours. And bear in mind also that this superb creature is no ordinary 
woman.”

“Indeed, it is an agreeable behind,” Cordelli admitted, fondling it; “but I am in 
limp condition: you saw the discharge I produced a short while ago.”

“A reparable loss,” Durand declared, “you shall be up again in no time, believe 
me. I have a lotion in my pocket, its effects are unfailing. Where do you wish the 
scene to take place?”

“In that vault; let us all descend there, I cannot tear myself away from my 
victim’s remains, you’d find it hard to believe, the degree to which they inspire 
me.”

We made our way down into the sepulcher.

Cordelli no sooner lifts away the winding sheet, he no sooner claps eyes upon 
his unlucky daughter’s vestiges, than his prick begins to stir again. Durand rubs 
his testicles with the lotion she had mentioned, then she frictions his member. I 
show him my behind, he reaches for it, socratizes it, kisses my mouth, and the 
erection is complete.

“This young lady will have the kindness,” says he, “to place herself in the 
casket. She will then be swathed in the shroud. We shall then go up to the chapel,
the slab will be lowered for a few moments; I shall then, I am perfectly certain of 
it, discharge at the edge of the hole.”

La Durand casts a glance at me; my answer was not slow in forthcoming.

“We are inseparable, Signor,” I informed the tradesman, “it shall therefore 
have to be over the two of us you lower the slab for a few moments.”

“Ah, dear Juliette, you want faith in me,” said Durand. “Go up then with Signor 
Cordelli, I shall stay below. And I commend myself to you, remember it, to you 
alone.”

A second time I took counsel with myself. I worshiped Durand; I realized that 
even a sliver of mistrust must soon turn into a wedge driven between us. There 
was the risk that they leave me buried alive? Offsetting it was the gravedigger’s 
eventual return. And if nothing happened, if all went well … how my confidence in 
my friend would be reinforced! what tranquillity ever after!

“Nonsense,” I declared; “and to prove to you, my love, that I am incapable of 
doubts in your regard, I stay here. Proceed, Cordelli, do what you like; and for my
acquiescence the price is one thousand sequins.”

“The sum shall be yours,” the tradesman promised, “I appreciate unconditional
docility, yours shall be recompensed.”

The scraps of the daughter are cleared from the casket, I install myself in it; 
Cordelli envelops me in the shroud; and he presses three or four kisses to my 
asshole. “Ah, the beautiful corpse,”, he sighs, walking around me several times; 
after which he and Durand mount the stone stairs leading to the chapel.

I confess it, a deathly chill penetrated me unto the very marrow of my bones 
when I heard the slab fall heavily into position. And now? I wondered. Helpless, I 
am in the power of two very wicked villains. Strange blindness of libertinage, 
whither shall you lead me!

But this ordeal was necessary.

I leave you to imagine how my uneasiness increased when stirrings up above 
announced the removal of the barricade with which Cordelli had blocked the 
chapel; and when those movements were succeeded by utter silence.

So, I said to myself, you are doomed. Perfidious Durand has betrayed you. And
I felt all my body laved in a cold sweat, from my scalp down to my ankles. Then, 
plucking up courage, I reasoned with myself: Softly, said I, let us not despair, ’tis 
no act of virtue you have just committed. Were that the case, well might you 
quake; but vice alone is concerned here, and so what can you possibly fear?

Such were my thoughts when the noises characteristic of Cordelli’s discharge 
were heard; the stone was lifted away; and a moment later Durand was bending 
over me.

“It is all over, my angel,” said she, “you are free and here are your thousand 
sequins. Will you suspect me in the future?”

“Never,” I cried, “never, forgive an irrational impulse: it was directed far more 
at Cordelli than at you. But let us get ourselves away from this place, I am faint 
from lack of fresh air.”

A weary Cordelli, whose bubbling sperm formed a puddle upon the slab, was 
sitting on the steps of the altar, awaiting us. We made ready to go; the 
gravedigger appeared, Cordelli paid him, and we left the cathedral. Durand 
wanted to spend the rest of the night in my bed.

“That episode has forged bonds between us,” I said to my companion, “it seals 
our friendship forever, our mutual trust. It has rendered us inseparable for life.”

“I told you so,” Durand replied, “our arms combined will bring much hurt to 
others; but never a scratch either to you or to me.

“Is it not true,” said I, “that had you had some other woman with you, she 
would have remained in that vault?”

“For a certainty. And I swear to you that Cordelli offered me two thousand 
sequins if I would agree to leave you there.”

“Well,” was my response, “let us look about for a pretty girl, let us propose her
to him and enjoy watching him repeat his performance.”

“But you already have the desired girl.”

“Who then?”

“Elise.”

“You are unfriendly toward my two maids, aren’t you! Is it jealousy?”

“No, but I do not like to see anyone near you whom you might think more 
attached to you than am I. Are you not just a little tired of the slut? I leave you 
the other one, but that Elise, surely you have had your fill of her by now? You 
cannot sleep at night unless it be between the pair of them? Why then, all that is 
required is that I take her place.”

“Your project excites me but at the same time I find it distasteful.”

“Which is to say that it has everything in its favor,” Durand rejoined, “for great 
pleasures are only born from surmounted repugnances. Ring for her, let’s sport 
with her, silently decree her death while frigging her; nothing amuses me like 
such pieces of deceit.”

“Ah, Durand, what a multitude of infamies you have me commit.”

“Say rather what an infinity of delights I prepare for you.”

Elise appears, beautiful as ever, the very effigy of Love; she slips obediently 
into bed between us; Durand, as yet only imperfectly acquainted with her, takes 
extreme pleasure in caressing the girl.

“There’s a truly voluptuous creature, upon my honor,” says the rascal, 
scattering kisses upon her, “have her lie on top of you, Juliette, and be tickling her
clitoris while I embugger her. Oh, what an inspiring ass, how our good tradesman 
is going to fancy these peerless buttocks!”

And the lewd thing, tonguing the anus lodged betwixt them, shortly introduced 
her little device thereinto. Stretched out upon Elise, and consequently upon me as
well, she sucked our mouths by turns.

“Twelve hours in a row I have been engaged in libertine activities,” she said, 
“and I ought by rights to be exhausted; but not at all, I feel as though nothing 
could abate my ardor.”

“And, do you know, I feel the same way. ’Tis our scheme,” I added in a 
lowered voice, “which particularly heats me, Durand, electrifies me. The two of 
us, let’s discharge over that delicious idea.!’ And as I was frigging Elise most 
dextrously, and as Durand was sodomizing her to perfection, the little dear was 
the first to discharge. Sensing the spasm occur, Durand set to spanking her 
ferociously; she withdrew from Elise’s ass and, swearing like one of the damned, 
scolded the poor soul for having upset her by discharging.

“The duty of a victim,” she told her harshly, “is to accommodate; she must 
never venture to partake of any pleasure whatever. You are a jade, you are a 
hussy, and a whipping will teach you to create disturbances for me.”

I hold the victim and the villain has at her for a quarter of an hour. Elise was 
familiar with this mania, she had frequently had to put up with lashings from me; 
but never before had she received one so violent.

“You are going to spoil her behind,” I pointed out, “and tomorrow Cordelli—”

“He values such disfiguring marks, they bring him to erection.”

And, while the libertine remained intent upon her work, the blood continued to 
course down Elise’s legs. The storm did finally subside, Durand embuggered me 
and, while in the pass of discharging, wanted to have the girl’s tattered buttocks 
within the reach of her kisses.

“A divine creature,” she pronounced when her spasms were over, “exactly what
we need. And you, my fairest of fair, say, have you discharged? Forgive me for 
paying so little heed to your pleasures: when in the throes of delirium I tend to 
inconceivable self-centeredness.”

“Oh, my dear, I have been at least as happy as you; see how wet my cunt is.”

“And your brain? Was it affected by the thing too?”

“Overwhelmed.”

We got back into bed, Elise between us; I blew out the candle. Before drifting 
off to sleep, Durand put her lips to my ear: “I relish few thoughts,” she said in a 
whisper, “more than that of lying the night with an individual who is certain to die 
the next day thanks to me.”

Durand called upon Cordelli early the following morning. Enchanted as he was 
by such an agreeable proposition, a bargain was quickly struck, the life of the 
ill-starred Elise was sold in exchange for a modest thousand sequins; but Cordelli 
meant to encompass the deed by refinements, and as I am about to relate this 
sinister adventure to you, rather than tell you of them ahead of time, I shall let 
these details come out in the course of the drama.

While my companion was off negotiating I had ordered Elise put in a state of 
readiness. She was bathed, freshened, perfumed, and once art had seconded the 
gifts of Nature, that beautiful girl, not yet eighteen years old, emerged radiant as 
an angel.

Durand returned and advised me that Cordelli expected us at five o’clock that 
same afternoon. “’Tis to transpire at one of his country properties, in a castle by 
the sea three leagues outside Ancona; and,” she said, “I believe I can assure you 
that the scene will be rousing. Now let us have lunch.”

Elise and Raimonde, as usual, were at table alongside us; ’twas there we 
announced to them that they were to be separated..

“Elise,” said we, “has caught the eye of a rich tradesman in town. Her future is 
assured; she is to stay here at Ancona.”

The two friends melted into tears. Then, throwing herself into my arms, “Dear 
lady,” Elise cried, sprinkling me with tears and kisses, “you promised you would 
never abandon me….”

And it was then, my friends, that I was able to measure the vibrations set up 
within a libertine soul when lust enters into collision with sensibility. I stiffened 
inwardly against the girl’s pleadings, I found pleasure in braving her tears, in 
refusing to allow her entreaties to act otherwise than as a spur to my lubricity.

“But, my dear,” I replied to that exquisite creature, fending her off, pushing her
back to her chair, “would I not blame myself forever if I were to stand in the way 
of your fortune?”

“I want no fortune, Madame, I ask for nothing but the favor of remaining with 
you until my dying day.”

“Elise,” said Durand, “are you then so very fond of Juliette?”

“Alas, Madame, but for her I would not be alive today. It was she who rescued 
Raimonde and me from a brigand who would without any question have 
massacred us otherwise, and when gratitude is added to the heart’s natural 
feelings, you understand, Madame, that nothing but impassioned friendship can 
be the result.”

“Be all that as it may, you must take leave of each other,” said the unkind 
Durand, “and very promptly too.”

Within me a storm was brewing; Durand detected it.

“Take her into another room,” my companion murmured to me, “I shall stay 
here and have Raimonde frig me.”

No sooner was I alone with Elise than I felt all my senses transformed by fury; 
that beautiful child kissed me as she wept: I abused her; and feeling my fuck flow
with the first blows I dealt her, I struck with redoubled force.

“In truth,” I said icily, “your sentiments surprise me, for I feel none even 
distantly resembling them. It may be that once upon a time I did not behold you 
with total indifference; however, I am weary of you today. If I have kept you for 
the past three months, lay it up to charity.”

“To charity, Madame!”

“Why yes, were it not for my pity, what do you suppose you would have turned
into? A streetwalker. Therefore thank me if I have taken the trouble to procure 
somebody for you, and express yo

ur gratitude by frigging me.”

I removed her clothes, I pored over her charms; to contemplate them in that 
frame of mind all but slew me with delight. How it thrilled me to be able to say to 
myself: In three days’ time, this glorious body will be the prey of maggots, and 
the credit for its destruction shall be mine.

Divine spark of lust! inexpressible delights of crime! Ah, what ravages you 
produce in the nervous system of a libertine female! Elise! Elise, thou whom I 
didst once dote upon, I deliver thee into the hands of thy butchers … and doing 
so, I discharge.

Striving to persuade me that, once gone, she would be sorely missed, how the 
cunning little thing redoubled her attentions! It was not long before they obtained 
triumphal results; she was sucking while socratizing me, I shot a flood into her 
mouth; I then did for her what she had done for me. I adored the idea of 
drowning her in pleasure before handing her over to death. She discharged, then 
burst into tears, addressing the most tender words to me, the most urgent 
entreaties, supplicating me not to send her away. She could more easily have 
moved a mountain. Once I was sated, “Come,” I told her, “it is time to leave.”

She thought to go to her room to pack together her belongings.

“Don’t bother,” said I, “we’ll send your things to you tomorrow.”

She casts herself into my arms … I repulse her, I slap her face hard; she 
bleeds. I believe I might have strangled her there and then had it not been for 
our agreement with Cordelli.

We went back into the salon. Durand was not there; I heard sounds in the 
adjoining room and went to peer through the keyhole. Heavens! what was my 
surprise to spy a man embuggering Raimonde, and Durand flogging the fucker. I 
knock … I ask leave to enter.

“Is it you?” Durand calls out.

“Why, of course; open the door.”

A finger to her lips, she bade me come in quietly. “It’s Cordelli…. He insisted 
upon seeing the girl you had in store for him; I did not want to disturb you, so I 
gave him Raimonde for the time being. As you see … he’s embuggering her. He 
seems to be mad about her, Juliette.”

“Pray do not interrupt anything on my account, Signor,” I hastened to say to 
him, “simply remember that she is not the one you have contracted for.”

“And I am dreadfully sorry about it,” the rake replied, his words punctuated by 
gasps of pleasure, “I am dreadfully—sorry—for her ass—the most beautiful ass in 
creation, the—tightest fitting—oh, with this there are—wonders to be achieved. 
However,” he went on, backing out of the breach, “I shall not discharge, ’twould 
be wiser for me to husband my forces. There,” said he, wiping his prick, 
recovering his breath, “let us talk business for a moment.”

Raimonde retired from the room; and the three of us, Cordelli, Durand, and I, 
drew up chairs and sat down.

“My impatience got the better of me,” he explained; “I arrived just as you were
getting up from the table, Madame Durand told me that you were amusing 
yourself with the one reserved for me. Seeing Raimonde with our friend, I formed
a desire to have her, and I must own that the having of her made me regret that 
not she but the other one is to be my victim. ‘ ’Tis Juliette’s favorite,’ Madame 
Durand informed me, ‘Juliette will never agree to part with her.’ Mademoiselle,” 
the seducer continued, taking hold of my hand, “listen to me. I am a generous 
man to deal with; I own millions, having for the past twenty years pocketed every
penny of the profits from the celebrated Senigallia Fair:(2) a few thousand 
sequins more, a few thousand sequins less, trifles I do not deign to take notice of 
when my passions are at stake. I do not know Elise; but I know your Raimonde, 
she pleases me infinitely. I have seen divine behinds in my day, I never fuck any 
save the warmest and the snuggest. This girl must be superb in distress; and, to 
put it simply, she is one of the most suitable women for victimization I have 
beheld in years. This then is what I am going to do: Sight unseen, I shall take the
other one, because I said I would, and I shall take this one too, in this case 
knowing what I am getting: will six thousand sequins be acceptable for the pair?”

“Hardly,” I replied, feeling greed, love of gold crowd every other sentiment out 
of my heart. “Twenty thousand sequins and you get the two of them.”

“But,” Cordelli reminded me, “I have already bought one for a thousand.”

“Consider the bargain broken; I sell them together or not at all, and I am not 
going to let them go for anything under the price I just named.”

“I can only approve my friend’s decision,” Durand put in; “it strikes me that 
you are lucky to obtain the darling of her affections so cheaply.”

“A girl I worship, and I sell her to whom? to a villain who intends to kill her!”

“Yes indeed,” the Italian admitted, “and to kill her to the tune of ghastly 
tortures, I assure you.”

“Well, such amusements must be paid for, Signor. Make up your mind, for let 
pity reassert its rights in my heart and you’ll end up with nothing.”

“Your merchandise is expensive, Mademoiselle,” the tradesman observed. “But,
damn my eyes! you catch me at a moment when the heat of lust puts right 
reason to rout. Show this voucher to my bookkeeper and he will immediately 
disburse the funds. In the meantime let us have a look at the other girl.”

“Scoundrel,” I whispered to my friend, “this is another example of your work. 
You seem to be determined to leave me nobody.”

“Oh, Juliette, for that blame nought but my love; think not that you shall ever 
regret having lost everybody else, for in having me you shall have more than a 
whole world.”

And she went off to collect the money.

I summoned Elise.

“Charming!” the rake exclaimed once he clapped eyes upon her. “Little wonder 
that you ask such a figure for such an article.” And hastening to undress the girl, 
his enthusiasm but rose when he was able to admire her charms in their entirety. 
He submits that delicate and sweetly modeled ass to a searching examination; he 
kisses it indefatigably, spreads it, tongues it, fucks it, comes forth to kiss it anew; 
and ardent though they be, the caresses he lavishes upon it, he cannot tear 
himself away from the divine object.

“Have the other one come in, we shall compare the two side by side.”

Raimonde appears and, soon just as naked as Elise, she offers her examiner 
everything needed to facilitate his observations. The scrupulousness wherewith he
proceeds is not to be imagined: the buttocks especially claim his narrow-eyed 
attention. While he concentrates upon his study I lay a light hand to his member, 
frig him slowly; his hands stray now and then to my buttocks, which he fondles 
while thrusting his tongue into my mouth; and then he embuggers Elise, while 
slapping us smartly, Raimonde and me.

“Truth to tell, the one is worth no less than the other,” he confides to me in 
private, “and both are delightful. I shall cause them much suffering.”

“Which, in your view, is the better ass?” I asked him.

“Oh, Raimonde’s, no doubt about it,” he replied, kissing that lovely personage 
with feeling; “better for temperature, better for fit…. Juliette, lie down upon that 
bed,” the insatiable libertine said, “I am of a mind to ass-fuck you also.”

He has Elise station herself to my left, Raimonde to my right: he then kneads 
and pinches their two behinds while fucking mine. Then, abruptly breaking off 
contact, “Enough,” he says, “else I discharge. Time is passing; let us be on our 
way.”

The two girls retire to make themselves ready for the journey. Finding myself 
alone with the Italian, “Don’t deny it,” I say, “it was my companion who induced 
you to choose Raimonde. Eh?”

“I shall not hide from you that she is eager to see her die.”

“The vixen! ’Tis jealousy: a sufficient motive, in so far as I am concerned. Oh, 
never fear, my mind is made up, those two wretches must be treated infernally.” I
was frigging him as I spoke, he was standing in front of me, I was rubbing his 
prick against my breasts, tickling his anus. “And,” I wondered, “exactly what form
of torture are you reserving for them?”

“You would not have it be mild?”

“Ah, if it were up to me, their torments would surpass anything you can 
imagine.”

“Delicious creature…. That is the way I like women to be; they are more 
ferocious than men if they will but give outlet to their aptitudes.”

“Behind that lie natural reasons,” I answered, “their organs are more finely 
constructed, their sensitivity profounder, their nerves more irascible: barbarity is 
not a trait of the individual of inferior sensibility.”

“Precisely; and with a much keener imagination than the one we have, a 
woman cannot help but embrace excesses more avidly: which is why, in crime, 
women always go farther than we. Let a duel be announced, a gladiatorial 
combat, a public execution, and you see women flock to watch the spectacle; take
a count of the onlookers, each time you will find women outnumbering men ten to
one. A great many fools,” the tradesman added, “dupes of this incredible faculty 
for feeling they notice in women, fail to realize that extremes coincide, and that it 
is precisely at the source of this capacity that cruelty has its origin.”

“Because cruelty is in itself but an extension of sensitivity,” said I, “and 
because the great horrors we commit are always owing to the higher degree of 
our soul’s sensitivity.”

“Listening to you, it is as though one were conversing with an angel, dear 
heart,” said Signor Cordelli; “kiss me and kiss me again, I am as much taken by 
your mind as by your charms. You ought to attach yourself to me.”

“I am inviolably attached to my friend,” I replied; “only death will sunder us.”

“She would come with you.”

“No, we wish to see our native land again.”

At that point I heard Durand’s footsteps. Going to greet her, I was able, as we 
stood out of range of Cordelli’s hearing, to learn of the pretty coup she had just 
executed.

“I tampered with the voucher,” Durand told me. “We have double the sum.”

“Forty thousand sequins?”

“Yes, they are already locked safely away.”

“Celestial creature!”

“Do you regret the transaction now?”

“Not anymore. But when Cordelli next sees his bookkeeper?”

“By then the crime will be consummated. One word of complaint out of the 
scoundrel and one word from us will have him broken on the wheel.”

“Kiss me, cleverest of friends!”

“Come and take your half of the money.”

“What need is there of that? Let us first attend to Cordelli; we shall divide our 
earnings when we return.”

“I would like you to have the entire sum; it gives me greater pleasure to see 
you at the summit of opulence than to increase my own wealth.”

And Cordelli having sent for us, we all set forth. After a several hours’ drive we
reached the tradesman’s castle, a veritable fortress situated upon a spur of rock 
jutting out into the sea. By a little farm lying at the base of the rock the carriage 
drew to a halt, for the road went no farther. From that point on there were steps 
to climb, four hundred of them in all, these being the sole means of access to that
redoubtable house. Before beginning the ascent we had to pass an iron gate, to 
which the tradesman had the key; there were six other gates like it at intervals 
along the stairway, and Cordelli opened and carefully closed each of them as we 
proceeded up. Durand, noticing my expression of surprise gradually yield to one 
of alarm, saw fit to reassure me. To Cordelli she said: “Yes, the description you 
gave me of your house’s whereabouts was exact, and our servants, who will 
easily find the place, have instructions to come to fetch us tomorrow morning if 
by ten o’clock we are not back in Ancona.”

“I am well known throughout the region,” said the tradesman, likewise eager, 
as it seemed to me, to put me at ease; “but you need not have troubled to give 
your orders, Madame Durand, you have my promise that we shall be returning to 
the city tonight, and you know me well enough to be sure that my word is my 
bond.”

Our two girls were not so easily reassured. A kind of premonition always 
accompanies impending woe, the unlucky pair felt it in all its force, the knees of 
both were buckling from terror.

A final gate is unlocked and then shut behind us; we are welcomed by two 
women of sixty.

“Everything is ready?” asks Cordelli.

“Since this morning, Signor,” one of the women replies; “we did not think you 
would be coming so late.”

We advance; it is a rather somber, low-ceilinged hall we enter first.

Cordelli moves to a window, draws the curtain aside. “Look where we are,” 
says he.

And great was our astonishment to see that we were some three hundred feet 
above the sea, and nearly surrounded by water.

“This rock describes a curve,” the Italian explained; “here, at its outermost 
point, we are about half a league from the mainland. One may make as much 
noise as one likes, there is slight chance of being heard by anybody.”

We left that room, mounted a flight of stairs which brought us to another: in it 
the scene was to take place.

Never perhaps had my eyes beheld anything quite so horrible. Upon a round 
dais located in the center of that room, itself circular, we made out, upon 
entering, all the divers instruments necessary to every known form of torture. 
Among them were some so execrable, so inconceivable and outlandish that I had 
never even dreamed of their existence. Two huge swarthy men, six feet tall, 
wearing fearful moustaches, of terrifying mien, naked as savages, stood at 
attention amidst that array of equipment, visibly ready to carry out the orders 
they were waiting to receive. Fifteen corpses of youths and young girls decorated 
the smoke-streaked stone walls of that evil den; and upon four stools surrounding
the central dais were seated two girls of sixteen and two boys of fifteen, all in a 
state of absolute nudity. The old women, who had entered along with us, closed 
and bolted the doors; Cordelli glanced at us, relishing our astonishment.

“This is where we are going to operate,” said he. “Rarely,” he observed for the 
sake of our two handmaids, “yes, very rarely does anyone leave this room having 
once come through its portals. Look sharply there, Dona Maria, have the clothes 
removed; start a fire; and let’s settle down to work without further delay … I feel 
the fuck tingling in my balls; and seldom have I been in such a mood for horrors.

“Juliette,” the lewd man said to me, “I appoint you my satellite, the general 
agent of my pleasures; undress and keep close by my side. Mindful of nothing but
the service, of the imperious needs and wants of my prick and of my ass, you 
shall minister carefully to both of them during the entirety of the scene. If I call 
for a fucking, you shall wet my asshole with your spittle; with your tongue you 
shall moisten the pricks that are to sodomize me; you shall yourself introduce 
them into my behind. If I elect to fuck, you shall guide my tool into the holes I am
moved to perforate, which you shall oil with saliva from your lips. At no time while
performing your duties shall you neglect this capital detail: once you have 
completed the oral preparation of whatever it may be, prick or ass, your mouth 
must be glued immediately to mine, and must suck it diligently and at length. 
Moreover, an attitude of deepest respect shall distinguish your bearing and govern
your actions: it shall not be forgotten that no one is admitted into this place 
except slaves or victims.

“You, Durand, shall lead the objects up to me, you shall present them to me, 
and remember, both of you, to do nothing without first giving me your asses to 
kiss.

“As for you,” he went on, addressing the elders, bare-armed and naked from 
the waist down, wielding a handful of slender green switches, “you shall follow 
close after me, and you shall exert yourselves upon my flanks and buttocks at 
such times as, in your judgment, they may benefit from stimulation.

“You, Bloodletter, and you, Barbaro, not only shall you fulfill your role as 
executioners, but you shall take all good care to perforate my behind each time 
you see me present it to you amorously; Juliette then shall seize your engines 
and shall fetch them up and introduce them into my ass, conforming to the 
instructions already given her.

“As regards you young people who, seated upon these four stools, and in the 
most respectful silence, are awaiting what it pleases me to prescribe to you, 
submissiveness is your lot. Think not that the ties through which you are 
connected to me, since you are all four my offspring though begot of different 
mothers, think not, I say, that familial ties are going to prevent me from 
dispatching you upon a prolonged and harrowing journey to death: be advised 
that I only gave you life in order to be able to deprive you of it, that infanticide is 
one of the sweetest of my pleasures, and that it is the very nearness of our 
kinship that will ensure my delight in martyrizing you.

“As for you, my lovely children,” he continued glaveringly, cruelly rallying my 
two women, “after what I have paid for you, no one will contest my right to do 
with you everything a more than ordinarily perverse imagination may suggest to 
me … and you can look forward to atrocious discomforts. I hope shortly to come 
to know all the effects of pain upon your sensitive constitutions.”

Hearing those words, the unhappy creatures fell upon their knees before 
Cordelli. Already undressed by the duennas, their rich black hair floating in 
disorder upon their breasts of alabaster, their tears wetting the feet of the tyrant, 
all this lends an indescribably affecting quality to the spectacle of their grief and 
their despair.

“Fuck my soul,” Cordelli says, sinking back into an armchair while I pollute him
with one hand, socratize him with the other. “How fond I am of misfortune’s tragic
effects, how they stiffen me…. Say, my pretty little jades, what if I lend you a 
dagger? You could stab yourselves or each other to death, I would not be 
unwilling to watch you do it.” And as he spoke the monster laid brutal hands upon
those two charming girls’ fresh and delicate breasts: he pinched them, 
compressed them violently, and appeared to glean uncommon pleasure from 
aggravating their mental sufferings by means of a quantity of little physical 
bullyings, inflicted, his hardening prick announced, to his lust’s advantage.

“Bring me their asses,” he told one of the duennas, “adjust them so that the 
holes are on a level with my lips. You, Durand, suck me; Juliette shall continue to 
frig me as I lie in your mouth.”

Thereupon he bit those two faultless asses and left marks of his teeth upon ten
or a dozen different places. Then, slipping his head between Raimonde’s thighs, 
so fiercely did he chew upon her clitoris that the poor girl fainted. Enchanted at 
achieving such an effect, he began to subject Elise to the same trial; but the girl 
twitched, the knave missed the mark, his teeth clamped instead upon the lips of 
her vagina, a piece of which he carried away. Bruised and shocked though they 
were by these initial attacks, he wanted to fuck them both in that state. The order
is given, the girls are laid belly down upon a long divan, their heads directly 
underneath the cadavers adorning the walls. And there, served by me, the rascal 
dipped alternately into their two asses and their two cunts, during a space of 
twenty minutes. After this, he found a bundle of switches, and having had one of 
the girls get down upon all fours and the other kneel upon her shoulders, in such 
sort that he could get at Elise’s divine buttocks and Raimonde’s exquisite teats, he
martyrized those fleshy forms, now individually, now collectively; for better than 
thirty uninterrupted minutes he lashed them, all the while the duennas, kneeling 
behind his ass, belabored his buttocks with a silver hatpin. Elise and Raimonde 
exchanged positions, so that he could thrash her buttocks whose breasts he had 
just finished beating, and worry the breasts of her whose ass he had been 
molesting hitherto. When everything was bleeding profusely, basins of water were
brought forward, wounds were stanched, and Cordelli, in furious erection, 
commanded one of his sons to come to him. In that delightful child all the gifts of 
a lavish Nature were combined: an enchanting countenance, a fine and fair skin, a
pretty mouth, lovely hair, the most adorable ass.

“He does indeed greatly resemble his mother,” the rake observed, kissing the 
boy.

“What became of the poor soul?” I asked the Italian.

“Fie upon you, Juliette!” he replied. “You are forever suspecting me of horrors, 
I sense it. Much surprised you would be, I dare say, if I were to produce the 
person for you right now.”

“I defy you to do it.”

“Very well, there she is,” Cordelli retorted, pointing to one of the corpses 
suspended from a hook upon the wall; “that is the boy’s mother, ask him if you do
not believe me. I depucelated the dear lad, here in this room, and that was 
scarcely thirty-six hours ago. Yes, here, as he lay in the arms of his loving and 
then living mother; and shortly afterward, as he will confirm, yes, before his very 
eyes, utilizing a curious torture, I sent his mama to the place where today I am 
going, in a manner no less curious, to send his nabs, madame’s darling son.” And 
the rascal, polluted by me, grew inordinately stiff.

He has one of the old women contain the child; upon his instructions, I moisten
the gomorrhean orifice, I guide the shaft; Durand sucks Cordelli’s Ganymede from
below, and the Italian embuggers while colling my behind.

Nimble as ever, ever sufficiently in control of himself to strike deep and yet 
only graze the edge of pleasure, Cordelli, without it having cost him a drop of 
fuck, withdraws from this ass too.

The other youth is brought to him. The same ceremony, the same economy of 
sperm; and the tradesman having camped one atop the other, thrashes them both
simultaneously. From time to time he pauses to suck a prick. Finally, impelled by 
a furious surge of lust, he bites the balls of the first-fucked, bites them so terribly 
that the child loses consciousness. Unperturbed, Cordelli moves on to other 
things. One of his daughters is led up; she was not a beauty, but about her there 
was something so mild, an air of modesty and innocence so irresistible that there 
was no refusing her one’s stintless homage.

“A virgin, that one,” said Cordelli, “of that there is no question; however, since 
I am no longer capable of catching an erection for a cunt, you,” he went on, 
nodding to the duennas, “shall lay her flat on this sofa, and hold her still.”

And as soon as he has that pleasant child’s two voluptuous buttocks well in 
perspective, the sinner molests them, pinches them, and claws them with such 
speed and such force that they are all ableeding the next minute: therewith he 
embuggers. Thinking to have acquired from that ass the vigor needed to attempt 
the cunt, he presents himself before it; and, his illusion sustained by our libertine 
fingerings and kisses and yet more so by the asses we offer to his caresses, 
success crowns his efforts, he blasts the maidenhead. He withdraws an 
incarnadine member to thrust it home again into the sanctuary he prefers, and 
after a few more such mingled attacks, he comes back to discharge in the ass of 
one of the boys whom to this end he has kept nearby him throughout all his 
activities up until now. He discharges, I say. A clap of thunder, one would have 
called it. I thought he was going to shake the house down. We were clustered 
around him; he was kissing my buttocks, an old woman was flogging him, Durand
was socratizing him, Elise was tickling his balls, he was pinching Raimonde’s ass, 
examining that of the little boy and that of the little girl posted ahead of him; in 
sum, everything, everyone, concurred in provoking a discharge the power of 
which is not readily to be described.

“Fuck!” he exclaimed when he was done, “the time has come for some horrors,
they are indispensable if I am to get myself back into form.”

“Then horrors you shall have, my friend, horrors you shall have,” said I, 
consoling his prick by mouthing it, by squeezing it, by carefully evacuating the 
very last drop of fuck from it.(3)

Cordelli was grateful for these attentions. The crowd encircles him once again 
while I suck him; his mouth finds that of the girl he has just devirginated, one 
would have thought he designed to tear her tongue out by the roots, so forcefully 
did he suck it. By and by, who would believe it? through an incredible incongruity, 
’tis the fetid maw of one of the crones he fastens upon and tongues for a quarter 
of an hour; and the foul fellow abandons it only in order, with identical delight, to 
pump the mouth of that one of his executioners he signals for. This last excess is 
the decisive one: I begin to feel the effects of the miracle. Cordelli takes one of 
my hands and, placing it upon the villain’s instrument, I am awestruck at 
discovering that the article in my grasp is thicker than my upper arm and almost 
as long as one of my thighs.

“Take that prick, Juliette,” the Italian says to me, “and steer it into the cunt of 
the little girl I have just deflowered. Keep in mind, if you will, that it must enter 
regardless of the consequences.”

Initial attempts proving futile, there was nothing else to do but bind the victim;
Cordelli ordered her four limbs secured by ropes made fast to the floor, in such 
sort as to ensure fair access to both her holes: thus, if his man failed to fight his 
way into one of them, he could take refuge in the other. I wheeled the engine into
position; Cordelli was urging the champion on from behind; lean and hairy though
those hinder parts were, the lecher tongued them contentedly, and looked to be 
ready to fuck them the moment that individual’s enormous device was niched 
where he wanted it to be. By dint of skill we succeed: the prick penetrates into 
the girl’s cunt, and death’s livid hue upon her brow attests to the damnable state 
of her physique. Cordelli, however, his eye fixed upon that extraordinary tool, 
soon issues commands to make for the other port; I act as pilot. Jostled, strained 
in every fiber, Nature gradually yields to resolute pressure, as she always does; 
nevertheless, the anus splits, blood gushes forth, and the Italian, in seventh 
heaven, hanging in the fucker’s bowels, smites him from the rear as he himself 
smites to the fore.

Oh, God of Justice! what contrasts! Imagine, if you can, that pretty little face, 
so touching, so sweet; that face being nastily kissed by the most unprepossessing
and the grimmest figure of a man to be found anywhere on earth, his bristly 
moustaches withering the lilies and the roses in the loveliest possible complexion, 
and with execrable blasphemies replying to the plaintive entreaties of the most 
innocent soul. Picture, my friends, on the other side, the infamous Cordelli 
preferring, to the beauties surrounding him, that paid murderer’s loathsome bum;
tonguing that vent, feeding upon it with the same ardor that would ordinarily have
animated anybody else before a pretty and youthful novice; inserting his prick 
thereinto, and finally ordering Durand to strangle the victim when his man 
discharges.

It all comes about: the unlucky child expires. And the Italian, debuggering, 
offers us a purpling, sharply risen prick, fit now for every kind of outrage.

“There I am, back in fettle once again,” says he. “And there’s one of them 
dead already. I behaved with restraint, my friends, as you noticed; for I do not 
believe one could more mildly put a person to death.”

One of the duennas thought to remove the corpse.

“Do not touch it, buggeress!” the merchant shouted, “those sights arouse me, 
how could you be unaware of the fact?” And the wicked man, pressing his face to 
that of his unhappy daughter, dares pluck hideous kisses from features twisted by
death and reflecting, instead of the graces which used to play there before, only 
the convulsions of pain … only the contortions of despair.

“Durand,” says the master of the house, “bring this man’s prick up again: I 
want him to be fucking me while I explore both the orifices of my remaining 
daughter.”

Preparations are made. Cordelli embuggers; buggery was usually his opening 
move. His man fucks him without preliminary oilings; what need of them had an 
asshole so amply proportioned? Elise and Raimonde are there, he kisses their 
behinds, to his right and left he handles those of his two sons, whose pricks are 
being sucked by Durand and me. From ass Cordelli skips to cunt, and the objects 
beneath his fingers vary. His man discharges: he summons the other. That other, 
at least as well furnished as his colleague, but of still more fearful aspect, if that 
be possible, vigorously sodomizes his employer and fires a pair of charges into his
fundament. The orgies begin to take on a serious note.

“All right, by little Jesus’ bugger-fucked Father,” our host roars, very wroth, 
“crimes, I need crimes, I need abominations, upon them I depend for further 
ejaculations, and in the chapter of ejaculations my selfishness is such that should 
it cost the life of every damned one of you in this room, why I’d slaughter the lot 
without an instant’s hesitation to obtain a good discharge.”

“With whom are you of a mind to start, villain?” I then ventured-to ask.

“With you … with some other … with I don’t care whom; little does it matter 
provided it stiffens me. Bah, do you fancy there is anyone here whose life counts 
more with me than another’s? Come, let us try this little slut,” the rogue said, 
catching the trembling Elise by one breast and dragging her thus along on her 
knees. He called for tongs, and while I frigged him, while one of the executioners 
immobilized the victim, and while everyone else formed a hedge of bare asses 
around him, the barbarian had the patience and the determination to nip the girl’s
breasts to pieces, removing small bit by small bit until he had so perfectly 
flattened out her chest that not even a suspicion remained of the two snow-white 
mammaries which had been embellishing it a few hours before.

This operation completed, the victim is presented to him in another position; 
held by four persons, her thighs are spread to the utmost, and her cunt gapes 
perfectly within his view.

“There we are,” says the cannibal, “I am going to toil awhile in the workshop of
the human species.”

I was sucking him this time; his tongs forage about for fifteen minutes, he 
buries them as far in as they will go.

“Turn her over,” he cries.

The most beautiful buttocks in the whole wide world are presented to him now,
he pries them apart, his cruel pincers disappear into the anus and that delicate 
part is attacked with the same frenzy as the other. And it is I, I, once mad about 
this lovely creature, it is I who now exhort her assassin, who exhort him to treat 
her thus. Baneful inconstancy of the passions, whither then you can drive us! Had
she been unknown to me, I might perhaps have felt some indulgence toward that 
poor creature; but ’tis unheard of, what one invents, what one says, what one 
does, when disgust has withered the tender petals of the flower of love.

Elise, swimming in her own blood, was breathing still; Cordelli contemplates 
her delightedly in her voluptuous agony; crime takes mighty pride in its works. 
Cordelli obliges me to frig his prick against the carnage he has wrought, he is 
thrilled to steep his member in the blood his hand has shed; and it is with a 
dagger he finishes off Elise.

One of his sons replaces my tribade. Cordelli has the window opened on the 
seaward side of the room. The child is attached to a rope fifty feet long, whose 
other end is secured to a beam; and then the child is dropped. “Are you ready?” 
the author of his days shouts down to him, exhibiting the knife with which he has 
but to slash through the rope: one quick gesture and the boy will disappear 
forever into a watery grave. From below rise the child’s screams; I frig his father; 
that father kisses Raimonde, he frigs one of his executioners while the other 
bum-fucks him, stabbing a pin into his buttocks as he does so. The rope is pulled 
in, the child is retrieved; but he is not unbound.

“Say, wert afraid?” asks the tradesman. “Didst have a fright?”

“No more, father, for pity’s sake, for pity’s sake—”

“Little bastard,” Cordelli sneers, “learn that the word father means nothing in 
my ears, nothing; I am deaf to it. Turn around: I must fuck you before feeding 
you to the fish. Yes, dear boy, to the fish, that is to be your fate: see what a 
powerful sway kindred ties exert over my heart!”

The scoundrel embuggers: while he is busy afucking, an additional length of 
rope is joined to the first one: this time it will be a two-hundred-foot fall. Two or 
three lunges and Cordelli retires, nodding to the executioners who thereupon 
seize the child and hurl him bodily out the window, from a height, that is, of two 
hundred feet, a distance he has no sooner traveled than the rope, suddenly 
checking his descent, thoroughly dislocates his limbs at the point where he halts. 
From there he is hauled back up. Broken inside and out, the poor lad was entirely 
out of shape.

“Another bum-tupping,” said the Italian.

“And then another tumble,” said Durand.

“Certainly; but lengthened yet a little more, the rope will not interrupt his ride 
till he is twenty-five feet above the waves.”

The re-fucked child is rethrown, recovered almost inanimate. His father fucks 
him for the last time; and when he is dangling ten feet above the surface of the 
water, “Ready?” the ferocious Italian bawled down to him; “your final moment is 
nigh.”

And he cuts the rope; and the sea at last provides the unhappy boy a haven of 
repose.

“That passion,” I remark to Cordelli, “is one of the prettiest in my 
acquaintance.”

“It heats you, Juliette?”

“Yes, indeed!”

“Then give me your ass to fuck. That will soothe you.” Cordelli filed away in me
for a quarter of an hour, plotting new pieces of mischief. Then ’twas Raimonde he 
called for. Her fate was writ in the Italian’s eyes, and she read it there at once.

“Oh, dearest mistress!” she said, clutching at me with outstretched arms, “is it 
then decided that I shall be surrendered to this monster? I who loved you so….”

Laughter was my only response. And his trusties having marched the darling 
thing up to him, the traitor began with some caresses; he fondles and kisses all 
her fleshy parts; he tongues, tickles the clitoris, embuggers, hovers ten minutes 
in the depths of Raimonde’s bowels, and she is cast naked into an iron cage filled 
with toads, reptiles, snakes, vipers, rabid dogs and cats which have not fed for 
five days. The wretch’s shrieks, her contortions, her twitchings once the animals 
got at her, her antics were beyond anything one can imagine; her pain, her 
distress were pathetic beyond anything one could believe, I was overcome by the 
sight; Durand was frigging me beside the cage, Cordelli, sucked by a duenna, was
fucking nearby. It took but a moment for that multitude of creatures to swarm 
over Raimonde, and the moment after that there was not a great deal of her to be
seen. The beasts made for her tastier parts, breasts and buttocks vanished in less
time than it takes to tell. The unfortunate event occurred when, as she opened 
her mouth to scream, a viper slithered into her gullet and she choked to death, 
well before it suited our pleasures. At that critical instant the other executioner 
was fucking Cordelli, the rogue was sodomizing one elder while tonguing the 
asshole of the second, palpating my buttocks with one hand and those of his 
surviving daughter with the other, and Durand was frigging me amain.

“Ha!” exclaimed Cordelli, uttering a string of coarse oaths and jerking his prick 
rudely out of the duenna’s fundament, “I’d thought that by sodomizing this old 
pump I would avoid the danger of a discharge, and blast my ass! I am on the 
brink of one.”

“No, my dear, nothing of the sort must be allowed to happen,” said I, bending 
his prick head downward; “let us dwell upon other matters for a moment.”

“Well,” said the tradesman, “what think you of the cage as a way to die, 
Juliette? I conceived of it for that slut the very first instant I saw her ass: it is 
enough for me to examine that part of a woman and her death sentence is 
dictated. If you like, Juliette, I shall inscribe yours upon your behind itself.”

And as he was pinching it vigorously while speaking those words, I danced 
lightly out of his grip and, quick as a wink, for my own substituted the ass of his 
one remaining son. He fixes a terrible stare upon the boy, it is he whose mother 
the villain massacred lately, and who can still see her embalmed remains there 
upon the wall.

“If I rightly recall,” said that incorrigible libertine, “I arranged to have this little 
beggar die by the same torture under which his mother perished, three days ago. 
First, the victim’s eyes are gouged out; then, his four extremities are lopped off; 
after that, his four limbs are broken; and he is definitively embuggered while an 
aide finishes him off with a dagger.”

“And that is what you subjected his mother to?” I asked.

“It is.”

“I have no objections to

raise; I would merely suggest that, along with the rest, extraction of the teeth 
and extirpation of the tongue seem to be called for.”

“Extraction of the teeth! Extirpation of the tongue! You are quite right, 
Juliette,” Cordelli replied, “I dealt too hastily with his dam the other day. But we 
shall not be so neglectful with her son. Ho,” said he, snapping his fingers to his 
executioners, “operate.”

During the proceedings, it was my ass Cordelli perforated; ahead of him he 
had, as prospect, that of the girl whose torments were due to follow next. Durand
showed him her ass to the right, and he had the spectacle to the left; the 
duennas flogged him.

The deftness and the mastery those assassins displayed in their work can 
hardly be imagined, and it would be even more difficult to render an idea of the 
intensity of the victim’s sufferings or the violence of his outcries. When Cordelli 
noticed that one agent sufficed to the task, he ordered the other, splashed all over
with gore, to come up and encunt me so as to improve his enjoyment of my ass. I
was, God knows, accustomed to outsized engines, nevertheless the intromission 
of that one occasioned me exceeding discomfort. Although that man was 
superlatively ill-favored, the horrors he had been bathing in, the forthright way he
took with me, the language he employed, the sodomite episode whereby his 
master was regaling me, everything soon combined to carry me off into 
transports, and I washed my fucker’s prick with the goodliest deluge of fuck. 
Cordelli, ecstatic at hearing my anthems of joy blend with the shrieks torture was 
wringing from his son, was overwhelmed; his sperm forces the sluices, and I am 
soaked at both ends. However, the boy’s doing to death was not yet completed; 
the executioner inquired whether he was to hang fire.

“Of course not,” the Italian answered him. “People are strange,” he went on to 
comment, “they always suppose that one cannot torment a creature unless one is
aroused. As for me, I protest that I am a rational man, I act deliberately in 
passion as in everything else: Nature endowed my being with a thirst for blood, I 
have no need to be excited in order to shed it.”

Work was resumed.

However, to preserve the liveliness of the scene, I reheated his prick in my 
mouth, and Durand stimulated him verbally.

“Cordelli,” she advanced, “though impressive, your ferocity is inadequate.”

“How so?”

“Once you have done your worst, there shall yet remain worse to do.”

“Prove it to me.”

“Easily. With your leave I shall myself organize the torture of your remaining 
daughter; and I am confident that you shall behold greater things than those your
timorous imagination has devised so far.”

“Go ahead,” the tradesman rejoined.

“Utilizing implements I see there,” said my companion, “you shall have your 
man delicately peel off the girl’s skin. Once flayed, she shall be whipped with 
thorns; after that, rubbed down with vinegar; and the operation demands to be 
repeated seven times. The nerves finally reached, small nails, red hot, shall be 
planted in them; the body may then be deposited in a fiery brazier.”

“Marvelous,” Cordelli said. “I agree to it, Durand, but I warn you: if it fails to 
make me discharge, I will subject you to the same torture.”

“As you like.”

“To work.”

The little maid is led up. ’Twas the prettier of the two. The unlucky creature 
had the loveliest possible figure, superb golden hair, a virgin’s look, and eyes 
whereof Venus herself would have been envious. The unkind Italian was moved to
kiss that charming little ass yet again; for, as he said, “I must pay my respects to 
it one last time before my barbarity causes its roses to fade. Ah, my friends, own 
that it is a lovely ass!”

And, profoundly stirred by the horrors impending, Cordelli soon passes from 
encomiums to deeds.

The girl is embuggered and after several charges the villain quits the field in 
order to relish as a bystander the cruel sight of his henchmen’s more massy 
members perforating this pretty little posterior. Essay is made; but, as you surely 
realize, success is obtained only at the price of the total demolition of the anus. 
Cordelli, while this was going forward, was sodomizing the executioner; the other 
one has at the cunt of the young person who, treated in that hard fashion, gives 
us the image of a lamb in the clutches of two lions. Greatly affected by the scene,
the profligate flits from the ass of one executioner to the ass of the other and, at 
last esteeming himself sufficiently heated, commands the torture to begin, 
appointing Durand its supervisor.

Again, words are not enough to describe the sufferings of the poor child once 
the Italian took his bundle of thorns to the new skin which came to light when the
outer layer had been removed. But it was something else again when that second 
skin was removed and the third lashed; the wretch’s shudderings, the way she 
ground her teeth and squirmed were infinitely pleasurable to see. Cordelli, 
remarking that I was frigging myself while watching, himself lent a hand to tickle 
me; but, absorbed by his victim’s torture, he entrusted the masturbator’s role to 
Durand, and my friend, quite as aroused as I, asked for the same attentions she 
was lavishing upon me. The operation lasted a considerable while, we discharged 
three or four times during it; all the creature’s epidermal wrappings were taken 
off without direct damage to her vital organs. Matters became far more grave 
when the nerves were attacked with the heated nails. Her screams rose in pitch 
and volume; she was equally inspiring to see. Cordelli decides to embugger her in
that appalling state; he makes the attempt, succeeds, and continues to drive 
home the nails all the while he sodomizes her. Excess of pain at length consumes 
everything still keeping her alive, and the miserable child expires upon receiving 
her assassin’s fuck in her bowels.

An icy seriousness then characterizes his features and his bearing. He dresses 
himself, has his executioners don their clothes, and together with them and the 
duennas he departs into an adjoining room.

“Where is he going?” I asked Durand, with whom I found myself alone.

“I have no idea.”

“And if he is scheming something? If it is to be our turn now?”

“It would be to get what we deserve.”

“Durand, I am confounded. How can you have taken it upon yourself to come 
to this house without being better acquainted with its owner?”

“He is rich. The hope of getting his, gold seduced me, it seduces me still. I am 
persuaded the rogue has his wealth cached somewhere hereabouts. Could we but
put him out of the way, and rob him. … I have some powder with me, its action is 
swift. An instant and the thing would be done.”

“Such a deed, my dear, sorts ill with our principles: to respect vice eternally, to
smite virtue only. By destroying this man, we halt a criminal career and perhaps 
save the lives of thousands, of millions, of creatures: ought we to do it?”

“Juliette, ’tis true what you say.”

Cordelli reappeared, followed by his escort.

“Ah, good sir, we were wondering where you have been,” said Durand. “Off 
performing some secret infamy, I venture to guess.”

“You are mistaken,” the Italian replied, opening a door communicating the 
room where we were and the one into which he had penetrated by another 
entrance; “there,” he continued, showing us an oratory adorned with all the 
attributes of established religion, “there is where I have been. When one is in 
such a woeful case as I, who surrenders to the temptations of dreadful passions, 
one must undertake at least a few good works to appease the inevitable wrath of 
the Lord.”

“Right you are,” said I, “allow us to imitate your excellent example. Durand, 
come with me, we are going to beg God’s forgiveness for the crimes this man has
induced us to commit.”

And closing the door, we shut ourselves up inside the oratory.

“Damn me,” I said to my friend, whom I had led thither only in order to discuss
affairs with her in privacy, “damn me if there’s not a change wrought in my ideas, 
and if that fool of a fanatic merits anything else than to die. Scruples were 
misplaced here: with his weak-watered soul, that bugger will not long persevere 
in vice; who can tell, these we have been witness to may perhaps be his last 
ventures into that domain. We are in a position to take the straight way with him, 
and at once.”

“I foresee no difficulty in ridding ourselves of the entire pack,” Durand 
observed. “It would be well, however, to preserve one of the old women, for we 
need a guide. Believe me, this tradesman has his treasure hidden somewhere 
under this roof; we shall find it, never you fear, and the find will be important.”

“There are those servants who will be coming to fetch him this evening.”

“They shall be given refreshments to drink.”

We rejoined the others.

“Now here we are as blessed as you,” we said, “but, for God’s sake, give us 
some refreshment—we are dying of thirst.”

Immediately, upon an order issued by Cordelli, the two crones serve a good 
meal to the master and his acolytes. At the third glass of wine, Durand skillfully 
seasons first Cordelli’s plate, then his two executioners’; there was no way of 
envenoming the duennas, who were partaking of no food. In a trice the powder 
produced the expected effect, and our three villains toppled out of their chairs as 
though felled by Divine Vengeance. Durand sprang upon the more agile of the two
elders. “Away,” she cried, stabbing her to the heart, “go join your unworthy 
accomplices; had your master been an authentic rascal like ourselves, he would 
have been saved. But seeing that he believed in God, I had no choice but to send 
him to the Devil. As for you,” Durand said to the other one, “if we let you live ’tis 
upon express condition you cooperate with us. We shall start by throwing these 
bodies into the sea; and then, conducted by you, we shall search this castle from 
top to bottom. There is treasure about, we are after it. Tell us first, are there any 
other people here?”

“Now? No, Mesdames,” the trembling crone replied, “I am the only domestic 
left in the house.”

“What do you mean by that? There are other masters?”

“I believe,” said she, “that there may yet be some vi

ctims. But promise you will spare me, I shall show you every part of the 
house.”

Before turning to anything else we disposed of the corpses. While dragging 
them to the windows and pushing them out, we asked the old servant whether 
Cordelli had been in the habit of coming here frequently.

“Three times a week,” she replied.

“And hideous massacres each time?”

“You were able to judge of his behavior. Come,” she said when we had 
completed our first chore, “I shall take you down to the dungeons. There may still
be some game in the larder.”

’Twas there, one hundred feet and more underground, the villain kept his 
provision of victims locked away. Each was in a separate cell: of twelve cells we 
found nine occupied: five lodged very attractive girls ranging between fifteen and 
eighteen years of age; boys of between thirteen and sixteen were confined in the 
other four; most of these victims had been debauched and ensnared in different 
Italian cities; however, two of the girls, one of sixteen, another of eighteen, were 
natives of Ragusa in Albania, and they were exquisite creatures indeed.

In the midst of examining them, sounds reached us, faraway but distinct; we 
hastened up to find out what was the matter. It was the arrival of our servants 
and of Cordelli’s, climbing the stairway to the castle. We received the Italian’s 
valets first, they were three in number: we bade them enter the dining hall, still 
littered with the remnants of our meal, we offered them wine to drink, and by 
means of the swift-acting powder we soon reduced them to the rank of their 
former master. Descending then to where our help was waiting, “Go back to 
town,” we told them, “we intend to spend another twenty-four hours here. 
Cordelli is retaining his servants, we need no others.” And our carriage left; we 
returned to the captives.

As we were poring over them, “Durand,” I said, “I am pleased to come by 
these two Albanians, they will fill the gap now that Elise and Raimonde are gone; 
and my reply to the signs of discontent I already notice in your expression, my 
reply, I say, is that I shall sacrifice them whenever you wish, just as readily and 
just as easily as I did their predecessors.”

“Women. Must you forever be surrounding yourself with women?”

“I cannot do without them. But I need only one heart; ’tis yours alone I aspire 
to keep forever, my treasure.”

“Flatterer, one must yield to all your little whims!”

Lila, that was the name of the sixteen-year-old, and Rosalba were therefore 
released at once, but placed none the less under lock and key in one of the 
castle’s finest chambers. Those poor girls had been a week in their insalubrious 
dungeons, ill-fed, with only straw to lie upon, and ’twas plain to see, the 
experience had shaken them severely. Both were still in a state of frightened 
shock; but when I kissed them, caressed them, tears came to their eyes and they
hugged me, showered me with kindnesses. They were sisters as it turned out, 
daughters of a rich trader in Ragusa with whom Cordelli had been in 
correspondence; he had persuaded their father to send them to Venice for their 
education, and the scoundrel invented a report of their death, thereby was he 
able to make them his.

“I am going to do the same,” said Durand, “and take one of those girls.”

“Do so, my dearest,” said I, “that is not the sort of thing that can ever provoke
my jealousy.”

“Monster!” said Durand. “The more delicate of us two, I am loath to have 
anything distract me from the cherished idea of you.”

“Cease, my love, cease to mistake carnal pleasures for moral distractions,” said
I. “I have already told you that my doctrines, while they may be different from 
yours, are unshakable withal; that I could fuck and frig myself with every 
inhabitant of this planet, and still not for an instant be weaned away from the 
tender sentiments I have sworn to preserve for you as long as I live.”

We installed the three other girls and the four boys in the hall of tortures, and 
after having amused ourselves with them for half the day, we refined the horrors 
Cordelli had committed and caused those seven to perish under circumstances a 
thousand times more cruel. That accomplished, we slept for two hours and then 
resumed our searches.

“Precisely where he keeps his money I am unable to tell you,” said the old 
woman, “nor indeed do I know for a certainty whether there is any here; but if 
there is, it should be in a cellar near the one where he stores his wine.”

We went down. Two stout bronze doors barred access to those cellars; and we 
had no tool to force them. However, the more difficulties we encountered, the 
greater, needless to say, grew our determination to surmount them. After much 
hunting and prowling about we discovered a little window which gave into that 
cellar, and which was protected by only two iron bars. By common impulse we 
both sprang forward and peered through: inside, we made out six great chests: 
you may imagine how our zeal redoubled at the sight. At length we manage to 
loosen and pry out those bars. I scramble through the window, in a state of 
keenest excitement I lift the lid of the first of the chests. Alas, what is our 
disappointment to discover that those huge coffers contain nothing but 
instruments of torture or articles of women’s clothing. Furious, I was ready to 
abandon the quest. But Durand was not yet willing to admit defeat. “There must 
be something else in here,” she insisted; “let us look patiently.”

I reach into the chest again; my fingers touch a ring of keys. One of them 
bears a tag: Key to the Treasure Room.

“Ah, Durand! No need to waste our time in this cellar, what we seek lies 
elsewhere, this tag proves it. First we find doors without keys, here now are keys 
but no doors. Dona Maria, is there anything you can say to help us? Only speak 
up and your fortune is made.”

“For the life of me, there is nothing I can tell you. Only that if we continue to 
search we may find something.”

“Go fetch me a twig from the hazel tree I saw growing in the courtyard,” 
Durand ordered.

When the old woman returns with it, my friend takes the twig lightly between 
thumb and forefinger and gazes at it attentively. For a moment the little stick 
hangs motionless. Then its free end rises, drawn to the left by some hidden 
suasion; Durand walks down a long gallery at whose end we come to another 
door. I try the keys; the door opens; the twig then gyrates rapidly between 
Durand’s fingers. There were ten enormous chests in that room and, indeed, they 
were not women’s garments we found in them, nor instruments of torture, but 
coins, coins of purest gold, several million of them.

“Splendid,” said I, full of courage and joy, “we have simply to carry it away.”

It was easier said than done. To call in the aid of the domestics would be to 
beckon to trouble. Impossible to lift those chests, to transport them out of the 
castle. They had therefore to be emptied. Before the choice facing us, we 
preferred to carry off less but to carry it off in greater safety. The old duenna, the 
two girls, Durand, and I, we each filled a sack with as great a load of the loot as 
we could bear, and from then on, for eight successive days, proceeded to remove 
Cordelli’s hoard. We gave it out that he was spending the month at his country 
seat, that he had invited us to come every day to be his guests; in the meantime 
we chartered a vessel for Venice. On the ninth day we went aboard, after having, 
while upon our last trip to the castle, cast the duenna into one of the cisterns, 
burying our secret by drowning it with her.

During the voyage the weather was superb, the sea very calm, the attentions 
of our women excessive, their flesh excellent: thus rested and in high spirits we 
arrived at Venice.

Incontrovertibly, it is a magnificent and imposing sight, that of a vast city 
floating upon the waters; as Grecourt somewhere says, it seems as if sodomy has
chosen Venice for its citadel and inviolable asylum, there to be able conveniently 
to extinguish, in the circumambient sea, the pyres wherewith fanatism might 
undertake to punish it; certain it is that unto sodomy this place provides sectaries
without number whose devotion to the cult is outdone by the population of no 
other town in Italy.

In Venice the air has a languid, caressing quality, conducive to thoughts of 
pleasure, but often unwholesome, especially when the sea is at low tide; the 
wealthier citizens then go to spend as much time as they can upon the delightful 
estates they own on the mainland or on the neighboring islands. Despite this 
uninvigorating climate many are the venerable persons one sees among the 
inhabitants, and Venetian women age not so quickly as elsewhere.

As a rule, the Venetians are tall and comely, their physiognomy is cheerful, 
their manner spirited, and this far-famed nation deserves to be loved.

I devoted the first days after our arrival to investing my newly acquired assets;
notwithstanding Durand’s entreaties that I keep all of Cordelli’s gold for myself, I 
insisted that we divide it equally. Our shares amounted to enough to earn each of 
us an annual return of roughly one million five hundred thousand livres; this, 
added to what I already had, brought my yearly revenues to around six million six
hundred thousand pounds. But lest such a sizable fortune cause us to appear 
suspect in Venice, we took all the steps necessary to create the belief that our 
affluence was. the product merely of our charms and of the effects of our magical 
arts upon the simple. We opened our doors, in consequence, to everybody of the 
one sex and the other who was seeking voluptuous entertainment or instruction. 
Accordingly, Durand had built a laboratory and a cabinet with special mechanical 
effects along the same lines as the one she had formerly had in Paris. It was fitted
with disappearing floors, sliding panels, boudoirs, dungeons, and everything that 
can deceive the eyes and impress the imagination. We hired some elderly female 
servants, who were speedily trained in all these maneuvers; and our two young 
Albanians were under orders to lend themselves, with alacrity, complacency, and 
submissiveness, to whatever chores either of us might assign them. You will recall
that they were virgins; that fact, coupled with everything we could reasonably 
expect from their charming faces and their youthfulness, enabled us to hope that 
those two little properties would produce rich yields once they had been brought 
under intensive cultivation. Moreover, I was to be at their side, and to resume all 
the old brothel exercises you saw me practicing years ago in Paris, when I first 
entered the career; the which, here in Venice, I was taking up again out of sheer 
libertinage, for mine were not necessitous circumstances—I believe I have made 
that plain to you.

The first individual to present himself at our house was an old procuratore of 
San Marco who, after a narrow inspection of us all three, threw the handkerchief 
to me.

“Perhaps,” was his tactful opening, “my taste might incline me toward the 
choice of one of your maids, but my pronounced debility would prevent me from 
enjoying the delights she offered me. I shall surely be more at ease with you, and
I shall now explain what our commerce will involve.

“You shall be so good,” the nasty fellow said to me, “as to apprise me of the 
date when your menstruation will be at fullest spate: we shall meet upon that 
day. With you lying on a bed, your legs wide-flung, I shall kneel before you, I 
shall sip the wine, I shall fuddle myself upon those menses I adore: and when 
from bibbing them I become very high, I shall conclude the sacrifice in the same 
temple where I have been worshiping, while one of your domestics—and the 
function cannot be entrusted to anyone save one of your female servants—will 
have the kindness to thrash me with all the force she can muster.”

“Good my Venetian Lord,” I replied, “does your Serenity propose to repeat this 
lewd scene frequently, or is to be staged but once?”

“Once,” the Procurator replied; “beautiful as you are, my angel, when a woman
has satisfied this passion with me, I am incapable of renewing our acquaintance.”

“Certainly, Excellency. Very well,” I said, “including supper, for a guest of your 
distinction never amuses himself in our house without honoring us with his 
presence at supper, ’tis one of our rules; including supper, then, and the whipper, 
that will cost you five hundred sequins.”

“You are expensive, Mademoiselle,” said the Procurator, rising to his feet; “but 
you are pretty, and so long as you are young you are right not to sell yourself for 
nothing. Upon what day am I to come?”

“Tomorrow: that which you are fond of is beginning today, the inundation will 
occur tomorrow.”

“I shall be here without fail,” the Procurator assured me.

And having, the next day, satisfied his foul passion, having had him drubbed 
with a bull’s pizzle, I received his disgusting homage, by which I feigned to be 
deeply moved, nay, overwhelmed. For my pay, over and above the five hundred 
sequins, I got a diamond worth at least twice that sum, and whereof the old 
rascal made me a gift in appreciation of my good manners.

A very wealthy merchant named Raimondi was my next suitor.

“Dear heart,” said he as he examined my behind, “is your ass intact?”

“Most assuredly, Signor.”

“Young woman,” he went on, spreading my buttocks, “you are telling me fibs; 
think not to impose upon a man who has my extensive knowledge and inveterate 
habit of asses.”

“Ah, Signor, I shall conceal nothing from you … merely once or twice, not 
more, upon my honor….”

And, without replying, Raimondi inserted his tongue into my asshole. He bade 
me stand up. He was all afire.

“Listen,” said he, “I am going to explain my passion to you: you either take it 
or you leave it if it does not suit you. My whole pleasure consists in watching 
others fuck, that alone inspires me, without that wonderful spectacle I will not, I 
cannot accomplish anything. You will find me six handsome men who will one 
after the other encunt you before my eyes; I amuse myself with them while they 
fuck you, and when they discharge into your cunt, I carefully recuperate and 
meticulously swallow everything they have deposited in your vagina: your art 
consists in performing the impossible in order to expel that everything into my 
mouth. This operation completed, you offer me your behind: I sodomize you while
your six men embugger me by turns. Once the sixth has discharged, I withdraw 
from your ass, I place myself upon a bed; you squat above me, and you shit into 
my mouth, while one of the men tongues your cunt, a second your mouth, a third
masturbates in front of me, a fourth sucks my prick, and while I frig the fifth and 
the sixth with my two hands. Your mard tumbles into my mouth, and I eat it; that
is quickly done. Then I get up from the bed; you take my prick into your mouth, 
you suck me exactly; all six men then come one by one and shit into mine: I 
swallow their shit, you swallow my fuck, there is the climax of the drama and its 
conclusion. But have a care, dear heart,” added the Venetian. “Have a care, for 
this great undertaking I have outlined to you is fraught with perils, they are grave
and in number they are three: firstly, there is the chance that, despite your best 
efforts, you fail to eject into my mouth the sperm you have received in your cunt;
secondly, it means trouble for you if you do not swallow mine; thirdly, you will 
regret it if you are unable to shit. Now, it were well that you be advised that each 
of these delinquencies is punishable by a hundred strokes of the whip, to be 
meted out by one of my six men; thus by failing to expel the six discharges, by 
refusing to swallow my fuck, and by not shitting, you accumulate a total of eight 
hundred lashes; one hundred if you have committed only one fault; et cetera. 
Speak.”

“Signor,” was my answer to Raimondi, “your passion is not of the easiest 
execution, it entails great hazards. I should therefore fancy that, taking into 
account all the accessories I am to provide, two thousand sequins would not be 
an exorbitant figure.”

“Your beauty is the deciding factor, I agree to the price,” the merchant 
announced.

We took appointment, and two days later I satisfied him.

Not long afterward Durand summoned me for a nobleman whose mania was 
not quite so dangerous. My friend frigged him, in the meantime he licked my 
nostrils, the outside and the inside of my ears, my eyes, my clitoris, the interior of
my cunt, my asshole, the intervals between my toes, and my armpits. After an 
hour devoted to that ceremony he ended by having me suck his member and by 
discharging in my mouth. Durand had given me a week’s notice in order that I 
might have myself in a state of readiness, that is, of appropriate filthiness, for the
quality of that libertine’s crisis was strictly proportionate to the greater or lesser 
degree of un-cleanliness in which he found the various parts.

He told the whole town about us, and we were besieged by clients. There was 
one who brought two Negresses with him. Naked and flanked by those two 
women, I was to submit myself to frigging at their hands: the contrast of black 
and white shortly took effect upon him. Once aroused, he fell to flogging the 
Negresses, and kept at it until the blood was flowing; I sucked him while he 
whipped; and then he whipped me. Then it was the Negresses’ turn: knocked 
about by the iron-tipped martinets and the bull’s pizzle they alternately used upon
him, he finished by embuggering me while one of the black women sodomized 
him with a dildo and he molested the ass of the other. From that personage I 
stole a superb diamond while I was in the act of sucking his prick; and apart from 
the gem, that extraordinary party cost him one thousand sequins.

A more unusual one appeared. He had to be bound naked to a painter’s ladder;
two of our servants thrashed him mercilessly; Durand sucked him. Perched on the
top of the ladder, I shat upon his uplifted face. When at length his prick had lifted 
too, we made him kneel, we acted as his judges, interrogated him, sentenced him
to be broken. All the instruments were there; but the bar was of pasteboard. 
Durand attached him to the cross; I delivered the beating, he discharged under 
the blows, gave us five hundred sequins, and fled off in confusion, ashamed to 
show his face to those with whom he had just indulged in such a peculiar caprice.

Our girls were also brought out upon the stage. We sold Rosalba’s maidenhead
eighteen times over, her anal pucelage thirty times; twenty-two times that of 
Lila’s cunt, thirty-six times that of her ass. And after having extracted six hundred
thousand francs from the harvest of those four first fruits, we surrendered them 
to the secular arm.

The French Ambassador wrote to me one day, requesting me to come to his 
residence with a girl, as pretty a girl as I could find. I bring him a child of sixteen, 
as lovely as daylight, and who, snatched from the bosom of a family she was 
fated never to see again, had cost me a veritable fortune. His Excellency has the 
two of us undress in a small chamber situated in the uppermost story of his 
house; in the cent

er of that room was a kind of deep hole, which one might have taken for a 
well. The Ambassador has us both lean over the edge, and gaze down into the 
shaft, that we might appreciate its depth; he observes our behinds, prominently 
displayed thanks to the posture we have adopted.

“Suppose I were to push you in, both of you,” the lewd diplomat hazarded, 
“what would happen?”

“Why, nothing dreadful provided we fell upon thick mattresses.”

“Ha! ’Twould be into Hell you would tumble, sluts; that opening is the mouth of
Tartarus.”

And as he pronounces these words, from the hole mount tongues of flame, 
meant to frighten us; we recoil.

“That pit, Excellency, is it then to be our grave?”

“No doubt about it, for I see your doom spelled out upon your asses.” He was 
kissing them, pinching them, while speaking; and the behind of the young thing I 
had brought him was especially molested, he bit it and prodded it with a long 
needle. Nevertheless, there was as yet no sign of erection in his prick, even 
though, in consequence of his instructions, I had been stroking and shaking it as 
hard as I could: “Fuck!” I heard the libertine exclaim, and saw him wrap his arms 
around my companion’s waist and lift her off the floor. “Fuck!” he repeated, “what
a pleasure to throw this baggage into the flames.”

The threat was swiftly followed by the act, and immediately I had contrived to 
put some consistency into his tool, the rake flung the girl into the hole.

“Frig!” he cried, “frig! frig! frig, bloody-fucking whore,” he shrieked as some 
mechanism, released by the impact of the girl’s falling body, sent flames shooting 
up from below.

Then, seizing a poniard as he feels his discharge impend, he himself leaps into 
the hole to stab the victim, whose screams notify me of her death. I did not see 
the Ambassador again; an old woman paid me, counseled me to hold my tongue, 
and we never again heard tell of that notable.

We were saying to each other, Durand and I, how odd it was that no women 
had been among our visitors, when Signora Zanetti, one of the wealthiest and 
most profligate ladies in Venice, communicated with us: she invited me to call 
upon her. That splendid creature, thirty-five years old, represented in the flesh 
the Roman noblewoman portrayed in classical sculpture. What a heavenly 
countenance! It was that of a living Venus, it was her figure, it was the complete 
assembly of all the goddess’ graces.

“I caught a glimpse of you at Santa Maria della Salute the other day,” that 
charming woman said to me. “Like myself, you were there doubtless in search of 
some object of lubricity; for I credit you with intelligence, and nobody with any 
ever goes to such places except with lewd intentions. ’Tis the custom here: the 
churches serve as our brothels…. Do you know, my angel, you are very pretty; 
are you fond of women?”

“How could one be indifferent to anything whereof you offer such an inspiring 
example?”

“Ah, there’s the French gallantry; ten years in Paris gave me an understanding 
of that jargon. Please tell me frankly whether you like women, and whether you 
would enjoy frigging yourself with me?”

“Yes, by all the gods.” And to lend weight to my words, I fling my arms around 
the neck of the beautiful Venetian and tongue her mouth for a quarter of an hour.

“You are enchanting, my angel,” says she, fondling my breasts, “and I am 
going to pass some delightful moments with you.”

We supped, and voluptuous frolic of the most piquant order crowned our lewd 
evening together. The most libertine of females, Zanetti had a prodigious grasp of 
the art of giving pleasure; few hands had ever frigged me with comparable skill or
results. When we had each discharged five or six times, had exchanged lechings, 
suckings, dildo-fuckings, had, in sum, exhausted all the resources of the most 
far-reaching sapphism, “We may now fuck,” my tribade said.

She rang.

“Have I any men out there?” she demanded of her chambermaid, an exquisite 
hussy of eighteen.

“Yes, my Lady,” was the reply, “ten of them have been in attendance; thinking 
that perhaps Signora may not be needing them this evening, they have retired 
most regretfully, for they are in sparkling form.”

“Have you been handling them, buggeress?” asked the lovely Venetian.

“Yes, my Lady, I have touched one or two, but there have been no discharges; 
Signora may verify this.”

“Bring them in, rascal, I want to give my new friend a treat.”

Rosetti promptly led in the ten young men, whose faces and figures I found 
much to my liking. The soubrette and her mistress furbish those weapons in the 
twinkling of an eye, and I find myself threatened by ten pikes, and it was all I 
could do to encircle the least of them with my two hands.

“Well then!” said Zanetti, naked, her hair floating free, her face flushed, “all 
this is yours to enjoy; where do you wish to have those pricks placed?”

“Fuck!” I exclaimed, awed by the prospect, “scatter them about, one here, one
there, everywhere….”

“No, my dear, the good things in life deserve to be desired,” she said, “content 
yourself with taking them in the cunt during this first round, that will excite you, 
you will then have developed a yearning for the rest; and leave matters to us.”

Rosetti has by now undressed herself; she and her mistress, rubbing briskly, 
maintain our athletes in shining condition; and my lovely friend introduces them 
one after the other into my cunt. Between introductions the slut stretches herself 
upon me, gives me her cunt to suck while she sucks my clitoris, while the two 
youths embugger her, and the soubrette fits the prick of a third into the ass of the
one fucking me.

The pleasures I derived from this opening series of tuppings, ah, good friends, 
those pleasures exceeded anything you can imagine. Once all ten had given me a 
taste of their instruments, I rolled over and presented my buttocks; the 
embuggery was begun without the delaying of an instant; during it, my cunt was 
sucked by Zanetti, who was in a kneeling position and was heating a prick in 
either hand. My fucker was sodomized, and I was sucking Rosetti’s cunt, she was 
electrifying the tips of two pricks by frigging them against her bush, in such a way
that I was alternately able either to suck her cunt or pump the pricks she was 
masturbating. When all the pricks had taken a turn in my bowels, we consolidated
the tableau so as to form a single compact society. I lie upon my back on top of a 
man who embuggers me; another encunts me; with my right hand I facilitate the 
introduction of a third prick into the ass of Zanetti, who, lying upon a fourth, was 
receiving a fifth prick in her cunt; with my left, I rendered the same service to 
Rosetti, also being fucked before and behind; an eighth man was sodomizing my 
sodomizer; a ninth was in Rosetti’s mouth, the last in mine.

“There is still room for two more,” Zanetti declared; “you observe that the pair 
sodomizing me and my chambermaid could perfectly well, without unbalancing 
the scene, each have a prick in the ass. Thus, a group of fifteen might easily be 
formed, and if it followed the lines of this one, it would be even more delightful.”

But overcome, sotted with pleasure, I replied only by further heaving of my 
flanks; and delirium submerging the thirteen of us all at once, ’twas in a torrent of
fuck we extinguished … or rather temporarily soothed our consuming lust.

The whole gamut of postures was repeated with Zanetti as their center and 
prime beneficiary, and now playing a subsidiary role, I had the revitalizing 
pleasure of watching that rascal’s extraordinary antics. Sappho, Messalina, every 
precedent was dwarfed; ’twas a frenzy, a mindless, convulsive lasciviousness, a 
string of blasphemies so energetic, of sighs so impassioned, of moans so deep, 
and shrieks so shrill at the instant of crisis! Oh, I repeat, never had Venus a 
proselyte so apt, never was delirium so intense, never did whore disport with such
abandon.

But she was not content with that; after having fucked, now we must drink, 
and we did so with the same immoderation: the chambermaid joined us at table, 
but the men were dismissed; and when the three of us were raving drunk, we fell 
to frigging one another anew, like sluts, until the morning sun peered in upon our 
saturnalia, at last obliged us to suspend them and in rest seek the strength 
necessary to begin afresh.

Several days later, that charming personage returned my visit. I had, she 
affirmed, made a prodigious impression upon her, she could not get the thought 
of me out of her head.

“Now that we are better acquainted, dear friend, I must confess my penchants 
to you,” she said. “I reek vice, and as reports agree that you have a very 
philosophical understanding, I have come in the hopes you will set my conscience 
at ease.”

“Speak, my love,” I hastened to reply, “what are the sins you cherish the 
most? In which ones do you indulge with the greatest pleasure?”

“Theft. Nothing amuses me like stealing others’ property; and although I have 
better than one hundred thousand livres a year, not a single day of my life goes 
by but I steal for enjoyment’s sake.”

“Console yourself, my darling,” said I, taking my friend’s hand in mine, “and in 
her whom you love behold one of that passion’s greatest zealots. Like you, I 
cannot dispense with stealing, and as do you, I derive pleasure from it—pleasure! 
why, I too have made of thievery one of my most precious pastimes. Stealing, my
dear, is a natural institution; not only is it not an evil, but, manifestly, it must be 
classified as good.

“Let me add, dearest friend,” I went on, embracing Zanetti with fervor, “that I 
am gladdened to perceive that your principles are untainted by any residue of 
moral scruple.”

“Upon all those questions nobody could be firmer than I,” the amiable Venetian
declared. “Led by my mind into imagining a thousand infamies, there is nothing I 
deny myself when my passions speak.”

“Goodness!” said I, “are you capable even of murder?”

“Even of parricide; even of the most frightful crime possible, if ’twere possible 
to say that for us humans crime does rightly exist.”

“Ah, by God,” I said to my friend, “kiss her and kiss her a thousand times over,
the woman who resembles you so perfectly, and deem me worthy of you.”

“Since you are so open with me,” said Zanetti, “I shall not be less so with you; 
listen, and shudder not at what I have to confide. And swear to me you shall 
never divulge to anyone the things you are about to hear.”

I vowed silence; and then my friend began to speak.

“You know, Juliette, that I am a widow, and therefore accountable to no one 
for the way in which I choose to conduct my life. Refrain from asking me how I 
won my freedom … and, rather than forcing me to a confession, guess that it is 
the reward of crime.”

“Was it committed by your own hand?”

“No. That miserable foe of my pleasures fell to an assassin; in Venice it is easy,
with a few sequins, to sever any tie.”

“It might have been better to have done the thing yourself. In any case, that 
would have established between us one more point in common.”

“Dear soul! How I adore you! And what a praiseworthy thing one does when 
one liberates oneself from those rogues when they contrive to become 
troublesome; by what right do they presume to curb our freedom? Let them grant
us divorce and husband-murder will be a little less rampant.

“At any rate, you must know that in Venice there exists a notorious association
of villains devoted uniquely to robbing, to swindling, to blackmailing and, when 
the need arises, to killing anybody who resists them. This association’s members 
and correspondents are many, its influence extends for thirty or forty miles round 
about; and its headquarters are at the house of a certain Moberti, director of the 
organization.

“Now, this Moberti is my lover; I am mad about him: no one has such 
sentiments for a man as I have for him. And yet, my dove, when you see him you
shall perhaps wonder at my passion for him; however, so soon as you come to 
know him your surprise will evaporate, and you will realize that it is possible to 
love a man for his tastes, his passions, his temper and cast of mind rather than 
for the physical amenities of his person.

“Moberti is fifty-four; he is as red-haired as Judas; his eyes are rheumy and 
small, set near together; his mouth is wide and ill-furnished with teeth; his nose 
and lips negroid; he is short, squat, misshapen, but endowed, in spite of all that, 
with an instrument so prodigious that, notwithstanding my extreme habit of 
sodomy, he scorches me, he fairly splits me every time he embuggers me … and 
he never takes his pleasure with me otherwise than in that manner. That, dear 
Juliette, is the description of the man I worship, although I put horns of cuckoldry 
on his head a hundred times every day; but to my truancies he raises no 
objection; he realizes I cannot forego them; and if, on my side, I tolerate 
unfaithfulness in him, even providing him with the game he is fondest of, he on 
his side allows me to fuck with whom and as often as I wish. No jealousy on 
either side: it is almost what one might call a spiritual union.

“Moberti has the kind of mind I admire; his is a disorder of the imagination so 
original, a ferocity so rarefied, an abandon of principle so prodigious, an atheism 
so profound, a corruption so complete, that all these qualities put my brain in a 
ferment, and upon their account I adore that man: the like of it is not to be found
in any of the descriptions of love penned by your poets and your historians down 
to this day.

“As you must imagine, Moberti has several agents in Venice, whom he places 
amidst the very rich, and who, in constant contact with the members of this 
caste, are in a position to provide him with intelligence. I am the foremost of 
those agents, I gather and sift information supplied by the others, and it is 
through me the principal thefts are planned. Our affair began but three years ago,
I have been serving him for only that long, but I can assert that in this short 
space I have brought him into more than ten millions and I have had him 
assassinate at least four hundred people; and that is what swells my head. I 
discharge, for three days and three nights running, my dear, each time I commit 
or am instrumental to the committing of crimes of this sort. He himself loves 
murder to the point where, like that famous Siberian robber, he will, during an 
expedition, appoint his comrades to carry off the loot in order to have his own 
hands free to cut the victims’ throats. He is, I insist, the crudest and the most 
barbarous scoundrel alive today; and it is the wonderful concordance of his vices 
with those of my character that makes for my devotion to him.

“As if to prove that the criminal destiny is always far happier than the virtuous,
provided it be incorrigible and bold, fate has been kind to my lover, who for 
twenty-five years has been leading a uniformly wicked existence; until now he has
not even come under suspicion. Several of his lieutenants have been wheeled, 
hanged, burned at the stake, but none of them has ever compromised him. This 
man, rare through courage, rare through perversity, looks forward to another 
twelve or fifteen active years before we retire, he and I, in Dalmatia, where he 
has lately bought some superb estates. ’Tis thus we intend to crown our lives, as 
evil as any that have left their blot in human annals.

“That, my dear, is what I had to tell you; decide whether you would like to 
throw in your lot with us. If you accept, I shall shortly issue you an invitation to 
join my lover and me at dinner; you will see him take his pleasure with me; with 
you too, if you desire; and we shall then all three confer upon arrangements for 
an intimate relationship.”

“Be sure of it,” I answered, “you could make me no more agreeable proposal. I
accept—accept everything—but upon two conditions: the first being, that if your 
lover cares to amuse himself with me, he shall pay my price, and I would add 
that, likewise, I shall only collaborate in his thefts provided I be given a 
substantial share of the proceeds. The second condition is that from this moment 
forward we share all expenses incurred in connection with our libertine exercises: 
it is your friend I wish to be, and not your whore anymore.”

That conversation was followed by a delicious supper, and we took leave of 
each other with promises to meet again before long.

Not knowing how this friendship might develop, I thought best, until such time 
as matters became clearer, to say nothing about it to my companion. Besides, our
relations, though close, allowed both of us a margin of freedom broad enough to 
enable us each to do whatever each wished independently of the other.

A few days later Signora Zanetti advised me that she had been in touch with 
her friend; that the latter was exceedingly eager to become acquainted with me; 
and that she therefore hoped for my company at dinner the next day. They would 
be expecting me at a charming house Moberti possessed on the island of San 
Giorgio, a few minutes by boat from the city.

What I had been told touching that extraordinary man’s looks proved accurate:
it would be impossible to be uglier than he, and difficult, at the same time, to 
have a more alert and crafty face.

“Here she is,” said Zanetti, embracing him, “the pretty girl I told you about; I 
trust you will find her satisfactory in every respect.”

The brigand then took me by the hand and, without a word, led me into an 
adjoining chamber, already occupied, I was rather surprised to discover, by two 
boys, fifteen years of age and of extreme beauty.

“Do not allow yourself to be scandalized,” said the lewd little man, “I am a 
bugger. Notwithstanding, I shall fuck you; in the ass, be it understood. Show that 
part to me, but have the kind consideration to keep your cunt well out of my 
sight: enable me to suppose that you are completely devoid of one.”

This opening struck me as rude. What it was that was attractive about this 
person I cannot say; but from the very first I sensed that such a man was 
someone to be loved automatically. Moberti was long peering at my behind, no 
detail escaped his attention; then, giving two forceful slaps to each of my 
buttocks, “Good,” he pronounced, “it will do, you may take off your clothes.”

“And your friend, Signor?”

“She will come; well she knows that nothing will be begun without her.”

And While I was undressing, Moberti caressed the two adolescents.

The beautiful Venetian appeared.

“You have provided for everything?” her lover inquired. “We are in no danger of
being disturbed? All the doors are locked? The dinner will be good?”

“Rely upon me. You know that I never neglect anything.”

“Then let us fuck in peace,” Moberti rejoined, “and surrender to the curious 
caprices imagination engenders.”

“Nothing stands in your way, my friend; you are screened from every gaze 
save that of God.”

“Peugh, I worry very little about that witness,” the roué declared, “I am only 
sorry that no God really exists, sorry, that is, to be deprived of the pleasure of 
insulting him more positively. But can we speak in this young woman’s presence? 
Is she of our breed?”

“Indeed she is, you remember what I told you about her. She merely waits to 
be assigned to her task, and I dare predict her performance will please you.”

“I am already pleased with her ass—as pleased, that is to say, as one can be 
with a female ass. Come, my dear, ready all the implements.”

Promptly unbuttoning the two boys’ breeches, Zanetti exposed their behinds to
the libertine, who, reclining upon a broad sofa, frigged himself while examining 
them.

“Hurry,” my friend whispered to me, “I am sure that he is burning to see your 
ass next to those other ones.”

My bush well camouflaged, I quickly take my place beside the boys, and 
Moberti subjects the three of us to a moment of impartial scrutiny. However, he 
kisses mine with an unmistakable ardor, tongues it deeply; he then orders one of 
his bardashes to get between my legs and pluck out some of my pubic hair, so 
that I am soon jerking and twitching about, and he goes on thrusting his tongue 
into my anus, and his mistress frigs him while she is herself frigged by the other 
bardash.

“Now heed me well,” the brigand finally says, “and, above all, contrive to carry 
out my instructions to the letter. You are to loose a fart into my mouth at the very
instant the boy pulls out one of your hairs, and when he pulls out the sixth, just 
as you fart, you are also to piss upon his face, and to cover him with invectives 
also.”

I have the good fortune to succeed in complying with this unusual prescription,
and with all the punctuality the libertine requests; and when I get to the 
inundation and when he hears it being accompanied by hard words addressed to 
the object of his lust, he snatches up a bundle of switches and thrashes me for a 
whole quarter of an hour.

“What are you doing? What in the world are you doing?” Zanetti cries, 
pursuant to the role she is playing on the edge of this scene. “What wrong has 
this creature done to you?”

“She farted, the nasty thing; more, she pissed her wretched urine all over my 
Ganymede, and sullied his delicious features; that’s what she did, and for such 
outrages no punishments can be severe enough.”

“Well then, rascal,” Zanetti replies, learned in the fine science of ensuring her 
lover’s pleasure, “I am going to whip you until you stop treating my friend in this 
way.”

Thereupon a sound thrashing is administered to him, and after fifteen minutes 
of this the Italian exhibits a member that has filled out to a foot in length and a 
circumference of eight inches.

“Have you ever beheld another of this size?” he asks, bringing it near.

“Heaven!” I exclaim, “I am doomed if ever you perforate me with such a 
device!”

“Yet that is what is about to happen to you,” says he, next ordering his 
mistress to undress also; “you will not be more discomforted than these children, 
they have virginal parts, you do not.”

“But whatever befalls them, I have no wish to die.”

At this point our colloquy is interrupted as Zanetti, naked, presents her 
hindquarters to him for kissing; and while one of the boys pulls a hair from her 
cunt, she fires a perfectly enormous fart point-blank at her lover’s nose, who 
swears, storms, hurls himself upon her, and embuggers her straightway. He has 
distributed the little boys and myself so cunningly that during this operation our 
three asses, clustered about his goddess’ flanks, are all near enough to his face 
for his indiscriminate kissing.

I was amazed, I confess, at the manner in which Zanetti stood up to that 
gigantic member’s incursion into her fundament; the slut never flinched; roaring 
oaths, the Italian was lunging backward and forward and snapping his teeth at 
our buttocks the whole time. He withdraws, the group dissolves, and he considers
us, cruel lust glittering in his eyes; he lies down upon the sofa, his face buried 
between his mistress’ buttocks, whose anus he suckles, and from there he orders 
us to come one by one and frig him briefly, taking good care to kiss his device, to 
lick his testicles, and to insert three fingers into his ass.

So extreme is the effect upon his member of this byplay that I am convinced 
he must be at the point of discharging; but no, his self-possession unimpaired, he
contains himself, rises, calls for switches, and belabors the four of us with might 
and main: we each receive two hundred cuts at least. This operation over with, he
seizes me, and in his glance I read trouble.

“Buggeress,” he announces, “I am of a mind to kill you.”

Accustomed as I was to all such scenes, fear nevertheless took hold of me, and
it was not lessened by what I seemed to detect in Zanetti’s stare.

“Yes, damn your thrice-fucked heart,” the Italian continued, “yes, foul slut that 
you are, my urge is to kill you.”

And as he spoke he squeezed my throat as if he were going to throttle me; 
next, he catches up a dagger, poises it over my breast while he is frigged by his 
mistress who pays no attention to me, who makes no gesture to reassure me. 
After keeping me several minutes in dreadful suspense, he bends me over the 
sofa, presents his prick at the entrance of my ass and drives it, without warning 
or preamble, so forcefully in that cold sweat bathes my face and I am on the 
verge of swooning. In the meantime, my friend was holding me fast, forestalling 
all the movements I might otherwise have made, so that I was ploughed, 
harrowed, cloven by that monstrous machine without being able to put up the 
slightest defense. While this went forward, Moberti was, with each hand, fondling 
the hinder parts of a bardash and kissing Zanetti upon the mouth.

A few moments of this and he ordered me, who had been resting my hands on 
the edge of the sofa, to place them on the floor instead, and to raise my rump as 
high as I could, and to arch my neck, bending my head as far back as possible; 
one of the little boys, straddling my neck, stood facing him, and Moberti tongued 
his mouth for a time; then the other bardash replaced the first, and his mouth 
was tongued in its turn; and Zanetti, striking a different attitude, came up to 
place her asshole where her lover had found nought but mouths an instant 
before. Discharge he did not, and withdrawing his prick suddenly and without 
precaution, he occasioned me almost as much pain by this precipitate retreat as 
when he had fought his way into the premises.

“Her ass is good,” he remarked when he had emerged from it, “it grips and it is
hot; but she wiggles while being embuggered, and you know, Zanetti, I cannot 
tolerate unsteadiness, it’s either absolute stillness or I don’t discharge.”

His mistress then flogs him a little with the switches; I was lying down upon 
the floor, the two acolytes were frigging his member against my behind.

Next, I am told to get up and stretch out flat upon the sofa; he has the 
children climb upon my body and range their asses side by side and adjacent to 
mine; he approaches his prick to a juvenile vent; advances; meets with stoutest 
resistance.

“Then tie the little bastards!” shouts the rake.

And I complying with Zanetti’s request for aid, we bind and garrote the 
youngster, having rolled him into a ball, so that his head, thrust down between his
legs, provides Moberti with a mouth to fuck as well as an ass; and to ensure that 
he will not budge out of position, Zanetti squats upon the child. Moberti comes up 
to the gate again, all possibilities of disturbance having now been removed. Three
determined heaves and the colossal prick disappears into the anus of the puny 
little fellow; I frig the libertine’s ass in the meantime, and he handles the other 
bardash.

During that voluptuous act the villain said dreadful things. He raved 
uninterruptedly about crimes, about abominations, about murders, about wanton 
destructions, about massacres. And for all that he still did not discharge. The 
second bardash was immediately trussed in the same position; Moberti enjoyed 
him in the same fashion, but, this time, he had hung the first, the boy already 
fucked, upside down and alongside his mistress, who, as hitherto, was squatting 
upon the bardash being embuggered; thanks to which arrangement, he had an 
ass, a cunt, and a mouth within reach of his lips. I was flogging him. His 
utterances became more horrible still, and the next instant I saw blood flowing in 
rivulets upon the floor: the cruel one, upon unleashing his seed, had stabbed a 
stiletto twenty times into both the boy he was sodomizing and the other dangling 
before him.

“Villain!” I exclaimed, redoubling the blows I was bestowing upon his behind, 
“that is a signal piece of treachery you have just performed, and you may flatter 
yourself that you are a monster.”

His discharge had been awesome, more like a volcanic eruption than anything 
else; his comportment was that of a wild animal rather than a human being.

Calm once re-established, the two corpses were dropped into a hole already 
dug in the little garden attached to the chamber where this scene had just 
transpired; the three survivors then dressed and readjusted themselves. Moberti 
fell asleep before it was time for dinner.

“Yes, he is indeed an unusual man,” I complimented his mistress.

“You have not seen anything yet,” Zanetti replied; “his behavior has been mild 
today, it is sometimes considerably worse.”

Two other victims were there: he would come to grips with them after the 
midday meal.

“And as they are girls, I can assure you that he will cause them ten times more
suffering.”

“Am I to take it that he finds our sex the more moving?”

“Of course. With people who are cruel in their pleasures it’s always the same 
story: the weakness, the frailty, the delicacy of a woman irritates them far more 
powerfully, their ferocity has far greater effect when pitted against helplessness 
than against strength; the more defenseless the object, the more violently they 
attack it, and as this introduces a greater portion of villainy into the deed, the 
enjoyment it affords is increased commensurately. Did he really hurt you?”

“He nigh maimed me. I have confronted grandiose pricks in my day; never did 
one cause me so much pain.”

Moberti awoke very shortly; scarcely had he opened his eyes when he called 
for food; dinner was served. We were in a cool, secluded room; everything 
required for the service lay ready and accessible, dispensing us from any need of 
domestics. It was while we were at table the brigand specified the tasks he meant
to entrust to me within the framework of his criminal organization: I was to act as
a cover for his thefts; I was to seek out victims for him; taking leave of Durand, I 
was to install myself in a house, alone, to which I would lure dupes whom he 
aimed to rob and kill. I immediately saw that were I to enter into this association,
infinitely more danger than profit would accrue to me; and able, in my position, to
disdain such mediocre earnings, I inwardly rejected this man’s proposals. But I 
was only too careful to conceal my true thoughts, and in order that nothing upset 
his illusion, I applauded his scheme warmly and promised to lend myself to it. 
Thus did we conclude the most magnificent repast I had enjoyed in a long time; 
when we stood up from table, Moberti drew me into a small chamber.

“Juliette,” he said to me once he had closed the door and we were alone, “you 
have observed my tastes from sufficiently near on to have realized that I situate 
my major delights in murder. Can I be sure of the zeal with which you are going 
to undertake to multiply my victims? Have I no weakness, no remorse, to fear in 
you?”

“Try me, my dear, there is no other way for you to allay your doubts,” I 
replied; “my conduct will tell you whether it is through enthusiasm or through a 
more passive complacency that I am aiding you to attain your ends.”

And at this point the most perfidious idea arose in my wicked imagination. I 
had no wish to become that man’s mistress, none to accept his offers of 
partnership, and yet, simply on evil principle, I feigned jealousy.

“Only upon one score do I have any reservations,” I declared. “To play second 
fiddle in your schemes is not much to my liking. Trust, affection, those treasures 
so worth possessing when they are bestowed by a person one loves, will any of 
that be mine? I have agreed to everything you proposed, true; but I should much 
prefer to be the only one to exercise this employment, and not to have, 
perpetually before my eyes, a rival as dangerous as your Zanetti….”

And the knave listened to me with equal amounts of surprise and interest.

After a moment of silence he asked me a question: “You would actually be in 
love with me?”

“Ah, I would be crazy about a man whose tastes are in every point identical to 
mine.”

“Excellent; not another word, everything will be arranged. You are infinitely 
more beautiful than Zanetti, I prefer you, and you are going to enjoy undisputed 
sway over my heart.”

“But she will be in despair when she discovers this! As well, shall I not be 
making the very worst enemy for myself? Do you think she will ever be able to 
forgive me for having seduced you?”

“Oh, were she to bother us seriously—”

“My God, what an idea! I tremble … a woman I am devoted to, a woman whom
you once loved … have you given sufficient thought to this crowning act of 
horror?”

“Horror? No such thing exists, all our acts are simply what they are, all are 
inspired by Nature: those are elementary precepts, and I wonder that you are still
at the stage of doubting them.”

“Ah, my scruples are certain to give way ere long before the charms of having 
you all to myself…. But I tell you now that so long as that creature breathes I 
shall be uneasy: on the one hand, I shall live in fear of her, and on the other I 
shall dread losing you. It seems to me that while we are on the subject it would 
be best to settle it right away. That woman is mischievous; if you but knew all the
things she told me about you…. Ah, believe me, if we do not take the necessary 
preventive measures she will never allow us one instant of peace.”

“I adore you, heavenly girl,” said the Italian, folding me in his arms, “your 
rival’s fate is decided, you triumph, nothing now remains but to consult together 
upon the manner in which she is to die.”

And, just as aroused by this idea as I, Moberti catches hold of my ass and 
flings into it without the slightest preliminary; that gigantean prick might have 
wrung shrieks from me upon some other occasion, but, in a fiery mood myself, 
instead of wilting before the dart I lunged at it, and discharged the moment 
Moberti’s balls danced against my buttocks.

“What shall we do to her?” the rake demanded while he fucked away. “It must 
be as we are in the midst of pleasures that we decree her sufferings.”

We did so; and the scene that is about to be described to you was the result of
our deliberations. We went back into the other room.

Moberti, eager to be at the peak of his strength, had taken care not to 
squander any of it in my entrails. Zanetti had been worried by our lengthy 
absence, and upon our return her eyes plainly announced that the demon of 
jealousy had begun to torment her heart. She suggested that we all remove into 
the room where the morning’s orgies had been celebrated; and there she 
presented to her lover the new objects intended for the pleasures which were to 
close the afternoon. Awaiting us were a twenty-six-year-old mother, seven 
months pregnant, and two charming little girls, one of eleven, the other of nine, 
whom she held by the hand. Moberti, already familiar with the merchandise, 
having himself negotiated for it, was thrilled to have it in his clutches at last.

“This,” he whispered to me gleefully, “is going to bring me an atrocious 
erection. That woman has been induced into error: she fancies I am going to 
render her some great services, but the tortures I have in store for her are 
hideous. Well, Zanetti, let us have the doors locked once again, let silence reign, 
let there be no noise in this house whatever, save that which I am about to make.
I would like to have the entire earth stand still when I lift my prick.”

Moberti sits down, he bids his mistress undress Angelica while Mirza, the elder 
of the girls, and little Marietta are told to wait in respectful silence until the 
brigand issues his instructions to them.

Zanetti, scrupulously veiling all of Angelica’s anterior parts, fetches the 
woman’s rump up to Moberti who, after handling it rudely, declares that before 
the hour is out there shall be changes wrought in the shape of this handsome ass.
He pokes and prods the replete belly, pinches it lustily, and predicts trouble for it 
as well.

“Ah, Signor!” says the interesting Angelica, “you have cruelly deceived me; it is
now but too plain what horrors lie ahead for me; at least respect the child I bear 
in my womb….”

’Tis with gales of laughter the villain greets this speech.

“Double-dyed whore,” he cries, raining blows upon the unlucky soul, “oh, 
indeed, indeed! rest assured, I hold your state in the very highest consideration; 
nothing, in my view, is more entitled to respect than a gravid female, and you 
must already sense the extent to which I am touched by your fascinating 
condition. Begin, nevertheless, by undressing your elder daughter for me, and 
bring her over here in the same way Zanetti has just presented you for my 
inspection.”

All this time kneeling between the libertine’s legs, I was polluting him gently to
keep his fire lighted, and he bestowed frequent kisses upon my lips. Nothing so 
pretty as the little girl who is led up to him, and nothing so cruel as the species of
lewd caresses wherewith he overwhelms the tender thing. The younger child 
advances; she is dealt similar treatment.

“Damn my eyes!” the exalted villain protests. “What a furious shame I haven’t 
the means to embugger the three of them at the same stroke.”

So saying, he takes the mother firmly in hand, lays her upon her back, lifts her
legs straight in the air and with cords secures them thus, then bum-fucks her. 
Following his request, I leap upon Angelica and assume a position which places 
my ass within reach of the libertine’s kisses; and upon my flanks his mistress 
establishes herself, presenting a second set of hindquarters to the insatiable one’s
caresses; with each of his hands he has at a child, whose buttocks he worries with
tongs. Not content to molest those two little behinds, he begins to pluck at the 
mother’s with the same instruments; as for ours, he confines himself to gnawing 
them while we expel farts into his mouth.

“Press down with your knees upon this worthless rascal, Juliette,” said he, “see
whether you cannot, through your combined weight, crush the nasty fruit stinking
in her entrails.”

Zanetti and I bestir ourselves, and there and then come near to squeezing the 
life out of poor Angelica. After fifteen minutes of reaming the anus of the sorely 
beset woman, who uttered piercing screams throughout this abominable torture, 
Moberti dis-embuggered and called for the elder of the two girls, Mirza. Zanetti 
opened up the way, and I presented the instrument, grown more terrible still from
its incursions into the mother’s ass. At the price of much struggling we finally 
succeeded, the Venetian and I, in inserting that enormous mass into the narrow 
orifice offered to its furies. As soon as Moberti notices that some progress has 
been made, he bolts forward with such vigor that he soon sheathes his weapon to
the hilt; but the unhappy patient faints.

“That is what I was after,” our ferocious personage explains, “I never begin to 
enjoy myself until my vexations have reduced them to insensibility. Ha, Zanetti! 
Do you hear what I am saying?” Then, to me, under his breath: “When I send her
to hell, I want her to arrive there blackened by a crime of the very first 
magnitude.”

Directed by the Venetian, Angelica clambers upon the back of her unconscious 
daughter, so that both their behinds are facing the rake; my buttocks are exposed
to the right, those of the younger daughter to the left, and my friend kneels 
before her lover’s ass; but will you ever guess with what episode the libertine now
regaled his lubricity? Biting his buttocks fiercely, his mistress had to imitate the 
growlings of a bulldog, while he, simulating the same animal, worried Angelica’s 
ass. I never saw anything so droll as this concert of canines; I must say, however,
that it was far less amusing for Angelica, whose buttocks, torn by the cruel 
brigand, were soon hanging in tatters down her thighs. He also gave a little 
attention, now and then, to mine and to the little girl’s, but that was only to 
sharpen his teeth, which, with renewed fury, he would redirect against Angelica’s 
posterior flesh, soon reduced to such a state of ruination that, like her daughter, 
she collapsed. Moberti changes asses; the other sister is stoutly attacked, and ’tis 
now upon the buttocks of the one latterly fucked that he directs his fangs.

In the meantime, Signora Zanetti is executing the orders she receives. While 
her lover is fucking, she, to promote his ecstasy, stabs the child he is gazing at, 
and the little creature falls dead, swimming in a pool of blood.

“Scoundrel,” exclaims the Italian, “see what a frightful deed you have just 
committed; may the Eternal, by whose grace you shall live yet a while, grant you 
time to repent what you have done, for hell would be your share were you to die 
laden with such a crime…. Leave the corpse where it is, I shall be wanting it in a 
while.”

These accumulated horrors have had their effect upon him, he withdraws now, 
having exhaled whole floods of sperm; this operation over with, he leaves Zanetti 
to keep the unhappy family company and retires with me into the room where we
had held our consultation a short time before.

“I am going to perpetrate atrocities,” Moberti declares, kissing me feelingly 
upon the mouth and brightening his member against my behind, “and your rival 
shall be enveloped in them. Would that I were able to devise something worse 
than what we have decided her fate is to be, would that there were some more 
terrible torture than the one she is to undergo; but limits there must be, and I 
grieve. None the less—ah, Juliette, I restiffen!—observe this treacherous idea’s 
influence upon my senses. What a superb ass,” he continues, fondling my 
buttocks, “I adore you, Juliette, you are full of imagination, in crime you possess 
inventiveness, in performing it facility, and if I am immolating Zanetti ’tis because 
I want you with me forever.”

“But, kind friend,” I interject, “do you not forget that this woman idolizes you? 
I yielded to your perfidious desires in a moment of weakness; I reproach myself 
for it. Thus to treat a woman who is so attached to us—”

“What the whore’s sentiments happen to be is to me of no importance; it’s my 
passions that are sacred, my erection that counts. Ha, the slut! She suspects 
nothing, this is the occasion to turn upon her. I foresee a delightful evening.

“Here,” he went on, “clad me in this tiger’s skin. They shall be all three of them
naked next door, grouped around the corpse: I shall attack them indiscriminately, 
I shall eat them alive; and my feelings for Signora Zanetti, you shall soon see 
what they are when I have my teeth in her and her mortal woes have begun. Do 
not fail to exhort me to extreme rigor during the scene. After that we shall 
terminate in the way we have planned; and if in the meantime anything more 
revolting occurs to you, you will include it among our resolutions; for, as now they
stand, they are far from measuring up to my desires.”

I entered and gave instructions to Zanetti. She was startled to be told to join 
the ranks of the others. Accustomed to commanding, she found subordination 
strange, and, not a little bewildered, she could not prevent herself from 
questioning me.

“What is he going to do?”

“You shall see,” was my chilly reply. And I went back to Moberti.

I found him masturbating, inspired by the execrations in the offing; catching 
sight of me, he heads toward my ass, submerges it beneath caresses: bending 
me forward, the mischievous fellow slides his stave into me, swearing that in all 
the world there is nothing that affords such pleasure as my behind. He sawed 
away for quite some time, during which we exchanged thoughts upon the 
forthcoming tortures, improved upon them, conceived horrors at which even the 
most savage animals would have shuddered.

“That should do,” said the rake, withdrawing, “I feel sufficiently aroused.” And, 
dressed in his tiger’s skin, its four paws armed with monstrous talons, and its 
muzzle so arranged as to permit the wearer to bite anything within reach; thus 
disguised, I say, and with me following in his train, naked, and wielding a huge 
cudgel for use in the event he showed signs of laggardliness, we made our 
entrance.

Zanetti is the first upon whom he leaps, with a blow of his claws he carries one
of her breasts away, and sinks his teeth so deep into a buttock that blood gushes 
forth at once.

“My God!” cries that unfortunate, “I am lost, Juliette, and ’tis you who have 
undone me! Ah, I ought to have known—what lies in store for me now? This 
monster, whom I loved so dearly, what horrors has he prepared for me?”

And each of her lamentations was answered by fearful abuse. Moberti, 
however, gave his victim a minute’s breathing space while he assailed the other 
objects surrounding her. Angelica and her daughter attempt to flee; but what 
escape is there from this fury? The libertine contemplates them; but there is 
another target he wishes to have at first: the corpse preoccupies him, he fastens 
upon it, his carnivorous fang ravens for a moment upon the poor creature’s inert 
remains, which he then abandons to pursue the two living objects cowering in a 
corner. He overtakes them both, martyrizes them with the same unabated fury; 
and it is precisely upon their fleshier parts the villain is happiest to batten. His 
prick is at an extraordinary stand. I am obliged to chase after him, sometimes 
thwacking him with all my strength, sometimes to frig him from underneath or to 
suck his behind: an operation I accomplish by raising the tail of the tiger’s skin.

His cruelties move gradually in the direction of refinement. He traps his 
mistress and signals to me as he leaps upon her; I aid him; we tie the wretch 
hand and foot, secure her to a wooden bench. He crouches upon her and with his 
sharp claws scratches out her eyes, tears off her nose, her cheeks: and he was 
kissing her, the brute, while she screamed; and I was frigging him as hard as I 
could.

“But for me,” I was saying to myself, “but for my treacheries, my perfidies, my 
counsels, he would never have undertaken this horror: I am its sole cause.” That 
delicious thought cost me a spasm; and he, pursuing his abominations, continued 
to kiss the doomed woman’s lips so as, said he, to lose not one of the precious 
gasps of the agony racking a mistress he had cherished! He turns her over, 
lacerates her behind, and has me pour molten wax into the wounds; at last, gone 
quite berserk, he pushes me aside and, while I frig him, the monster tears, 
assassinates, rips to shreds the woebegone object of his erstwhile passion, whom 
he finally leaves lifeless upon the floor.

Drunk from rage and lust, he turns upon the other two victims. With his claws 
alone he snatches the child out of the mother’s womb, smashes it against that 
poor woman’s head, hurls himself upon the surviving girl, chokes, rends, 
massacres them both. Thereupon he speeds like an arrow into my ass, ’tis there 
the maniac, along with his fuck, rids himself of the murdering fever which has 
reduced him to the level of Nature’s most dangerous animals….

And we speed back to Venice, promising to meet again at the earliest 
opportunity in order to settle the final details of the association into which, from 
the first, I had no desire whatever to enter.

I spent a sleepless night. Ah, ye gods! how I tossed and turned in my women’s
arms as they frigged me and as I dwelt upon the crimes wherewith I had just 
soiled myself. It was then I realized that among the pleasures life offers us, none 
is so violent as that of murder; and that once this passion has stolen its way into 
the heart, there is no possible dislodging it. Nothing, no, nothing bears 
comparison with the thirst for blood. Only taste it, and thenceforth, insatiable, you
exist solely through the destruction of victims.

However, not for all the world would I have fallen in with that man’s proposals:
in them, as I have already told you, I saw risks infinitely outweighing profits; 
firmly resolved to refuse, I related everything to Durand, who assured me that my
decision was wisely taken, since Moberti would undoubtedly cease to treat me as 
his mistress before three months were out. When he called I had the door shut in 
his face, and I never saw him again.

Durand one day besought me to come to her apartments, she had a woman 
there who ardently desired me; for the attraction I exerted, outrageously if you 
like, but naturally withal, was stronger upon women than upon men. Signora 
Zatta, wife of a magistrate, perhaps fifty years of age, was yet in possession of 
her beauty and endowed as well with a furious fondness for women. No sooner 
does she clap eyes upon me than the tribade sets to cajoling me as would a man, 
and her solicitations become such that she deprives me, as it were, of all means 
to resist her.

We sup together, and when dessert arrives, the Messalina, half-drunk, flings 
herself upon me and takes off my clothes. Zatta was one of those idiosyncratic 
women who, full of clever and original ideas, are drawn to their own sex not so 
much out of taste as through libertinage, and whose behavior with it proceeds 
less from the quest for real pleasures than from a wish to indulge lascivious 
caprices. This creature had nothing but masculine tendencies: I discharged six 
times beneath her cunning fingers, or rather ’twas but a single ejaculation which 
lasted for two long hours. Once returned to my senses, I thought to criticize her 
preliminary tactics, which I held bizarre; but I found her as apt in their defense as
she was adroit in performing them. She proved to me that the aberration she 
delighted in was for her more enjoyable than any other; she added that she 
carried her manias to their logical conclusion, and that she never discharged more
agreeably than when surrendering to them.

She desired other girls; seven responded to the call; after having frigged 
herself with all of them, from her pocket she produced a dildo the likes of which I 
had never before set eyes upon. That singular instrument had four stems. Signora
Zatta began by burying one of them in her ass and sodomizing me with a second. 
We were back to back: the two remaining stems were curved upward in a 
half-circle: these we buried in our cunts. In this position, we each had a girl 
between our legs, who sucked our clitoris and who maneuvered the machine with 
artistry. Employment had to be found for the five others. Two were hence 
assigned to flog those who were sucking us; two more, perched upon chairs, gave
us their cunts to drink from; and the last supervised all the others, moving about 
the ranks and seeing to it that everything was accomplished in strict accordance 
with prescription. Zatta and I fought together against the pack, and after having 
exhausted all our seven women, having had our buttocks lashed raw, she 
proclaimed her intention of avenging herself upon our whippers. We flogged them 
unmercifully; they complained, they screamed, ’twas in vain, we were inflexible, 
and no quarter was granted until floods of fuck had appeased our fury. The 
indefatigable rascal, aroused rather than calmed by this series of lewd episodes, 
insisted that we spend the night together, and it was dedicated to a thousand 
imaginative impudicities, each one more voluptuous and more unusual than the 
last. That libertine’s greatest skill was probably in the licking of the asshole. She 
could so lengthen and stiffen her tongue that the longest and most agile finger 
would not have procured sweeter sensations.

That day’s requirement of supplementary women led Durand to yield upon a 
point I had been pressing for quite some time. We added four charming creatures 
to our household, and retained, outside, more than five hundred others, ready at 
any hour of the night and day.

The excesses of turpitude we witnessed in our house, excesses committed by 
individuals of both sexes, were frequent and outstanding. Experienced though I 
was, I continued to learn, and I avow that I would never have supposed the 
human imagination could soar to such incredible heights of corruption and 
perversity. What I saw achieved there defies belief; ’tis a vast, an endless abyss 
of horrors and infamies into which libertinage is able to drive the human being. 
How dangerous he is when aroused! No, I may truthfully say so, the most 
ferocious and the most savage beasts never attain such monstrosities. The 
influence we enjoyed, the silence, the orderliness, the subordination which 
reigned in that asylum, the extreme ease with which the visitor availed himself of 
the means to undertake every variety of imaginable and unimaginable debauch; 
everything encouraged the shy man, everything quickened the enterprising man’s
enthusiasm; and passions, no matter what form in which they might present 
themselves, in no matter what kind of brain they might waken, were always sure 
to be fed, to be favored, and to be satisfied with us.

It is there, my friends, I have said it before, I proclaim it again, yes, if one 
wishes to understand men, it is there one must follow his behavior: it is in his 
hour of lubricity, in his lubricious expressions that his character, laid absolutely 
bare, yields itself, in all its truest colors, to the appreciations of the philosophic 
student; and it is after having scrutinized him in these moments of intimacy that 
one can estimate and predict the consequences of the impulsions of his execrable 
heart and of his terrifying hungers.

In the matter of lust-murders our policy was severe; however, this fantasy’s 
adepts were so numerous, requests for permission to indulge in it were so 
frequent, and the price people were willing to pay was so high, that we were 
forced to establish a rate for this only too common mania in sanguinary mankind. 
For one thousand sequins you obtained in our house the right to do to death, in 
the manner of your choosing, either one young boy or one young girl.

But to enjoy all these extravagances and to benefit from the intellectual 
stimulation they afforded, we had, Durand and I, set up observation posts, secret 
alcoves whence, without being seen, we commanded a perfect view of everything 
that transpired in the boudoirs used by our libertines; and ’twas from those 
vantage points we absorbed the richest instruction in a wide range of curious 
refinements. Whenever individuals desiring objects of libertinage struck us as 
worth the trouble observing, we would remove to our concealed loges, and there, 
at leisure, having ourselves fucked, or having ourselves frigged, we would dwell 
profitably upon the lascivious details untrammeled debauchery offered to our 
gaze. With my age and my looks, it often fell out that I was chosen in preference 
to one of the creatures the house had for hire; and in that case, if the client 
suited me and the figure seemed to justify it, I would prostitute myself 
unhesitatingly. Likewise, Durand’s originalities, her curious caprices and 
pronounced bent for crime, her charms, though somewhat on the decline, often 
brought in a demand for her services; and there were still other times when the 
two of us were contracted for, or when we were included along with one or more 
other girls, and then God knows what orgies they were!

A member of one of Venice’s most distinguished families presented himself one
day. The libertine’s name was Cornaro.

“It is a consuming passion that brings me here,” he announced to me, “I must 
reveal its particulars to you.”

“Speak forth, my Lord, make your orders known; we do not turn anybody 
away from this house.”

“Why then, my dear, the thing is this: I require to embugger a little boy of 
seven, lying in the arms of his mother and of his aunt. And those two women 
must themselves sharpen the instruments which will be used by a helper I shall 
myself supply: he will trepan the child while I am sodomizing it. The operation 
once over, I shall have to embugger the mother, lying upon the body of her son; 
my helper, still using the instruments sharpened by the aunt and the mother, will 
ablate the latter’s buttocks; these, cooked upon a grill, will be eaten by me, by 
the two women, and by you too, and with this meat we shall none of us drink 
anything except fine brandy.”

“What a horror, my Lord!”

“Yes, yes, ’tis a horror, I know; but only horrors give me an erection, my dear; 
the worse they are, the more they excite me; and but for the fact they are never 
so horrible as I would like, I consider myself a happy man.”

An appointment was fixed. His surgeon arrived with him, as did a pair of 
vigorous fuckers; Cornaro retired with them into a room, telling me that he would
call when he needed me. And so I withdrew, and went promptly to one of the 
hiding places whence, as I mentioned to you, we were able to watch those of our 
guests from whose capers we expected to derive some pleasure: Cornaro set to 
work, and the effect the spectacle obtained upon me is something hardly to be 
described.

Two hours later, he summoned me back, I entered. The little boy lay sobbing in
his mother’s arms while she covered him with her caresses and wet him with her 
tears. The surgeon, the fuckers were drinking, and the young aunt was weeping 
in the company of her sister.

“Fuck!” expostulated the Venetian, “have you ever, I ask you, beheld a more 
sublime scene?” Then, after contemplating it for a moment, “Why,” he said, 
feigning surprise, “are those tears I see? You weep, whore, because I am going to
kill your son? But what interest can you have in this little chap, since he is no 
longer in your womb? Come, let us operate, Juliette, let us operate; do some 
ass-fucking where I can see you while I am in action, take one of these bucks, I’ll 
keep the other: I am unable to do anything unless I have a prick in my ass.”

While I adopt the libertine’s suggestion, he, laying firm hands upon the child, 
camps him atop his mother’s back and fucks him while being fucked and while the
young aunt, kneeling, sharpens the tool needed for the forthcoming operation, 
under the inspection of the surgeon who flogs her in the meantime. I was so 
placed as to be able to miss nothing: although my ass, stoutly perforated, stood 
positively under Cornaro’s nose, he had given orders that my fucker retire from 
time to time and tender him his prick for sucking, which, having sucked it, he 
would then reinsert in my fundament. Everything had been proceeding as he 
wished, when, sensing his sperm about to boil over, he turns his head and nods to
the surgeon. That artist snatches the blade out of the aunt’s hands, and in less 
time than it takes to tell, he slices the crown off not one skull, but all three, 
scoops the brains out, and braying like a donkey, our Venetian notable discharges 
deep inside the entrails of one of the masses he has just deprived of thinking 
being. He withdraws, the three wretched individuals, not yet dead, thrash about in
the center of the room, and scream.-Does the wildest jungle beast commit 
atrocities of this kind?

“Ha!” exults Cornaro, “nothing has ever given me such pleasure; let us finish 
these victims off,” he goes on, clubbing at their heads with a bludgeon, “yes, by 
fuck, let’s finish them off and treat ourselves to a little grilled buttock.”

“Villain!” I say to this barbarian, “do you not repent the horrors you have just 
perpetrated?”

“Juliette,” he sighed, “when you reach the point where I am, the only thing you
rue is an act of virtue.”

Beside myself from lust, I hugged that divine scoundrel to my breast; I frigged 
him, by imparting delightsome sensations I strove to restore the energy he had 
lost with his ejaculation. He teased, he nibbled my teats, sucked my mouth. I 
whispered disgusting things in his ear, horrible things; to material titillations I 
added the provocation of lascivious conversation. When I heard him ask for my 
ass I thought my triumph certain; he knelt before my buttocks, he toyed with 
them, squeezed them while tonguing the hole for a quarter of an hour: but his 
prick did not lift out of its sagging condition.

“A discharge leaves me limp for a week,” he apologized; “the enormous 
amount of time required before I become aroused, the copiousness of my seminal
loss, the entire thing exhausts me. Let us have supper; my forces may return 
amidst the lewdnesses with which we shall punctuate the meal, and perhaps, 
stuffed with food and drink, we shall consummate some further crimes. In the 
meantime, have yourself fucked within my full view, for there is libertinage 
aglitter in your eyes, Juliette, and I should suppose your need for a discharge is 
urgent.”

“No,” said I, “since you intend to wait, I shall wait too; you alone excite me, 
the others do not: it is your sperm I wish to see flow, and nothing else will cause 
the ejaculation of mine.”

“If that be the case,” said Cornaro, “let our supper be as impure as possible, 
let us transform it into a frightful orgy. I need not specify the details; by now you 
know my tastes, you will leave me nothing to desire.”

Garbed as a bacchante, Durand, when everything was ready, announced to us 
that supper was served. We removed into a vast feasting hall, in whose middle 
stood a table set for four: Cornaro, Durand, myself, and a fifty-year-old woman 
named Laurentia, reputed to be the most profligate, the most corrupt, the most 
lascivious creature in the whole of Italy. Laurentia, like the rest of us, elected to 
eat human flesh, watched philosophically while it was brought on, and devoured it
without repugnance.

Nothing so delicate as the various dishes that accompanied those sanguinary 
viands. Eight courses, composed of everything of the rarest and most succulent, 
preceded and followed the grillades; but, as had been agreed from the beginning, 
nothing was drunk but the finest old brandy. Eight stewardesses of fourteen, with 
delicious faces, served the brandy: they had it in their mouths, and when 
beckoned, they would step forward and from between their rosy lips squirt it 
down the guest’s parched gullet. A pair of fifteen-year-old bardashes stood at 
attention directly behind each guest’s chair, eight in all, ready to execute 
whatever orders they might happen to receive. Deployed at each of the four 
corners of the table was a group made up of two old women, two female 
blackamoors, two vigorous fuckers, two more catamites, two girls of eighteen, 
and two children of seven. A simple gesture to the nearest group brought it up to 
the actor who cared to dally with any or all of the subjects composing it. At the 
four sides of the room were that many raised platforms, upon each of which a 
couple of Negroes lashed a girl of sixteen or seventeen who, once torn to shreds, 
would vanish through a trap door, to be replaced the same instant by a fresh one;
to right and to left of each fustigator, and upon the same stages, were other 
Negroes embuggering mulatto bardashes, aged between twelve and thirteen. 
Four girls, fifteen years of age, hovered underneath the table: their function was 
to suck Cornaro’s prick and our cunts. From the ceiling depended a great 
candelabrum which at the same time spread throughout the hall a light as pure 
and bright as sunlight, and, uncommon particularity, also shot a concentrated and
fiery beam at a choir of children stationed upon balconies under the arch of the 
ceiling, and, burning them, produced an incessant shrill complaint from on high. It
was that phenomenon which most struck Cornaro, the one which amused him 
more than anything else, and for which he had the most fulsome praise. Our man,
enraptured, after having glanced at everything warranting his notice, sat down, 
protesting that he had never seen anything so lubricious.

“That woman,” he said, his eyes falling upon Laurentia, “what is she?”

“A bon vivant like yourself,” said Durand, “a slut capable of surpassing you in 
infamy and whose cunt is being frigged at this very minute, just as your prick is 
being sucked.”

“All very pleasant indeed,” said Cornaro, “but it seems to me that before sitting
down at the same table with me, that woman and Durand ought to have shown 
me their behinds.”

“You are quite right,” the two of them answered, rising promptly and bringing 
their asses to within a few inches of Cornaro’s face.

The libertine palpated them, kissed them; with his connoisseur’s discerning 
gaze still fixed upon them, “These,” he opined, “are asses whereupon libertinage 
has more than once placed its stamp; they are in degraded condition, I like it: it 
is the result of the years and the work of lubricity; these blemishes delight me. 
Oh,” he continued, addressing the company at large, “oh, how beautiful is 
corrupted Nature in its details, and how the poppies of age are, in my estimation, 
to be preferred to the roses of childhood! Kiss me, heavenly asses! Waft your 
scented zephyrs toward me, and then get back to your places so that we can all 
prostitute ourselves in concert.

“And these women I see hereabout me?” Cornaro inquired next, considering 
the suppliants surrounding the table.

They,” I replied, “are victims who are under sentence of death and who, 
knowing the authority you wield in these parts, are on their knees to implore your
mercy.”

“They shall certainly not obtain any,” the barbarian declared, glancing fiercely 
at them; “many a time have I caused people to die, but I have never granted one 
reprieve or pardon.”

Therewith we fell to eating, and everyone and everything with a role to 
perform entered into action.

Cornaro, being sucked uninterruptedly, was halfway stiff already; he demanded
that each of the victims step forward and receive some abuse at his hands. One 
by one those charming creatures rise, begin by presenting their ass to the lewd 
dignitary, and afterward submit humbly to what he is pleased to mete out to 
them. Slaps, pinches, hair-pullings, nose-tweakings, bites, burns, buffets, 
ass-spankings, breast-twistings, scratches, little is omitted, and once they have 
got what is due them, they return to their former places and resume their 
kneeling position. These preliminaries over with, Cornaro leans my way, having 
me take hold of a prick whose state I was beginning to feel rather proud of.

“Those sluts are affecting me,” he confided in my ear, “I may soon begin to 
misbehave.”

“The means are all there, my friend,” I replied, “we simply await the impulses 
of your heart and your mind’s instigations; speak, and an exemplary 
submissiveness will give you proof of our devotion.”

Then Cornaro, somewhat rudely, passed his two hands beneath my buttocks 
and, pulling me toward him, lifted me a little into the air: he called one of the 
fuckers’ attention to my ass. “Over here,” said he, “sodomize her as I hold her 
aloft.”

A prick sounds my bum, Cornaro’s tongue probes my mouth; one of the young 
servants grasps his prick, another worries his ass.

“Off with you, Juliette,” he says; “hither, Laurentia, take her place.”

The same ceremony; Laurentia is embuggered, Cornaro sucks, at intervals, the
prick which is fucking her. Durand’s turn comes next; identical episodes. All the 
women undergo the same fate, all are ass-fucked by a fresh fucker who, as 
before, periodically interrupts his tupping in order to allow the libertine to lick 
away the maculations acquired during intercourse. The fricatrices are changed, 
and I dispatch the youngest and prettiest girls one by one to fondle the rake’s 
member and to lend their buttocks to his slaps and pounding.

“Let us eat,” he finally says. “That will do by way of prologue, we shall refine 
our gestures as we proceed. Juliette,” he asks me, “what is your view? Is there 
any more divine passion in the world than lust?”

“I would venture to say that there is not; but lust must be carried to excess: in
libertinage, he who applies curbs is a fool who denies himself all possibility of ever
knowing what pleasure is.”

“Libertinage,” Durand put in, “is a sensual aberrance which supposes the 
discarding of all restraints, the supremest disdain for all prejudices, the total 
rejection of all religious notions, the profoundest aversion to all ethical 
imperatives; and that libertine who has not attained this philosophical maturity, 
tossing back and forth between his desires’ impetuousness and the bullying of his 
conscience, will be debarred from perfect happiness.”

“I do not think,” said Laurentia, “that fault can be found with his Lordship upon
any of the articles that have just been enumerated, and I am convinced he has 
intelligence enough to be immune to the effects of commonplace ideas.”

“It is in any case certain,” said Cornaro, “that I acknowledge the sanctity of 
absolutely nothing in human society, and that for the great good reason that 
everything men have instituted is absolutely nothing but the product of their 
self-interest and their prejudices. Is there a single man alive anywhere who can 
legitimately assure me that he knows more about the world than I do? Once one 
has ceased to have any belief in religion and therefore in a God’s idiotic 
confidences to mortals, everything of man’s invention must be subjected to the 
closest scrutiny and consigned immediately to scorn, if in me Nature’s urgings are
to despise and trample upon those lies. Hence, once it is demonstrated that in the
spheres of religion, of morals, and of politics, no man can be better informed than
I, I may, as of that moment, be as wise as he, and from then on nothing he 
announces to me can rightfully claim my respect. It is in the lawful power of no 
human being to force me to believe or accept what he says or thinks; and 
however little regard I have for these human reveries, however much I flout 
them, there is no person on earth who can pretend to the right to censure or 
punish me therefor. Into what chasm of errors or foolishness would we not tumble
were all men blindly to adhere to what it suited some other men to establish! And
through what incredible injustice will you call moral that which emanates from 
you; immoral that which I uphold? To what arbitration shall we apply in order to 
find out upon which side right and reason lie?

“But, some will object, there are certain things so visibly infamous that no 
possible doubt can exist of their danger and their horribleness. For my part, dear 
friends, I sincerely declare that I know of no deed answering to this description, 
none which, recommended by Nature, has not at some time in the past formed 
the basis of some hallowed custom; and, finally, none which being seasoned by 
some attractions, does not through that fact alone become legitimate and good. 
Whence I conclude that there is not one which ought to be resisted, not one 
without its usefulness, not one which has not had somebody’s sanction in its 
favor.

“But, it will be most stupidly said, since you were born under this or that 
latitude, you ought to abide by the usages prevalent there. Bah, enough; you are 
being absurd in wanting to persuade me that I should put up with wrongs done 
me because of accidents of birthplace; I am such as I was formed by Nature; and 
if there be a jar between my penchants and the laws of my country, blame Nature
for it, impute no fault to me.

“But, it will be added, you will be a menace to society, society shall have to 
protect itself, to remove you from its midst. Platitudes. Renounce your senseless 
curbs, and give equally, equitably, to all persons the right to revenge themselves 
for the wrong done them, do that and you shall have no more need of codes of 
law, you will have no more need of the brainless calculations of those bloated 
pedants that go under the amusing title of criminalists, who, clumsily weighing in 
the scales of their ineptness actions beyond the grasp of their somber genius, 
refuse to realize that when Nature is all roses for us, she can necessarily be 
nothing but thistles for them.

“Abandon man to Nature, she will be a far better guide to him than your 
legislators. Destroy, above all, these populous cities, where the accumulation of 
vices drives you to repressive lawmaking. What necessity is there that man live in
society? Restore him to the forest wilderness whence he came, and let him do 
there whatever he likes. His crimes, as isolated as he, will then be an 
inconvenience to no one, and there will be no further purpose for your restrictive 
regulations; savage man is subject to two needs only: the need to fuck and the 
need to eat; both are implanted in him by Nature. Nothing he will do in answer to 
the one or the other of these needs can possibly be criminal; if ever passions 
other than these are found in him, only civilization and society engendered them. 
Well, as soon as it is clear that these recent offenses are nothing but the fruit of 
circumstances, that they are inherent in social man’s way of life, by what right, if 
you please, do you blame him for them?

“There, then, are the only two species of offenses man can be subject to: (1) 
those imposed upon him by the state of savagery: now, would it not be sheer 
madness on your part to punish him for these? and (2) those his social existence 
amidst other men inspire in him; would it not be yet more extravagant to deal 
severely with these? And so what is there left for you to do, ignorant and stupid 
moderns, when you see crimes committed? You should admire, and you should 
hold your tongue; admire … yes, most certainly, for nothing is so fascinating, 
nothing so arresting nor so beautiful as man swept away by his passions; hold 
your tongue … even more certainly, for what you behold is the handiwork of 
Nature, toward whom your proper attitude must be one of breathless awe and 
silent respect.

“As regards my own self and personal affairs, I concur in your view, my 
friends, that the world can boast of no more immoral man than me; there is not a
single prohibition I have not violated, not a principle out of whose grip I have not 
delivered myself, not a virtue I have failed to outrage, not one crime I have 
neglected to commit; and I must confess that ’tis only when I have acted in 
uttermost defiance of all social conventions, of all human laws, that I have really 
felt lust throb in my heart and inflame it with its divine fire. Every criminal or 
ferocious deed excites me; to murder on the highways, that would excite me; to 
ply the hangman’s trade, that would excite me. And so why deny oneself these 
deeds, once they hurl one’s senses into such a voluptuous ferment?”

“Ah,” Laurentia murmured, “to murder on the highways….”

“Yes, indeed. That is perpetrating violence, any violence agitates the senses; 
any sort of nervous emotion, directed by the imagination, essentially quickens 
pleasure. If, therefore, my prick rises at the prospect of going out and killing 
somebody on the highway, that action, to which I am impelled by the same 
principle that moves me to unbutton my breeches or lift a petticoat, must be 
excused on the same grounds, and I shall therefore commit it with the same 
indifference, but nevertheless with greater pleasure, because its capacity to 
irritate is greater.”

“What,” said my companion, “has the idea of God never checked your 
misbehavior?”

“Ah, do not talk to me about that ignoble chimera, it was already the object of 
my derision by the time I reached the age of twelve. I shall never be able to 
understand how any man in his senses can pay an instant’s heed to a disgusting 
fable which the heart abjures, which reason disavows, and which can win 
partisans only among fools, low knaves, or imposters. Were there actually any 
such thing as a God, master and creator of the universe, he would be, 
incontestably, if one is to judge by the notions widespread among his sectators, 
the most bizarre, the crudest, the most wickedly spiteful, and the most 
bloodthirsty of figures; and none of us would have energy enough, force enough, 
to hate him, to execrate him, to revile him, and to profane him to the degree he 
would deserve. The greatest service legislators could render humanity would be 
an ironclad law against theocracy. Few realize how important it is to obliterate 
that hideous God’s baneful altars; until those fatal ideas can no longer rearise, 
man will know neither rest nor peace on earth, and the threat of religious strife 
will always be poised over our heads. A government that permits all forms of 
worship has not absolutely fulfilled the philosophic objective toward which we 
must all aim: it must go farther, it must expel from society’s bosom those 
elements which may hamper its action. Well, I shall demonstrate to you whenever
you like that no government will ever be vigorous or stable so long as it allows in 
the country any worship of a Supreme Being—that Pandora’s Box, that 
keen-edged weapon destructive of every government, that appalling system in 
virtue of which everybody fancies he has the right to cut everybody else’s throat 
every day. Let him die a thousand deaths, the man who thinks to preach a God, in
any country however governed. The blessed scoundrel the feebleminded revere 
has no other purpose than to sap the foundations of the State; inside it he 
endeavors to form an independent caste, the everlasting foe of happiness and 
equality; he strives to achieve dominion over his compatriots, he strives to light 
the fires of discord, and ends up enchaining the people, with whom he is aware he
shall be able to do whatever he wishes once he has blinded them by superstition 
and gangrened them by fanaticism.”

“And yet,” Durand remarked, merely for the sake of hearing our man’s 
conversation, “religion is the cornerstone of morality; and morals, however you 
have twisted them, none the less remain very essential in a government.”

“Of whatever nature you may suppose this government,” Cornaro rejoined, “I 
shall prove to you that morality is useless to it. And morality, furthermore, what 
do you mean by the term? Is it not the practice of all social virtues? Will you then 
be so kind as to tell me what bearing the practice of any virtue can possibly have 
upon the workings of government? Are you afraid that the vice which is the 
opposite of these virtues might upset those workings? Never. Nay, it is far less 
important that governmental action be exerted against corrupt persons than 
against moral persons. The latter are addicted to arguing, and you will never have
a solid government where men spend their time using their rational faculties: for 
government is a brake upon men, and the man with a mind wants no brakes upon
him. Whence it is that the shrewdest lawmakers were eager to bury in ignorance 
the men they sought to rule; they sensed that the chains they meant to impose 
were more apt to keep the imbecile on his knees than the individual of genius. 
You are going to reply to me that in a free government this cannot be the 
lawmaker’s desire. And I am going to ask you what government is free; does any 
such thing exist anywhere on earth? More, can a single free government possibly 
exist? Is not man everywhere the slave of laws? And, once this is so, does that 
not mean he is everywhere in chains? Once enchained, is it not the desire of his 
oppressor, whoever he may be, to maintain man in that state where he can be 
most easily held captive? Now, is that state not plainly the state of immorality? 
The kind of drunken rapture the immoral and corrupt man perpetually vegetates 
in, is that not the state in which his legislator can maintain him most conveniently,
paralyze him most easily? Why then should the legislator wish to inject virtues 
into him? Never save when man purges himself does he grow restive, 
contentious, examine his governors, and change the regime. For your 
government’s sake, pinion the citizen by means of immorality, drown him in 
immorality … and he will never cause you any trouble. I ask you, moreover, 
looking at things in a broader sense, I ask you whether vices are of any 
consequence in dealings between men: what matters it to the State whether 
Peter robs John, or whether, in his turn, John murders Peter? It is perfectly absurd
to imagine that these various tit-for-tats can be of the slightest consequence to 
the State. But there must be laws to keep crime in check…. What need is there to 
keep crime in check? Crime is necessary to Nature’s right functioning, her laws 
expect it, it is the counterweight to virtue: and it beseems human beings to 
undertake to repress it! The man of the primeval forest, say, did he have laws 
holding his passions in check, and did he lead an any less happy existence than 
you? Fear not lest strength be ever discomfited by weakness; if the latter always 
comes away the loser, ’tis because Nature wills that it be thus; and it is not for 
you to oppose her law.”

“That,” said I, “is a system which opens wide the door to every sort of horror.”

“But they are indispensable, horrors: does not Nature convince us of it when 
she causes the most virulent poisons to grow cheek to jowl with the most 
wholesome plants? Why do you object to crime? Not because you find it evil in 
itself, but because it is prejudicial to you: do you suppose, however, that the man 
who is served by crime thinks to condemn it? Why, no! If then crime makes for as
much happiness in the world as unhappiness, where is the justice of the law that 
punishes it? The character of a good law must be to promote the welfare of 
everybody; the law you promulgate against crime will not achieve anything of the 
sort, it will satisfy no one but the victim of the offense, and will probably 
supremely displease the agent. The great shortcoming, the final misfortune of 
men is, in their lawmaking, never to consider more than one fraction of humanity 
and always to utterly disregard the rest; you wonder that so many blunders are 
committed, now you know why.”

We had reached that point in the discussion when a servant came to announce 
to us that a woman plunged in extremest poverty was waiting downstairs, and 
earnestly desired to have a few words with Signor Cornaro.

“Send her in,” I said before the Venetian had a chance to reply.

The women surrounding the table immediately got up from their knees to 
make room for the ensuing scene, and joined the fifty sultanas who were 
exhibiting their asses upon the four stages.

A moment later there entered, with modesty, a pregnant woman of about 
thirty, as lovely as Venus, and followed by two little boys belonging to her, one of 
whom was fourteen, the other thirteen, and by two girls, also her children, aged 
fifteen and twelve.

“Oh, my Lord!” she cried, she and the rest of her family sinking down at the 
feet of Cornaro, the perfect dupe of a scene I had arranged with a view to playing
upon his susceptibilities, “oh, my Lord, my Lord! ’tis your kindness I implore; in 
the name of heaven, have pity upon a poor woman abandoned by her husband 
and the mother of these unhappy children you see begging you for bread. For two
years now have we been destitute; without work, without resources, the grave 
must soon claim us all five if harsh mankind persists in denying us any means to 
prolong our existence. Oh, good sir! look not unmeltingly upon the wretchedness 
that invokes your compassion: succor us, else we must perish.”

As I said, this woman’s appearance was delicious; her negligent dress, her 
pregnancy, graces distributed everywhere about her person, the enchanting looks 
of her children, the tears bathing the cheeks of everyone in this fascinating 
family: so incendiary was the general effect, so furiously did it inflame our 
libertine’s criminal lust, that for an instant I thought he was going to discharge 
before a finger was laid upon him. But he fought his feelings into line, ’twas for 
much more piquant scenes the rascal was reserving himself; and ’twas to execute
them he took me with him into a chamber nearby, whither the victims I have just 
described had been promptly directed.

And now that cannibal’s ferocity attains full flower. He is beside himself; 
incoherent speech declares his extreme disorder, he stammers, babbles, his 
words are foul, his phrases unconnected, his ideas blasphemous, dreadful. I shall 
continue to portray him in this distracted mood: no aspect of the subject can be 
left obscure by the artist who undertakes to portray for mankind the monstrosities
of Nature.

“Well then, bitch,” says he upon making his entrance, “I have come to relieve 
you; you are gravid, I am going to make you whelp. Quickly, strip … naked, 
naked, and buttocks especially … Juliette, I stiffen, I stiffen considerably … rub 
alcohol on my balls … but get these sluts out of their clothes, and make haste….”

And, pronouncing these words, he aims a terrible punch at the mother’s face: 
blackens her eye, breaks one of her teeth, sends her crashing twenty feet away; 
and the brute, the while leering at her, handles my ass so ungently that, fearing 
lest he turn upon me, I hurriedly remove the rags covering the poor wretch, 
already fallen to the floor which her tears and her blood are soon to wet. Having 
to stoop over to undress her, I make the fairest exposition of my behind: lewd 
Cornaro takes firm grasp upon it and embuggers me.

“Strip her,” he cries, “pull the clothes off her body, tear them off, strangle her if
she resists; are you insensitive to my erection?”

Cornaro now demands that the unlucky creature get upon her knees and beg 
me to undress her; and while she is doing so, he spits in her face. Once she is in 
the state he desires, he quits my ass, jerks her to her feet, then, himself, in the 
twinkling of an eye, snatches everything they are wearing off the two boys and 
the two little girls, and assails those four behinds with the most heavy-handed 
and the most loathsome caresses. Then, ordering me to sear the mother’s 
buttocks with a candle-flame for a few moments, “That will do,” he cries, “now 
give me some switches.”

These instruments having been furnished him, he has the mother stretch out 
upon her back; then, upon her swollen belly, he establishes the four children, one 
atop the other, which provides him with a belly and four behinds to flagellate. 
First, he kisses, paws that pyramid of charms, he praises their beauty, expresses 
wonder that poverty and privation have made no visible inroads upon these 
unhappy creatures’ health or plumpness. Then, shifting from surprise to 
wickedness, and plying his switches with the speed of light, he thrashes the 
targets set tier on tier, from that overripe, snow-white belly to the uppermost of 
those eight appetizing buttocks. I frigged him during the operation, and resorted 
to the most atrocious and sanguinary stratagems to keep his energy from 
flagging. Now and again, when he would pause to rest, when he would gaze 
gloatingly at the stripes and slashes his barbarity had inflicted, he would thrust 
his prick into my ass, withdraw after three or four stabs, and resume his baleful 
fustigations. Weary of this inaugural pleasure, he gave it up in favor of pressing 
the young mother’s belly, of kneading it, beating it, hammering it with his fists, 
and while he did so he was covering the four children’s bloody behinds with his 
kisses.

Positions are altered; he lays the mother in the middle of the bed, upon her 
back; between her legs establishes each of the children, one after the other, and 
embuggers them while inflicting every kind of painful outrage upon the mother’s 
belly.

“My friend,” I say, “you are in discharging humor, I can see it in your eyes: a 
little more and this scene will cost you your fuck, after which you will be unable 
either to consummate your crime or to enjoy the further episodes which ought to 
precede its accomplishment.”

“And what other entertainment do you intend to provide me?” the Venetian 
inquired, his head reeling from lubricity.

“Come with me,” said I, “leave these creatures to catch their breath, you shall 
return to them in a few minutes.”

I drew him into a little room where Durand, with the aid of Laurentia, had just 
completed preparing the new scene you are now to behold.

That room was decorated to represent one of those temples where the 
Saturnalia were celebrated in the Rome of olden days. Nine lubricious tableaux 
greeted the Venetian’s eyes.

The first featured a handsome man in middle years, prick aloft and hovering 
close to the ass of a little boy, whom a catamite was caressing.

In the second was seen a woman of forty frigging a girl of fifteen, herself being
frigged by a girl of eighteen.

In the third was a vigorous athlete ass-fucking a beautiful Negress and 
cunt-sucking a pretty white woman.

In the fourth, a mother flogging her daughter and being flogged herself by a 
man.

The fifth offered a man embuggering a calf and being sodomized by a large 
dog.

The sixth, a man whipping his own daughter, bound to a step-ladder; he was in
the meantime receiving a lashing from somebody else.

The seventh, a group of ten girls, all ten with tongue in cunt.

The eighth, a group of ten men, one embuggering the next, and so curiously 
disposed were the ten attached actors that they formed one spherical mass.

In the ninth and last you saw men embuggering halfwit or syphilitic girls all the
while they were cunt-sucking beldams of sixty at least, and small boys were 
nibbling their asses.

In the middle of all that, a couple of matrons looked to be offering Cornaro six 
little girls, aged only two or three, all naked, all as pretty as little cherubs. 
Everybody wore wreaths of flowers, everybody was in action. From all sides 
nothing could be heard but cries, whether of pleasure or of pain, and the whistling
of thongs and the impact of leather upon flesh. Everybody was naked; everybody 
illustrated lewdness in its most scandalous colors. Lamps burning scented oil 
created an agreeable illumination and at the same time shed an enchanting odor 
throughout the place, crowning touches added to so many others that rendered 
this temple one of the most delicious sanctuaries that was ever edified for lust.

Our man wanders among the formations; two masculine fuckers and two 
feminine whippers follow him wherever he goes, applying themselves by turns to 
irritate his ass in all possible manners.(4) Here, the lecher squeezes or wrings a 
teat; there, he tickles or claws a cunt; farther along, blows of his fist bloody a 
pretty face. ’Tis the raging tiger loose in the sheepfold.

“All right,” says he, “let’s have an end to this, I cannot endure any more. But I 
wish to operate before a public, I wish to join the pleasure of creating a scandal to
the horrors which will finally bring my sperm forth. Give me half a dozen girls and
as many young men, the most sensitive and honorable and decent ones you have 
here; they will stand about me while I act, and I shall do my best to give the most
appalling performance possible.”

I promptly bring him what he asks for, and we all troop into the chamber 
where the unhappy family is waiting for us. The crowd surrounds Cornaro. Death 
is decreed for those who prove unable to bear the spectacle, or who wilt before it,
or weep. Cornaro lays hands on the mother; he hangs her by the feet from the 
ceiling, thus causing her to be stifled by the child in her womb. He has the prettier
of the two daughters held by her sister and embuggers her; then, armed with a 
carpenter’s saw, he slowly severs the poor creature’s head, while doing so 
sodomizing her steadily. The cruel man made that execrable operation last over 
an hour. It upset three of the feminine spectators, who collapsed and from falling 
sustained serious hurt.

“Mark them,” said Cornaro, “I shall attend to them when I have finished over 
here.”

The neck is at last cut all the way through. Another member of the family is 
brought forward; and it is not until Cornaro has installed himself in the ass of the 
last of the children, a boy, not until he has hacked through the neck of this last 
victim, that the villain unleashes the tides of foamy sperm whose seething has 
rendered him so ferocious. Before the end came, three more members of the 
audience, all feminine, had swooned; and all the others had given way to tears. 
As for the mother, she was no more: the pressure of the child weighing upon her 
diaphragm had suffocated her. Thus it was that in this horrible den one beheld 
nought but crime’s incarnation on the one side, and its sinister effects on the 
other.

“Why, what is this, my friend!” said I, approaching the culprit and rattling his 
device, “what! you are going to leave these victims unpunished, you are not going
to carry out the sentence you pronounced against them?”

“No,” sighed the Venetian, “I am exhausted; I am not surfeited with crime, but
it has worn me out. I need rest….”

Despairing of extracting anything further from him, I had him served a cup of 
hot broth, and he withdrew after having paid one hundred thousand francs for the
orgies he had just celebrated.

Following Cornaro, the next of our memorable visitors was a Venetian lady of 
quality and outstanding wealth, very famous for her debauchery. Silvia, forty-five 
years of age, tall, superbly proportioned and with the most beautiful eyes 
possible, arrived for a three days’ sojourn at our house.

“My friends,” she announced to us, “I have a repletion of fuck which cannot be 
let otherwise than in horrors, and these I desire in every kind. To begin with,” 
continued this contemporary Messalina, “I want you to prostitute me to some 
libertine, bizarre in his tastes, who will take me upon an extended promenade 
through the most noisome hogwallows of dissoluteness.”

“I have someone ready downstairs, and I believe he is the personage you 
require. However, Signora, he will undoubtedly lift hands against you. Nay, he is 
sure to thrash you.”

“Ah, dear heart, that is all I ask; I burn to be the victim of such a libertine…. 
What will he do to me after that?”

“After having treated you like the lowliest of the low, he will oblige you to frig 
pricks upon his face; he will have you cunt-fucked while he looks on, and he will 
conclude by embuggering you.”

“Delicious!” was Silvia’s reply; “that is exactly what I am looking for. Let us 
begin the scene at once; later, I shall indicate to you the way in which I would 
have it terminate.”

I had the man in question brought up. It so happened that he had requested 
someone of precisely Silvia’s age and shape; great was his joy at being 
introduced to her. Our two actors were swiftly come to grips; and I, behind my 
partition, nonchalantly reclining between a set of girls frigging me before and 
behind, I missed not a detail of the ceremony. Dorsini opened with a dozen stout 
kicks delivered to the ass, rapidly succeeded by twenty slaps in the face and eight
or ten fist-blows, but all that meted out with such speed that Silvia might have 
thought she was caught in a hailstorm. She remains of firm countenance withal, 
and the expression in her eyes is of nothing unless it be pleasure. That flurry of 
hands is followed by tirades of hard language; rarely has a woman been insulted 
as Dorsini insults his partner.

“Very well,” says he, “let pricks be fetched in; I want to see how this whore 
does her work.”

Six first-rate fuckers appear; Silvia, naked, her buttocks pressed against the 
ruffian’s belly, empties out the engines, spraying their contents over Dorsini’s 
face; he is dripping with sperm; she rubs it upon his nose; his prick has scarcely 
begun to stir. A further half-dozen youths appear; he orders them to fuck his 
high-born whore.

“Bleeding Christ!” he exclaims, watching her squirm beneath them, “what a 
jade, what licentiousness! You have some heat in you, eh, old bag of bones? Make
some noise, whore, curse a bit, tell Almighty God what you think of Him.”

And it is by a torrent of invectives against the Eternal that Silvia responds to 
this invitation. Never was the idiom of blasphemy carried so far. Of that I would 
probably still be persuaded today had not Dorsini contrived to outdo her. While 
swearing, the miscreant was frigging himself, fondling the fuckers’ behinds one by
one, and fondling that of his slut also. At length he has her turn around; a 
vigorous fucker who encunts her exposes her hindquarters to Dorsini, who, after a
preliminary examination of that ass, an examination which is not, as you might 
suppose, conducted without a few vexations, trains his member at the immoral 
orifice and flings thereinto in a matter of moments. Silvia endures everything and 
never once flinches: for true it decidedly is that one may glean as much delight in 
the patient’s role as in the agent’s: the imagination is the only cradle where 
pleasures are born, it alone creates, fashions, orients them; where the 
imagination is still, when it does not contribute inspiration or embellishment, all 
that remains is the physical act, dull, gross, and brutish.

But Dorsini, being himself embuggered while embuggering, excites himself 
only temporarily in the anus; the mouth is the shrine where he is ordinarily wont 
to sacrifice, ’tis there his homage is normally consummated; he roars out his need
for the mouth, Silvia lends hers, he lodges himself there without interrupting his 
copulatory motions and discharges to the great contentment of the hussy, who 
sucks him with an ardor wholly appropriate to her whorishness, and all the 
dreadful disorder of her lubricious mind. Dorsini pays and takes his leave.

“Let us share it,” Silvia said to me, “I like money earned in the whorehouse, it 
has always brought me good luck. Well, that has limbered me sufficiently,” she 
went on, “we can now proceed with the rest.”

The shameless creature then gathered twenty-five superb men and twenty-five
girls of exceeding beauty together in a spacious drawing room, and for the next 
sixteen hours gave herself over, with myself as witness, to the most monstrous 
riot of debauchery, to the most inordinate and unseemly passions, to whimsies at 
once foul beyond words and beyond belief extraordinary in a woman who, 
necessarily, could have contracted such habits only after first having renounced all
concern for her reputation, all principles of modesty and virtue, whereof, 
according to the legend, our sex must be the exclusive repository, and from which
we women never depart save it be to surpass everything men can achieve of the 
most execrable in this kind.

Silvia, all afire, ended up with cruelties; this is customary. Here is the horror 
she invented. For victim she chose a little boy of thirteen, fair as an angel.

“I am going to reduce him to such an extremity that he’ll be fit for nothing but 
burial in a few days. For how much are you willing to sell him to me?”

“One thousand sequins.”

The bargain is concluded.

The rascal has this child secured to a curved bench, in such a way that, as 
though he were over a barrel, his ass is entirely exposed; Silvia then squats over 
the face of a handsome young man lying upon the piles of cushions, and has her 
cunt licked by him while another, on all fours, comes up from behind and tongues 
her ass. Excited by these proceedings, she picks up a lighted candle and gleefully 
scorches the buttocks, chars the asshole of the victim who, as you must surely 
imagine, utters frightful screams throughout the operation. As for Silvia, she 
discharges; swearing like a trooper, the slut goes into an ecstasy, and ferocity 
brings her to the point where, having had the child turned over, with her teeth she
tears away its genitals. We bore the boy out unconscious, he died three days 
later; and Silvia, triumphant, after having paid me a king’s ransom, was before 
very long back with us again to renew similar horrors.

’Twas to her recommendation we owed the visit paid us several months 
afterward by Senator Bianchi, one of the Republic’s richest figures, and aged 
about thirty-five. That libertine’s mania was to betake himself to a brothel with his
two nieces, whom he had in ward, and to prostitute them there. Though he had 
striven to annihilate modesty in those two young girls’ souls, the influence of an 
exemplary upbringing was yet strong enough in them to transform the experience
into an ordeal. They blushed red when I looked at them; thus covered with 
confusion, all their candor shone forth, further enhancing the graces wherewith 
Nature had ornamented them: no living creature could have been lovelier than 
either one of those two. Simply to gaze at the pair sufficed to make me embrace 
the roué’s lewd scheme; and I could not resist employing certain formulas 
calculated to scandalize those chaste ears.

“What order of merchandise do these whores require,” I asked the Senator, “do
they like their meat fat or lean?”

“They are too shy to answer, look and see for yourself,” Bianchi replied, raising 
the skirts of the one and the other, “measure their cunts and gauge their needs.”

“Good,” said I, after a certain amount of poking about with my fingers, “it’s 
something not too filling that seems to be called for.”

“To the contrary!” Bianchi protested. “I want these children to grow; give me 
the biggest articles you have.”

And in accordance with this expressive order, at which the poor dears’ crimson 
cheeks only paled a little, I produce six young fuckers the least of whose 
members showed a foot in length by eight inches in circumference.

“That is what I want,” our man says to me as he handles the goods; “but six 
are too few. You don’t know these young ladies’ appetites; meek as lambs they 
may appear to you, but when they fuck, they fuck like she-wolves, and I venture 
to say that it will take twelve men if they are to be satisfied at all.”

“Well, here are another six. And you, amiable libertine,” I ask, “what shall be 
your needing? What are you wont to do while your nieces are being dishonored?”

“I fuck boys; get me six of them, and nothing older than twelve.”

I have them for him in an instant; by the time the operation begins I am at my
post, for I need hardly tell you that I was not one to miss many such scenes.

That libertine performed horrors, and upon his nieces had still worse 
performed. He died not long after his visit to us, and in expiring the wicked 
patrician disinherited his unlucky wards. So it was that by and by, having already 
endured severest hardships, they came to seek refuge with us, and it was granted
them at the price of a prostitution whence we earned a pretty penny. It was the 
younger of the two, that is to say, one of the loveliest girls in Europe, that I 
provided to a man whose passion merits a separate article in this encyclopaedia of
inhuman lewd practices.

Alberti was a tall and sinewy man of fifty-five years or so, whose mere glance 
sufficed to petrify a woman. I showed him the beautiful and delicate child I had 
appointed to him. He bids me remove her clothes, and then examines her, 
palpating her uncouthly or as one might a horse whose defects one wishes to 
ascertain. Not a word during this inspection; not a gesture indicative of lubricity; 
nothing apart from a bright light in his eyes, and his labored breathing.

“Is she pregnant?” he asked me after a while, applying his muscular hands to 
her belly.

“I do not believe so,” I rejoined.

“A pity; I am prepared to pay double when they are. In any case, knowing the 
purpose I shall be putting it to, what is your figure for this animal?”

“Two thousand sequins.”

“You’d get it if she were pregnant; since she isn’t, you’d better take half.”

The bargaining was conducted in the victim’s presence; we finally reached an 
understanding and I sold her. Bought, she was immediately shut away in a small 
chamber in our house, so thick-walled and narrow and isolated that there was no 
chance of her cries being heard. There, with some straw to lie upon, the wretch’s 
sufferings were to last nine days: her ration of food was to be reduced gradually 
during

the first four, thereafter she was to be fed nothing whatever. Each day the 
fierce Alberti would come to torment his victim; he would spend two hours doing 
it: Rosalba and I were regular witnesses to those sessions, along with another girl
who was changed every day.

Upon his first visit, the first thing that cruel libertine did was press the victim’s 
buttocks and breasts; he pressed them forcefully; he softened them, pinched 
them, crushed them with such skill that in less than an hour those four globes of 
flesh were all black and blue. Placed opposite him, my ass was on an exact level 
with his lips, he kissed my behind while toiling over his prisoner; in the meantime 
Rosalba frigged him, and the third girl flogged him as hard as she could. Lost in 
meditation, nothing came from Alberti’s mouth but a few unconnected words, 
occasionally interspersed with oaths.

“Vile flesh,” he remarked ironically, “execrable ass. Such offal is fit for nothing 
but to be boiled down into soap.” And every grace embellished the objects he 
dared refer to in that manner. He did not discharge.

On the second day the proceedings were the same as on the first; on the third,
the fleshy parts of the victim were in such a swollen, such a woeful state, that she
was taken by a high fever.

“Excellent,” said Alberti, “this is better than I expected; my intention was not 
to halt her food until the fourth day, but in the light of these developments, it can 
be stopped now.” And he continued to squeeze, to compress. Toward the close of 
the visit he sodomized the victim, while pinching her thighs vigorously; then the 
girl assisting us was treated likewise, and my behind was tongued. The next three
days’ episodes were identical; never once did he discharge. By then, the victim’s 
buttocks and breasts resembled steer hides that had been cured in the sun, and 
the fever, having continued to rise despite the suspension of nourishment, we 
wondered whether the wretch would last until the ninth day.

“She had better be given confession,” Alberti said to me at the conclusion of 
the eighth day’s activities; “she will die without fail tomorrow.”

This precaution made me laugh; but when I learned that the lecher wanted to 
be a secret witness to the ceremony, and that it was but a further vehicle to his 
lubricity, I fell in gladly with the idea.

A monk came and confessed the sufferer while in the adjoining room, between 
Rosalba and me, Alberti listened to all that was said. This episode appeared to 
entertain him enormously.

“God blast me!” said he while we frigged him, “the plight she is in, ’tis uniquely
my doing. Oh, how I love to hear the slut tell of her sins….” And, having 
previously warned the doomed creature that the confessor was hard of hearing 
we lost not a syllable of that pious exchange. The monk disappears; the lecher 
enters. Exhausted by hunger, by fever, and by contusions, the young girl looks to 
be ready to give up the ghost. Such is the spectacle the villain wishes to enjoy. He
settles himself squarely in front of her and while he embuggers Rosalba, while the
girl accompanying us flogs him, he orders me to carry forward the work he has 
been pursuing for a week. I approach the victim, I lay hands on those derelict 
parts, I tug, I squeeze; and at the second or third application of pressure, the 
miserable thing, worn out by such prolonged sufferings, falls at our feet, lifeless. 
And it is at that instant our Alberti discharges. But, merciful heavens! what an 
outpouring: never in all my days had I seen such a lengthy nor such an 
impetuous expenditure of sperm. He was for more than ten minutes in ecstasy; 
no clyster, however copious, could have yielded results quantitatively comparable 
to that villain’s ejaculation.

Alberti became one of our best clients: not a month went by but he passed a 
nine-day period under our roof. We soon gave him Bianchi’s other niece; she was 
more delicately constituted than her sister, however, and expired on the seventh 
day.

Concurrently with all this Durand was enjoying a great success with her cabinet
of marvels. So extensively had she informed herself touching all the intrigues in 
town that in a very short space she was in a position to tell everybody his fortune.
She learned that Senator Contarini, father of the most gloriously beautiful young 
daughter, was head over heels in love with her; having found that out, she went 
to see him.

“Rouse in your charming Rosina the desire to hear what the stars portend for 
her,” said Durand; “mention my house; I shall hide you there, and guarantee you 
the fullest enjoyment of her in the course of the various ceremonies I shall 
prescribe that she undergo in order to discover her destiny.” The Senator, 
transported, promises Durand everything her heart desires if only she succeeds. 
The modest sorceress inquires to know the father’s passions; and as in his reply 
he alluded to all sorts of requirements, she asked him for three thousand sequins.
Contarini was a wealthy man; he paid half the sum in advance; and the 
rendezvous was made for two days hence.

Very eager to have her future foretold, Rosina writes to Durand, requesting an 
audience, and in her answer the latter proposes the same day she and the 
Senator have already agreed upon. Rosina arrives, sends her duenna home; and I
do declare that when that superb child was rid of the thin veils enveloping her, it 
was as though we were beholding a sunrise. Figure to yourself that most perfect 
thing heaven can make, and you will still have but an imperfect idea of the 
fascinating girl whom I shall, though it be in vain, endeavor to describe to you.

Rosina, sixteen years of age, tall and shaped like one of the Graces, belonged 
to the line of those virgins immortalized by the brush of the painter Albani. Her 
chestnut tresses fell in gently curling waves upon her alabaster breast; her large 
blue eyes inspired at once love and desire; and to those lips of freshest pink 
would be drawn anyone who sought the spirit of the divinity of whom Rosina was 
the pure embodiment. No skin was ever so fair; no breasts were ever so round; 
no thighs were ever so plump; never was there a cunt so strait, so warm, so 
dainty and sweet; and buttocks! ah, what living being could have resisted that 
wondrous ass? To see it was to be overpowered; I for my part could not withstand
the temptation to caress it. She must, we advised that adorable child, to obtain 
the predictions she was so eager to know, cooperate in the consultation; the 
auguries supposed certain sacrifices.

“You shall be whipped, my angel,” Durand notified her; “submitted, what is 
more, to a personage who will take his pleasure with you in every imaginable 
manner.”

“Heaven! If ever my father were to—”

“He is severe, your father?”

“Jealous of me as of a mistress.”

“So be it; but never shall he hear a word of what is about to come to pass: ’tis 
the Supreme Being who is going to visit you, dear girl, and the breaches 
sustained through your intercourse with him will be mended in the most magical 
way. This ceremony, I must add, is indispensable; unless you submit to it, farewell
all hope of learning what you wish to know.”

And, my friends, be certain that I was mightily amused by the struggle I now 
saw being waged between modesty and curiosity. Rosina was of two minds; 
repelled by the prescribed tests, seduced by the prospect of instruction, she was 
at a loss what to do or what to say; and had it not been for the arrival of her 
father, we might well have spent the rest of the day enjoying her perplexity. But 
as the Senator was there, the shilly-shallying had to be brought to an end; Rosina
finally decided. While Durand remained with her, I went and joined her father.

Powerful though Contarini’s feelings for his daughter assuredly were, in a soul 
like his libertinage had an ascendancy over sentiment, and the Senator found 
himself capable of a few teasing gestures which were enough to persuade me that
he would not take it ill were I to display my charms to his eyes. I complied; and 
from his caresses I soon reached conclusions touching his tastes. The lewd rascal 
was passionately fond of the behind, and he was busy paying court to mine when 
we heard a tapping on the other side of the partition.

“That is the signal, Excellency, get ready; the body of your charming daughter 
is about to be delivered to you.”

A panel slides open and the lower five-sixths of the beautiful Rosina, that is, 
everything of her from toe to chin, arrives naked before us and at the disposition 
of the incestuous Senator.

“Ah, fuck!” he cries, feasting his eyes upon the treasure, “frig me, Juliette, frig 
me, I am going to die from pleasure examining such a wealth of charms.”

I frig; the libertine explores. For a moment, everything before him appears to 
warrant his desiring; aye, he has kisses to bestow upon the cunt itself; but soon 
he is conquered by the ass. There is no imagining the ardor with which he 
embraces that part.

“Frig from underneath,” he said to me, “while I lick the hole of this 
incomparable posterior.”

His self-possession soon gone, his iron-hard prick lifts toward that vent, he 
embuggers. Rosina, little accustomed to such attacks, utters ringing screams; 
that libertine’s impetuosity is lessened not one whit, he pushes, he presses, he 
strikes bottom. The rake gropes for my buttocks; he would have my mouth glue 
itself to his, he would that with one of my hands I favor his assaults, that with the
other I tickle his anus.

“Libertine,” I ask, obeying his instructions, “is your intention then to confine 
yourself to that? are you not going to aim a thrust into this pretty little bush?”

“No,” the loyal sodomite replies, “no, I am not the man for such an 
undertaking: it’s fifteen years since I last touched that forbidden fruit, my 
abhorrence of it is of fifteen years’ standing; however, I plan to whip.”

So saying, he withdraws, seizes the withes I hand him, and falls to thrashing 
his daughter with such violence that the blood we needed for the operation was 
soon flowing down her thighs.

“You find me cruel, my child,” Contarini said to me as he smote away, “but 
one’s passions are what they are; the more they are refined, the more dreadful 
are their excesses.”

At that point, the desire to augment the pretty little wretch’s sufferings 
introduced abominable ideas into my head.

“You doubtless have designs regarding the future of your daughter,” I said.

“Yes; they are to fuck her soundly, to flog her cruelly, to make this festival last 
three months, then to force her to take the veil.” And the loveliest skin in the 
world was being covered with stripes during this dialogue.

“In truth, Signor, I very much wonder whether that is the wisest course. 
However, once you have had your fill of her, the means for disposing of her will be
supplied to you here, you will avoid having to pay her dowry to a convent.”

“What is this you are saying, Juliette?”

“Ah, there are a thousand different means to that end…. What! Is it possible? 
The idea of a venereal murder has never defiled your imagination?”

“A murder? Why, yes … once or twice … but, bless me, murder my daughter?” 
And I saw the Senator’s prick twitch, its tip rise, rubicund and wrathful: proof 
positive that the mere allusion to the project was having an inflammatory effect 
upon his senses.

“Juliette,” he went on, fervently kissing the marks left by his cruelty, “admit 
that it would be a horrible crime … an appalling act before which all Nature would 
shudder….”

“Perhaps; but you will enjoy it.”

Then, to rouse the lecher to the final pitch of excitement, I reach for a silken 
cord, tug it. The light dims in the chamber where we are; I rap upon the partition;
and the next moment, hidden machinery sets into motion and we have the 
entirety of Rosina before us.

“Take a firm grip upon yourself,” I whisper to Contarini, “she is there, all of her.
Proceed; but not a word from you.”

The libertine lands upon his daughter, presses ecstatic kisses to her mouth, to 
her breasts, re-embuggers her, discharges.

“Good lord! See what you have done,” I say; “I surrender her to you, and you 
throw your opportunity away. Let’s send her back, I shall do what I can to restore
you to life while Durand draws up her horoscope.”

I signaled again, the child was borne away; the panel slid shut, and in another 
room the resourceful Durand sold her to another buyer. Our trade included three 
or four regular clients exclusively interested in prostitutions of this sort, and we 
took care to provide them with what seemed likeliest to suit their needs.

I moved heaven and earth to rekindle a spark in our Senator; all my efforts 
came to nought. Contarini was one of those limited individuals unable to carry out
criminal projects except in the throes of passion; my suggestion had been too 
strong for him, and now he asked to have his daughter back. I went at once to 
notify Durand; but she, in view of the piles of gold the delicious little thing was 
certain to earn, simply would not hear of parting with Rosina. Won over to her 
opinion, I quickly struck upon the solution that would satisfy all concerned.

“Excellency!” said I, rushing into the room where the Senator was waiting, 
“Excellency!” said I, tears streaming from my eyes, “your unhappy daughter…. 
Alas, terrified by the predictions contained in her horoscope, she has just leapt 
from a window; she is no more, Excellency, she is dead.”

Deeply grieved, Contarini followed me into my companion’s apartment; he was
shown a disfigured body which in point of age and figure looked to be that of his 
daughter; and that was what the simpleton believed. He thought for a moment to 
threaten us with prosecution, but, quickly sobered when reminded of the 
likelihood of well-founded countercharges, he fell silent and went out weeping like
a fool, leaving us in possession of his cherished and adorable child, who, promptly
seduced by us, soon turned into one of our most accomplished whores.

Not long afterward a noble Venetian came to us to buy poison for a woman he 
had doted upon and whom he had married two years previously. The poor fellow 
was convinced she had cuckolded him. He was mistaken; his wife was a model of 
good behavior and restraint. I alone was responsible for his suspicions, I had 
manufactured them from sheer spite. That woman displeased me; I decided to 
organize her downfall, I succeeded. She was envenomed by her aristocratic 
husband; you may imagine how I rejoiced at the deed.

A little while later we had a request from a son who was eager to take the 
straight way with his father. Here, the question was one of an inheritance and of 
an impatient young man who was tired of waiting; for two thousand sequins we 
sold him the secret thanks to which he was his own master the next morning.

You will, I know, render me the justice of believing that I was never so much 
engrossed by this whirl of activity as to neglect myself; rich enough to devote an 
enormous outlay to my pleasures, and to surrender my body to others through 
wantonness or sordidness alone, I bathed, carefree, in an ocean of horrors and 
impudicities. My tastes for theft and murder were given generous expression 
throughout; and once my perfidious imagination had conjectured a victim’s doom,
seldom was there more than the briefest interval between the intention and the 
deed.

Such was the high level upon which I was pursuing my moral and physical 
disorders when one day from Zeno, Chancellor of the Republic, I received an 
invitation to come, along with my two friends, to his house lying by the Brenta 
Canal. We spent an entire day there, rioting amidst everything of the most 
piquant that lewdness can devise. Wearied after so much voluptuous revelry, we 
were enjoying a delicious supper when an eighteen-year-old girl, the loveliest of 
creatures, urgently requested an interview with Zeno.

“What! Here, in this place, consecrated to my pleasures, and at this hour?”

“Your Grace,” said the servant, “she pushed past the gatekeeper, past the 
footman, she is in despair, she has rushed hither from Venice, she says that the 
matter is vital, that there is not an instant to lose.”

“Have her enter,” said the Chancellor. “Oh, Juliette,” he went on, lowering his 
voice, “lest I am greatly mistaken, I believe an occasion is at hand to put my 
principles into practice.”

The door opens, and the most beautiful girl I have ever seen falls weeping at 
the magistrate’s knees.

“My Lord!” cries the lovely one in distress, “my father’s life is at stake. Arrested
yesterday on charges of conspiracy, he whose brain has never entertained a 
seditious thought, he, absolutely innocent, goes to the scaffold tomorrow. To save
him there is nobody but you; I beg you to intervene. If blood must flow, oh, my 
Lord, let it be mine rather than his, let me die in my father’s stead.”

“Amiable child,” said Zeno, lifting the girl up and directing her to take a chair at
his side, “are you not Virginia, the nobleman Grimani’s daughter?”

“I am.”

“Signorina, I am acquainted with this affair; and however you may interpret it, 
I must assure you that your father is exceedingly guilty of treasonable plotting.”

“No, my Lord.”

“Guilty, I repeat. Be that as it may, all is not yet lost…. Juliette, come with me. 
I shall be yours in an instant, Virginia; I am going to prepare the document 
needed to save your father.”

“Blessings be upon Your Grace!”

“Be not overhasty with expressions of gratitude, my dear; this pardon has yet 
to be granted.”

“What?”

“You shall be apprised of everything, Signorina, everything shall soon be in 
your hands; and you will be able to blame no one but yourself if you do not obtain
what you ask.”

We remove into a chamber nearby.

“There,” said Zeno, “is a creature who arouses me to an uncommon degree; 
Venice boasts of no more beautiful girl; I must have her, have her at any price. 
Save her father, however, that I cannot do, and even if I could, I am convinced, 
Juliette, that I would not. I am going to write two letters; in one, I shall request 
his pardon; his prompt execution in the other. And I shall see to it that she carries
the second back with her, although supposing it is the first. Persuaded that in her 
hands she has the instrument to rescue her father, Virginia will grant me what I 
ask of her. But when she discovers that I have deceived her … ah, Juliette, there’s
the rub.”

“Is it necessary to send her back at all?”

“Grimani’s daughter … Venice, the entire Republic—”

“She must be denounced.”

“But I cannot both accuse her and enjoy her. Once she stood before a court, 
why, it would all come out: it would be my ruin.”

“Zeno, your accusations are secret, your tribunals obscure, your executions 
nocturnal: promise this girl that you are pardoning her father; send her off, as 
you said you meant to do, with the note that will put the noose around his neck; 
accuse her immediately afterward: I assure you that my women and I will act as 
your witnesses. These little horrors are my depraved heart’s delights; certify that 
this girl came here with no design other than to seduce you, we will bear out your
contention; dismiss as calumnies, recriminations, whatever she invents for her 
defense; fee well the lawyer who shall be given her for the sake of form; let the 
preliminary hearings be conducted promptly and perfectly in camera; and inside 
twenty-four hours, if that is what you want, she will be out of the way.”

“You are right,” said he. “As for the letters, there they are. Oh, Juliette, I 
foresee an enjoyable experience. What a charming girl you are!”

He returned to the company. “Signorina,” said Zeno, “I believe this should be 
sufficient: read this paper. However,” he went on, “such favors, as I presume you 
realize, are not granted for nothing.”

“Oh, good my Lord, all we have is yours for the asking, I am under instructions
from my family to accede to whatever your requests may be.”

“They are not for money,” said the Chancellor, “what I demand is more 
precious: your charms, Virginia, must be abandoned to me. I want no other 
reward, but I shall not forego that one: and this letter shall not leave my hands 
until I have obtained what I ask for.”

“Great God, what a sacrifice! O thou whom I love,” said she, drawing from her 
bosom a locket containing the portrait of her intended, “why must I be placed 
between infidelity and infamy! Your Grace, would it not be a noble thing, to 
content yourself with the happiness of saving an innocent man’s life—”

“Impossible. And you have not an eternity to make up your mind; I give you 
one minute. Your father’s crimes are such that it were better for you to take rapid
advantage of my charity.”

And, leaving her to meditate her decision, Zeno moved into a neighboring 
boudoir with Lila to prepare himself for the infamies that were animating him. I 
nodded to Rosalba, whose powers of penetration were showing new signs of 
development with every passing day; and, height of wickedness, we, Rosalba and 
I, fell to preaching to the girl.

“Ah, beware, Signorina,” Rosalba warned her, drawing her a little to one side 
and employing a confiding tone, “do not trust that libertine; he is capable of 
anything who is capable of demanding your honor in exchange for your father’s 
life. Once he has had his way with you he will play you false; and who is to say 
whether, to cover up his crime, the monster will not immolate you upon the 
still-palpitating remains of the worthy author of your existence? But, supposing 
that he does abide by his word, how will your fiancé view this sacrifice? It is of the
species which love is little inclined to overlook, and you must consider it a 
certainty that he will never pardon you; I tell you, beware of all the snares being 
set for you. You are undone if you weaken….”

At this point I address Virginia in my turn, pretending not to have heard the 
drift of Rosalba’s speech to her.

“Signorina,” say I, “only too well do I know that at your age nice scruples and 
fine feelings are the gods to which one fancies it one’s duty to devote oneself. 
This stubborn constancy you maintain toward your lover, ought it, I ask you, to 
outweigh all the filial sentiments owing to your father? Zeno, the most upright of 
men, is incapable of deceit; remember, besides, that it is not your heart he 
solicits, but merely your body. Ceding it to him, you will remain no less pure in 
your lover’s eyes.

“Ah, believe me, lovely Virginia, in the situation where circumstances place 
you, it would be sinful to refuse. Will you coolly watch your father walk to his 
death when an instant’s complacency on your part could save him? And, Virginia, 
there is this too: are you sure that the fidelity to which you would sacrifice 
everything is being as religiously observed by your lover as by you? and are you 
yet unfamiliar with the way of all flesh? Were it to happen, now, that the man you
love had less than your share of virtue, think of how bitterly you would repent 
having immolated your father to an unrequited sentiment! No, Signorina, you 
cannot disdain the proposal that has been made to you, you cannot, I repeat, 
without guilt; the modesty you are going to set aside is a virtue created by 
convention, whereas the filial piety you would outrage by not yielding, that, my 
dear, is Nature’s true sentiment, the authentic and priceless sentiment you cannot
stifle without perishing from grief.”

Fancy, if you will, my friends, the anguished perplexity that such words were 
able to produce in this timorous and sorely beset soul; so upset was she in her 
mind that her moral forces were near to deserting her. Zeno’s return occurred at 
that point, and he arrived in such a state of indecency that there could be no 
further doubt, his unhappy victim was lost. The rascal had a towering erection, 
and Lila, naked, led him in by the end of his prick.

“Well, has she reached her decision?” he stammered.

“Yes, my Lord,” I replied, “yes, indeed, this young lady is too reasonable not to
feel that she owes much more to her father than to her alleged virtue, and she is 
prepared to lay it by here and now.”

“No, no,” cried the poor girl, tears springing to her eyes, “I would rather die….”

But, seizing her without further ado, we, my women and I, stripped off her 
clothes and in two minutes, despite her struggles, her nudity stood revealed to 
the Chancellor’s impure gaze.

Dear God! what forms! what skin! what rosy freshness! Not Flora herself could 
have matched those charms. Zeno admired them avidly, and each of his multitude
of lewd kisses seemed to coincide with the discovery of a new wonder. We offered
the ass to him: great heaven! what allurements, what firmness, what rotundity! 
and when we pried it open, when to Zeno’s eyes we exposed the cunning little 
aperture, object of his desires, we thought him about to expire of pleasure as he 
fucked it with his tongue.

“Let us see how she looks when aroused,” said the Chancellor; “Juliette, and 
you, Rosalba, tickle the sensitive parts of her body; watching you at work, I am 
going to have myself worked upon by Lila, and as you progressively inflame this 
damsel, my mouth, straying over her charms, will verify the glow of pleasure in 
them.”

I was not sorry to be entrusted with this chore, for, ever since my first glimpse 
of that celestial creature, I had been fairly dying to frig her. We attacked so 
skillfully, my companion and I, that lust soon began to gleam in Virginia’s 
beautiful eyes; and the pretty rascal, trembling ecstatically in our arms, summons
Zeno’s prick to the destruction of her maidenhead. Lila brings the Chancellor’s 
engine up to the gate; the libertine thrusts; as he is lightly weaponed, and as 
Virginia has been exhaling whey in abundance and now discharges afresh, all 
difficulties vanish, there he is, master of the fort; I alone am holding the victim, 
frigging her at the same time; as for Lila, crouching atop Virginia, she presents 
her handsome posterior to the lecher’s kisses; and Rosalba flogs him.

He was rushing toward the crisis when I checked him, a hairs-breadth short of 
it.

“You cannot afford a thoughtless expenditure of munitions,” I reminded him, 
“do not forget that another stronghold awaits storming.”

“True,” he conceded, retreating.

And, in a flash, to his lewd covetings we swung around the most divine ass 
Nature had fashioned since the creation of Ganymede’s. Zeno contemplated it.

“Buggerblast me!” said he. “What a treasure mine eyes do behold!” But rather 
than amuse himself bestowing further praise, the scoundrel, profiting from the 
help we provided him, soon forced the barriers. Virginia, through the position I 
had made her assume, lay upon my face and I sucked her cunt while the 
Chancellor sodomized her; my friends were frigging, handling, ministering to 
Zeno. Everything enfolded him in pleasure, everything hastened the escape of the
fuck which he soon shot to the depths of the world’s most beautiful ass, despite 
the outcries, the writhings of the victim, who had not endured this assault as 
patiently as the other.

“What a fucking I have had,” said he as he drew forth his member. “Oh, 
Juliette, save only for yours, no ass on earth can produce such a sensation; I am 
still in its grip—”

“Come, my friend, let us dispatch that letter.”

“For a certainty,” the monster replied to me, “I have just acquired, from 
fucking this girl, all sorts of reasons to condemn her father. However,” he added in
a subdued voice, “however, Juliette, I do not intend to limit myself to that piece of
mischief.”

Then lower:

“I shall not stop there, Juliette. I would like my wickedness to dazzle you, my 
dear, and for the means necessary to further fuckery I count upon the episode 
about to follow.”

“Do you mean to allow its object to remain alive for long?”

“Why,” said Zeno, “I believe that if I were to add a little postscript to the letter,
the authorities would come here to my palace to arrest her; and as between now 
and then I shall have achieved a fresh erection, perhaps I shall be in her ass at 
the moment they arrive to take her away to death.”

“You are to be congratulated upon the idea,” I say to Zeno, “act upon it 
quickly.”

The appropriate lines are annexed to the missive, the courier departs for the 
city, and we return to our lewd play. From the manner in which I saw Zeno 
caressing Virginia’s buttocks it was easy to tell that he was inwardly scheming 
against that splendid behind. There is no imagining the atrocities an ass inspires, 
when one h

as enjoyed it thoroughly.

“Ah ha! you want to whip it, do you? You want to tear that magnificent ass to 
shreds, my friend; and you hesitate to do so? To work, Lord Chancellor,” I say, 
“satisfy yourself; in my pocket I have a lotion which, applied to the stripes, will 
efface all sign of them in three minutes. And if, as proof of what she has suffered,
the baggage wishes to show the marks, the evidence will contradict her, and 
everything else she has to say will that much more surely have the sound of 
calumny.”

“Juliette,” Zeno exclaimed, “you are delightful, I shall never cease to proclaim 
your merits.”

Thereupon, listening now to nothing but the voice of his passion, the villain has
us hold Virginia and, swearing like one of the damned, with barely one hundred 
strokes he transforms a peerless behind into mincemeat. He starts in upon the 
second hundred, and I take his prick into my mouth; my two women flog him 
while he flogs Virginia; and soon his prick begins to lift, and when ’tis up, and 
hard, he hurls himself like a madman upon the girl, sodomizes her, and 
discharges shrieking.

“Oh, Juliette!” he declares once he has finished, “what a shame I cannot 
myself immolate this slut, what pleasure it would give me to kill her! With her 
profound sensitivity she would be responsive to every torture we could invent, the
one more divine than the other. Think, to flay that bosom! to burn those buttocks!
Juliette, Juliette! I would like to roast her heart on her belly, then eat it upon her 
face.”

When I drew forth my lotion and prepared to anoint Virginia’s wounds, Zeno 
stayed my hand. “No,” the monster said to me, “leave my marks upon her, I want
her to wear them to the scaffold, I want her to have the possibility of exhibiting 
them, I want her to dare not do so; the idea strikes me as droll….” And with 
horrid remarks and cruel jibes we slew and slew again all hope in the poor girl, 
sporting with her thus till the sbirri were there.

For Zeno’s fatal letters had succeeded but too well; Grimani’s daughter was 
placed under arrest.

“Just Heaven!” the wretch cried upon perceiving the effects of the Chancellor’s 
traitorous maneuvers; “you deceived me, villain, but my judges will hear me and I
shall be revenged for your horrors.”

“Do your duty, gentlemen,” the phlegmatic Zeno said to the officers, seeming 
to ignore the imprecations being addressed to him, “take this girl away; grief 
appears to have addled her brain.

“Has action been taken,” the monster went on to ask, “upon my 
recommendations that the culprits be put promptly to death?”

“Your Worship,” said one of the policemen, drawing forth two bloody objects 
from underneath his cloak, “here is how your orders were executed.”

And Virginia sinks to the floor in a swoon, having recognized the severed heads
of her father and her beloved.

Zeno turned to me with a smile. “Quite a scene, is it not?” he whispered. “It is 
restiffening my prick, I will have you note. Let us obtain privacy so that we can 
devote ourselves to further horrors.”

“By all means. Keep the heads, Sire, and send those myrmidons away.”

“Very good, gentlemen,” said the Chancellor, “that will do: Virginia will be in a 
Venetian dungeon within two hours. Leave these relics here, and return to your 
other duties.”

“One moment,” I murmured to Zeno, “the fellow who brought the heads, 
would he be the trusty who performed the decapitations?”

“Yes.”

“If that be so, then there is a refinement to outrage we can ill afford to neglect.
Unhandsome as he is, and his hands still steeped in gore, the man who just 
beheaded the girl’s father and her lover must now fuck her, so it would seem to 
me.”

“Decidedly,” said Zeno; “there are delicious things to be done in life, one must 
be careful to omit none of them.”

One of the sbirri leaves, Zeno enclosets himself with the other, with Virginia, 
with the two heads, with the three women, and with me. We give our attentions 
to the victim, mindful to place the heads before her so that, upon opening her 
eyes, they be the first objects she sees. To the headsman is appointed the task of 
summoning the girl back to life, and upon recovering her senses, they are the 
grisly vestiges of her dear ones she beholds, ’tis in the arms of her executioner 
she finds herself. I was frigging that ill-favored man while he was ministering to 
Virginia.

“Fuck this attractive girl,” the Chancellor said to him.

“Your Grace!”

“’Tis an order; you assassinated the father, continue at present, fuck the 
daughter; you killed the lover, I want you to fuck the mistress now.”

Smitten by these words as though by a thunderbolt, Virginia sinks back again 
upon my breast, nearly unconscious.

“Softly, softly,” I say to Zeno, “since, unfortunately, this is to be your last 
discharge, it ought at least to be complete, and we should use every means at 
our disposal to make it brilliant.”

Put in charge of affairs, herein as follows was the voluptuous grouping I 
adopted. The sbirro slides underneath Virginia, encunts her, opens and presents 
the sublime creature’s buttocks to Zeno, who embuggers her; one in each hand, 
Virginia holds the severed heads in place upon the executioner’s chest, I give him 
my cunt to suck, turning my behind toward Virginia; Zeno frigs, to right and to 
left, my two friends’ asses; a charwoman flogs him. Before that onslaught of 
delightful sensations, the lewd Chancellor could not be expected to hold out 
forever; by and by, he discharges; we all do the same; Virginia is borne out inert 
from this scene of horrors.

We leave. The Chancellor in person conveys his victim to the prisons of the 
Palace of Justice; and twenty-four hours later, thanks to our depositions, Virginia’s
sentence is handed down. That was the moment we were waiting for. By dint of 
gold and seductions, Zeno arranges to have another girl take her place at the 
block; and Virginia returns into our clutches. We ourselves act the part of her 
executioners, a substitution whence she derives no benefit. God! what a scene it 
was! the thought of it had me seeping for a week afterward; I can recall few 
infamies which wrought upon me as that one did.

Women, in the meantime, continued to arrive in droves at our house; some to 
have their fortunes told, the others, in security and secret, to wallow in the rarest 
and most extreme forms of libertine misconduct. Owing to measures we had 
taken, we were in a position to furnish our female clientele with boys and girls, 
and that under conditions of inviolable clandestinity. We also provided everything 
needed by youthful couples who, embarrassed by the obstructions created by 
parents, were grateful to take shelter with us. Other matches were made in 
obscurely lit apartments, where the men were unable to recognize the women we 
supplied to them. To how many fathers did we thus contrive to give their 
daughters; to how many brothers, their sisters; to how many priests, their 
penitents!

There came to me one day two women, of twenty and twenty-five, both 
charming, and who, having both taken a fancy to me, besought me to direct their 
games and in them to play a third. We all three had supper together; their mania 
consisted in sucking my mouth and my cunt. They proceeded by rapid shifts, in 
such a way that she who had just cunt-tongued me now tongued my mouth, and 
she who had been kissing my mouth moved instantly to my cunt. During this 
luxurious to-and-fro my role was to frig them simultaneously and uninterruptedly, 
one with either hand, and after that, fitted with a dildo, to fuck them in turn; 
while she who was not being fucked was having herself tongued by her who was; 
exceedingly lubricious they were, that pair. There is no imagining the things they 
invented, the things they said in the course of their lewd antics. One of them, I 
recollect, was so carried away that she was moved to go and have herself fucked 
by the inmates of a hospital full of syphilitics.

Welcome, you who will now explain to me the workings of the imagination in 
persons of my sex; for my part, it is beyond me. In general, those two libertines 
were as lively, as clever, as amiable as they come: my own belief is that Nature is 
infinitely more lavish in her favors to tribades than to other women, and that just 
as she accords them a richer, more flexible imagination, so she has provided them
with superior means for experiencing pleasure and bestowing delight.(5)

Another adventure which you will insist upon hearing was the extraordinary 
outing I made in the company of four Venetian ladies.

They waited for a stormy day, then arrived to fetch me in a gondola at a 
moment when flashes of lightning were flickering across the sky. We headed a 
certain distance out to sea; the storm broke; claps of thunder filled the air.

“This is the instant, come,” said the rascals, “let us frig one another; and let it 
be with streams of sperm we hurl our defiance at the tempest.”

And the sluts spring upon me like a quartet of Messalinas. Bless me, I reply in 
kind: too sensitive to pleasure to be chilled by such everyday natural phenomena,
I join them in blaspheming the chimerical God who, it is said, produces them. 
Meanwhile, the thunder rumbles, lightning leaps in all directions. Caught in the 
rising swell, our gondola is tossed about like a cork; and we swear, we discharge, 
we brave alarmed Nature, risen in wrath against all existing things, and respectful
of our pleasures alone.

Another very pretty woman sent to request me to come to lunch at her palace.
I was obliged, while she surveyed the proceedings, to pollute her fifteen-year-old 
son; after that, we frigged each other in his presence. She had her daughter 
called down, who was one year younger. She ordered me to excite that maiden, 
while she had her son embugger her; next, she herself held her daughter before 
the youth’s sodomite attacks. While that was going forward, I was cunt-sucking 
the daughter and the mother was exciting, lingually, the asshole of the young 
lady’s fucker. Never had I met with a more cold-bloodedly libertine nor more 
composed intelligence. The moment she learned that we traded in poisons, she 
purchased a complete store of them. I asked her whether she planned to employ 
any with the pretty objects we had lately enjoyed.

“Why not?” she answered. “When I indulge in these infamies, I never restrict 
their scope.”

“Delicious creature,” I responded, kissing her upon the mouth, “the more 
restraints one thrusts aside in these cases, the more one discharges.”

“Then I shall discharge plentifully,” she observed, “for barriers are things I 
ignore.”

Six months later she was husbandless, fatherless, motherless, without 
children.

A member of the Council of Ten sent for me, needing a woman to serve his 
son’s pleasures while he himself embuggered that son.

Another, belonging to the same Chamber, required that I frig myself with his 
sister, who was old and ugly. He embuggered that sister; after which, he did the 
same to me; then I received one hundred lashes from that sister’s hand.

In brief, there was no species of venereous activity, of debauchery, of infamy 
to which Durand and I did not dedicate ourselves from morn to night; and not a 
day passed but our fourfold trade of whore, procuress, fortune-teller, and 
poisoner brought in a thousand sequins, and often much more.

Supported, applauded, sought after by all the most amiable libertines, male 
and female, in the city of Venice, we were, without the slightest doubt, leading 
the most delightful and the most lucrative of lives when a dreadful reversal 
disrupted our partnership, deprived me of my beloved Durand, and caused me the
loss, in the space of a day, of all the sums I had brought to Venice for investment,
and all those I had earned there.

In the punishment it meted out to Durand, fate expressed an intolerance of the
same weakness for which I myself had been made to pay many years before. My 
fault, leading to my enforced departure from Paris, had been a reluctance to carry
crime to its ultimate degree. The same misfortune befell Durand; and such cruel 
lessons could only reinforce her conviction, and mine, that the most dangerous 
course, when you are in crime’s train, is to face about in a virtuous direction, or to
lack the boldness necessary to pass the final frontiers; for my friend’s failure was 
indeed one of courage rather than of will; and if the unhappy creature suffered 
defeat, ’twas not through default of ambition, but through that of nerve.

The three State Inquisitors had, one morning, summoned Durand before them;
and after having sworn her to absolute secrecy, they divulged their need of her 
destructive assistance for the purpose of annihilating a numerous faction which 
had formed inside the city.

“Unfortunately, affairs have got beyond the point,” they advised her, “where 
legal means can be employed; poison is the only one remaining to us. You have, 
as you know, benefited from our indulgence during the three years you have been
in Venice, we have allowed you to enjoy the fruits of your crimes in perfect 
tranquillity; today, as token of your gratitude, we expect you to lend yourself in 
an advisory capacity or as an executant to crimes similar to those which our duty 
might otherwise have required us to punish most severely. Would you be able to 
disseminate the plague through a town and at the same time preserve from its 
ravages such persons as will be indicated to you?”

“No,” said Durand, although she did in fact possess both the required secrets; 
she possessed them, but she was afraid.

“Very well,” said the magistrates. A door was opened and she was dismissed.

And what added to her fright was the fact that they had not even bothered to 
warn her to keep silent.

She returned straight to the house. “We are lost,” she told me the moment she
entered. Thereupon she related everything that had just taken place. My first 
thought was to send her back at once to see the Inquisitors.

“It would change nothing,” she replied. “Carrying out the work, I would lose 
my life just the same; they would do away with me secretly. No, the only thing for
me to do is leave you this very minute; for if they discover or suspect that we 
have seen each other, you shall be compromised.”

The poor thing made ready to go. “Farewell, Juliette,” said she, “adieu. We 
may perhaps never meet again.”

Not two hours after my friend had departed officers appeared at my door with 
a warrant from the Republic. I am escorted to the Palace; I am led, deeply 
disturbed, to a remote, very isolated room in one of the uppermost stories. My 
guards form close ranks about me. A wide black taffeta curtain divided the room. 
Two Inquisitors appear; the police leave.

“Stand up,” one of the Inquisitors says to me, “and give clear and precise 
answer. Have you known a woman named Durand?”

“Yes.”

“Have you committed crimes jointly with her?”

“No.”

“Did she in your hearing ever speak ill of the government of Venice?”

“Never.”

The other judge now spoke up, his voice was grave. “Juliette, your replies are 
calculated to deceive; you tell us less than we already know; you are guilty.” He 
paused for a moment, then drew the black curtain aside. Behind it, hanging from 
the ceiling, was the body of a woman at which I no sooner looked than I averted 
my gaze in horror. “There is your accomplice; and that is the manner in which the
Republic punishes cheats and poisoners. Get you gone from its territories inside 
twenty-four hours, else you will meet with the same fate tomorrow.”

My head swam, I lost consciousness.

When I returned to my senses I was in the hands of an unknown woman and 
still surrounded by police officers. I was dragged out of that room.

“Now go home,” the chief of the sbirri advised me, “comply scrupulously, 
punctually, with the orders of the Republic. Refrain from obstructing the task of 
the bailiff who will confiscate your holdings and chattels, that is to say, the funds 
you have in Venetian banks, your household furniture, and your personal jewelry. 
Leave with the rest, otherwise you die if sunrise finds you still in the city.”

“I shall obey, good sir,” I replied, “I shall obey, I have no wish to remain any 
longer in a town where they punish people for having declined to do evil.”

“Silence, Madame, silence; were anyone else to hear such remarks, you would 
not leave this palace alive.”

“My thanks to you, my good man,” I said to that turnkey, dropping one 
hundred sequins in his palm, “I understand your advice and I appreciate it; when 
tomorrow comes I shall be far away from your melancholy swamplands and 
lagoons.”

My packing was accomplished in no time. Lila and Rosalba appeared to wish to 
stay in Venice, where they were earning a comfortable living; I left them there; 
with me I took only one woman, who had been at my side ever since my marriage
and of whom I have not spoken hitherto because she never played any role in my 
adventures. Having permission to keep my pocketbook and my cash, I set out 
with a little more than eight hundred thousand francs; everything else was seized 
by the Republic; but still intact were my Roman investments, from which I had 
dividends of five million a year, and that helped cheer me up. That night I reached
Padua; less than a week later, Lyon, where I halted for a few days’ rest. During 
my northward journey I had not once paused to dally, and that little fast had 
brought on a violent need for fucking; to satisfy it, I betook myself most naturally 
to the house of a celebrated bawd whose address I had been given, and who in 
the course of the fortnight I spent with her, furnished me with everything I could 
possibly wish for in the one and the other sex.

Considering no risk entailed in a return to Paris, since the Minister from whom 
I had fled was no longer among the living, I decided to proceed thither once I 
received a reply from Noirceuil, to whom I penned a letter describing my intended
move. Delighted at the prospect of seeing me again, that stout and cherished 
friend assured me that it was with the greatest pleasure he looked forward to a 
sight of me and of the progress his outstanding pupil had made. I dispatched 
another letter to Abbé Chabert, asking him to bring my daughter to Paris, and I 
named the hotel at which I planned to stop. We all converged there at almost the 
same moment. Marianne was entering her seventh year. No child could have been
prettier than she; but Nature was mute in me, libertinage had extinguished its 
voice. Such then are its effects; taking a soul in its tyrant’s grip, it is loath, so it 
would seem, to allow room there to any sentiment other than those it inspires, 
and if in its despite some other contrives to penetrate, it is able to corrupt it at 
once and turn it to its advantage. I am obliged to say that in embracing Marianne 
I felt absolutely nothing stir in me but the pulsations of lubricity.

“There’s a pretty subject for educating,” I murmured to Chabert; “oh! I am 
eager to preserve this creature from the errors that drove her mother from Paris, 
and from those that brought about the downfall of Durand in Venice. I shall make 
her so aware of the necessity for crime that she will never stray out of its path, 
and if ever virtue strives to worm its way into her heart, I want it to discover vice 
so firmly entrenched there as to have not even the chance to launch an attack.”

Chabert, who had presided over Marianne’s upbringing, was pleased to have 
me admire all her little talents; she played the piano, she danced charmingly, 
drew prettily … spoke Italian, etc.

“And the animal temperament?” I asked the Abbé.

“Animal enough, I believe,” Chabert replied, “and if we do not watch our step, 
the little minx will be frigging herself fairly soon.”

“Why, I shall aid her,” said I, “I shall be overjoyed to gather the first indications
of her nubility.”

“Wait just a bit,” the Abbé advised me, “else you may endanger her health.”

This consideration, however, affected me barely at all. The Abbé, who had 
come to Paris several times during my absence, informed me of the most recent 
developments and took charge of the transfer of my funds from Rome. I soon 
acquired two fine town houses, as well as the country estate you are familiar 
with.

The day after arriving I went to find Noirceuil; he welcomed me with every sign
of happiness, and declared that in his opinion I was more beautiful than ever. 
Having continued to profit from the Minister’s favor up until the time of his death, 
Noirceuil, while I had been away, had tripled his fortune, and all Paris looked upon
him as one of the foremost men of the day.

“Juliette,” he assured me, “be certain that I shall never take a step upward 
without enabling you to rise alongside me; you are indispensable to my existence;
I like committing crimes with nobody but you, and delicious excesses await us if 
we succeed in obtaining a still greater amount of influence than the very 
considerable amount of it I enjoy already: it shall therefore be necessary for us to
combine our efforts in order to exploit this vein.”

After that he invited me to recount my adventures; and when I came to the 
five hundred thousand francs I had promised to turn over to Fontange de Donis, 
being brought up in a convent at Chaillot, and who must then have been 
seventeen years old, he urged that we amuse ourselves with the girl and pocket 
the half-million. His arguments touching this matter were so compelling that I 
cannot resist repeating them to you; I should interject that I deliberately adopted 
a hesitating attitude, which incited him to reason more forcefully and at greater 
length than he might otherwise have done. Here then is how he combated my 
simulated objections, one evening when we were supping together in his little 
house at Barrière-Blanche.

“When one has two reasons for doing a thing, Juliette,” said he, “and none for 
not doing it, I confess to you that I am inclined to disbelieve my ears when I hear 
the question raised of whether it should be done. When one is thirty years old, 
when one has intelligence, no prejudices, no more religion, no more God, no 
remorse, the most thorough habit of crime, much to gain from doing that thing, I 
confess to you, once again, that it strikes me as passing strange to hear it asked 
whether that thing is to be done or not. Once one has ready to hand everything 
required to operate, once one has already accomplished greater and more difficult
things by far, once one has found pleasure in doing them, once one has been 
thrilled by that pleasure, I frankly confess to you, when over and above the same 
dose of pleasure the thing offers still greater advantages, then it sounds very 
peculiar indeed to hear one debate, shall I succumb to the temptation? shall I not 
succumb to it? You merit the whip, my dear Juliette, yes, the whip, for daring to 
consult me upon any such futile affair as this; I therefore declare to you that if 
four days hence it has not been attended to, executed, done, I shall break off all 
dealings with you, and regard you as one of those insipid, characterless women 
who spend their lives fidgeting without ever achieving anything. Are you going to 
allege that you are rich enough to dispense with a sum upon which the welfare of 
an unhappy orphan may depend? Ah, Juliette! does one ever have enough 
money? Granted, as spent by you, this half-million will go merely for superfluities:
I ask you whether the enjoyment of these superfluities would not, from your point
of view, be preferable to the vain pleasure of renouncing them for the sake of a 
little girl with whom you have no acquaintance, and whom, through this gift, you 
would furthermore be robbing of the only pleasures to which you ought to submit 
her.

“Let us, if you like, glance inquiringly at the existence of this little girl—for, oh 
yes! it is not so devoid of importance as to be undeserving of investigation. What 
is she to you? Nothing. Who is she? The bastard engendered by a woman with 
whom you had libertine traffic. Very respectable titles! But, one moment now: 
what will happen if you fulfill the prescribed commission? Nobody in the wide 
world will congratulate you; they will simply say you performed your duty. If, on 
the other hand, you keep the sum, never will anybody know it was given you in 
trust to hold for another, and you will have the delicious pleasure of enjoying it: 
say, the more attractive in your eyes, is it this empty and pointless duty, or the 
happiness you will procure for yourself with the sum? Oh, Juliette! can you waver 
for an instant? I shall go farther; I myself have never seen this girl, but you, look 
carefully at her, tell me whether upon her brow it is not written: ’Tis for thy little 
pleasures Heaven placed me in this world; consider all the irresistible fatalities 
which have led our paths to cross, and see whether it is not a victim Nature offers
thee in my person. Yes, that is the legend writ upon her brow, you shall read it 
there; and whose hand but Nature’s could have inscribed it? But, you may 
perhaps reply, ’tis to hurt the interests of a friend; I behaved badly with her, all 
the more reason why I should make up for it now. There are, here, two things to 
be proven: that you are not hurting your friend’s interests, and that there is not 
the slightest wrong in thwarting a dead person’s intentions, whatever the idiotic 
respect fools have always had for such things. In what way, to begin with, will you
be deceiving your friend? Her pure and simple intention was that this sum go to 
her daughter; but no clause denies you the right to benefit from it beforehand. 
Thus, hold on to the money with the intention of bequeathing the sum to her 
when you are gone, if she outlives you, and there’s your conscience at rest, if 
matters are such that you feel the need to placate it. What would be a violation of
your friend’s wishes, would be to leave this property to a third person; but when 
you put it profitably to use with the idea of leaving it behind you, those wishes, 
certainly, are perfectly carried out. Madame Donis did not say to you, keep this 
child out of danger’s way, I recommend her life to your protection, and if by ill 
chance she dies, the funds will be yours, but yours only under those 
circumstances; no, not at all, she merely said: here are five hundred thousand 
francs, I am leaving them to my daughter. Well! if this child survives you, let the 
money become hers, and the dead mother’s desires shall be satisfied.

“But there is more: were you, I must now point out, even were you to violate 
this dead woman’s intentions, would you not simply be declining to act like a fool?
for how do you suppose one can possibly feel obliged to honor the instructions of 
someone who has departed out of the world? To fail an individual while he is alive 
is to cause him hurt, because his passive existence sustains injury and suffers 
from your refusal to obey him; but once this existence has ceased, it cannot feel 
pain anymore, no more pain can there be; the shock is nullified, there being no 
one there to endure it; it is therefore perfectly impossible to offend a dead 
person; whence it results that every heir who to his own detriment executes a will
for no other purpose than to cocker a corpse is as thorough an imbecile as the 
man who throws his money out the window; for the latter sacrifices his money, 
and the former sacrifices his happiness to the satisfaction of a nonexistent being, 
and according to my belief, between the one piece of madness and the other 
there is not much to choose. The world is full of many such benign little 
institutions of which people are loath to get rid, but which are not for all that any 
the less ridiculous. The clauses contained in testaments should none of them be 
executed, for it is absurd to think to be bound by them; absurd to think to endow 
a man with the faculty of action when he is dead, ’tis contrary to every law of 
Nature and of good sense: and there’s an end to the question. Retaining the five 
hundred thousand francs, you in no wise counter your departed friend’s 
intentions; I have, I think, demonstrated it sufficiently well. Let us now examine 
another branch of your dilemma: if I surrender the money, I secure this little girl’s
well-being; whereas if I do not surrender it, I secure my own. To this the following
reply may be made.

“We are able, it seems to me, to estimate the qualities in others only through 
the intimate relationships they have with us: someone’s features correspond, fit 
in nicely with ours, only then do we have a motive for liking him; we are charmed
by his face, his mind, his character, his attitude, all that affords us pleasure, and 
to frequent this object is for us a real delight. But when between two delights only
one can be had, common sense dictates, there is no question about it, that the 
choice be for the better. Such is your position: either you must enjoy Fontange, at
the expense of the five hundred thousand francs, or you must enjoy the five 
hundred thousand francs at the expense of Fontange. Here, there is no need for 
me to offer you any advice; you alone can choose which enjoyment suits you 
best. Compare, deliberate, and simply remember that whatever decision you 
come to, you will inevitably feel some misgivings, for virtue provokes remorse 
just as does crime. Consequently, if you abandon Fontange and keep the money, 
you will be saying to yourself, why did I choose this course? I regret that pretty 
creature. If it is the opposite course you elect, it will be, how weak I am! I would 
have enjoyed five hundred thousand francs, and today I am obliged to make shift 
without them. Observe, however, that the former of these regrets is necessarily 
counterbalanced by a real consolation, a physical consolation. True, you will say to
yourself, I have lost Fontange, but I have enjoyment; whereas for the latter the 
only compensation is an isolated, transitory pleasure, an insipid sacrifice to virtue 
whence you will never derive merit, a small inner satisfaction, an intellectual 
pleasure in itself very mediocre and apt at all times to be troubled by the other 
regret. The one involves a privation of slight importance, while ensuring much and
delightful material happiness; the other, a very substantial privation and a little 
mental thrill. Your way of thinking, besides, is incompatible with such pitiful little 
moral delights; it is not when one believes in nothing, it is not when one detests 
virtue and adores vice, it is not when one loves crime for its own sake or for the 
advantages it yields, that one can be interested for long in virtuous pleasure. 
Simply compare that with the charms of enjoying your five hundred thousand 
francs, and you will sense the difference at once. The main object, you say, is to 
avoid remorse. If that be so, then, immediately and unhesitatingly, commit the 
crime you are projecting; for I say unto you, that if you do not commit it, you 
shall no sooner have denied yourself the possibility of committing it than you shall
be devoured by chagrin at having let go by such a splendid opportunity to 
appropriate this money. For you, crime is not what it is for others. You have 
attained the point where you find the very keenest excitement in crime, it affords 
you the extremest voluptuous pleasure; therefore doubt not that this pleasure, 
which you will, in this case, enjoy all the more, there being no further restraints 
to cast off; doubt not, I say, that this pleasure entirely offsets the little pangs and 
qualms by which anybody else might have been afflicted, undertaking this deed.

“And so I see for you, in the case of the crime done, enjoyment firstly, in the 
doing of it, a further enjoyment, subsequently, for having done it; and in the 
other case, I see nought but a decided privation, a privation whence you will 
suffer not once, but continually and increasingly, as with every day your caprices 
become more numerous, and every day demand further resources to be satisfied;
and by way of compensation, I see nothing but the solitary feeling, a feeling that 
for everybody is temporary and dilute, that is entirely frivolous for you, of having 
accomplished not a good deed, but an exceedingly ordinary one. For I might 
perhaps excuse you for doing it were it in any sense what they call heroic, since 
that would at least mean some satisfaction for your pride; but no, instead I see 
no pleasure whatsoever accruing to you. Your deed is not great, it is not glorious; 
it is merely common. You accomplish no good through ensuring Fontange’s 
enjoyment of the money, and you do yourself a very great disservice by not 
preventing it. But that would suppose, you say, getting rid of this little girl in order
that she never find out I have robbed her. Well indeed! once you have no difficulty
conceiving of murders committed for lewdness’ sake, it seems to me that it 
should be just as easy for you to conceive of those warranted by material 
considerations. Both sorts are inspired by Nature; both have the same aim, and 
proceed from the same passions. You commit lust-murder to put yourself in a 
proper frame of mind for sensual pleasure; you commit all kinds of other murders
for the identical purpose of satisfying a passion. Between this murder and that 
murder there is not a particle of difference: any difference you were to try to 
establish between them would be frivolous; only the motives behind them permit 
distinguishing one murder from the next. Now, assuredly, Juliette, it is far more 
legitimate to commit the misdeed prompted by a powerful interest than merely 
for the sake of an agreeable ejaculation. You are quite prepared to murder for 
mental stimulation, for your imagination’s comfort, and yet you dare not do it 
when a fortune is at stake!

“From the foregoing two sets of alternatives emerge: first, if the transports 
Fontange procures you are greater than those you can expect from her property, 
the right course is to preserve Fontange, find a husband for her, and enjoy the 
milksop pleasure of having done your duty, of having done well with respect to 
Fontange, but very ill with respect to yourself: for, make no mistake about it, to 
perform a good deed is one thing, but to deprive oneself of a bad deed is 
something else, and it cannot be taken so lightly. There are perhaps times when 
some small amount of merit may attach to the performance of a kindly act; none 
ever exists in denying oneself the pleasure of performing a wicked one; because 
the former shines in the eye of the public, the latter does not. The second set of 
alternatives is this: if the pleasures you may expect from this supplement of 
fortune are to you of greater moment than Fontange’s well-being, you must waste
no time getting rid of her: for you cannot enjoy both these happinesses, and you 
must perforce sacrifice the lesser, the weaker of the two.

“Let us now determine what kind of sentiment you owe to Madame Donis…. 
None, so far as I can see. Sensual pleasure brought you together, crime 
separated you. Were she yet alive, you would certainly owe her nothing; dead, 
she is obviously entitled to still less. ’Twould be absurd, extravagant to continue 
to have any feelings whatever for a person who can no longer benefit from them; 
to this person’s shades, neither respect nor consideration, neither love nor 
remembrance is owing; he can be allowed no place in your imagination, because 
his presence there could not be anything but disagreeable, and you know that it is
included among our principles never to permit any ideas to enter the mind save 
pleasant or voluptuous ones. Well, this train of ideas points smoothly, and 
logically, toward mistreatment of the daughter, since ’twas out of lust you killed 
the mother; these ideas would be disrupted, would inevitably be spoiled if you 
were now to go and render the daughter a service. Hence, not only is there no 
disadvantage in your refusing to be helpful to the girl in any way, but it is even 
necessary to your pleasure that you render her exceedingly unhappy. The idea 
engendered by the unhappiness into which you are about to plunge her will renew
those of the atrocities you wrought against the rest of the family; and from the 
interweaving and combining of all these ideas there shall necessarily result for 
you a voluptuous whole, certain to be disintegrated by contrary behavior on your 
part.

“Do not allege to me the tender feelings for Madame Donis that inhabited you 
once upon a time. It would be absurd to reawaken them; not only because you 
have damaged them through your crime, but because one must take good care 
not to preserve the least tender feeling for someone who exists no longer; it 
would be to wear out the heart’s faculties needlessly, and to impair the 
effectiveness of its action upon more real objects; nothing should be of less 
concern to us than a person deprived of life.(6) Thus, as regards Madame Donis 
you are in a position where you have every right to offend her, since you owe her 
nothing, and where, offending her, you offend nobody, since she exists no more; 
and so, I repeat to you, it would be the most dreadful folly for you to hesitate. 
But, do you tell me, you hear an inner voice which seems to be urging you to 
resist; you ask me whether this is the voice of Nature? No, Juliette, no; this voice,
about whose source you cannot conceivably be in error, is no other than that of 
prejudice: if it still sways you, lay it up to weakness, and to the fact that the 
criminal deed involved here is less familiar to you than those you ordinarily 
indulge in, even though it amounts to nothing else than the theft you are fond of 
and commit day in and day out. Here, it is most certainly the voice of prejudice 
you are hearing, instead of that of Nature, for when Nature speaks, her urgings 
are invariably to seek happiness, no matter at whose expense. Therefore let it be 
the most critical kind of audition you accord that voice, sift the chaff out of its 
message, you will then hear it in all its purity, and ceasing to drift anxiously, 
buffeted by doubts, you will then act in confidence and peace, without any fear of 
outraging Nature whom, to the contrary, you will be serving when you accomplish 
the crime that you know she would have you commit, who assures you pleasure 
from committing it.

“Thus, what I would do, were I in your place, would be to amuse myself 
thoroughly with this girl, to rob her, and then to put her in such a damnable plight
that you could at any moment add further height to your happiness by feeding it 
upon the charms of seeing her languish; which, from the standpoint of voluptuous
pleasure, is preferable to killing her. The felicity I recommend to you will be 
infinitely keener; beyond the physical happiness acquired from enjoyment, there 
will be the intellectual happiness born of the comparison between her fate and 
yours; for happiness consists more in comparisons of this sort than in actual 
physical enjoyments. It is a thousand times sweeter to say to oneself, casting an 
eye upon unhappy souls, I am not such as they, and therefore I am their better, 
than merely to say, Joy is unto me, but my joy is mine amidst people who are just
as happy as I. It is others’ hardships which cause us to experience, our 
enjoyments to the full; surrounded by persons whose happiness is equal to ours, 
we would never know contentment or ease: that is why they say, and very wisely 
indeed, that, to be happy, you ought never look upward, but always at those who 
are below you. If then ’tis the spectacle of the luckless who must necessarily 
complete our happiness by the comparison they furnish between themselves and 
us, one must take care not to relieve such downtrodden as exist; for by raising 
them, through this aid, from the class which provides elements for your 
comparisons, you deprive yourself of these comparisons, and hence of that which 
improves your pleasures. However, simply to limit oneself to withholding aid from 
the needy in order to preserve this class useful for the comparisons whence the 
best portion of your happiness derives, that is not enough; you must neglect no 
opportunity to generate misery, both in order to increase the size of this class 
generally, and in order, particularly, to create a sector of it which, your own 
personal handiwork, sharpens the delights that are going to result for you from 
the comparisons it will provide. Thus, in the present instance, your complete 
pleasure would consist in making away with this girl’s inheritance, in then 
reducing her to beggardom, in constraining her as it were to come begging at 
your gate, where you would cruelly refuse her the pittance she asks; thus, by 
drawing the spectacle of misery into your immediate vicinity, improve your 
enjoyment through comparison as intimate and at the same time as 
advantageous to you as possible, since all the woe confronting you is of your 
unique fabrication. That is what my advice to you would be, Juliette, that is what I
would do if I were you. … I would have a daily erection thinking about these 
delicious ideas, standing before the still more divine spectacle of the distress I 
would have caused; and in the midst of these rare pleasures, I would exclaim, 
Yes, there she is; by means of a crime I got possession of her; and this 
inheritance I have usurped, I spend upon pleasures so sweet that nothing I do is 
not crime; I am, through my behavior toward her, nothing but criminal, I am 
perpetually in a state of crime; not one of my pleasures is untainted by it…. And 
with an imagination like yours, Juliette, oh! how heavenly such a complication 
must be!”

Noirceuil was very hot by the time he reached the end of his digression, and as
since my return we had still done nothing together, we now moved straight to a 
sofa. Lying there in his arms, I admitted that at no moment had I been visited by 
doubts concerning the fate of little Fontange, and that what I had said to him had 
been said only in order to give him the occasion to expound his doctrines. I 
promised him the young girl, assuring him that, however interesting she might 
be, we would not fail to establish her in a quagmire of grinding poverty, after 
having wrung all we wanted from her.

“Well, well, Juliette,” said Noirceuil, fondling and kissing my buttocks, “if you 
depraved yourself in the course of your travels, I was not idle during the same 
period either; and you have returned to find me a thousand times worse than I 
used to be; there is not a single horror I have not accomplished since we last saw
each other. Will you believe it? I am responsible for the death of Saint-Fond; I 
aspired to his post, I missed getting it; but nothing will prevent me from 
succeeding the man occupying it at present; his doom is a matter of time only, 
the machinery is in place; and once I hold office, which I ambition for what it will 
put in my hands, to wit, all the power of the idiot prince and all the wealth of his 
kingdom, then, oh, Juliette, the mountain of pleasures that shall be ours! Crime, 
such is my wish, must stamp every instant of my career; you will not weaken with
me as you did with Saint-Fond, and together we shall go far.”

By and by I had to present my ass to that maniac; but he withdrew from it 
without leaving any fuck behind him.

“I am waiting for someone,” he explained. “Allow me to inform you: she is a 
very attractive creature of about twenty-five, whose husband I have had jailed: 
this in order to get possession of the wife. If she opens her mouth, he can be put 
to death tomorrow; but as she adores him, I think she will keep silent. She also 
has a child, whom she idolizes; my aim is to induce her to forsake the lot; I 
propose to fuck the wife, have the husband broken on the wheel, and send the 
child to the workhouse. I have been preparing the operation for two months; up 
until now, the young woman’s love and virtue have held out admirably. You shall 
see how pretty she is. I should like you to help me seduce her. What has occurred
is as follows.

“A murder was committed in her house; she was there when it happened, 
along with the victim, her husband, and another man. Her testimony is crucial; 
the other man has deposed against the husband, but this woman’s evidence is 
needed, and the case cannot progress until she gives it.”

“Rascal! this entire intrigue smacks of your confection: you had the man killed 
by the witness whom you seduced and who has sworn ’twas the husband did the 
deed; you want the wife to corroborate the thing, both for the pleasure of making
her yours and for that other pleasure, more piquant still, of turning her into her 
husband’s assassin.”

“Quite right, Juliette, how well you know me! All that is my doing. But I am 
eager to round out my crime, and I count upon you. Ah, my dear, it’s a 
voluptuous discharge I see ahead of me when this evening I shall fuck that 
woman.”

She arrived. Madame de Valrose was indeed one of the prettiest creatures you 
could hope to see: petite, but exquisitely shaped, well fleshed, with a dazzling fair
skin, the world’s loveliest eyes, breasts, and an ass that made the mouth water.

“Good evening to you, Madame,” said Noirceuil, “you have reached your 
decision?”

“Good Lord,” that charming woman replied, her eyes filling with tears, “how 
can you expect me to agree to such a horrible thing?”

“Take care, Madame,” I broke in sharply; “Monsieur de Noirceuil, having 
acquainted me with your business, has authorized me to offer you a word of 
advice. Bear in mind that as matters now stand, your husband is doomed, for to 
that end but a single witness is required, and one exists, as you are aware.”

“But he is guiltless, Madame; the witness who accuses him is the murderer 
himself.”

“You shall never convince your judges of it. This witness had no relations 
whatever with the dead man, but your husband had a good many. Therefore, I 
repeat, you should consider your husband as done for, incontestably. When, in the
light of this terrible certainty, Monsieur de Noirceuil, whose influence you know to 
be great, offers to save him if you agree to testify against him, I for my part—”

“But what purpose does it serve, this testimony, since Monsieur is eager to 
save my husband?”

“Without that testimony he cannot do it; it will enable him to show irregular 
procedure, and that slander doubtless exists, if not perjury, once the accused’s 
wife testifies against him.”

“Then shall I not be punished?”

“A convent… whence we will have you out again in a week’s time. Madame, 
that you are able to hesitate is more than I can understand.”

“But my husband will believe that I sought to undo him, he will blame me in his
heart; and in mine this idea shall weigh forever. It shall lie between us 
everlastingly: I save my husband only by creating an undying distrust which 
means eternal estrangement, which means—”

“Agreed, but is that not better than sending him to the gallows? And if you 
truly love him, should you not grant his life greater importance than the 
possession of his affections? If he dies, will you not also be separated forever?”

“Terrible alternative! And if I am being deceived … if this avowal seals his doom
instead of saving him?”

“This injurious suspicion,” said Noirceuil, “is my reward for wishing to be of 
help to you, Madame, and I thank you.”

“Why, yes, Madame,” I put in heatedly, “Monsieur de Noirceuil ought by all 
rights to drop your case this very minute; how dare you cast such aspersions 
upon the most virtuous of mortals?”

“For the aid he proposes he has set a price that dishonors me. I worship my 
husband, never have I broken faith with him, never, and it is not when he is beset
by cruel troubles that I need crown his misfortune with such a woeful outrage.”

“This outrage is imaginary: your husband will never learn of it. Manifestly, you 
are an intelligent person: how then, I wonder, can you cling to these illusions? It 
is not, moreover, your heart Monsieur de Noirceuil is seeking, but simply your 
favors, which should greatly reduce the hurt in your eyes. But, I shall further add,
even were this hurt to exist, even were it grave, of what account can it be when 
your husband’s life hangs in the balance?

“By way of conclusion I may say a word in defense of the price Monsieur de 
Noirceuil asks. Ah, Madame, you are ill-acquainted with the spirit of the age if you
fancy that kindnesses are accorded for nothing nowadays. Actually, in return for a
service which your entire fortune would not begin to pay for, Monsieur de 
Noirceuil, by demanding nothing beyond a little forbearance on your part, is 
willing to accept exceedingly little, it seems to me. In short, your husband’s life is 
in your hands; it is saved if you accuse him, lost if you do not. There is your 
dilemma. Speak.”

And at that point the dear little woman was seized by a dreadful fit of sobbing 
which so

aroused Noirceuil that the scoundrel had out his member and gave it to me to 
frig before Madame de Valrose’s very eyes. She fainted.

“Quickly there, buggerblast me!” said Noirceuil, “pull up her skirts, let me fuck 
her.”

Her pretty bosom having been brought into view when I unlaced her stays, 
Noirceuil was soon kneading and mauling her in that barbaric manner with which 
he is wont to caress breasts. I finished undressing the poor creature; she was still
unconscious when I took her upon my lap, exposing that pretty ass to the 
libertine who, while I tugged at his pubic hairs, readied himself for his beloved 
sodomy. Careless of his victim’s feelings, Noirceuil drove into the breach with such
impetuosity that he soon summoned the little lady back to life.

“Where am I?” she gasped upon opening her eyes, “and what, good lord! is 
being done to me?”

“Have patience, my child,” I said in a rather chilly tone, “it won’t be long before
we have everything we want from you.”

“But these things—”

“Strange things which your husband never did, eh?”

“Never, oh never! I shudder—”

“Shudder away, but at the same time think a moment, Madame,” said the 
ferocious Noirceuil, pursuing his embuggery, “it would require no more than to cut
through the thinnest of partitions and the act you take exception to would be 
nullified; and so, if you like, Juliette, with a razor—”

“Fuck, Noirceuil, fuck, your mind is beginning to rove.”

And the little woman, continuing to struggle: “Let go of me, let go! ’Tis a 
violence, an abomination—”

“Why, God damn your soul!” Noirceuil roared, seizing a pistol and clapping the 
barrel to her temple, “any more disturbance from you, just one more word, and I 
blow your brains out.”

’Twas then the unhappy creature realized that resignation was her only course.
Wearily, tearfully, she bends her head, lays it upon my breast, I pinch her belly, 
pull the hairs from her bush, cause her, in fine, such sharp pain that Noirceuil, 
locked in that trim little anus as though in a vice, senses the sperm rising in his 
balls. He catches hold of her breasts from underneath, wrenches them so cruelly, 
her pain becomes so extreme that the rake fairly screams as he discharges. He 
withdraws; and I, leaping upon that charming woman, I in my turn derive an 
excruciating pleasure from her. This scene revives Noirceuil; his prick rearisen, he
comes forward to join us. Through the position I am in, my buttocks are 
accessible to him, he kisses them, and, inserting his prick in Madame de Valrose’s
mouth, orders her to suck it: her initial reaction is one of horror, her next impulse 
is to disobey. What a group! I was sprawled atop Valrose; Noirceuil was lying 
upon me; he was warming himself in that pretty little person’s mouth and was 
tonguing my ass. I poured fuck into my fricatrice’s cunt, Noirceuil loosed his into 
her mouth. Then we readjusted ourselves.

“There we are,” said Noirceuil, his self-possession once returned, “the infidelity
has been committed; do you or do you not intend to save your husband?”

“Will he be saved by that, Monsieur?” was the charming creature’s question, 
asked in the mildest and sweetest voice; “are you very sure it will save him?”

“I swear it by all that is holy,” the traitor declared, “and if I am mistaken, I am 
willing to forego all renewal of the pleasures I have just tasted with you. Be here 
tomorrow morning, we shall go to the judge together, you will sign a deposition 
affirming your husband’s guilt; I shall have him at your side the next day.”

“Oh, Noirceuil,” I murmured to that monster, “how I admire this perseverance 
you are able to display in crime, even beyond the moment when the passions 
have subsided.”

“Why, you saw me accomplish my act of pleasure,” Noirceuil replied; “you 
know, do you not, that my every expense of fuck is the signing of a death 
warrant?”

We separated. Madame de Valrose, whom I conveyed to her home, besought 
me to take an interest in her case; and I promised that I would, with the sincerity
one owes to a whore one has become tired of. The following day she made her 
deposition; and on the day after that Noirceuil arranged affairs so cleverly that 
the poor little thing was declared her husband’s accomplice, and hanged beside 
him where he, after having been broken, lay exposed upon the wheel. We were, 
Noirceuil and I, watching from a window, I frigged him during the spectacle, he 
frigged me. Was my discharge agreeable? Not in ages had I enjoyed a better one.
Compassion moved Noirceuil to ask for the custody of the child, he obtained it, he
fucked it, and inside twenty-four hours had flung it into the streets, penniless and 
naked.

“Far, far better that than to kill it,” he pointed out to me, “its sufferings will last
longer, as shall my joy at being responsible for them.”

Meanwhile, Abbé Chabert had found me everything I needed. A week after 
having arrived in Paris I moved myself into a town house, you know what a 
delightful place it is; and I bought this property in the neighborhood of Essonnes, 
where we are forgathered today; I invested the rest of my funds in various 
holdings, and when all my business was completed, estimated my income at 
roughly four million a year. Fontange’s five hundred thousand was spent 
furnishing my two houses, magnificently, I think you will agree. Next, I turned my
attentions to libidinous arrangements; I assembled my several seraglios of 
women, in town and in country; I hired thirty valets, all of them tall solid fellows, 
comely, chosen especially for size of member; and you know the service I get 
from them. I have, besides, six mackerels of my own in Paris, they pander 
exclusively to me, and when I am in the city I always spend three hours at one of 
their establishments, every day. Out here in the country, they send me what they 
find, and you have often been able to verify the quality of their furnitures. With all
that, I would venture to suppose there are few women who can claim to lead a 
more delightful life; and yet, you know, I do not cease to want; I consider myself 
poor; my desires are infinitely in excess of my possibilities; I would spend twice 
as much, if I had it; and I leave no stone unturned to increase my wealth, 
criminal or not, there is nothing I am unwilling to do for money.

Once these divers arrangements had been made, I sent a servant to bring 
Mademoiselle Fontange from Chaillot; everything owed for her keep was paid, and
she was led out of her nunnery. Nothing in all the length and breadth of Nature 
could equal that girl’s beauty. Imagine Flora herself, and of Fontange’s graces and
attractions you will still have a very imperfect idea. Seventeen years of age, 
Mademoiselle Donis was blonde; loosened, her superb tresses reached nearly to 
the floor; her eyes were a lovely brown, of incomparable liveliness, sparkling with 
love and voluptuousness at once; her delightful mouth never seemed to open 
save to heighten her beauty; and her faultless teeth resembled pearls set amidst 
roses. Naked, this heavenly creature could have served as model to the painter of
the Graces. That richly rounded mons veneris! Those gloriously turned, infinitely 
inspiring thighs! That ass, that sublime ass! O Fontange! the cruelty it required, 
and the libertinage, not to spare such a host of charms, and not to exempt at 
least you from the rigorous fate I reserved for all my playthings.

Five years before, when her mother had first talked to her about me, Fontange
had been told that all possible respect and consideration were due me; upon 
learning who had sent the servant to fetch her away, she was overjoyed; and 
upon arriving, dazzled by this opulence, by this multitude of valets, by these 
magnificent furnishings, things which were all very new to her who had never 
until now been outside her convent, she blinked her eyes in disbelief, wondering 
whether she had not been transported to an Olympus, borne above the clouds to 
some aerial dwelling place, habitat of gods: she may even have taken me for 
Venus. She sank down at my knees, I raised her up; I kissed her rosy mouth, her 
glistening eyes, her two cheeks so fair and which so quickly took Nature’s 
brightest crimson hue when touched by my lips. I hugged her to my breast and 
felt her little heart beat excitedly against mine, like that of a fledgling dove one 
has stolen from its nest. She was dressed with a degree of stylishness, albeit 
simply; from underneath a pretty flowered hat her superb blonde hair fell in curls 
to her two exquisitely shaped shoulders. When she spoke it was in a gentle tone, 
in a musical voice full of sweet mildness.

“Madame, I thank a generous heaven for the privilege of being able to devote 
my life to you. My mother is dead; in this world I have no one else but you.”

As the words came forth her eyes grew moist, and I smiled.

“Yes, my child,” I said to her, “your mother is dead; she was my friend; hers 
was an untimely, an unusual death … she left in my trust a certain amount of 
money for you. If you behave deservingly toward me, you may be rich; but that 
will all depend upon your conduct, upon blind obedience to my will.”

“I shall be your slave, Madame.” And she bent and kissed my hand.

And I kissed her mouth again, rather more lingeringly this second time. I lifted 
her kerchief away, freed her bosom from its veils. She reddened; though 
unsteadied by agitation, nevertheless she continued, in measured and respectful 
terms, to sound the well-bred and decent young lady. Then for the third time I 
take her in my arms … her hair is a little disheveled, her lovely breasts are 
entirely bare; and, after fastening my mouth upon hers, “I believe,” I say to her, 
“I believe I am going to love you, for you are young and pure and sweet.”

The idea of shocking her occurred to me then: nothing is prettier than virtue 
scandalized by vice. I ring for my women; I have them undress me in the 
presence of this heavenly little girl; I gaze at myself in a looking glass.

“Tell me, Fontange,” I say, kissing her anew, “is it true that I have an attractive
body?”

And the poor thing averted her eyes; her face was scarlet. Around me I had 
four of my most beautiful women: Phryné, Laïs, Aspasia, and Theodora; all four 
between sixteen and eighteen years of age; so many Aphrodites.

“Come, Mademoiselle,” Laïs said to her, “do not be backward. ’Tis a favor 
Madame is granting you; take advantage of it.”

She advances, but with lowered eyes. I take her by the hand, draw her down 
upon my body.

“What a child she is,” I murmur to my women; “Phryné, show our babe in 
arms what she is to do.”

And Phryné sits down beside me, takes my head upon her breast and, reaching
a hand toward my cunt, begins to rub my clitoris. No woman acquits herself of 
that chore so well as she. Her execution is adroit, tutored, the play of her fingers 
lascivious, unerring; she kisses and caresses the behind in a singular manner; her
tongue, when that is what I wish, tickles the anus marvelously; her movements 
upon the mons veneris harmonize amazingly with what she is capable of doing in 
the other temple, which she sucks indescribably when called upon. While Phryné 
was in action; Laïs, astride my chest, advanced her dear little cunt into position 
for sucking; Theodora was frigging my asshole, and the beautiful Aspasia 
maintained Fontange nearby the spectacle and her attention fixed upon it, while 
frigging her to soothe her aching conscience.

“Did you not use to do the same thing with your companions?” Aspasia asked 
her.

“Oh, never!”

“Fiddlesticks,” said I from between Laïs’ buttocks, “it’s nothing but 
masturbation in convents, I know it from experience. At your age I had already 
had my hands under everybody’s skirt.” Then, leaving the cunt I had been 
sucking: “Come here and kiss me,” I ordered Fontange.

She approaches; I devour her.

My women received instructions to undress her. And proceedings were 
temporarily interrupted while the clothing that was hindering my pleasures was 
removed, Fontange’s first, then everyone else’s. Ah, great God! how beautiful the 
child was when naked! what fairness of skin! what proportions!

“Very well,” said I, “place her upon me, in such a way that I have this most 
winning of cunts above my lips. To you, Aspasia, will go the ass her position will 
be offering you: tongue her anus. Phryné, you shall frig her clitoris, seeing to it 
that all exhalations drain into my mouth. I am going to spread my legs; you, 
Theodora, between my thighs, shall cunt-suck me while, Laïs, you shall be licking 
my asshole. Fair friends, pray put all your science to best purpose; use every trick
you know, invent others, for this maid excites me exceedingly, and I wish to shed 
a sea of fuck on her account.”

I need not describe to you all the pleasure I was to extract from this celestial 
scene; I went half-mad from joy. Lust did in due time assert itself in the young 
Fontange; she was unable to resist the voluptuous sensations vibrating 
throughout her being. Modesty gives way to raptures, and the novice discharges. 
Oh, how delicious is the first flowing of fuck! With what joy I fed upon that nectar!

“Turn her over,” were the next instructions I issued to my women; “have her 
place her head between Theodora’s thighs, and suck her cunt; I in the meantime 
shall frig her ass with my tongue; Laïs will do the same to me; I shall be fondling,
stimulating an ass with each of my two hands.”

Another ecstasy, another ejaculation on my part; it is more than I can bear, I 
seize Fontange, I leap upon her, I press my clitoris hard against hers, I rub 
frenziedly, I devour her mouth, my women tease my ass, spank it, thrash it, slip 
their hands underneath and worry my sex, in short, they overwhelm me with 
pleasure, and I loose what must be my tenth discharge, with my impure sperm 
drenching the delicious cunt of the prettiest and most virginal of girls.

The fuck gone forth, the illusion faded away. Beautiful as Fontange was, I now 
saw her with nought but that malign indifference which wakes cruelty in me when 
I am weary of objects, and soon her doom was spelled out in the depths of my 
heart.

“Put the clothes back on her,” I said to my women.

I too got dressed; I sent the others out, we remained alone.

“Mademoiselle,” I said to her harshly, “augur nothing from a fleeting moment 
of inebriety into which Nature plunged me against my will; banish any thought 
that predilection might, on my part, have had something to do with it; I am fond 
of women in general; you satisfied me; there’s an end to it. You must now be 
informed that your mother gave me five hundred thousand francs for your dowry;
it were simpler that you learn the fact from me than from some other source.”

“Yes, Madame, I already know it.”

“Ah, Mademoiselle, you already know it; my congratulations to you. However, 
what you do not already know is that your good mother contracted a debt in this 
very same amount to a certain Monsieur de Noirceuil, to whom I of course 
transferred the sum, and who may bestow it upon you, if he chooses, or else keep
it, for it belongs to him, both the money and the decision too. I shall take you 
tomorrow to see this gentleman, and urge you to behave with utmost 
obligingness should he happen to make any demands upon you.”

“Madame, the ethical and moral training which supplied the very basis of the 
excellent education I have been given—Madame, I wish to say that they are 
hardly consistent with your counsels.”

“Nor with my actions, you may as well add, since you have taken it into your 
head to scold me. Blame me even for my kindness to you, I advise you to do that 
also.”

“I am not saying that, Madame.”

“Well, do say it if you want to, for I assure you that your reproaches affect me 
as little as your praise: one frolics with a little girl like you, and when the game is 
over, one scorns her.”

“Scorn, Madame! I thought that only vice was to be scorned.”

“Vice amuses, virtue bores. And according to my belief, whatever promotes our
pleasures always deserves preference over that which gives nothing but headache
and depressive vapors…. But you answer back, my fair one; you are tart, you are 
forward, you are insolent, and you are far from that degree of superiority which 
renders such failings excusable. An end to these discussions, Mademoiselle, if you
please; the fact is that I owe you nothing; that with the half a million intended for
you I paid a creditor to whom your mother was in debt; and that it lies with that 
creditor to decide whether to retain the sum or return it to you; and I warn you 
that he will keep it unless you show all kinds of consideration for him.”

“What kinds of consideration, Madame?”

“The same kinds I have just required from you; I should think you must 
understand what I mean.”

“In that case, Madame, your Monsieur de Noirceuil shall keep everything. I am 
not the person to embark upon any such infamous career as this you propose to 
me; and if, out of respect for you, out of frailty or childishness, I was able a little 
while ago to forget what I have been taught to regard as my duty, so well have 
you opened my eyes that I have been punished for my fault.” And from those 
eyes, the most beautiful in all the world, there now gushed a flood of tears.

“Indeed,” I said, “it is scarcely to be believed. We do not fall down at 
Mademoiselle’s knees, and lo! she makes a scene. My God, where would we 
libertines be if we had to perform curtsies and reverences before all the little 
harlots who frig us?”

The word harlot was the signal for a veritable tempest; there was a banging of 
the head upon the table, there were shrieks of despair, there were tears scattered
all about the room; and, if you wish to know the truth, ’twas not without the most
trenchant pleasure I carried on my humiliations of the Fontange for whom I had 
been all afire a short moment before. Pride is salved by the illusion’s collapse; and
from disdain for the idol one obtains an indemnity for all one spent when 
prostrate before it. That silly little goose irritated me to a point beyond 
description.

“Look here, my child,” I said to her, “if Monsieur de Noirceuil does not give you 
your dowry, you will enter my service; it just so happens that I need a girl in the 
scullery, you can surely wash my pots and pans.”

And this brought forth tears in such abundance that I wondered whether she 
was not going to suffocate.

“On the other hand,” I continued, “if you dislike kitchens you can always go 
abegging or try whoring. Whoring, that’s what I believe I would suggest; your 
looks aren’t bad; and you have no idea what’s to be earned from frigging pricks.”

“Madame,” said Fontange, quite beside herself, “I am destined to neither of 
those trades. I wish to leave this house, kindly allow me to go. I repent the things
I have done here, all my life I shall pray to be forgiven by the Supreme Being. … I
intend to return to my convent.”

“Do you? Your convent won’t take you in. To live in convents costs money. You 
have none.”

“I have friends there.”

“No, you don’t, now that you are poor.”

“I shall work.”

“Come, come, little fool, calm yourself, dry your tears; my women will look 
after you this evening, tomorrow I shall take you to Noirceuil, and if you are mild 
in your manners you may not find him quite so harsh in his, nor as mischievous 
as I have been.”

I ring, recommend the girl to the care of my tribades, have horses hitched to 
my carriage, and fly to Noirceuil’s house. He requests details; painting Fontange 
for him in none but truth’s colors, I could not fail to arouse him.

“Here,” says he, trundling out a very rigid prick, “behold, Juliette, the effect of 
your descriptive abilities.”

And bidding me accompany him into his boudoir, he engaged me to cooperate 
in several of those curious fantasies which rather double than extinguish the 
effects of desire, which are not pleasure-takings but which, with libertine spirits 
like Noirceuil, outvalue all the licit conjunctions whether of hymen or of love. We 
were two hours at play, for I too am fond of those little horrors. I satisfy them for 
men with the same pleasure they take in submitting me to them; their lubricity 
ignites mine; no sooner do I content them than I want them to content me in my 
turn; and after, as I say, several hours of foul frolicking, which cost us no loss of 
any kind, this, according to my recollection, was the declaration Noirceuil made to
me:

“It is a most extraordinary caprice I have been dwelling upon for a very long 
time, Juliette, and I have been awaiting your return with impatience, having in all 
the world nobody but you with whom I could satisfy it. I should like to marry … I 
should like to get married, not once, but twice, and upon the same day: at ten 
o’clock in the morning, I wish, dressed as a woman, to wed a man; at noon, 
wearing masculine attire, I wish to take a bardash for my wife. There is still more 
… I wish to have a woman do the same as I; and what other woman but you 
could participate in this fantasy? You, dressed as a man, must wed a tribade at 
the same ceremony at which I, guised as a woman, become the wife of a man; 
next, dressed as a woman, you will wed another tribade wearing masculine 
clothing, at the very moment I, having resumed my ordinary attire, go to the 
altar to become united in holy matrimony with a catamite disguised as a girl.”

“Assuredly, good sir, this, as you yourself have said, is a curious caprice that 
has entered your head.”

“Yes, but since Nero married Tigellinus as a woman and Sporus as a man, I am
originating nothing except the celebration of the two unions in the space of a 
single day and, of course, the whimsical idea of having you imitate me; there is 
the matter of the ties which already subsist between ourselves and the objects 
which shall be utilized in this farce, and here I think we have greatly improved 
upon Nero. Your two wives are, firstly, Fontange who, clad in mannish garb, will 
become your husband; secondly, your daughter who, dressed in the customary 
raiments of her sex, will marry a Juliette in man’s clothing. My husband and my 
wife, who shall they be, do you wonder? They shall be two children, Juliette, yes, 
two children sired by me and of whose existence you have until now been 
unaware, of whose existence, indeed, nobody knows. One of them is nearing 
eighteen, he is to be my husband: a Hercules for vigor and looks. The other is 
twelve; ’tis the incarnation of Eros. Both are the fruit of the most legitimate 
commerce; my first wife produced the elder, the younger was given me by the 
sixth. All told, I have had eight wives. That, I believe, you do know.”

“But did you not tell me that you had no children left?”

“These two have been dead to the world; both have been raised with great 
care, and in the strictest conformance with instructions, in one of my castles far 
off in Brittany. Neither one has ever seen the light of day. They have just been 
delivered to me here in town, they made the journey in a sealed coach. They are 
a pair of veritable savages, scarcely able to speak. But that is of little importance;
properly guided, they will do very nicely for the ceremony; the rest is our affair.”

“And appalling bacchanalia, I take it, are to succeed these unusual weddings?”

“Exactly.”

“And Noirceuil, you wish to have my poor adorable little Marianne become one 
of the victims in these hideous orgies, is that it?”

“No, she’ll not be a victim, but she will be present, my lust demands that. No 
harm will be done her, of that you may be perfectly certain: your women will 
entertain her while we are at work, that is all….”

Noirceuil obtains my agreement to everything. It will soon be seen how the 
villain kept his word.

’Twas not immediately nor without difficulty that Mademoiselle Donis 
succeeded in understanding the peculiar arrangement of the forthcoming scene: 
virtue regularly has trouble accommodating itself to vice’s extravagances. Partly 
from fear, partly from eagerness to please, the unhappy girl did at last give her 
whole consent, but only after I had solemnly vowed that these scandalous 
weddings would conclude in nothing apt to alarm her modesty. The first ceremony
took place in a small town lying two leagues from the magnificent castle Noirceuil 
owned outside Orléans, and in which the postmarital festival was to be 
celebrated; the second ceremony, in the chapel of that same castle.

I shall not fatigue you with the details of those two rites; you will be content to
know that everything transpired decently, punctually, and in strictest accordance 
with tradition; the religious ceremonies were followed by their civil counterparts, 
enacted in an equally dignified manner. There were wedding rings, there were 
Masses, benedictions, constituted dowries, witnesses; nothing was lacking. 
Costumes and paint artistically disguised the two sexes, embellished them where 
necessary.

By two o’clock that afternoon Noirceuil’s dual project had been carried out: he 
had become the wife of one of his sons, the husband of the other, while I found 
myself the husband of my daughter and the wife of Fontanges. Everything 
completed, the gates to the castle were shut and barred. The weather being 
exceedingly cold, great fires were lit in the superb hall where we were to 
forgather; and severest orders having been issued that the impending 
bacchanalia be interrupted under no circumstances, we closed ourselves up inside
those baronial surroundings. In number we were twelve.

We being the two heroes, Noirceuil and I sat upon a black velvet throne placed 
in the center of the hall; below the throne there were to be seen, all wearing 
crowns of cypress, the elder of Noirceuil’s two sons, named Phaon, eighteen years
of age; the younger, aged twelve, whose name was Euphorbe; my daughter 
Marianne and Mademoiselle Donis; the two groomsmen at the weddings, agents 
of Noirceuil’s sodomite pleasures and his hired killers, one of whom was dubbed 
Desrues, the other Cartouche, each of some thirty years, both garbed as 
cannibals, with switches, daggers, and live snakes in their hands, both posted at 
our sides in the attitude of bodyguards; on the right of us as on the left, seated, 
were two of my tribades, Theodora and Phryné; at our feet, two whores, likewise 
naked, appeared to be awaiting our orders. These girls, simply picked out of a 
bawdyhouse, were a bare eighteen and twenty years of age, and both were of the
most charming physiognomy: they were there as auxiliaries to the scene.

Surveying these preparations, I felt just a little apprehensive for my precious 
Marianne and was moved to remind Noirceuil of the assurances he had given me.

“My dear,” was his reply, “it ought to be plain to you that I am tremendously 
overwrought. Consider what it did to me this morning, to satisfy the incredible 
longing that had been preoccupying me for years. It crazed my brain, Juliette, 
that’s what it did, and I fear you have chosen a bad moment to remind me of 
promises of good behavior: let a little added irritation set the nervous system 
ablaze, and you know as well as I that all such guarantees go up in smoke. Let us
enjoy ourselves, Juliette, let us amuse ourselves; perhaps I shall abide by my 
word; but if I do not, in the lewd pleasures which shall soon see us gripped in 
ecstasy, strive to find the strength to endure the misfortune you seem to dread—a
misfortune which, between us two, is by no means as dreadful as they make out. 
Think, dear Juliette, that for libertines like us, the hand is stayed by nothing, nor 
is the mind; that, for us, an object’s ten thousand titles to inviolable respect are 
that many reasons to outrage it further: the more exigent virtue appears, the 
sooner it pleases furious vice to defile and degrade it.”

One hundred candles lit that hall as the scene opened.

“Cartouche, Desrues,” said Noirceuil to his two ministers, “worthy emulators of
the famous men whose names I permit you to bear; you who, like your patrons of
whose high feats history shall transmit an indestructible record down to the last 
generations of mankind; you, I say, who have never failed to lend your arm to the
noble and ennobling cause of crime, go undress the four destined to holocaust 
and whose brows are wreathed in the foliage of death’s tree, go strip them, and 
of their raiments, whereof there is no further need, make the employment I have 
prescribed to you.”

The emissaries step forward; the four victims are despoiled of every article of 
clothing, which is flung piece by piece into the roaring blazes that warm the hall.

“What baneful ceremony is this?” asks Fontange, seeing the fire consume 
everything she has been wearing, her skirts, her petticoats, even her shift; “why 
burn these garments?”

“Dear girl,” Noirceuil replies, “a little earth, some sod, you shall soon need no 
more than that for cover.”

“Good Lord! what do I hear! And what have I done to earn this?”

“Bring that creature to me,” Noirceuil says.

And while Laïs sucks him, while one of the whores toils over his ass, and while 
I excite him verbally, the libertine glues his mouth to the mouth of that 
enchanting girl, and pumps it an entire quarter of an hour despite Fontange’s 
resistance, which is keen but vain. Then, shifting his lewd attentions to her 
behind, “Oh, Juliette, she has an ass too! a beautiful ass,” he cries, working 
himself into an ecstasy before it; “’twill be delightful to fuck all that and to 
martyrize it….”

Therewith his tongue slips into the cunning little hole; meanwhile, upon his 
orders, I with one hand pluck out the silky hairs growing upon that lovely girl’s 
cunt and pinch her budding breasts with the other. He forces her upon her knees, 
bids his two men tongue her here and there, and ends with having her kiss his 
bum.

These commencements were trying for the young thing, her shame and 
discomposure were extreme; if anything was more powerful than these two 
feelings, ’twas the terror inspired in her by the preparations for what, as best she 
could tell, seemed due to follow. Trained to modesty, having received none but 
the best principles in the house whence she came, Mademoiselle Donis was 
necessarily in an evil situation; and nothing amused us more than the fierce 
conflict raging between her sense of decency and her perception of iron necessity.
There was one point at which she sought to elude the inevitable.

“Stop that squirming and stay just where you are,” Noirceuil told her harshly; 
“do you not realize how delicate the imagination is in a man like me? A mere 
nothing disturbs it, the instant service fails, everything breaks down, comes all to 
pieces; understand that the divinest charms are null unless presented to us 
submissively and with obedience.”

And while he spoke the rascal was fondling the girl’s ass, ’twas over that 
angelic creature’s buttocks the impurest and most ferocious hands were 
wandering. “Bugger-fuck!” he exclaimed, pursuing his palpations, “how unhappy I
intend to make this little jade! Look at these charms, and tell me whether they do
not cry out for horrors!”

He then has her take hold of Cartouche’s prick, obliges her to frig it, savoring 
the sight of innocent hands accomplishing the chores of vice; and as the poor girl,
all in tears, exhibits much disgust for the work but no skill, he orders one of the 
whores to give her lessons and compels the student to humbly thank her teacher.

“Some abilities as a fricatrice may well stand her in good stead,” Noirceuil 
remarked; “the frightful state of misery to which I propose to reduce her shall 
oblige her to do something to stay alive.”

He bade her tongue the two whores’ cunts; after that, to suck his prick; and 
enjoined the company to slap her hard upon the face whenever the slightest hint 
of repugnance could be read there.

“Very good,” said he, “let us give thought to hymeneal pleasures, we have 
devoted ourselves long enough to those of love.” Then, casting a murderous 
glance in Fontange’s direction: “Aye, well may she tremble,” said he, “and more 
than tremble in anticipation of the moment when I return to busy myself with her 
again.”

Laïs and Theodora are dispatched toward Phaon, at once Noirceuirs husband 
and his son; they soon succeed in erecting him, and lead the boy up to Noirceuil 
who, bent over me, nonchalantly presents his behind to the chaste consort whom 
my tribades guide his way. I was frigging him from below and he was tonguing 
now the one whore’s asshole, now the other’s.

“Have the customary ceremonies observed,” he says to Phaon’s conductresses,
“this young bridegroom is not to make away with the favors offered to him until 
he has first shown himself worthy of them.”

Phaon kneels, adopts a worshipful attitude before the ass facing him, kisses it 
respectfully, rises to his feet, and, yielding to the impulses being developed within
him, the handsome youth runs his instrument hilt-high into his dear papa’s ass. 
Membered like a mule, his capers and heaves soon produce quivers of joy in the 
patient, and rakish Noirceuil falls to simulating the little shrieks, the smirks and 
smiles of the bride undergoing her defloration; he sighs, he moans, his 
contortions are amusing beyond words. The youth, perfectly excited by everything
surrounding him, soon discharges into the entrails hugging him happily. When he 
has completed his act he is obliged to reiterate the respectful gestures with which 
he began. Then he retires; but Noirceuil, very hot, wants fucking; his panting 
anus seems to be crying forth the need for pricks; Cartouche and Desrues 
sodomize him; while they do, he kisses the buttocks of Laïs and of Theodora to 
which, he avows, he has taken a mighty fancy. Niched underneath him, I suck 
him with all my strength; and he fondles whore’s ass. Fucked twice by each of his 
men, Noirceuil is ready for new things. “Now we shall play the husband,” he 
announces; “after having acquitted myself so well in the wifely role.”

Euphorbe, his second son, is brought to him. I am asked to pilot the engine; 
three lusty blows and the pucelage is no more. His weapon is still loaded when 
Noirceuil withdraws, and he comes forth with an ardent desire for Fontange. It is 
the whores who march her up to the line and who supervise the operation.

“Juliette,” says Noirceuil, “oblige me by violently biting this little girl’s cunt 
while I embugger her. Since during my pleasure I would that she experience a 
maximum of pain, your instructions, Cartouche and Desrues, are to seize each of 
you one of her hands, and to remove her fingernails with the blade of a 
pocketknife.”

Everything is put into execution. Fontange, stunned by this variety of 
simultaneous agonies, knows not whether it is her mutilated fingers which hurt 
her most, or the bites wherewith I lacerate her cunt, or the hammerings of the 
monstrous prick tearing her fundament. But ’tis, it seems, the embuggering which
is creating the greatest difficulties for her ravaged frame; the titillations provoked 
in her behind appear to be nearly too much for her to endure. Her screams, her 
tears, her groans attain such a pitch of violence that Noirceuil, powerfully stirred 
by all he hears, teeters on the brink of crisis. He retreats from the breach.

“Oh, Juliette!” he cries, “what a delightful ass the slut possesses, and how I 
adore making her suffer. Would that I had all hell’s demons to help me bother her,
each by means of an original and unheard-of torture.”

He has her turned over and held by the harlots; I open and present her cunt to
him: he plunges impetuously into it, while burning sulphur is put before the 
wretched girl’s nostrils and her ears are shorn away. The maidenhead is blasted, 
blood flows, and Noirceuil, more aroused than ever, decunts, has the victim held 
aloft by his two trusties, an

d sets merrily to flogging her with martinets whose iron tips have been heated 
in the fire. He himself is whipped by the whores while he is acting, and he 
sprinkles kisses upon the asses of my tribades, whose buttocks are poised nearby
on a level with his lips; I suck him and at the same time tickle his anus.

“We are comfortable in here, are we not,” says Noirceuil a few minutes later; 
“the severe cold reigning outside gives me a splendid idea.”

He wraps himself in a heavy fur mantle, has his two men and me don others, 
and we walk out of doors with a naked Fontange. In front of the chateau is a 
great marble basin now covered with ice; upon it Fontange is placed. Cartouche 
and Desrues, holding great horsewhips and large firecrackers, stand by the 
basin’s edge; Noirceuil, two or three paces back, watches, and I am at his side, 
frigging him. Fontange is told to skate six turns around the basin; when she 
strays too close to the edge, she is driven off by the whips; when she moves too 
far away, firecrackers are tossed at her, they explode about her head or between 
her legs. ’Tis a very gay spectacle, as the poor creature skids and slides this way 
and that, falling very frequently, each time all but breaking a leg.

“What!” exclaims Noirceuil angrily, seeing that she is about to complete her 
sixth circuit without having met with serious accident, “what! the slut is to come 
through unscathed?”

But the next instant, to Noirceuil’s relief, an exploding firecracker blows one of 
her breasts away, she totters, fractures an arm as she falls.

“That, by God, is a little better,” mutters Noirceuil.

She is borne back into the castle, unconscious; there, she is given that 
minimum of attention required to restore her to usefulness, her wounds are 
lightly bound up; and the stage is set for further scenes.

Noirceuil demands that my daughter frig me while he looks on; he avidly kisses
the child’s pretty hinderparts while she is engaged at her task.

“That shall turn into a lovely ass, Juliette,” he says to me, “it already excites 
me enormously.”

And though she was but seven years old, the wicked fellow prodded her 
tentatively with his gigantean prick; but, wheeling suddenly away from Marianne 
and toward his son Euphorbe, Noirceuil fits himself into that other fair young 
posterior, ordering me to crush the boy’s testicles. There is no pain to equal what 
the unhappy child experiences, simultaneously tormented before and behind. 
After a brief run in that charming ass Noirceuil withdraws and has the child lashed
by his ministers. While one of them flogs, the other embuggers the sore-beset 
Euphorbe, whose virile parts, in conformance with his father’s wishes, are lost to 
a razor-blade wielded by me, who shaves them clean off his belly. Noirceuil, 
managing to keep one eye on the operation, ardently kisses Theodora’s buttocks 
in the meantime.

“Come now, Juliette,” he says to me, “have yourself fucked.”

In a fearful state, I wanted nothing else. The two cannibals laid hands on me; 
one darted into my cunt, the other lodged himself in my ass; Noirceuil moved 
from the first to the next, embuggering them by turns while the whores spurred 
him on with lashes. As soon as he sees my discharge terminated, Noirceuil calls 
for Fontange and surrenders her to the two executioners.

“Make free with her,” he tells them, “do whatever you like provided you torture
her the while you fuck her.”

The two rascals treated the girl so roughly that, in their arms, she swooned 
away once again.

“One moment,” said Noirceuil, “I cannot resist sodomizing her anew.”

And while he was satisfying himself I surprised him with an unexpected piece 
of cruelty: using a scalpel, I cut out my ward’s right eye. That horror overpowers 
Noirceuil: his patient’s reaction to the pain is so lively, her muscular contraction so
sharp, that the libertine loses his seed ten inches inside the maid’s rectum, at a 
juncture where he is being sodomized himself and is girt round by display of ass.

“Come along, my fair one,” he says to the bedraggled creature; he grips her 
hard by the arm and drags her bodily into an adjoining chamber. I follow.

“Behold,” says he, pointing to a table upon which lie, in gold coins, the five 
hundred thousand francs belonging to the poor girl, “that is your dowry; in order 
that you see that wealth, we have left you an eye, and it is our fond hope that the
sight will prove an unhappy one: for that money is not to be yours. Slut, my 
intention is that you die of starvation; and I am going to treat you in such sort 
that you shall never be able to complain of your fate, although I am also going to 
set you at liberty. Here,” he went on, taking her by the wrist, “touch this gleaming
stuff, ’tis gold, ’tis yours, and yet you shall never have it. Aye, buggeress, feel it, 
that is what I want you to do; and now that you have done it, you’ll do nothing 
more with these useless organs.” So saying, he secures her hands upon a 
butcher’s block, embuggers her, and I cleave off her hands while he is operating; 
the blood is stanched, the stumps bandaged…. Immediately, fucking 
uninterruptedly, the barbarian orders his victim to open her mouth and stick forth 
her tongue: I seize it with tongs, I sever it at the root; I gouge out the remaining 
eye…. Noirceuil discharges.

“Good,” says he, withdrawing and dressing the girl in a shift of sackcloth, “we 
are now assured that she shall not write, that she shall be blind as a bat, that she
shall say never a word to any soul that lives.”

We escort her to the gate and out upon the highroad.

“Go seek your living,” says Noirceuil, giving her a ferocious kick, “your living, 
indeed! The thought of the fate that awaits you gives us greater cheer than we 
would derive from your assassination; begone, slut, venture into the world and 
denounce your persecutors, if you can.”

“Ah, but she will be able to grasp their questions if nothing else,” I pointed out,
“her hearing remains to her.”

“Does it now?” said the barbarous Noirceuil. “Then we shall remedy that,” and 
he drove the point of a knife successively into each of her ears.

We returned to the company.

“Excite me, you rascals,” our libertine said to the four women; “I have just 
discharged, I must recover my forces…. Frig these men and let them fuck me; my
need of horrors is never so great as when I have been lately committing them.”

Noirceuil is encompassed: asses, pricks surround him everywhere; he is 
frigged, fucked, tongued, sucked.

“Ah, Juliette,” he announces once his device begins to rise, “Juliette, I wish to 
fuck your daughter.”

Without allowing me time to reply, the villain leaps upon her, has his satellites 
hold her for him, and embuggers her with the very speed of light. My poor 
Marianne’s shrill screams are all the warning I receive of the dreadful outrage 
perpetrated against her.

“My stars, Noirceuil! What are you about?”

“I am ass-fucking your child. This had to happen, did it not? and is it not better
that it be your friend rather than some other who plucks the flower?”

After having mercilessly scraped and torn the little dear, he withdraws from her
bleeding anus, still in possession of his energies; and casting haggard glances at 
the two harlots, he proclaims his intention to sacrifice one of them. The luckless 
girl clutches-his knees, implores him, fails to move him: she is seized, sat astride 
the top of a double ladder and tied fast. Noirceuil, in a chair placed five or six 
yards away, holds a cord whose other end is attached to the girl. Theodora and 
Laïs, kneeling, frig his prick, balls, and asshole; the two cannibals fuck me within 
his view; the remaining whore is bound head downward to a stake, and in that 
awkward posture awaits events. Twenty times the rascal tugs on the cord, twenty 
times the victim comes crashing down, is set back upright, pulled down again, 
and this abominable game does not end until she has broken both her legs and 
had her skull cracked. These infamies having heated the libertine, he instructs an 
aide to blindfold the other whore, and decrees that each of us inflict several 
wounds upon her. The ordeal will cease when she succeeds in guessing the name 
of her aggressor: choking on her own blood, she collapses before she is able to 
identify any of the hands that are causing her woe. Upon Noirceuil’s orders and 
following a suggestion originating with me, these two wretches, out of whom not 
all the breath has fled, are hung up inside the chimney for a slow roasting above 
the flames and asphyxiation from the smoke.

Drunk with lust, Noirceuil roves in a rage about the salon; his lunatic stares fall
upon the five objects still at the disposition of his lewd fury: my two tribades, my 
daughter, and his two sons. Everything leads me to suspect that he is ready to 
immolate them all at once.

“O infamy on high!” he shouts, “remove these curbs that make me little, when 
I would imitate thee and commit evil. I ask of thee no faculty for virtue, but canst 
not at least communicate to me thy mighty capacities for crime, and let me wreak
havoc after thy example? Ah, dog of heaven, for one instant, if thou darest, put 
thy lightning into my hands, and once I have destroyed mortals, thou shalt see 
my loins grow gladder still as I hurl the bolt that blasts thy execrable existence.”

With these words he leaps upon his son Phaon, embuggers him, has himself 
embuggered, and orders me, while I am being frigged by Theodora, to tear the 
living heart out of the child he is fucking, and to give it to him that he may eat it: 
the villain devours it, and at the same moment he discharges, drives a dagger 
into the breast of his other son.

“Well, Juliette! Look, my angel, and tell me, have I not done a fine day’s work?
Say, am I steeped enough in blood and atrocities?”

“You make me shudder, Noirceuil, but I imitate you withal.”

“Think not, Juliette, that the orgy is over, nor that I am done.”

His glittering eyes fall once again upon my daughter; his erection is that of a 
maniac; he seizes Marianne, has her pinioned, and encunts her.

“By God,” he cries, “this little creature makes my head spin, damn me if ’tis 
not true. What do you mean to do with her, Juliette? You are not the sentimental 
fool, you are no

t the idiot to have feelings for this loathsome spawn of your abominable 
husband’s blessed testicle; so sell her to me. Sell me the slut, Juliette, I wish to 
buy her from you; let’s both soil ourselves, you in the pretty sin of vending me 
your child, I in the still more rousing one of paying you only in order to 
assassinate her. Yes, Juliette, yes, let’s assassinate your daughter”—and here he 
finished wiping his prick and nodded toward it, gleaming and purple—“consider, if 
you will, how this idea inflames my senses. Stay, Juliette, have yourself fucked 
before you pronounce, answer me not till you have a pair of pricks in your body.”

Crime holds no terrors for anyone when in the act of fucking; and one must 
always ponder its attractions when swimming in tides of sperm. Pricks penetrate 
me, I am fucked; a second time Noirceuil inquires to what purpose I wish to put 
my daughter.

“O villainous soul!” I cry, loosing discharge upon discharge, “star of perfidy, 
your ascendant places all else in eclipse, smothers all else in me save the longing 
for crime and infamy…. With Marianne do you what you please, whoreson knave,”
say I, beside myself, “she is yours.”

No sooner does he hear these words than he decunts, takes hold of the poor 
child in his two wicked hands, and hurls her, naked, into the roaring fire; I step 
forward, and second him; I too pick up a poker and thwart the unhappy creature’s
natural efforts at escape, for she thrashes convulsively in the flames: we drive her
back, I say; we are being frigged, both of us, then we are being sodomized. 
Marianne is being roasted alive; and we go off to spend the rest of the night in 
each other’s arms, congratulating each other upon the scene whose episodes and 
circumstances complement a crime which, atrocious perhaps, is yet, in our shared
opinion, too mild.

“So tell me now,” said Noirceuil, “is there anything in the world to match the 
divine pleasures crime yields? Is there anything that can compete with the 
criminal humor? Beyond the criminal sensation is there anything that produces 
such vibrations in us?”

“No, my friend, not to my knowledge.”

“Then let us live in crime forever; and may nothing in all Nature ever succeed 
in converting us to different principles. He is not a man to be envied who, smitten 
by remorse, undertakes the equally baneful and imprudent and needless retreat; 
for, irresolute, pusillanimous in his acts, he will be no happier in his new career 
than he was in the one he renounces. Happiness is dependent upon energetic 
principles, and there can be none for him who wavers all his life.”

We spent a week at Noirceuil’s country manor and accomplished a few new 
infamies every day. During that stay he urged me to try one of the passions of the
Empress Theodora, Justinian’s wife. I lay down upon the ground; two rustics 
sprinkled barleycorn upon my bush and upon the labia of my sex; a dozen large 
geese were brought up from the barnyard, and they began to peck at the seeds 
with their beaks, causing me such furious irritation in those parts that, when it 
was all over, I was absolutely obliged to fuck. Noirceuil, who had foreseen these 
results, presented me to fifty of his peasants, who performed prodigies with me. 
He too wished to try the geese; he had them feed from his ass, and afterward 
proclaimed that an ass-pecking procured sensations keener than those of the 
whip. To these debauches he added that of ordering both the schoolmaster and 
schoolmistress of the town to furnish him thirty pupils of the sex each taught. He 
held a mixed class at his castle, had the little girls depucelated by the little boys; 
then finished by whipping, sodomizing, and, at last, poisoning the lot.

“My friend,” I said to Noirceuil, “these are all trifles; can we not advance a step
and crown our orgies by some truly brilliant action? These townspeople have no 
supply of water but what comes from their wells; I have something of Durand’s 
confection which will envenom the entire population inside two days: between my 
women and me, we shall, I promise you, spread devastation everywhere.” And I 
was frigging Noirceuil while making that proposal to him. He proved unable to 
refuse.

“Fuck,” was the response of the rake, helpless to contain his sperm at the 
announcement of such a scheme, “oh, by God! Juliette, ’tis a very curious 
imagination Nature gave you. Do whatever you like, my angel, the floods you are 
milking from me signify my acceptance.”

I was as good as my word. All had been stricken four days later: fifteen 
hundred souls were interred, and almost as many were reduced to a state of 
agony so dire that they were heard pleading for death to come. The entire 
disaster was attributed to an epidemic. The ignorance of the provincial doctors 
protected us even from suspicion; and we returned to the capital after an 
expedition which had cost us discharges beyond counting.

Such is the happy position you see me in, my friends; I have a furious 
fondness for crime, I would not dream of pretending otherwise; crime, and 
nothing else, irritates my senses, I shall go on professing its maxims down to my 
dying hour. Exempt from all religious dreads, able, by discreet procedures and my
wealth, to avoid difficulties with the law, what is the power, human or divine, that 
could impose a check upon my desires? The past encourages me, the present 
electrifies me, and I have little fear for the future; and my hope is that the rest of 
my life shall by far surpass the extravagances of my youth. Nature created human
beings to no other end than that they amuse themselves on earth, and make it 
their playground, its inhabitants their toys; pleasure is the universal motor and 
law, it shall always be mine. Too bad for the victims, victims there must be; all 
the world would fly to pieces were it not for the sublime economy that assures 
equilibrium; only through acts of wickedness is the natural balance maintained, 
only thereby does Nature recover ground lost to the incursions of virtue. Thus, we
are obeying her when we deliver ourselves unto evil; our resistance thereto is the
sole crime she can never pardon in us. Oh, my friends! let us take these principles
well to heart; in their exercise lie all the sources of human happiness.

Thus did Madame de Lorsange conclude the story of her adventures, whose 
scandalous details had more than once wrung bitterest tears from the interesting 
Justine. Otherwise stirred were the Chevalier and the Marquis; the straining and 
full-colored pricks they brought to light proved how different were the sentiments 
that animated them. They were in the midst of complotting some horror when a 
footman brought word of the return of Noirceuil and Chabert: they, the reader will
recall, had been to the country for a few days, leaving the Comtesse to acquaint 
her two other friends with facts of which those other gentlemen had for a long 
time had cognizance.

The tears which had just wet our unhappy Justine’s cheeks, her charming air …
her sorrowing mien, the afflictions it told of; her native timidity, that touching 
virtuousness shadowed in all her features, everything about her incensed 
Noirceuil and the churchman, who must absolutely submit this luckless creature 
to their filthy and ferocious caprices. They took her off to a separate chamber 
while the Marquis, the Chevalier, and Madame de Lorsange gave themselves over 
to other but no less bizarre, crapulous, lewd frolics with the numerous lust-objects
which that château had in plentiful store.

It was toward six o’clock and the day was waning when they all reassembled 
again, and deliberation was entered into regarding Justine’s fate. In view of 
Madame de Lorsange’s refusal to keep such a prude under her roof, the debate 
was whether to fling the poor soul out of doors or immolate her in the course of 
divers orgies. The Marquis, Chabert, and the Chevalier, more than sated with the 
creature, stood firmly for the latter alternative; Noirceuil, who had listened to the 
opinions of the others, now asked to be heard.

“My friends,” he said to that joyous society, “in cases like the present one I 
have often found it extremely instructive to allow Nature to take her own course. 
There is, you have noticed, a storm brewing in the sky; let us entrust this 
personage to the elements. I shall embrace the true faith if they spare her.”

This proposal met with general acclaim.

“I love such ideas,” said Madame de Lorsange, “let us carry it out with no 
delay.”

Lightning glitters, the winds howl, the clouds boil as though in a caldron, all the
firmament is

seething. One might have said that Nature, tired of her works, was readying to
confound all her elements in order to force them to adopt new forms. Justine is 
shown the door; not only is she not given as much as a penny, she is sent forth 
stripped of the little that remained to her. Bewildered, humiliated by such 
ingratitude and so many abominations, but too content to escape what could have
been worse still, the child of woe, murmuring thanks to God, totters past the 
château gates and down the lane leading to the highroad…. Scarcely does she 
reach it when a flash of lightning breaks from the heavens, and she is struck 
down, smitten by a thunderbolt that pierces her through.

“She is dead!” cry the villains, clapping their hands and hastening to where 
Justine lies upon the ground. “Come quickly, Madame, come contemplate 
heaven’s handiwork, come see how the powers above reward piety and goodness.
Love virtue, we are told, and behold the fate reserved for its most devoted 
servitors.”

Our four libertines surround the corpse; and although it has been horribly 
disfigured, frightful designs nevertheless shape themselves in libertine minds, the 
shattered vestiges of the defunct Justine become the object of lewd covetings. 
The infamous Juliette excites her friends as they snatch the clothes from the 
body. The lightning, entering by way of the mouth, had burst out through the 
vagina; fierce jests are made upon the path by which the fire of heaven chose to 
visit the victim.

“Yes,” Noirceuil said, “praise be to God, he merits it; there you have the proof 
of his decency: he left the ass untouched. It is still a beautiful thing, this sublime 
behind which caused so much fuck to flow; does it not tempt you, Chabert?”

And by way of reply the mischievous Abbé inserts his prick to the height of the 
balls in that lifeless hulk. His example is shortly followed by the others; unto her 
ashes they all four insult that dear girl, one by one; the execrable Juliette, 
watching them, frigs herself without pause; and finally the company retires, 
abandoning the corpse by the wayside. Woeful and ill-starred creature, ’twas 
written on high that not even the repose of death would safeguard you from the 
atrocities of crime and the perversity of mankind.

“Truly,” declares Madame de Lorsange as the friends walk back to the château, 
“this most recent episode more than ever confirms me in the career I have 
pursued up until now. O Nature!” she exclaimed in her enthusiasm, “it is then 
necessary to thy plan, this crime against which in their stupidity a multitude of 
fools inveigh; thou dost desire crime then, since thy hand punishes them who 
dread it or refrain from committing it. Oh, these late events are most welcome, 
they consecrate my happiness and perfect my tranquillity.”

Only a few moments after the party had re-entered the gate a coach rolled up,
having arrived by a different road; it drove into the courtyard just as the five 
friends got there. From it stepped down a tall woman, very well attired; Juliette 
went to greet her.

The newcomer, just heavens! was no other than Durand, the bosom companion
of Madame de Lorsange, she whom the Venetian Inquisition had sentenced to die,
and whom Juliette believed she had seen hanging from the ceiling in that terrible 
courtroom. “Dearest soul!” she cried, casting herself into her friend’s embrace, 
“by what stroke of fortune … great God, explain this to me … can I believe my 
eyes?”

A drawing room is opened, everyone enters, sits down, and in silence listens 
while the most mysterious of adventures is clarified.

“My dear Juliette,” Durand began, and her voice and manner were composed, 
“standing before you is that very one whom you thought done horribly to death 
and forever lost, and who, by dint of her intrigues, her industry, her knowledge, 
now returns in greater fortune and better health than ever, since over and above 
the considerable riches that are hers to keep she has the further happiness of 
bringing you what the authorities confiscated from you in Venice. Exactly, 
Juliette,” that loyal friend continued, depositing a large bundle of papers upon the 
table, “your fifteen hundred thousand livres a year are there, restored to you; 
that was all I was able to salvage; enjoy it in peace, my dear, and grant me 
nothing in return save the certitude of spending the remainder of my days in your
society.”

“Oh, my friends!” cried Juliette, wild from joy, “will he be wrong, the author 
who someday writes the story of my life, if he titles it The Prosperities of Vice! 
Make haste, Durand, tell us your wonderful tale, and be persuaded, let me say it 
at once, that ’tis I who beg you never again to leave us so long as you live.”

Whereupon that forever celebrated woman, as succinctly as she could, 
informed the company that by promising to lend her services to the rulers of 
Venice, she obtained in exchange the assurance that another woman would be 
put to death in her stead, the example being necessary for Juliette whose 
properties the Council wished to acquire, and whose departure from the city was 
esteemed desirable, as a measure of prudence. The feint having met with 
complete success, she had then gone on to satisfy the Inquisitors, and produce in 
Venice a pestilence that carried off twenty thousand people; the operation 
terminated, she had asked, as a bonus, that her friend’s belongings be remitted 
to her, the request had been accorded; her uppermost thought was then to 
escape from the city without delay, firmly convinced that these perfidious 
Venetians, nourished upon Machiavelli’s principles, would rid themselves of their 
accomplice at the first opportunity.

“And so I rushed hither, my dearest, in search of you,” Durand continued; “I 
contribute to your happiness, I ask no more. As do I, laugh at fate, which saved 
me twice from the gallows: assuredly, I was not born for the rope. What destiny 
holds in store for me I know not; but when my hour comes, let it overtake me as 
I lie in my cherished Juliette’s arms, let it be so and I shall endure death without 
a murmur.”

And the two friends, clasping each other, were fifteen minutes exchanging 
avowals of the sincerest friendship, confidence, and devotion which vice prizes 
quite as much as virtue, whatever may say the churlish sectators of that dismal 
and tedious divinity. Everybody was partaking in the two women’s joyous 
effusions when there was a great clattering in the courtyard as a courier from 
Versailles rode up; he asked for Monsieur de Noirceuil; and when presented to 
him, handed a sealed order to our libertine.

“Great heaven!” the latter exclaimed, having perused the document, “it has 
been decreed, my dear Juliette, that every kind of good fortune be lavished upon 
us this lucky day. The minister is no more; here is the letter, in the King’s hand, 
commanding me to hie myself back posthaste to the Court, where I am to assume
the reins of government. What an ocean of felicities this news promises us! I go 
up to the capital, come with me, both of you,” Noirceuil continued, addressing 
Juliette and Durand, “I want to have you by me forever; and indeed, how can I 
forego your assistance once I am at the helm of the ship I am about to steer! 
You, Chabert, I give you an archdiocese; Marquis, I name you Ambassador to 
Constantinople; for you, Chevalier, it’s four hundred thousand livres a year: you’ll 
remain in Paris to superintend our affairs. Come, good friends, let us all rejoice 
together, from all this I see nothing but happiness accruing to all save only 
virtue—but we would perhaps not dare say so were it a novel we were writing.”

“Why dread publishing it,” said Juliette, “when the truth itself, and the truth 
alone, lays bare the secrets of Nature, however mankind may tremble before 
those revelations. Philosophy must never shrink from speaking out.”

The company left the following morning; greatest success crowned our heroes 
for the next ten years. At the end of that space, the death of Madame de 
Lorsange caused her to disappear from the world’s scene, just as it is customary 
that all brilliant things on earth finally fade away. Unique in her kind, that woman 
died without having left any record of the events which distinguished the latter 
part of her life, and so it is that no writer will be able to chronicle it for the public. 
Those who might care to attempt its reconstruction will do little else than offer us 
their dreams in the place of realities, and between the two the difference is 
immense in the eyes of persons of taste and particularly in the eyes of those who 
have found the reading of this work of some interest.


Bibliography

I. WORKS PUBLISHED DURING THE AUTHOR’S LIFETIME

LITERARY WORKS

1. Justine, ou les Malheurs de la Vertu. En Hollande, Chez les Libraires associés
[Paris, Girouard], 1791. Two volumes, 8vo. Frontispiece by Chéry. During Sade’s 
lifetime, there were six further printings between the initial publication and 1801. 
Sade’s re-arrest that year put an end to the reprintings. These subsequent 
editions were:

1) En Hollande [Paris, Girouard], 1791. Two volumes, 12mo. Certain copies of 
this edition include twelve erotic engravings.

2) À Londres [Paris, Cazin], 1792. Two volumes, 18mo. Frontispiece and five 
engravings.

3) Troisième [fourth] édition corrigée et augmentée. Philadelphie [Paris], 1794.
Two volumes, 18mo. Frontispiece and five engravings.

4) À Londres [Paris], 1797. Four volumes, 18mo. Further augmented edition. 
Six erotic engravings.

5) En Hollande [Paris], 1800. Four volumes, 16mo. Presented as the Troisième 
édition corrigée et augmentée, this is actually a reprint of the original edition.

6) En Hollande [Paris], 1801. Four volumes, 16mo. Also presented as the 
Troisième édition corrigée et augmentée, this was a reprinting of the 1800 
edition.(1)

2. Aline et Valcour, ou le Roman philosophique. Écrit à la Bastille un an avant la
Révolution de France. Orné de quatorze gravures. Par le citoyen S***. À Paris, 
chez Girouard, Libraire, rue du Bout-du-Monde, n° 47, 1793. Eight volumes, 
18mo.

There are actually three different editions of this work, bearing different dates 
and, in some instances, containing sixteen rather than twelve engravings. Sade 
announced(2) the book would appear at Easter of 1791, but the instability of the 
times and the death of Girouard beneath the guillotine in 1794 kept the book 
from appearing until 1795, which date should be taken as the date of reference of
the original edition.

3. La Philosophie dans le boudoir. Ouvrage posthume de l’auteur de “Justine.” 
À Londres, aux dépens de la Compagnie, MDCCXCV. Two volumes, 18mo. 
Frontispiece and four erotic engravings.

4. La Nouvelle Justine, ou les Malheurs de la Vertu. Ouvrage orné d’un 
frontispice et de quarante sujets gravés avec soin. En Hollande [Paris], 1797. Four
volumes, 18mo. These four volumes comprise the first part of the definitive 
edition of this work, of which the second part, in six volumes, bears the title:

5. La Nouvelle Justine, ou les Malheurs de la Vertu, suivie de l’Histoire de 
Juliette, sa soeur [ou les Prospérités du vice.] Ouvrage orné d’un frontispice et de 
cent sujets gravés avec soin. En Hollande [Paris], 1797.

6. Oxtiern, ou les malheurs du libertinage, drame en trois actes et en prose par
D.-A.-F. S. Représenté au Théâtre Molière, à Paris, en 1791; et à Versailles, sur 
celui de la Société Dramatique, le 22 frimaire, l’an 8 de la République. À 
Versailles, chez Blaizot, Libraire, rue Satory. An huitième [1800]. One volume, 
8vo, 48 pages.

7. Les Crimes de l’Amour, Nouvelles héroïques et tragiques; précédées d’une 
Idée sur les romans et ornées de gravures, par D.-A.-F. Sade, auteur d’ “Aline et 
Valcour.” À Paris, chez Massé, éditeur-propriétaire, rue Helvétius n° 580. An VIII 
[1800]. Four volumes, 12mo. Four frontispieces. This work contains eleven 
stories, as follows:

Vol. I—Juliette et Raunai, ou la Conspiration d’Amboise, nouvelle historique; La
Double Épreuve.

Vol. II—Miss Henriette Stralson, ou les Effets du désespoir, nouvelle anglaise; 
Faxelange, ou les Torts de l’ambition; Florville et Couvral, ou le Fatalisme.

Vol. III—Rodrigue, ou la Tour enchantée, conte allégorique; Laurence et 
Antonio, nouvelle italienne; Ernestine, nouvelle suédoise.

Vol. IV—Dorgeville, ou le Criminel par Vertu; la Comtesse de Sancerre, ou la 
Rivale de sa fille, anecdote de la Cour de Bourgogne; Eugénie de Franval.

8. L’Auteur de “Les Crimes de l’Amour” à Villeterque, folliculaire. Paris, Massé, 
an XI [1803]. 12mo, 20 pages.

9. La Marquise de Gange. Paris, Béchet, Libraire, quai des Augustins, n° 63, 
1813. Two volumes, 12mo.


POLITICAL PAMPHLETS

1. Adresse d’un citoyen de Paris, au roi des Français. Paris, Girouard, no date 
[1791]. 8vo, 8 pages.

2. Section des Piques. Observations présentées à l’Assemblée administrative 
des hôpitaux. 28 octobre 1792. De l’Imprimerie de la Section des Piques, rue 
Saint-Fiacre, n°2., 8vo, 4 pages.

3. Section des Piques. Idée sur le mode de la sanction des Loix; par un citoyen
de cette Section. De l’Imprimerie de la rue Saint-Fiacre n°2, 2 novembre 1792. 
8vo, 16 pages.

4. Pétition des Sections de Paris à la Convention nationale. De l’imprimerie de 
la Section des Piques. No date [1793]. 8vo, 4 pages.

5. Section des Piques. Extraits des Régistres des délibérations de l’Assemblée 
générale et permanente de la Section des Piques. De l’Imprimerie de la Section 
des Piques, 1793. 8vo, 8 pages.

6. La Section des Piques à ses Frères et Amis de la Société de la Liberté et de 
l’Égalité, à Saintes, département de la Charente-Inférieure. De l’Imprimerie de la 
Section des Piques, 1793. 8vo, 4 pages.

7. Section des Piques. Discours prononcé par la Section des Piques, aux mânes
de Marat et de Le Pelletier, par Sade, citoyen de cette section et membre de la 
Société populaire. De l’Imprimerie de la Section des Piques, 1793. 8vo, 8 pages.

8. Pétition de la Section des Piques, aux représentans du peuple français. De 
l’Imprimerie de la Section des Piques, 1793. 8vo, 8 pages.

II. PRINCIPAL POSTHUMOUS PUBLICATIONS

1. Dorci ou la Bizarrerie du sort, conte inédit par le marquis de Sade, publié 
sur le manuscrit avec une notice sur l’auteur [signed A. F. (Anatole France)]. 
Paris, Charavay frères, éditeurs, 1881. 16mo, 64 pages.

2. Historiettes, Contes et fabliaux de Donatien-Alphonse-François, marquis de 
Sade, publiés pour la première fois sur les manuscrits autographes inédits par 
Maurice Heine. À Paris, pour les membres de la Société du Roman Philosophique, 
1926. 4to, 340 pages.

Contains the following works: HISTORIETTES—Le Serpent; La Saillie gasconne;
L’Heureuse Feinte; Le M. . . puni; L’Évêque embourbé; Le Revenant; Les 
Harangueurs provençaux; Attrapez-moi toujours de même; L’Époux complaisant; 
Aventure incompréhensible; La Fleur de châtaignier. CONTES ET 
FABLIAUX—L’Instituteur philosophe; La Prude, ou la Rencontre imprévue; Émilie 
de Tourville, ou la Cruauté fraternelle; Augustine de Villeblanche, ou le 
Stratagème de l’amour; Soit fait ainsi qu’il est requis; Le Président mystifié; La 
Marquise de Thélème, ou les Effets du libertinage; Le Talion; Le Cocu de 
lui-même, ou le Raccommodement imprévu; Il y a place pour deux; L’Époux 
corrigé; le Mari prêtre, conte provençal; La Châtelaine de Longueville, ou la 
Femme vengée; Les Filous. APPENDICE—Les Dangers de la bienfaisance (Dorci).

3. Dialogue entre un prêtre et un moribond, par Donatien-Alphonse-François, 
marquis de Sade, publié pour la première fois sur le manuscrit autographe inédit, 
avec un avant-propos et des notes par Maurice Heine. [Paris], Stendhal et 
Compagnie, 1926. Small 4to, 62 pages.

4. Correspondance inédite du Marquis de Sade, de ses proches et de ses 
familiers, publiée avec une introduction, des annales et des notes par Paul 
Bourdin. Paris, Librairie de France, 1929. Small 4to, 452 pages.

5. Marquis de Sade. Les Infortunes de la Vertu. Texte établi sur le manuscrit 
original autographe et publié pour la première fois avec une introduction par 
Maurice Heine. Paris, Éditions Fourcade, 1930. 8vo, 206 pages.

6. Les 120 Journées de Sodome, ou l’École du libertinage, par le marquis de 
Sade. Édition critique établie sur le manuscrit original autographe par Maurice 
Heine. À Paris, par S. et C., aux dépens des Bibliophiles souscripteurs, 1931–
1935. Three volumes, 4to, 500 pages (uninterrupted pagination throughout the 
three volumes).(3)

7. Marquis de Sade. L’Aigle, Mademoiselle. . ., Lettres publiées pour la 
première fois sur les manuscrits autographes inédits avec une Préface et un 
Commentaire par Gilbert Lely. Paris, Les Éditions Georges Artigues, 1949. One 
volume, 16mo, 222 pages.

8. Marquis de Sade. Histoire secrète d’Isabelle de Bavière, reine de France. 
Publiée pour la première fois sur le manuscrit autographe inédit avec un 
avant-propos par Gilbert Lely. Paris, Librairie Gallimard, 1953. One volume, 16mo,
336 pages.

9. Marquis de Sade. Le Carillon de Vincennes. Lettres inédites publiées avec 
des notes par Gilbert Lely. Paris, “Arcanes,” 1953. One volume, 16mo, 106 pages.

10. Marquis de Sade. Cahiers personnels (1803–04). Publiés pour la première 
fois sur les manuscrits autographes inédits avec une préface et des notes par 
Gilbert Lely. Paris, Corréa, 1953. One volume, 12mo, 130 pages.

11. Marquis de Sade. Monsieur le 6. Lettres inédites (1778–1784) publiées et 
annotées par Georges Daumas. Preface de Gilbert Lely. Paris, Julliard, 1954. One 
volume, 16mo, 288 pages.

12. Marquis de Sade. Cent onze Notes pour La Nouvelle Justine. Collection “Le 
Terrain vague,” no. IV. [Paris, 1956.] Small (4)to, 158 pages (unnumbered).

13. Marquis de Sade. Voyage d’Italie, précédé des Premières oeuvres, suivi des
opuscules sur le théâtre. Publiés pour la première fois sur les manuscrits 
autographs inédits par Gilbert Lely et Georges Daumas. Textes critiques par Pierre
Klossowski, Roland Barthes, Hubert Damisch, Philippe Sollers, Michel Tort et 
Pierre Fedida. Paris, Tchou, éditeur, 1967. One volume, 16mo, 656 pages. With an
exhaustive bibliography by Jean-Claude Zylberstein.


III. PRINCIPAL UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPTS

1. Les Jumelles ou le Choix difficile. Two-act comedy in verse.

2. Le Prévaricateur ou le Magistrat du temps passé. Five-act comedy in verse.

3. Jeanne Laisné, ou le Siège de Beauvais. Five-act tragedy in verse.

4. L’École des jaloux ou la Folle Épreuve. One-act comedy in vers libres.

5. Le Misanthrope par amour ou Sophie et Desfrancs. Five-act comedy in vers 
libres.

6. Le Capricieux, ou l’Homme inégal. Five-act comedy in verse.

7. Les Antiquaires. One-act comedy in prose.

8. Henriette et Saint-Clair, ou la Force du Sang. Prose

drama in five acts.

9. Franchise et Trahison. Prose drama in three acts.

10. Fanny, ou les Effets du désespoir. Prose drama in three acts.

11. La Tour mystérieuse. Opéra-comique in one act.

12. L’Union des arts ou les Ruses de l’amour. A play in alexandrines, prose, and
vers libres. In the Catalogue raisonné of 1788, this work was to comprise six 
parts and a final Divertissement. In the extant manuscript, the Divertissement 
and one play, La Fille malheureuse, are missing.

13. Les Fêtes de l’amitié. Two acts incorporating prose, verse, and vaudeville.

14. Adélaïde de Brunswick, princesse de Saxe, événement du XIe siècle. Novel.


IV. PRINCIPAL UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPTS EITHER DESTROYED OR NOT 
RECOVERED4

1. L’Égarement de l’infortune. Three-act prose drama.

2. Tancrède. One-act lyric play in alexandrine verse with music interspersed.

3. La Fille malheureuse. One-act comedy in prose.

4. La Fine Mouche. Tale.

5. L’Heureux Échange. Tale.

6. La Force du Sang. Tale.

7. Les Inconvénients de la pitié. Tale (first draft).

8. Les Reliques. Tale.

9. Le Curé de Prato. Tale.

10. La Marquise de Thélème. Tale (first draft).

11. Le Portefeuille d’un homme de lettres. Of this projected four-volume work, 
there exists eleven historiettes published by Maurice Heine, an avertissement, the
Voyage de Hollande included in the Voyage d’Italie published by Lely and Daumas,
and various fragments.

12. La Liste du Suisse. Historiette.

13. La Messe trop chère. Historiette.

14. L’Honnête Ivrogne. Historiette.

15. N’y allez jamais sans lumière. Historiette.

16. La justice vénitienne. Historiette.

17. Adélaïde de Miramas, ou le Fanatisme protestan. Historiette.

18. Les Délassements du libertin, ou la Neuvaine de Cythère.

19. Les Caprices, ou un peu de tout. Political work.

20. Les Conversations du château de Charmelle. The first draft of Les Journées
de Florbelle.

21. Les Journées de Florbelle, ou la Nature dévoilée, suivies des Mémoires de 
l’abbé de Modose et des Aventures d’Émilie de Volnange servant de preuves aux 
assertions, ouvrage orné de deux cents gravures. This immense work, contained 
in over a hundred notebooks, according to Lely’s estimate, was burned by the 
police at the request and in the presence of Sade’s son, Donatien-Claude-Armand.

22. Conrad ou le Jaloux en délire. Four-volume novel. The manuscript, 
according to La Biographie Michaud, was “seized at the time the Marquis was 
taken to Charenton.”

23. Marcel ou le Cordelier. Four-volume novel.

24. Mes Confessions. Two volumes. It is thought that diaries Sade kept during 
his thirteen-year detention at Vincennes and in the Bastille were to have provided 
some of the contents of these Confessions.

25. Réfutation de Fénelon. One-volume polemic.


Notes

Notes for Part Four

1 On page 192 of his Persian Letters.

2 These particulars, the reader should be reminded, were exact at the time 
Madame de Lorsange was touring in Italy. Everybody knows the changes that 
have transpired since, both in Florence and in other parts of this fine country. 
(Note added.)

3 Very great, says Machiavelli, must be the accomplice’s devotion if the 
personal danger he sees himself exposed to is not greater still; which proves that 
you must either select for your lieutenant someone related very intimately to you,
or destroy him when you are finished with his services. (Discorsi, Lib. III, Cap. 6.)

4 Everybody who has even a mild leaning toward crime recognizes his portrait 
in this paragraph; may he then extract all possible benefit from what precedes 
and from what follows it upon the way of living delightfully the kind of life Nature 
has appointed him to, and may he be persuaded that these counsels are those of 
a person-who speaks from experience.

5 We may elucidate this idea by saying that the good dinner may be the source
of some physical delight, and that saving the lives of the three million victims 
would cause only moral delight, even to an honest spirit; which establishes a 
great difference between these two pleasures; for moral delights are mere 
intellectual enjoyments, uniquely dependent upon opinion, arbitrary and doubtful, 
and this to the point that a vicious spirit senses none of the enjoyments of virtue; 
corporeal delights, however, are physical sensations, upon which opinion has 
absolutely no bearing at all, and which are similarly felt by all human beings and 
for that matter by animals too; whence it proceeds that preserving those three 
million people from death would be a pleasure no more substantial than the flimsy
prejudice it is founded upon, and which only a small fraction of humanity would 
feel; while the dinner would be a pleasure felt by everybody, and hence far 
superior; wherefrom it is plain to be seen that were the choice even between a 
gumdrop and the entire universe, any wavering would be equally illogical and 
inexcusable. This argument serves to demonstrate the immense advantages of 
vice over virtue.

6 There is truly no limit to what one may obtain from women simply by causing
them to discharge. Experience shows that one has only to make their cunts leak a
few drops of fuck, and they are ready and eager for the most revolting atrocities; 
and if those women who have a native fondness for hideous crimes cared to 
reflect a little upon their emotions, they would admit the astonishingly powerful 
connection that exists between physical emotions and moral aberrations. The 
wiser for recognizing this, the sum of their pleasures would henceforth increase 
by leaps and bounds, since they would correctly situate the germ of 
voluptuousness in the disorders which they could from then on carry to whatever 
extreme their lust might demand. I give an illustration. Arsinoe had but a single 
pleasure, that of fucking. A libertine lover mounts her; and chooses the moment 
of her ecstasy to suggest a criminal scheme to her. Whereat Arsinoe notices that 
her joys increase tenfold; she does what he proposes, and the heat engendered 
by this crime adds to the fire of her lust: Arsinoe has thus enriched her repertory 
by one pleasure the more. Any woman may do as much; all of them should: 
imitating Arsinoe, to the allurements of a first form of enjoyment they too will add
the spice of a second. Every immorality leads to another, and the more of them 
you associate to fucking, the happier you must necessarily become.

7 “See his Collected Verse, Vol. I, p. 28, last edition.

8 Jacques Vallée, Seigneur des Barreaux, whose connections with Théophile de
Viau were intimate, was born at Paris in the year 1602. The impunity and the 
libertinage of these two rakes was quite unparalleled. The well-known sonnet 
alluded to here (and it is one of the most execrable pieces of poetry to be found 
in that or any other age) was, it is said, composed during an illness; Vallée 
afterward disavowed it. And indeed it is not a production any healthy man would 
own to. Paraphrased in this manner, our readers may perhaps find it somewhat 
less unendurable.

9 Cardinal de Bernis addressed the convives in Italian; Juliette has rendered 
his scandalous verses into French. Here we reproduce her version, which reveals 
much poetic skill, much verve. Even if these were not entirely lost in English 
translation, they would be less than sufficiently appreciated by the English reader 
whose susceptibilities they might offend.—Tr.

10 Chaufour: everybody knows the story of this hero of buggery, burned 
publicly at the stake on the Place de Grève by judgment and order of the whores 
whose power was uncontested in Paris at that time.

11 That belonging to John the Baptist, the beloved bardash of Mary’s son.

12 He is usually regarded

as the patriarch of monks and the institutor of their rules.

13 Last king of the Jews.

14 Nine out of every ten men who take it upon themselves to frig women are 
less than adequately convinced of their patient’s urgent need at such time to have
pleasure penetrate into her through every pore. He who would procure her a 
voluptuous emission must hence manage in such sort that he keeps his tongue in 
her mouth, is able to fondle her breasts, has a finger in her vagina, another upon 
her clitoris, a third in her asshole. Idle were his expectations of attaining the mark
who neglects but one of these circumstances. Whence it is that at least three are 
required in order to drive a woman truly out of her mind.

15 So are those officers denominated who stand the watch and arrest thieves 
in Rome.

16 See his treatise on pleasure.

17 The sustained pleasure it affords is uniquely responsible for the custom the 
Asiatics have of keeping women under lock and key: you’ll not suppose that 
jealousy is at the root of this practice? Can jealousy exist in the heart of a man 
who has two or three hundred wives?

18 This project was actually conceived while I was at Rome, and I alter nothing
but the names of the actors.

19 Let me render thee this homage, charming and never to be forgotten 
friend. Thy name is the only one I have been unable to take it upon myself to 
disguise in these memoirs. Thou wert ever the philosopher, that is thy role in my 
writings and thou must surely forgive me for my eagerness to make thy identity 
known to the whole world.

20 The more unusual it was, the more pleasure it was bound to give, of this 
none of the rational participants could be in any doubt; for thus it is with all 
lubricities. No passion in the world demands so many aliments as that one; there 
is none that needs to be tended with more care: the more it asks, the more one 
must give it; and what we receive therefrom depends strictly upon what we 
sacrifice to it.

21 And what passeth all understanding is that the Jacobins of the French 
Revolution wanted to smash the altars of a God who spoke precisely their own 
language. Yet more extraordinary, they who detest and want to destroy the 
Jacobins act in the name of a God who speaks like the Jacobins. If this be not 
here the ne plus ultra of human folly, I ask you where it is to be found. 
(Supplementary note.)

22 The Peter of the Christians is nothing else than the Annac, the Hermes, and 
the Janus of the Ancients; all individuals to whom the gift of opening doors to 
some beatitude or other was attributed. In Phoenician or in Hebrew the word 
peter means to open; and Jesus, playing thereupon, could say to Peter: “Since 
thou art Peter”—that is to say, he who opens—“thou shalt open the gates to the 
kingdom of heaven,” just as taking from peter only its meaning of the Oriental 
word kepha, which means building stone, he had said: “Thou art Peter, and upon 
this rock I will build my church.” Mine was once used to denote what is brought 
forth from a mine; similarly, may they not have called opening what was 
extracted from the quarry, to which the name opening was formerly given? Thus, 
the words to open and stone may have had the same meaning, whence the pun 
made by Jesus, that imbecile who, as everyone knows, never opened his mouth 
but riddles, anagrams, or puzzles came out of it. His talk is all tedious allegory, 
where places are joined on to names, names to places, and the facts always 
sacrificed to illusions. At any rate, this apostolic word is a very ancient one, dating
from long before the days of Christianity’s Peter. Most mythologists have 
recognized it as the title of a person appointed to care for the posterula.

23 There was then in Rome a certain Gerardius Brazet, regarded as the Holy 
See’s official poisoner; he had envenomed eight popes, upon the orders of those 
who were anxious to succeed them. The Vatican pontiffs of that time, says 
Baronius, were such great villains that never before in any age had the like of 
them been seen, nor so many scenes of horror.

24 It is of him they said that he mounted the throne like a fox, reigned there 
like a lion, and died like a dog.

25 Of her the poet Jacopo Sannazaro, the Neapolitan Petrarch, tells us:

Hoc jacet in tumula Lucretia nomine sedra,

Thaïs Alexandria filia, sponsa nurus.

26 But let us translate straight out of Tacitus: “He caused the Christians to be 
put cruelly to death for having set fire to Rome. These Christians,” the historian 
continues, “were people hated for their infamy, and because of a rogue named 
Christ, their spiritual leader, who had been executed under the reign of Tiberius. 
But after having been repressed for a while this pernicious sect bred up a stench 
anew, not only in its place of origin but in Rome itself, whither all roads lead and, 
as it were, all sewers too. First to be seized were those who professed openly to 
belong to this vile cult, their avowals led to the arrest of a great crowd of similar 
wretches, who were convicted of atrocious crimes. Hatred for them was general 
and unbounded, whereof the proof is the disgraceful deaths they were made to 
die, covered by the skins of wild beasts and left to the dogs, or affixed to crosses 
and left to rot, or again burned in heaps like faggots, to light the streets and 
highways (it is the source of the expression lux in luce). Nero willingly lent his 
gardens for these spectacles. He would be seen, dressed as a driver, mingling 
among the people or seated in a chariot. Those executions of Christians amused 
him hugely, he often took a direct hand in them.”

Listen now to what Lucian tells us of this same sect: “It is an assembly of 
ragged vagabonds, fanatical of eye, frenzied of gesture, uttering moans, doing 
contortions, swearing by the son begot of the father, predicting a thousand awful 
calamities to the Empire, reviling all those not of their belief.” Such was the 
Christian religion from the very outset: a horde of troublemakers and scurvy 
fellows followed about by whores. The woes of this rabble finally interested the 
weaker members of society, as usually happens; had the sect not been 
persecuted it would have faded away and never anymore been heard of. It is 
incredible that one such heap of impostures, atrocities, and gibberish could have 
held our forefathers spellbound for ages. When shall we become wise enough to 
be irrevocably and forever done with all this?

27 My intimates know that throughout my Italian travels I was accompanied by
a most attractive and engaging woman; that simply out of lewd philosophic 
principle I introduced this person to the Tuscan Grand Duke, to the Vicar of Christ,
to Princess Borghese, to their Royal Highnesses the King and Queen of Naples. 
They may therefore be perfectly certain that everything I say relating to the 
voluptuous side of the journey is authentic, that I have depicted nothing but the 
accustomed behavior and characteristic attitudes of the persons I mention, and 
that had they been witness to these scenes, they could not have rendered 
sincerer accounts of them. I take this occasion to assure the reader that the same
applies to the descriptive part of my narrative; it is scrupulously exact.

28 Nearly all the world’s peoples have enjoyed the right of life and death over 
their offspring. This right is perfectly natural; and of what may one better dispose 
than of what one has given? If there could be gradations of the alleged crime of 
murder, that is, if one could rank in their order of greater or lesser evil, things 
which contain none, infanticide would surely stand at the bottom of the scale: the 
prompt facility every man possesses to repair this trifling misdemeanor entirely 
effaces the little amount of badness in it. From a narrow study of Nature one finds
that our first instinctive urge is to destroy our issue, and destroyed it would 
infallibly be if pride did not often advocate sparing it.

29 Regeneration or, better still, transformation is the term we ought to use for 
this change we see take place in matter; it is neither depleted, nor wasted, nor 
spoiled, nor corrupted by the different forms it assumes; and one of the main 
causes of its durability and vigor may perhaps consist in the seeming destructions
which subtilize it, accord it greater freedom to form fresh miracles. Matter, in fine,
does not destroy itself to change from and assume new modification, any more 
than does, as Voltaire says (and it is from him this note is extracted), a cube of 
wax you melt into a round puddle smash in changing shape. Nothing less out of 
the ordinary than these perpetual r

esurrections, and there is nothing stranger in being born twice than once. 
Wherever you bend your glance in the world, you encounter resurrection: 
caterpillars resuscitate as butterflies, an orange pip you plant resuscitates as an 
orange tree, all the animals buried in the ground resuscitate as grass, as 
potatoes, as worms, and nourish other animals whereof they rapidly form part of 
the substance, etc., etc., etc.

30 The penalty decreed against child-murdering mothers is an unexampled 
atrocity. Who then has a greater right to dispose of this fruit than she who carries 
it in her womb? If in all the world there is an article of property to which no 
outside claim can be fair, it is surely this one. To interfere with the usage a woman
chooses to make of it is stupidity carried beyond any conceivable extreme. 
Indeed, one must set a very high price by the human species to punish an 
unhappy creature, simply because she has not been concerned to double her 
existence nor eager to confirm the gift she unwillingly prepared. And what a 
curious calculation it is, this that leads to sacrificing the mother to the child! The 
crime committed, there is one creature the less on earth; the crime punished, 
now there are two. How clever one must be to reckon thus! And how intelligent 
our lawmakers are! And we allow such laws to remain in force! And we have the 
simple good-naturedness not to obliterate them along with the memory of the 
witty rogues who made them!

31 At this point, the story becomes infinitely more comprehensible.

32 Beaulieu reports the episode.

33 Come now, Braschi, enough of these timid details, we want bold strokes 
and a broad canvas. Look here: the proscriptions of the Jews, of the Christians, of
Mithridates, of Marius, of Sulla, of the Triumvirs; the slaughterings of Theodosius 
and Theodora, the furors of the Crusaders and the Inquisitors, the savageries of 
the Templars, the Sicilian massacres, those of Mérindol, of St Bartholomew, of 
Ireland, of Piedmont, of the Cévennes, of the New World: the total shows 
twenty-three million, one hundred and eighty thousand human beings murdered 
in cold blood on account of their opinions alone! The man who is fond of murder 
foments opinions in order that they give occasion for assassination.

34 This I attest for having seen it myself.

35 Those Spanish were also the world’s most effeminate people; it is an easy 
step from affluence and softness to cruelty.

36 One by one were removed: fingers, toes, feet, hands, teeth, eyes, nose, 
tongue, all protruberances, virile parts, and the clitoris in the case of women.

37 Once women are in the habit of exciting themselves to pleasure only by 
giving vent to the cruelty latent within them, the extreme delicacy of their fibers, 
the prodigious sensitivity of their organs cause them to go a great deal farther 
than men in this direction.


Notes for Part Five

1 The Neapolitan ounce is worth about eleven French livres ten sous.

2 With what art the workings of the tyrant soul are here developed; and how 
many revolutions explained by this single word!

3 The reader is herewith notified that the names of the participants in this 
celebrated conjuration have all been disguised.

4 Say, O genius of the Stockholm revolution, didst thou not go to school in 
Paris?

5 See, in La Fontaine, the ingenious fable “The Frogs Who Seek a King.” Un 
happy inhabitants of this globe, there’s the story of you one and all.

6 He was the one Ankerstrom killed in 1789.

7 Those who have had a close view of this woman, famous as much for her wit
as for her misdeeds, will here recognize her sufficiently well to agree that this 
portrait of Catherine could only have been painted from nature.

8 This whip is fashioned from a bull’s pizzle; to it are attached three thongs of 
moose hide. A single stroke draws blood: these instruments are of incomparable 
utility to those who cherish, either actively or passively, the pleasures of 
flagellation. To increase their effectiveness, steel tips may be fitted to the thongs; 
it then becomes possible to remove flesh virtually without effort; one hundred 
strokes applied by a vigorous arm will kill anyone. One such whip, more or less 
studded, is in the possession of every voluptuous Russian.

9 This habit is so compelling that its addicts are unable to do without whipping,
and were they to deprive themselves of it, it well might be to their peril. Just prior
to those moments when they customarily repeat the ceremony, they are subject 
to itchings so extreme that sound thrashing constitutes their sole hope of relief. 
See Abbé Boileau’s history of the Flagellants; and the excellent translation Mercier
de Compiegne has given us of Meibomius.

10 Fifty versts make about thirty-five miles.

11 At Tiflis the Christians outnumber the Muslims, there are more churches 
than mosques.

12 It will be remembered that this is Princess Borghese’s first name.

13 May these excellent principles, taking firm root in good minds, make an end
forever of the dangerous prejudices which are the cause for our regarding these 
passions as enemies, when from them alone is born the only felicity we can hope 
for on earth.

14 The reader must think back to the period at which this was written.

15 It has not come out so well with those peoples who, through a mistaken 
impulse of philosophy, thought they were destroying superstition when they 
pillaged its altars. What remains to them now? The same prejudice, and no more 
gold. The ninnies! Seeing not by what hand they were being manipulated, they 
fancied they were abolishing worship, and actually lent it strength; mean 
instruments of the rascals directing them, the poor fools fancied they were 
serving Reason, when they were only fattening swine. Religious revolutions are 
prepared by clever writings, by instruction, and end with the total extinction not 
of the baubles of religious stupidity, but of the knaves who preach and foment it.

16 Marie Antoinette of France.

17 It has been remarked that there were never so many police regulations, 
restrictive codes governing morals, etc., as during the closing years of the reigns 
of Charles I and of Louis XVI.

18 Not until the fatherland was in danger did the Romans name a dictator.

19 This sketch was done from nature.

20 The ounce is worth eleven livrcs ten sous.

21 Called Puteoli in classical times.—Tr.

22 Nature’s primary impulses are invariably criminal; those which steer us 
toward virtuousness are merely secondary, and never but the fruit of education, 
of debility, or of fear. The individual Nature molds for kingship, who, once out of 
her hands, falls into the hands of no educators and who by dint of his new 
position becomes the most powerful of men and immune to fear, that royal 
personage, I say, will take his daily bath in the blood of his subjects; and will be 
the natural man besides.

23 See, on this subject, the speech of the Bishop of Grenoble in the fourth 
volume of La Nouvelle Justine, pp. 275 ff.

24 It is the common practice in Italy to make one’s confessor one’s pimp; in 
high-ranking circles, these two offices are closely knit, and the priests, given a 
little to intriguing anyhow, usually exercise them admirably and simultaneously.

25 Certain carping critics complained that, in Justine, we introduced only 
masculine villains onto the stage; here, thank heaven! we are in no danger of 
hearing the same withering reproaches. The truth, alas, is that evil-doing, one of 
the fundamental elements in the workings of Nature, is in an approximately equal 
degree manifest throughout the entire range of Nature’s creatures; the more 
sensitive an individual, the more sharply this atrocious Nature will bend him into 
conformance with evil’s irresistible laws; whence it is that women surrender to it 
more heatedly and perform it with greater artistry than men. But all, men and 
women alike, are wicked because they have to be: if in any of that there is 
anything absurd or unjust, it is the law made by the man who dares have the 
idiotic and vain pretension of repressing or combating the law of Nature.


Notes for Part Six

1 Whores of that nationality are greatly sought after in foreign lands. Their 
extreme indulgence, their accomplishments, their libertinage, and their beauty 
have won them a position of privilege among the world’s harlots, who in other 
countries are almost always ugly, inept, and unclean.

2 The most famous in all Italy.

3 Few men know how to have themselves cared for following discharge; 
exhausted, prostrated, they sneak off into a corner, listless and empty-headed. 
Nevertheless, upon post-ejaculatory care depends the vigor necessary to tasting 
further enjoyments, and to emerging from former ones in a less collapsed state. 
This care consists in having oneself sucked without delay, in having one’s balls 
comforted and fondled, and in the application of very hot cloths. It is also helpful, 
after the crisis, to absorb restoratives, or spirituous liquors. The latter employed 
as lotions upon the testicles will also produce excellent effects.

4 Never is one’s desire for a prick in the behind so keen as directly after a 
whipping; and never does one more keenly desire the whip than just after an 
ass-fucking. ’Tis incredible how these two pleasures hang together and mutually 
feed each other.

5 These charming creatures, of whom fools are wont to have a low opinion, 
bring to society the same qualities they demonstrate in pleasure: they are always 
more original, more intelligent, more agreeable than others; almost all of them 
have graces, talents, imagination: why therefore hold against them a failing for 
which only Nature is responsible? Clumsy, dull-witted devotees of ordinary 
pleasures, you censure them only because they reject your advances; but if one 
pauses to analyze the women who appreciate you, they will always be found to be
almost as stupid as yourselves.

6 It is, of course, at this point that we should examine the revolting absurdity 
of weeping over the dead. Sooner than lament, one should rejoice; for by 
perishing, this dear one you loved obtained his deliverance from all life’s 
tribulations. Furthermore, our grief, our tears can be of no use to him, and they 
affect us unpleasantly. The same applies to burial ceremonies, and to the respect 
one might still have for the deceased: useless, superstitious, all of it. To a cadaver
one owes nothing other than to deposit it in good soil, where it can germinate at 
once, swiftly metamorphose into worm, housefly, or vegetable, which is difficult in
cemeteries. If one wis

hes to render a last service to a dead man, then place him at the foot of a fruit
tree, or in some fertile meadow; that is all you owe him, all the rest is absurd. 
(Touching this matter, see the remarks on p. 959.)


Notes for Bibliography

1 See the “Bibliographie des Œuvres de Sade” drawn up by Robert Valençay in 
Les Infortunes de la Vertu, Paris, Les Éditions du Point du Jour, 1946.

2 In a letter of March 6, 1791.

3 An earlier edition of The 120 Days; edited by Dr. Eugen Dühren, was 
published in 1904. The version is so riddled with errors, however, that Maurice 
Heine’s 1931–1935 edition must rightly figure as the original edition of this work.

4 Numbers 1 through 17 represent works mentioned in the 1788 Catalogue 
raisonné; numbers 18 through 20 are works seized at Sade’s publisher, Massé, on
15 Ventôse, An IX; number 21 is the projected ten-volume work burned at the 
Préfecture de Police after Sade’s death; numbers 22 through 25 correspond to 
works mentioned in the “general catalogue” that appears in Cahiers personnels 
(1803–04).
