Juliette Read online

  Juliette

  THE MARQUIS DE SADE

  TRANSLATED BY

  AUSTRYN WAINHOUSE

  COMPLETE AMERICAN EDITION

  SIX VOLUMES IN ONE

  Copyright © 1968 by Austryn Wainhouse

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  Contents

  Foreword

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Part Five

  Part Six

  Bibliography

  Foreword

  To the final version of Justine—and there are three versions of Justine—Sade added, as its complement and to complete it, The Story of Juliette; the two panels of a diptych, interrelated and yet distinct, they were first published in the year 1797 as an immense book called La Nouvelle Justine. The bibliographical details are these:

  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: 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.

  As for the preceding redactions, the earliest and shortest, Les Infortunes de la Vertu, whose manuscript shows the date 1787, was designed for inclusion in a volume of those contes, historiettes, and fabliaux, carefully made, inoffensive, and eminently regular writings to which Sade attached a special importance. For it was through his “public” performances—first as a storyteller, later as a playwright—that, as he rightly felt, he belonged to the “world of letters.” At the same time, and ever more so as he passed his prisoner’s time, along with his literary ambitions he nourished others, totally irregular, engendered by a rage no ordinary consolations could appease, and that rendered him the mortal enemy of the world outside. He wrote Les Infortunes de la Vertu in the Bastille. He was still there the next year when, seeing further into his theme, he began those variations and expansions upon which he was to remain embarked for a decade.

  Justine, ou les Malheurs de la Vertu, printed in 1791, enlarges upon the “philosophical tale” without departing from its conventional expression. However, the increased violence of her experience is transforming the central figure: she is turning into something that neither the postulates nor the language of eighteenth-century common sense or “right reason” can securely fix. In her resistance to “things as they are,” in her incorrigible unwillingness or her inability to learn the lessons of the world, her mysterious absence in a world ruled by laws of wickedness, where only crime pays, where there are only weak and strong, only victims and tyrants, the latter always right and the former wrong perforce—in this, the given and the possible world, Justine’s virtue is unreasonable and unreasoning: It is not miscalculation, it is aberration. Her tormentors, with logic and lucidity on their side, consider her perverse, mad. But they do more than consider her; she is of enduring interest to them, they are fascinated by her; in the unhappy girl’s nature they encounter something irreducible, something insurgent and unconquerable. And, well considered, that something is hardly less awesome, it is even more troubling than all the barbarities she undergoes.

  Again rewritten, the dialectic of the earlier versions now reinforced through presentation in two stories, the scenes, the discourses multiplied, the whole invaded by excess and now in ten volumes and four thousand pages long, it is a masterpiece that appears in 1797, “a work beyond which no other writer, at any time, has ever managed to venture; we have, so to speak, a veritable absolute in our hands, in this relative world of letters …*

  * Maurice Blanchot, “Sade,” in the introductory section to The Marquis de Sade: The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings. New York, Grove Press, 1965.

  La Nouvelle Justine has been outlawed in France for the past one hundred seventy years. Since the Directory no French government has shown itself delinquent in regard to Sade. Like all its predecessors, the Fifth Republic has discharged its duty. The law must of necessity respect crime.

  It was committed anew, La Nouvelle Justine was reprinted and circulated clandestinely under the Third Republic and read, but read, be it understood, by the rare readers of-rare books who in Sade beheld everything they for the most part were not, a rageur they could approach, could savor and admire in safety, protected by the implicit belief that the positions Sade assailed were invulnerable. Of those positions not one seemed anything like secure when, under the Fourth Republic, in 1949, L’Histoire de Juliette was reissued in an edition which, while not clandestine, was hardly very public, being limited to “475 copies” sold with utmost discretion and at a dear price. Nonetheless, and although the authorities were slow to move, the rules of the game had to be complied with in the end, and the publisher was prosecuted by the regime through the intermediary of La Commission du Livre and on January 10, 1957, found guilty of “outrage to public morals.”

  On the question of “public morals,” on the question of in what sense—in what final sense—they are outraged by Juliette, and on the question of the final sense—the outrageous and revolutionary sense—of Juliette, it would be advantageous to reproduce a few lines, written over half a century ago, in which Apollinaire, with his sure intuition, exactly grasps what is at issue in Sade’s novel. The passage is quoted in the prefatory note to the 1949 Pauvert edition, and deserves to be inserted in this first American edition.

  The Marquis de Sade, that freest of spirits to have lived so far, had ideas of his own on the subject of woman: he wanted her to be as free as man. Out of these ideas—they will come through some day—grew a dual novel, Justine and Juliette. It was not by accident the Marquis chose heroines and not heroes. Justine is woman as she has been hitherto, enslaved, miserable and less than human; her opposite, Juliette represents the woman whose advent he anticipated, a figure of whom minds have as yet no conception, who is arising out of mankind, who shall have wings, and who shall renew the world.

  Ten years ago, the publishing of Sade in the United States seemed impracticable, seemed practically unthinkable; it was a project to wait and think about. The present translation was begun in September of 1956, and not finished until September of 1966. Signed by a Pieralessandro Casavini, most of it—to be precise, the first five of what were to be seven volumes in all—was brought out in Paris over the years 1958–1961. That translation has been reviewed throughout, revised here and there; what remained incomplete has been completed; and altered circumstances have appeared to authorize the abandoning of a pseudonym.

  Circumstances aside, the Sade I have frequented is a revolutionary, and his importance, in my eyes, is associated with revolutionary perspectives. Let me try to specify which ones.

  As a thinker, as a pamphleteer, as secretary and then president of his section in Paris, as a magistrate, Sade took an active part in
the Revolution, and certainly took his risks: his concern with the Revolution was intense, and yet his attitude toward it was divided. Its objectives—the classical objectives, those which despite all the bitterest controversy remained, by and large, the possible objectives with Western revolutionaries down to the other day—were his, but only to a certain extent. That is, they fell short of what he was after; and the question of degree became a question of the essential. Like Antigone, Sade wanted “everything, and all at once”: which is to want the “impossible.” But that is what a revolution is, the desiring of the impossible, the striving for the fulfillment of the impossible desire; and anything less is too little, it is nothing. For “Those,” as Saint-Just warned, “who make their revolutions halfway do but dig themselves a grave.”

  The Marquis de Sade wanted what no mere formal rearrangements could provide, what no modifications of material and relative conditions can alone satisfy; he wanted “a permanent insurrection of the spirit,” an intimate revolution, a revolution within. He wanted then what today revolution no longer holds “impossible” but holds to be a starting point as well as a final end: to change man. To change him through and through, cost what it may, be it at the price of his “human nature,” and even at the price of his sexual nature—and above all at the price of that which, in our communities, has forged all relations between all men and denatured them, and merged love and continuity into one disaster, one inhumanity.

  —AUSTRYN WAINHOUSE

  Part One

  ’T was at Panthemont we were brought up, Justine and I, there that we received our education. The name of that celebrated retreat is not unfamiliar to you; nor does it require telling that for many a long year the prettiest and most libertine women gracing Paris have regularly emerged from that convent. Euphrosine, the young lady in whose footsteps I was eager to follow and who, dwelling close by my own parents’ home, had fled her father’s household to fling herself into libertinage, had been my boon companion at Panthemont. As ’twas from her and from a certain nun, a friend of hers, that I acquired the basic precepts of the morality which, as you listened to the tales my sister has just finished recounting, you were somewhat surprised to find in a person of my young years, it would seem to me that before anything else I ought to tell you something about those women, and to provide you with a circumstantial account of those earlier moments of my life when, seduced, corrupted by that pair of sirens, the seed destined to flower into vices without number was sown in the depths of my soul.

  The nun I refer to was called Madame Delbène. For five years she had been the abbess of the house and was nearing her thirtieth year when I made her acquaintance. To be prettier than she were a thing impossible; a fit model to any artist, she had a sweet, celestial countenance, fair tresses, large blue eyes where shone something tender and inviting, a figure copied after one of the Graces. The victim of others’ ambition, young Delbène had been shut up in a cloister at the age of twelve in order that an elder brother, whom she detested, might be rendered wealthier by the dowry their parents were thus spared from having to set aside for her. Imprisoned at an age when the passions begin to assert themselves clamorously, although none of this had been of her choosing, for she’d then been fond of the world and of men in general, it was only by mastering herself, by coming triumphant through the severest tests, that she at last decided to give over and obey. Very precocious, having conned all the philosophers, having meditated prodigiously, Delbène, while accepting this condemnation to retirement, had all the same kept two or three friends by her. They came to visit her, to console her; and as she was exceedingly rich, they continued to furnish her all the literature and all the delights she could desire, even those which were to do the most to fire her imagination, already very lively and little cooled by the effects of seclusion.

  As for Euphrosine, she was fifteen when I became attached to her; and she had been Madame Delbène’s pupil a year and a half when the two of them proposed that I enter their society—it was the same day I entered into my thirteenth year. Euphrosine’s complexion was somewhat less than white, she was tall for her age, very slender, had engaging eyes, considerable spirit and vivacity, but in looks she was no match for our Superior, and was far less interesting.

  I have no need to say that among recluse women the thirst for the voluptuous is the sole motive for close friendship: they are attached one to the other, not by virtue, but by fucking: one is pleased by her who soaks one at sight, one becomes the intimate of her by whom one is frigged. Endowed with the most energetic temperament, I had, starting at the age of nine, accustomed my fingers to respond to whatever desires arose in my mind, and from that period onward I aspired to nothing but the happiness of finding the occasion for instruction and to launch myself into a career the gates unto which my native forwardness had already flung wide, and with such agreeable effects. Euphrosine and Delbène were soon to offer me what I was seeking. Eager to undertake my education, the Superior one day invited me to luncheon. Euphrosine was there: the weather was incredibly warm, and this excessive ardor of the sun afforded them an excuse for the disarray I found them in: apart from an undergarment of transparent lawn maintained by nothing more than a large bow of pink ribbon, they were perfectly naked.

  “Since you first arrived at this establishment,” Madame Delbène began, kissing me rather carelessly upon the forehead, her eye and hand betraying a certain restlessness, “I have had an unabating desire to make your intimate acquaintance. You are very attractive. You appear to me to be in possession of some wit and aptitude, and young maids of your sort have a very definite place in my heart—do you blush, little angel? But I forbid you to blush! Modesty is an illusion—resulting from what? ’tis the result of nought but our cultural manners and our upbringing, it is what is known as a conventional habit. Nature having created man and woman naked, it is unthinkable that she could have implanted in them an aversion or a shame thus to appear. Had man only faithfully observed Nature’s promptings, he would never have fallen subject to modesty: the which iron-clad truth, my heart, proves that there are certain virtues whose source lies nowhere save in total negligence, or ignorance, of the code of Nature. Ah, but might one not give a wrench to Christian morals were one in this way to scrutinize all the articles which compose it! But we’ll chat about that later on. Let’s speak of other matters for the nonce. Will you join us in our undress?”

  Then those two minxes, laughing merrily, stepped up to me and soon had me in a state identical to theirs; whereupon Madame Delbène’s kisses assumed a completely different character.

  “Oh, but my Juliette is lovely!” cried she, admiringly; “see how those delicious little breasts have begun to heave! Euphrosine, I do declare she’s better fleshed there than you are … and, would you believe it? she’s barely thirteen.”

  Our charming Superior’s fingers were tickling my nipples, and her tongue quivered in my mouth. She was not slow to observe her caresses were having so powerful an influence upon my senses that I was in serious danger of being entirely overcome.

  “O fuck!” she apostrophized, unable to restrain herself and startling me with the vigor of her expressions. “Ah, by sweet Christ! what verve, what a fiery temper! Let’s be rid of all these damnable hindrances, my little friends, to the devil with everything that yet screens from clear view charms Nature never created to remain hidden!”

  And directly flinging away the filmy costume which had enveloped her, she revealed herself to our eyes, lovely as Venus, that sea-risen goddess who exacted homage from the Greeks. It were impossible to be better formed, to have a skin more white, more sweet, to have more beauteous curves, forms better pronounced. Euphrosine, who imitated her almost at once, delivered fewer charms to my view: she was less plump than Madame Delbène; rather darker in her skin, she would perhaps have pleased less universally; but what eyes! what vivacity! Stirred by such a quantity of wonders, earnestly solicited by the two women they belonged to, besought to follow their example and be rid of
all modesty’s restraints, you may be very certain that I yielded. Her head reeling from sublimest drunkenness, Delbène bore me to her bed and devoured me with her kisses.

  “One moment,” she panted, wholly ablaze, “one moment, my dears, we had best introduce a little method into our pleasures’ madness: they’re not relished unless organized.”

  So saying, she stretches me out, spreads wide my legs and, lying belly down upon the bed with her head lodged between my thighs, she sets to cunt-sucking me, the while exposing the world’s most handsome buttocks to my companion’s view, from that pretty little girl’s fingers she receives the same services her tongue is rendering me. Euphrosine knowing full well what was apt to flatter Delbène’s tastes, amidst her pollutions interspersed sharp slaps upon the nun’s behind: they had an indubitable effect upon our amiable instructress’ physical being. Quite electrified by libertine proceedings, the whore bolted the whey she was making squirt in a steady stream from my little cunt. Now and again she paused to gaze at me, to contemplate me in these throes of pleasure.

  “The beautiful creature!” the tribade exclaimed. “Oh, great God, was there ever a more inspiring child! Have at it, Euphrosine, frig me, my love, lay on, I want to die drunk on her fuck! Quick now, we’ll change about, let’s vary what we’re doing,” she cried a moment later; “you must wish for something in return, dear Euphrosine? But how shall I be able to repay you for the pleasures you’re giving me! Wait, wait, little angels, I’m going to frig you both at the same time.”

  She places us side by side on the bed; following her recommendation, we each advance a hand and set to polluting each other. Delbène’s tongue first probes far into the recesses of Euphrosine’s cunt, and she uses either hand to tickle our assholes; from time to time she relinquishes my companion’s cunt so as to pump mine, and thus both Euphrosine and I, experiencing three pleasures simultaneously, did, as you may be fully persuaded, discharge like muskets. Several instants later the resourceful Delbène has us turn over, and we put our asses at her disposal; while frigging us beneath, she applies determined lips to Euphrosine’s anus, then to mine, sucking with libidinous choler. She praised our buttocks’ conformation, spanking them teasingly, and half slew us with joy. When done, she drew away: