Juliette Read online

  “Do unto me everything I have done unto you,” spake she in a thickened voice, “frig me, the both of you. Frig me. I shall lie in your arms, Juliette, I shall kiss your mouth, our tongues shall intertwine … shall strain … shall suck. You shall bury this fair dildo in my womb,” she pursued, putting the instrument into my hands; “and you, my Euphrosine, you shall assume charge of my ass, you shall employ this lesser tube to arouse me in that sector: infinitely straiter than my cunt, it asks for no bulkier apparatus…. You, my pigeon,” she went on, kissing me with inordinate feeling, “you’ll not leave my clitoris unattended, will you? ’Tis there the true seat of woman’s pleasure: rub it, worry it, I say, use your nails if you like—never fear, I know how to bear a little pressure … and I am weary, Christ’s eyes! I am jaded and I require to be dealt with stoutly: I want to melt absolutely into fuck, fuck I want to become, if I am able I want to discharge twenty times over. Make it so.”

  Oh, God, with what liberality we did repay her in the one coin she valued! It were not in human power more passionately to labor at giving a woman pleasure … impossible to imagine one who had a greater appetite for it. The thing was done at last.

  “My angel,” that charming creature said to me, “I attempt to express my delight at having come to know you, and words fail me. You are a veritable discovery, from now on I propose to associate you with all my pleasures and you shall find that we may avail ourselves of some very poignant ones, despite the fact male company is, strictly speaking, forbidden us. Ask of Euphrosine whether she is content with me.”

  “Oh, my beloved, allow my kisses to speak for me!” exclaimed our young friend as she cast herself upon Delbène’s breast; “’tis you I am indebted to for an understanding of myself and of the meaning of my existence. You have trained my mind, you have rescued it from the darkness wherein childhood prejudices enshrouded it. Thanks alone to you I have achieved being in this world. Lucky Juliette, if you will condescend to lavish similar attentions upon her!”

  “Yes,” Madame Delbène replied, “why yes, I am anxious to take her education in hand. Just as I have told you, I should like to cleanse her of all those infamous religious follies which spoil the whole of life’s felicity, I should like to guide her back to Nature’s fold and doctrine and cause her to see that all the fables whereby they have sought to bewitch her mind and clog her energies are in actuality worthy of nought but derision. But now to luncheon, my friends’, we’d best refresh ourselves; when one has discharged abundantly, what one has expended must be replenished.”

  A delicious collation, which we took entirely naked, soon restored to us the strength necessary to begin afresh. Once again we fell to frigging one another—and immediately were all three plunged back into the wildest excesses of lubricity. We struck a thousand different poses; continually altering our roles, we were sometimes wives to fuckers whom the next instant we dealt with as husbands and, thus beguiling Nature, for the length of an entire day we compelled that indulgent mother to set the crown of her voluptuousness most sweet upon all the little infractions of her laws we committed.

  A month was so spent; at its end Euphrosine, her brain nicely crazed by libertinage, left the convent, then bade farewell to her family and went off to practice all the disorders of frenzied whoring and low license. Later, she returned and paid us a visit; she figured her situation, and we being too corrupted to find anything amiss in the career she was pursuing, pity was farthest from our thoughts, and our last wish was to discourage her from forging ahead.

  “I must say she has managed very well,” Madame Delbène remarked to me; “a hundred times over I have yearned to respond to the same call, and indeed I surely would have, had my taste for men been strong enough to surmount this uncommon liking I have for women. However, dear Juliette, in fating me to inhabit the cloister all my life long, heaven also had the kindness to provide me with only a mediocre desire for any sort of pleasure other than those this sanctified place plentifully affords me; that which women may mutually procure one another is so delicious that my aspirations do not go very much farther. Nevertheless, I do recognize that one may take an interest in men; it is no mystery to me that one will now and then do everything under the sun to lay hands on them; whatever is connected with libertinage makes powerful sense to me…. My fancy has roved very far. Who knows, perhaps I have even gone beyond what one may imagine, have been gripped by wants whose satisfaction defies all conception?

  “The fundamental tenet of my philosophy, Juliette,” went on Madame Delbène, who, since the loss of Euphrosine, had become more and more fond of me, “is scorn for public opinion. You simply have no idea, my dear one, to what point I am contemptuously indifferent to whatever may be said about me. And, pray tell, what beneficial or other influence can the vulgar fool’s opinion have upon our happiness? Only our overdelicate sensitivity permits it to affect us; but if, by dint of stern and clear thinking, we succeed in deadening these susceptibilities, eventually reaching the stage where opinion’s effects upon us are null, even when it be a question of those things which touch us most intimately—then, I say, then that the good or bad opinion of others may have any influence whatsoever upon our happiness becomes utterly unthinkable. We alone can make for our personal felicity: whether we are to be happy or unhappy is completely up to us, it all depends solely upon our conscience, and perhaps even more so upon our attitudes which alone supply the bedrock foundation to our conscience’s inspirations. For the human conscience,” continued that deep-learned woman, “is not at all times and everywhere the same, but rather almost always the direct product of a given society’s manners and of a particular climate and geography. Is it not so, for example, that the same acts the Chinese do not in any sense consider inadmissible would cause us to shudder here in France? If then this most unrigid organ is, depending merely upon latitude and longitude, able to excuse and justify any extreme behavior, true wisdom must advise us to adopt a rational, a moderate, position between extravagances and chimeras, and to evolve attitudes which will prove compatible simultaneously with the penchants we have individually received from Nature and with the laws of the country we happen to dwell in; and these are the attitudes out of which we must elaborate our conscience. And that is why the sooner one sets to work adopting the philosophy one intends to be guided by, the better, since that philosophy alone supplies its form to the conscience, and our conscience is responsible for governing and regulating all the actions we perform in life.”

  “Heavens!” I cried, “have you carried indifference to the point of not caring in the slightest about your reputation?”

  “Quite, I do not care about it in the slightest,” Madame Delbène answered. “I might even confess that I take a greater inner pleasure from my conviction that this reputation is extremely bad than I would reap from knowing it was good. Oh, Juliette, never forget this: a good reputation is a valueless encumbrance. It cannot ever recompense us for what in sacrifice it costs us. She who prizes her good reputation is subject to at least as many torments as she who behaves neglectfully of it: the first lives in unceasing dread of losing what is precious to her, the other trembles before the prospects opened up by her own carelessness. If thus the paths conducting the one to virtue and the other to vice are equally bestrewn with briars, why is it that we subject ourselves to such vexations in selecting between these ways, why do we not consult Nature and loyally observe her directives?”

  “But,” I objected, “were I to make these maxims mine, Madame Delbène, I greatly fear I should have to flout far too many conventions.”

  “Why indeed, my dear,” she retorted, “I believe I’d prefer to have you tell me you greatly fear you’d taste too many pleasures. And what precisely are these conventions? Shall we inspect the matter soberly? Social ordinances in virtually every instance are promulgated by those who never deign to consult the members of society, they are restrictions we all of us cordially hate, they are common sense’s contradictions: absurd myths lacking any realit
y save in the eyes of the fools who don’t mind submitting to them, fairy tales which in the eyes of reason and intelligence merit scorn only…. We’ll have more to say on that subject, you have but to wait a little, my dear. Have confidence in me. Your candor and naïveté indicate you are in singular need of a tutor. For very few is life a bed of roses: only heed me, and you’ll be one of those who, with the thorns that must be there, will find a goodly number of flowers in her path.”

  Seldom indeed does one come across a reputation in shabbier repair than this one of Madame Delbène. A nun who held me in especially high esteem, being disturbed by my rapport with the Abbess, warned me that she was a doomed woman. She had, I was told, poisoned the minds of nearly every pensionnaire in the convent, and thanks to her advice at least fifteen or sixteen of them had already gone the way of Euphrosine. It was, she assured me, an unprincipled, lawless, a faithless, an impudent brazen creature who flaunted her wicked notions; vigorous measures would long ere this have been taken against her were it not for her influential position and distinguished birth. These exhortations meant nothing to me: a single one of Delbène’s kisses, a single phrase from her had a greater effect upon me than all the weapons it were possible to employ with a view to sundering us. Even had it meant being dragged over the precipice, it seemed to me I should have preferred definitive ruin at her side to celebrity in another’s sight. Oh, my friends! there is a certain perversity than which no other nourishment is tastier; drawn thither by Nature … if for a moment Reason’s glacial hand waves us back, Lust’s fingers bear the dish toward us again, and thereafter we can no longer do without that fare.

  But it was not long before I noticed our amiable Superior’s attentions were not concentrated exclusively on me, and I as quickly perceived that others were wont to cooperate with her in exercises where libertinage had a more preponderant share than piety.

  “And will you take lunch with me tomorrow?” she inquired one day. “I expect Elizabeth, Flavie, Madame de Volmar and Madame de Sainte-Elme. We’ll be six in all; we ought surely to be able to accomplish some truly startling things, I dare say.”

  “Goodness!” I exclaimed. “Do you amuse yourself with all those women?”

  “Of course. But you mustn’t for one instant suppose I am limited to them. There are thirty nuns in our establishment, I have had commerce with twenty-two; we have eighteen novices: I have still to make the acquaintance of one of them; and of the sixty pensionnaires presently with us, only three have resisted me so far. Whenever a new one arrives I simply have to get my hands on her: I accord her one week, never longer, to think over my proposals. Oh, Juliette, Juliette, my libertinage is an epidemic, whosoever is in my vicinity is bound to be infected by it. How very fortunate for society that I restrict myself to this dilute form of evil-doing: oh, what with my proclivities and principles, I could perhaps adopt another which might easily prove more of a nuisance to the world.”

  “And what would you do, my gentlest one?”

  “Who can tell? Do you not realize that the effects of an imagination so depraved as mine are like unto the impetuous waters of a river in flood? Nature wouldst that it wreak destruction, and destroy it does, no matter what, no matter how.”

  “Do you not ascribe to Nature,” I suggested to my interlocutress, “what ought rather to be considered the result of your depravation?”

  “Now heed me well, little light of my life,” said the Superior; “it’s early yet, our friends aren’t due to come till six and before they arrive I can perhaps reply to some of your frivolous notions.”

  We both sat down.

  “In that our unique knowledge of Nature’s inspirations,” began Madame Delbène, “reaches us through that interior sensory we call the conscience, it is by analyzing this latter we shall rationally and profitably sound Nature’s operations—which, in us, are impulsions—and which fatigue, torment, or bring enjoyment to the conscience.

  “The word conscience, my beloved Juliette, denominates that as it were inner voice which cries out when we do something—it makes no difference what—we are forbidden to do: and this eminently simple definition lays bare, to even the most casual glance, the origins the conscience has in prejudices inculcated by training and upbringing. Thus it is the child is beset by guilt directly he disobeys instructions—and the child will continue to suffer pangs of remorse until such time as, having vanquished prejudice, he discovers there is no real evil in the thing his education has induced him to abhor.

  “And so conscience is purely and simply the construction either of the prejudices that are insinuated into us or of the ethical principles we ourselves devise in our own behalf. So true is this that it is altogether possible, if for material we employ sensitive principles, to forge a conscience which will haunt and sting and bite us, afflict us most woundingly upon every occasion—it is, I say, quite possible that we find ourselves possessed of a conscience so tyrannical that, once having promised ourselves to execute them for the sake of our sensual gratification, we then fail to carry out in their fullest and richest details any however entertaining schemes, even vicious ones, exceedingly criminal ones. Whence it is there is engendered, as antidote to the first, that other sort of conscience which, in the person who stands aloof from superstition and vulgar claptrap, speaks angrily to him when by miscalculation or self-deception he chooses to come at happiness by some other road than the highway which must naturally lead him to his object. Hence, in the light of the principles we have devised for our own individual use, we may equally well have cause to repent at having done either too much evil, or too little, or none. But let us take the word in its most elementary and most common acceptation: in this case, guilt—that is to say, what prompts the utterances of the inner mechanism we have just designated as the conscience—in this case, guilt is a perfectly useless debility, a weakness whose grip upon us we have got to break with all possible dispatch and with all the determination we can muster. For feelings of guilt, once again, are nought but the distillations, the effluvia of a prejudice produced by fear of what may befall us for having done any conceivable kind of thing forbidden for who knows what vague or flimsy reason. Remove the threat of retribution, alter opinions, abolish civil codes, shift the felon from one clime to another, and the misdeed will, of course, remain exactly in substance what before it was, but he who commits it will no longer feel twinges of guilt over his act. Guilt, thus, is merely an unpleasant reminiscence; it crops out of the customs and conventions one happens to have adopted, but it never results from, never has any connection with, the character of the deed one happens to have performed.

  “Were this not so, how could one ever succeed in stifling remorse, in overcoming guilt? And we may be very certain that even when it be a question of acts of the broadest consequence, stifled they definitely may be, provided one’s mental development is sufficient and provided one has toiled earnestly to extinguish one’s prejudices. Proportionately as these prejudices are extirpated by maturity, or as habitual familiarity with deeds that initially upset us gradually toughens the sensibility and subdues the conscience, the susceptibility to guilt, formerly but the effect of the conscience’s frailty, is soon diminished, finally annihilated: and thus one progresses, until one arrives at the most appalling excesses: they may be repeated as often as one likes. But, it may perhaps be objected, guilt feelings are surely more or less intense in keeping with the variety of the misdeed perpetrated? Yes, to be sure, since the prejudice against a major crime is more powerful than one against a lesser crime, and the punishment prescribed by the law commensurately heavier in the one instance than in the other; however, discover the strength indiscriminately to do away with all prejudices, acquire the wisdom to rank all crimes on a single plane, and, becoming swiftly convinced of their resemblance, you will know how to tailor guilt to fit the occasion. Which is only to say that, having first learned to cope with the guilt consequent upon petty misbehavior, you will soon learn to quell any uneasiness over having performed a sizab
le atrocity, and to learn also to execute every atrocity, great and small, with a constant and inviolable serenity….

  “And so it is, my dear Juliette, that if one is visited by misgivings after having done a fell deed, that is because one clings to some doctrine of freedom or of free will, saying to oneself: How wretched I am because I didn’t act otherwise! But were one really to wish to persuade oneself that this talk about freedom is all empty prattle and that we are driven to whatever we do by a force more puissant than ourselves; were one to wish to be convinced that everything in this world has its purpose and its utility, and that the crime whereof one repents is just as necessary to Nature’s grand design as are war, the plague, famine by which she periodically lays whole empires waste—and empires are infinitely less dependent than Nature upon the acts that comprise our individual existences—were we to make these efforts, we’d cease even to be able to conceive of remorse or guilt, and my precious Juliette would not say to me that I am mistaken in laying up to Nature’s will that which ought only to be regarded as depravity’s handiwork.

  “All moral effects,” Madame Delbène went on, “are to be related to physical causes, unto which they are linked most absolutely: the drumstick strikes the taut-drawn skin and the sound answers the blow: no physical cause, that is, no collision, and of necessity there’s no moral effect, that is, no noise. Certain dispositions peculiar to our organisms, the neural fluids more or less irritated by the nature of the atoms we inhale, by the species or quantity of the nitrous particles contained in the foods making up our diet, by the flow of the humours and by yet a thousand other external causes—this is what moves a person to crime or to virtue and often, within the space of a single day, to both. There’s the drumhead struck, the cause of a vicious or of a virtuous act; one hundred louis stolen out of my neighbor’s pocket or transferred as a gift from mine to someone in need, there’s the effect of the blow, the resultant sound. Are we answerable for these subsequent effects when the initial causes necessitate them? May the drum be beaten without there being a sound emitted? And can we avoid these reverberations when they and the blow are themselves the consequence of things so beyond our control, so exterior to ourselves, and so dependent upon the manner in which we are personally constituted? And so ’tis madness, ’tis true extravagance to refrain from doing whatever we please, and, having done it, to repent thereof. Thus guilt and remorse appear as pusillanimous frailties we ought not to encourage, but to combat to the very best of our ability and overcome by means of sane deliberation, reason, and habit. Will remorse alter the fact the milk’s been spilt? no, and so we might as well dry our tears: remorse does nothing to make the act less evil, since remorse always comes after the fact; very rarely does remorse prevent the fact from recurring. Therefore, I must conclude that remorse is futile. The evil act once committed, one of two things must follow: either the act is punished, or it is not. In the second hypothesis, to feel sorry would assuredly be the height of stupidity: for what is the point of repenting any conceivable sort of deed which has given us the very completest satisfaction, and whence we have endured no painful consequences? In such a case, to regret the harm this act may have caused someone else would be to love him more than one’s own self, and it is perfectly ridiculous to grieve over the sufferings of others when their pain has procured us pleasure, when it has been of some use or profit to us, when it has tickled, titillated, aroused, delighted us in whatever may be the manner. Hence, in this case, there is no earthly excuse for remorse.