While engaged in research for my life work, the twenty-volume Legal History of France (which is still in progress), I have had unlimited access to the national archives in Paris. This research involves reading every single French legal document in existence-court decisions, laws, trial evidence and all manner of related items.
One particularly dismal day I came across a packet of letters, sealed in a steel box which I had to break open. It was not unusual in my research to come across curios of this kind, and I had really become quite blase, but these immediately caught my eye, addressed as they were to the infamous master criminal of sex, the Marquis de Sade, at Charenton asylum outside Paris.
I settled down with these letters on that dark day, and as I proceeded through them I felt my whole being cauterized with shock and rage. Never, in the entire history of France (and I speak with an authority that is absolute) have such violations of morality and legality taken place. I had, in my research, become inured to the most hideous crimes, the most revolting outrages against human sensibility, and yet I found myself, reading these documents, all but frothing at the mouth.
Immediately I began seeking a publisher for the letters, which I had photocopied before replacing them in their niche, but no French publisher would touch them. There were vague insinuations concerning the "authenticity" of the epistles, and the probable lawsuits from the descendents of the Prozinard and Sade families, as well as the fear of government censorship.
I therefore determined to translate the letters into English and have them published in the United States, where the power of hypocritical and vicious censors seems finally to have been somewhat curbed, and where publisher, public and court alike can appreciate historical documents with sensitivity.
These documents are, then, of considerable social, historical and psychoanalytic importance, above and beyond their sometimes titilating, sometimes agonizing narrative surface. They show the effects of a decayed, corrupted social system on an impressionable mind, a system which could, and did, produce such criminals as the Marquis de Sade and his daughter.
As long as you Americans can preserve your democratic institutions, you need never worry about producing types such as these.
I therefore offer you Jacqueline, who, for all her sinful ways does not, as I believe the American phrase goes, pull any switches.
Jean-Paul Denard, LL.D. Paris, 1969
First Letter
Dear Monsieur le Marquis, It may interest you to learn that you have a daughter, a beautiful young woman whose blood, flesh, sinews, breasts, nipples, lips, tongue, eyeballs, vagina, shoulders, anus, fingernails, hair, toes, hips, neck, buttocks, thighs, clitoris, calves and lusts were all created out of your violent sperm.
No! Not the spawn of that miserable bitch whom you had the misfortune to marry many years ago-hardly!
Do you recall a beautiful girl by the name of
Cecile whom you seduced nearly twenty-three years ago in a chateau near Marseilles? Think, Monsieur-that girl is my mother.
I have known of my parentage, or rather of your part in my parentage, since the age of sixteen. In the time since then I have heard many, many things about you, lascivious and delicious detail of your alarming sexual achievements.
I have envied and, I blushingly confess, idolized you for many years.
I think, in all due filial modesty, that you would approve of my life and of all that I have been able to do during the short time I've had the run of the globe.
The news of your incarceration at Charenton has filled me with sadness. But I imagine your life there is somewhat easier than most of the other prisons in which they've locked you up, and I understand they let you put on plays.
I would like to correspond with you, I think we have a great deal in common and much to say to one another.
Please write to me, my dear father. I shall look forward anxiously to your early reply, and meanwhile, please accept the loving affection of your natural daughter, Jacqueline de Prozinard
Second Letter
Dear Monsieur le Marquis, I am deeply distressed by your curt and insulting reply. That you should deny your patrimony and accuse me of being a bizarre crank, or worse, of being a fortune seeker out to claim some part of your estate-an estate, I might remind you, sadly in arrears, deeply in debt-is absurd. Another claim on it would be the equivalent of asking you, who are by now, I have no doubt, impotent, to service the insatiable desires of the joint harem of the sultans of the East.
No, Monsieur, I make no claim on your paltry estate. I have personal wealth, personally acquired, which surpasses the accumulated wealth of your ancestors from time immemorial. I do not ask for love either I realize you would as soon sodomize or murder a daughter as look at her.
I make claim only to your interest in me, your recognition and approval of me. For you, dear sir, are the only man in the world whom I, in turn, can respect.
You asked for proof, for details. I have ample proof, full details. You cannot recall the night you conceived me? Let me refresh your memory.
Do you recall an autumn evening nearly twenty-three years ago which you spent at the Chateau de Prozinard as the guest of my mother, the Countess de Prozinard and her husband, the Count?
You were an uninvited guest, and you announced yourself at the door as a nobleman on his way to Marseilles, set upon by thieves. As I was able to ascertain later, you weren't on the way to Marseilles, but had, in fact, just been run out of that city for sodomizing and poisoning several prostitutes! You were, at the time, the closest thing to a scapegrace fugitive that a nobleman could become.
But you were still in the prime of your manhood, still seductive and cruelly handsome and dressed like the fashionable dandy that you were. You were accompanied that night only by your valet, a strapping lad of nineteen or twenty.
When you appeared at the door and explained your plight you were graciously received by the Count and my mother, who were just about to dine. You were invited to join them.
Do you recall my mother? I'm sure you must have been lasciviously aroused by her at first glance, and determined to use her in any way you possibly could. At eighteen years of age, she must have been the model of girlish beauty just reaching the first full bloom of womanhood. With her auburn hair and creamy skin, her amber eyes and delicate bone structure, fully fleshed, she must have reawakened your jaded senses, so accustomed then to the disease-ridden prostitutes of Marseilles. My own earliest memories of her are those of a goddess; one whom I hated rather than worshipped, it is true, but a goddess nevertheless.
The Count, you may recall, was a fat robust dolt who cared more for hunting, eating and drinking than for the pleasures of the boudoir. My mother had detested him from the beginning when her parents had forced her into marriage because of his rank and wealth. I doubt very much if the Count, who was already in his late fifties, had been capable of giving her any satisfaction whatsoever after the heroic effort of penetrating her virginity on the marriage night.
I do know that after my birth, after Mama's unhappy experience with you, she refused the
Count all access to her boudoir and led the life of a semi-recluse.
But you, no doubt, couldn't be less interested in these petty details of family history. You want me to get on with the details of your seduction of her.
Dinner went extremely well, and you distinguished yourself with your grace and wit and warmth, all put on, no doubt, in order to impress and infatuate the poor, frustrated darling of a Countess.
The young girl had never seen anyone like you in her life. She was completely taken in by you. How do I know all this? Do you think she would ever have told me? God, no!
She kept a diary, which I was able to recover shortly before her untimely death, that she had clearly marked, "To Be Burned."
The entry for the date of my conception reads as follows:
Were it not for the overwhelming testimony of my body-my fragile young body now covered with welts, bruises and gashes on the outside, and on the inside, still aching with the relentless penetrations that have been made upon me over and over-I might imagine that what transpired last night was all a horrible nightmare. But the brutish pain and (worst of all, for my soul's sake) the undeniable, tingling pleasure I felt and still feel, are all too real.
How could I have allowed such a thing to happen? Oh, may God have mercy on me!
He was a stranger, a total stranger. He appeared at our door last evening as we were about to dine. When the Count learned the gentleman was a noble who had been set upon by thieves, he invited him to dine with us.
The gentleman entered the room and immediately on seeing him I felt my heart begin to beat faster. I felt my face flush scarlet when he was introduced to me and kissed my hand with his lips. He is the most handsome and dashing man I think I have ever seen in my life-or ever wish to see again. He has the most piercing pale blue eyes, eyes that seem to look through you into your very thoughts and desires. I glanced at those eyes for only a moment, and had to look away immediately; but during that moment I think I had already been ruined.
If only Louis had been more of a husband to me, had done more to satisfy and calm my raging desires! But now it's too late, the hideous damage is done.
During dinner the Marquis entertained us all with his brilliant and witty descriptions of the court and of Paris. He told several scandalous anecdotes concerning the King-a frightfully immoral man-that made me blush threefold: first, the stories themselves were so graphic that I was terribly embarrassed to be seen hearing them; then I would blush at having blushed, at showing myself to be such a provincial, totally ignorant of the court and its pleasures; and then I would feel the Marquis' eyes on me and I would turn even redder at the thought of engaging in such affairs with such men as the Marquis himself.
The Count was immensely taken with Monsieur de Sade and the conversation went on far into the night. Stoup after stoup of wine was drained dry, with my husband, as usual, drinking the lion's share. I had a great deal to drink myself, much more than I should have, and much more than I had ever had before, and I was feeling terribly giddy. Added to all my other tortures this morning is a hammering headache.
Finally, right in the middle of one of Monsieur de Sade's lascivious anecdotes, the Count fell forward onto the table and passed out like a snuffed candle.
The Marquis turned to me, smiling and said, "I seem to have bored your husband, Madame. My stories, perhaps, were too tame for him."
I blushed again and said like a schoolgirl, "Oh, no, Monsieur le Marquis, I loved your stories." Furious with myself then I turned even redder, looked away and began to clasp and unclasp my hot, perspiring hands.
"Perhaps we can think of other things to do this evening to amuse ourselves. It's quite early yet." I could feel his eyes burning into me and I dared not meet them.
"It may be early in Tans, Monsieur, but here in the country it's quite late. Were it not for your visit I would already have retired to my bedchamber."
"A charming prospect," he said.
"At any rate there's little to do here in the evening, unless you wish to read."
"I don't think so, Madame."
"May I show you to your room, then, Monsieur?" I asked, rising, and being careful not to look at him.
"That would be nice, Madame. I would love to have you show me to my room."
We moved from the table and I ordered the servants to carry the Count to his bedroom and retire for the night. With a candle in my hand I mounted the stairs. As we neared the room designated to be his for the night the candle began shaking so much I could hardly hold onto it, and the Marquis, putting one arm around me and resting his hand on my bare shoulder (how my flesh tingled at his touch!) took the candle from my quivering clasp.
"Th-this way, Monsieur," I said, my voice nearly breaking with excitement.
We entered the room and he ordered his valet to retire. Setting the lighted candle on the night table, he placed his other hand on my other bare shoulder and stood facing me, his chest pushing into my breasts.
"You're an adorable creature, Madame. Madame-A beautiful girl like you must have a more pleasant name than Madame. What is your Christian name?"
"Cecile," I answered, my eyes cast downward.
Then he kissed me lightly on the forehead, and I nearly swooned and fainted away. If only I had simply extricated myself from him, if only I had slapped his face, pushed him away and ran! But I couldn't move a muscle in any direction save toward his hard body.
"Cecile is a lovely name. It is all beauty and freshness and roses and snow and soft flames."
Then he kissed me on the mouth. I pursed my lips, I tried to pull away, he had already taken too many liberties. But his grip was too strong and his lips and tongue were too insistent. My mouth melted and I offered it to him, a rose opening for a honeybee.
Then the fires broke out all over my body and in spite of all I'd been taught, all I believed, all I thought I knew about myself, I wanted this gentleman, this stranger, far more than I had ever wanted my husband, or could ever want him now.
He broke the kiss and still holding me tightly, said, "I have a favor to ask of you, which, as a good hostess, I hope you won't refuse. If you were a Parisian hostess you certainly wouldn't refuse it, you'd consider it an honor, and I hope your provincial upbringing hasn't blinded you to the laws and customs of hospitality. I have a great difficulty in getting to sleep. Alcohols, potions, spells, none of these do any good. I need a woman's hand on my forehead to whisper me to sleep. Perhaps it's a holdover from my childhood, I don't know. But I must have it. Will you come back to me once you've gotten ready for bed, once the rest of the house is quiet? You could make me very happy."
I wanted to refuse. I wanted with all my will to pull away from him and leave without speaking any further, without touching any further, but, alas, I made the mistake of looking into his gleaming blue eyes, eyes that demanded everything and desired me. I melted into his arms. "Wait for me," I whispered into his ear, and withdrew into my boudoir.
I dismissed Micheline, my chambermaid, knowing she would notice my excitement immediately. Then I began undressing.
It was still not too late. I could still save my honor and avoid the heinous sin of adultery.
But I was weak, too passionately weak, and to questions of morality, fidelity, chastity, goodness, honor, the only answer I could summon was the throbbing answer of my blood, racing through my body and working every nerve to the fever pitch of desire for Monsieur de Sade.
I dressed in a loose gown with no undergarments and when I was sure the household was asleep I tip-toed down the hall in bare feet, my heart thumping madly, my breath coming in gasps.
Without knocking I opened the door. The room was not dark, several candles were still lit, and the Marquis stood with his back to the door, searching through one of his trunks.
When I closed the door he started slightly and turned to me. He still wore his riding breeches and boots, but he had removed his other garments and was nude from the waist up. I gazed with admiration and desire at his broad shoulders and powerful chest, his flat, hard belly and slender hips.
I trembled as he walked toward me slowly and I think I would have fainted dead away or run from the room in panic if he hadn't caught me in his arms and covered my mouth with his.
His hands were upon my back, furiously caressing me and pulling my gown up until he was able to dig his fingers into the tingling flesh of my bare buttocks.
We were near the bed, and he seated me upon it, drawing the gown up over my head so that I was totally nude except for the small gold cross that hung in the cleft between my breasts.
It was the first time in my life I had ever been naked before a man, and I thought I would be ashamed. I was taught to De ashamed, never had dreamt of showing myself to the Count, even on our marriage bed.
Yet instead of shame I felt exhilaration, freedom and excitement, and when the Marquis, now equally naked, bent me over onto my back, biting and sucking my breasts, his hands roving over my thighs and probing the lips of my sex, I felt such desire and need and excitation that without thinking I cried out, "Take me with your body, Monsieur, possess me, I beg of you!"
I reached for his penis, which was hard and stiff, twice as long and thick as my feeble husband's, and pulled him toward me. He needed little urging. With a violent thrust that seemed to rend me in half he took possession of me instantly and forcefully. He withdrew slightly taking the moment of rending pain with him and then joyous transports shook my body. Like a wild beast I writhed with him, transfixed by a pleasure I had never known before.
It seemed an eternity of joy, the eternity of joy I forsook last night, paid in advance. I do not know what happened to me, but as his movements became more violent and his breath turned to gasps and howls, mine did as well, and as he turned stiff, his back arching upwards, mine did as well, and I felt all the joy suddenly intensify a million fold and break, dissolve-I cried out again, and ecstasy suffused my loins, my breasts, my belly, my thighs, my head, my hands holding the Marquis' clenched buttocks.
As I lay there, eyes closed, moaning with pleasure, I felt him withdraw from me, rise and cross the room. A moment later he spoke my name, and I looked up at him.
He stood over me with a long, tasseled leather whip in one hand, and manacles in the other.
"Cecile, you have committed a grievous sin, the sin of adultery. You will roast in hell for it."
I protested, began to weep, but he slapped my face and went on.
"Your husband," he said, "hired me to test your fidelity. I have found it wanting."
I begged him not to say anything, not to ruin my life forever.
"There is one way to avoid the infamy and castigation that will inevitably crush your soul and blacken your reputation for the rest of your life."
"I'll do anything," I cried out, "anything." I went to the floor, crawled up to him on my knees and kissed his feet. He kicked me over onto my back and then commanded me to stand up. I did so. He placed the heavy manacles on my wrists. They were connected by a short chain. He led me to the wall, where a thick spike held several face towels. Throwing the towels on the floor he raised my arms over my head, placing the chain on the spike. It was high over my head so that I had to stretch and arch my body and even then only the tips of my toes touched the floor. I felt as though my arms were going to be pulled out of their sockets.
My naked, vulnerable breasts heaving, I stood facing him as he backed away with the whip in his hand. He wore the cruelest grin I have ever seen on anyone's face. He lifted the whip and cracked it across my breasts. When I streamed, he laughed and lifted the whip again, cracking it across my thighs. The more I cried out the more his pleasure seemed to increase. I tried to close my eyes, but the suspense was unbearable, and when I opened them his arm would already be in motion; a split second later the whip would burn across my belly.
When he had covered my breasts, my thighs, my belly with gashes and welts and bruises he dropped his whip and came up to me, kissed me roughly on the mouth and went down across my wounds, licking and sucking on them.
Once he had quenched his thirst in this way he stood up and turned me around, reversing the position of the manacles. I faced the wall now, my back was to him. To my absolute terror he went back to the whip.
How many times those cruel leather thongs racked and pierced the tender skin of my back and hips and buttocks and thighs which had never even been spanked as a child! It could have been ten minutes or it could nave been ten boars. It seemed like all eternity in hell, where I am destined, and when he finally, miraculously stopped those indignities, he pulled me d wn from the spike and commanded me to he face down on the bed.
I felt more strange than I have ever felt in my life. The pain itself had subsided, but my sensations had not, sensations that now sent an icy, exotic tingle all through my bleeding body.
The brute then pounded onto my back and accosted me from the rear. Grabbing my breasts and digging his nails into the nipples, his teeth into my neck, he violently thrust his stiffened member steadily into my posterior, an orifice I had never dreamed could be used for such purposes.
I screamed with pain and he moaned with pleasure to hear me in such agony. With cruel, aggressive strokes he took his pleasure from me as I stiffened with pain. And once again (Dear God, forgive me!), the rending agony suddenly transformed into inexplicable pleasure. The more he hurt me, the more pleasure I felt!
In spasms and roars he reached his peak, stiffened, and having released himself violently, rolled over alongside me on the bed.
Removing the manacles from my wrists he commanded me to place them on his own wrists. He arose, pulling me roughly onto my feet with him and commanded me to whip him as savagely and as mercilessly as he had whipped me. To whip him until my arm collapsed from exhaustion.
To this I complied happily and savagely, feeling a secret vicious joy in seeing the stripes of blood follow the wake of the whip across his broad, powerful back and muscular buttocks.
"Harder, harder!!" he kept screaming and exhausted finally, I dropped the whip, he commanded me to come to him and kneel in the narrow space between him and the wall.
The beating had excited him even more than he had been before. He held my head in his hands, directing it at the uplifted point of his pink, throbbing standard, where he sought satisfaction yet again.
I did as he commanded, weeping the while for shame and sometimes gagging at the depth of his wicked thrusts.
When he had taken his pleasure of me in this way, having held my head forcibly in place until his last spasm had subsided and I had swallowed the last drops of his potent juices, he commanded me to release him from the manacles. When I had done so he ordered me to bathe, go immediately afterward to bed and to stay there until my wounds had healed. Nothing would be said of the matter to the count.
Without knowing what I was doing, but feeling utterly possessed by this powerful naked man standing before me and utterly imposing his will on me, I fell to my knees once more and begged him either to take me with him or to kill me.
His answer was the back of his hand cracking across my face, brutally knocking me back onto the floor. I crawled back to him and embraced his calves.
"Stupid little girl," he said. "How could I be interested in you? Even killing you would be a bore. Now get up and leave me. I never wish to see you again."
I think my heart, my soul, my womanhood, my pride, my whole self lay there on the floor when I arose, naked and bleeding, gathered up my gown, and fled.
And lie there still.
I slept late this morning, and when I awoke, a beehive of stings and honey, he was gone. I think he has gotten me with child.
* * *
And that, cher Papa, is how you made me.
Are you proud of yourself, of what you did to that poor unsuspecting girl? Did it awaken a small flame in those tired old loins of yours?
For myself, I consider it a delightful way m which to be created, and I shall always cherish every last detail of that night. It has been a very great influence on my life-as you shall find out subsequently.
Do you believe me now, Papa? And would you like to learn more of your innocent little daughter?
Please write soon, and don't be so rude.
Third Letter
My dear Father, You remember now! I cannot and shall not express the ecstasy that your letter has ejaculated into me! I am sure your jaded old heart has no use for such girlish nights, and you must forgive me if, for a moment, I indulge in the joy of your acknowledgement of me as your daughter, however curt and qualified that acknowledgement may have been.
So I am no longer an orphan!
I must confess that after your first rude letter I became a little alarmed and began to entertain some doubts concerning the reliability of my mother's diary. Could she have been mistaken? I thought. Gotten the names mixed up? Or could the entire episode have been an hallucination, the desperate fantasy of a lonely, frustrated woman seeking to embellish the boredom of her marriage. Her marriage-the listless slops of a fat and half-impotent old dolt.
(And speaking of impotence, please forgive the little thrust in my last letter concerning your own abilities. I have no doubt that you still retain all the vigour of your first, sperm-strewn adolescent nights, nor do I have any doubt that the "therapy" to which you allude is most satiating for your assorted partners.)
The one part of your letter which does disturb me is the last paragraph, in which you flatly deny the possibility that my life and exploits might interest you in any way. How do you know? Let me prove otherwise!
Now that I am reassured that you are, beyond any doubt, the true father of my body, I want one other assurance from you: that you are the father of my free, immoral and immortal spirit as well.
Since you, incarcerated as you are, have ample time to read, and I in blissful circumstances which I will explain in due course, have equally ample to write, lend me your ear, Father. I will open myself and my life to you. Then judge whether or not I am truly your daughter.
I shall begin in the beginning, nine months after you brutally kicked my mother, naked and bleeding, from the chamber you had usurped for the night.
Apparently, my birth was an excruciatingly painful one for poor Mama. I can just see little me, six pounds of pink wet flesh, fighting to stay in while the midwife tugged and pulled me into the world, kicking and elbowing and screaming to stay where I was. Mama never ceased referring to the pain, and as I look back, I imagine she felt it to be the first of many punishments God had in store for her.
This (for her) horrible experience, coming on the heels of your abrupt and total conquest, and equally abrupt and total desertion of her, swore her off men for the rest of her bitter life, as I mentioned before. She hardly spoke with the Count at all, taking most of her meals in her room. The old fool thought she'd been taken sick, and was relieved to have her off his hands, leaving him free to hunt all day and to drink and eat all night with his cronies.
I became the sole concern of Mama's life. She loved me with a hatred that knew few bounds, and I responded in kind. Her training of me was fanatically severe, austerely religious. She sought from the start to turn me against the world and all its pleasures. I was denied even that basic birthright of femininity, the smooth, siding, silky titillation of delicate undergarments, slithering to caress our most private parts, whereby we contrive to keep constantly aroused and ready. Instead she made me wear the coarsest cotton underthings and the plainest, drabbest frocks. She kept my golden hair cut close and refused me access to any children of my own age, or anyone else, for that matter.
Thanks to your fiery blood and the indomitable lusts which I inherited from you, I fought back every step of the way, determined that sooner or later I would make up in spades for the abnegation I was undergoing.
At twelve years of age my mother felt that she had sufficiently inoculated me with virtue to entrust the holy sisters with my further education. Actually, all that had happened was that I had grown so adept in dissembling the show of virtue, while silently cursing her and her God, that I was able to pretend such saintliness that even she, with her beady, eagle eyes, was fooled. What a prim, sweet, dough-faced, raisin-lipped, docile prude I'd become! And all to get out of her grasp and into the nunnery!
Yes, the nunnery! It may be hard for you to imagine how a daughter of yours could concentrate all her ambition, could spend all her hours playing Nicoise Nice-nipples in order to get into a nunnery. The fact was, father, I had nowhere to go but down from that pre-eternal pinnacle of disembodied virtue.
And rejoice I did when the old girl broke the news. I cried, of course, pretending not to want to go, and this reaction, as expected, confirmed her resolve. I was to leave the next day.
At last I was to be allowed out from under the starched, crenellated skirts of that witch-finally I was to see something of the world, if only from a nun's-eye view.
My high hopes were initially dashed, however, by the ruthless asceticism of that prison. After the exhilaration of getting away from home had worn off I began to founder and sink into deeper and deeper hopelessness until the nunnery seemed even worse than Mama's chateau.
I was locked in an individual cell, awoken at four in the morning for prayers-a miserable routine all day, prayers and lessons, lessons and prayers, no conversation allowed, no free time whatsoever, and then locked up in the same freezing, empty, dismal cell.
At one desperate point my passionate, indomitable spirit sank so deeply into depression I really began to think there was no hope whatsoever for me, that I was doomed to a dark life beneath an ocean of bone-crushing piety.
It was then that my body itself came to the rescue, entering into that change whereby a child is gradually changed from an airy, incorporeal sprite into an earthly cauldron of molten lusts. I felt my breasts begin to swell, the nipples begin to extend and thicken. I would cup and caress them at night, pinching and fondling my nipples.
A strange new pleasure would ripple through my body. My gown already pulled up to my neck, I would slip my hand down between my thighs where a light pubescent down had begun to grow. I would rub and fondle and pinch myself there, all the while feeling the most delightful sensations rapidly suffuse my limbs, breasts, arteries and nerves.
I did not know to what this pleasure was due; I was certain it was forbidden; and thus the pleasure was doubled. I formed no images of copulation or flagellation or even of osculation. I simply surrendered myself to pure, unadulterated sensation.
I was curious to know if any of my little companions were as fortunate as I. But it was impossible to find out. Intercourse of all kinds was forbidden in that prison, and I was certain that, should they learn of my solitary nightly romps, my hands would be chained to the bedposts from then on, if not chopped off altogether.
I was finally rescued from my titillated and solitary suspense by Sister Claire-Marie.
Sister Claire-Marie had just completed her novitiate when she entered our convent as an instructress. Her cell was in the same block as mine, and thus she was directly in charge of me.
By this time I was in the third form, during which I was catechized and given personal instruction by my superior-Sister Claire-Marie.
She was a beautiful, sensuous young woman of twenty or twenty-one who had taken Benedictine vows, I later learned, when her fiance and lover was killed in a duel over the affections of another woman. This double blow-to her emotions from the loss of her lover, and to her pride from the knowledge of his infidelity-resulted in her renouncing men in favor of the convent.
I also learned rather quickly that although she had renounced men, she had not altogether renounced the pleasures of which men are commonly thought to be the sole purveyors.
I had been catechized by her several times in her cell, and although taught to look down at all times and never to look any sister full in the face, I couldn't help stealing glances at her lovely white face, with its full red mouth and dark, hungry eyes. When I did meet her gaze, her eyes, which always remained fixed on me, would seem to burn more intensely, setting off a rose-colored flame in her cheeks.
.Sister Claire-Marie seemed to me then the image of perfect beauty-a beauty enhanced, rather than hidden and submerged, by the grim monastic habit. I wanted to tell her of my secret nightly pleasures, to ask her if other people had such feelings, if she had such feelings or whether I was unique. I was terrified, though, terrified she would go running to the Mother Superior and have me thrown through a trap door into Hell.
Finally, one day, the catechism completed, I rose to leave.
"One moment, Jacqueline," she said, "sit down again."
I complied, trembling with anticipation and fright. I felt something momentous was about to happen.
"Jacqueline," she began, "I have been your spiritual advisor for some months now, and I think the time has come to go beyond formal instruction and the catechism. The time has come to deal with some of the specific spiritual problems that your young soul faces. Do you understand?"
"Yes, Sister," I said, not understanding.
"First of all, Jacqueline," she continued provocatively, "I want you to tell me how long you pray at night, and what you do between the time you pray and time you go to sleep."
I blushed as red as the blood of our Lord, and stammered incoherently for some moments before I was able to blurt out, "I-I pray an hour every night," which was a lie-I never prayed at all, and never will. (Except, perhaps-and don't let this go to your head, Papa-to you.)
"And then what?" she asked. "What do you do then, Jacqueline dear?"
I wanted to tell her then and there, wanted to find out what was happening to me. I threw fear and caution to the winds and said, "I touch my self." Blushing, I lowered my head and waited for it to be lopped off.
"That's nice," she said gently, "but I don't quite know what you mean. Perhaps you'd better show me."
My fear turning to anticipation and excitement, I shot a glance at the small barred window on the cell door. Catching my glance, she arose, closed the solid shutter across the window and double-bolted the heavy door.
"You mean you want me to-to do it? Right here?" I asked. I was more surprised and delighted than embarrassed now and when she came up to where I was standing, her face flushed, her full mouth redder than usual, her eyes burning, I knew somehow she was on my side, no longer playing the moral catechizer.
Pretending naivete, but knowing in my blood that something delicious was about to happen, I moved toward the bed.
"Should I-should I take off my clothes-as if I were going to bed?" I asked, reading the answer in her glazed eyes.
"Yes, Jacqueline, dear," she said, "let me help you." She bent down and lifted the habit over my head. A few coarse undergarments stripped away, and I was naked on the bed. She kneeled on the floor alongside me, almost in an attitude of prayer as, breathing rather heavily, she gazed longingly at my body.
At that time, if you will permit a realistic appraisal, shorn of false modesty, I was worth watching (as, of course, I am now). Just short of fourteen, my flesh had begun to fill out. My breasts, while nowhere near the jutting fullness to which they were destined to bloom, were like large buds, their premise still intact. The nipples, though, were fully formed, large, pink, fresh, untouched and erect as I lay naked on the bed. Then I slid a hand up my belly and pinched one nipple, caressing the saucer-like breast with the palm of my hand.
"This is what you do?" she breathed, "is this all you do?"
"And this," I said, letting my right hand slip down between my legs as I gazed smiling at her. Slowly I began rubbing the rosy erected lips of my pubescent sex, and this was too much for Claire-Marie.
She stripped off her habit and her. undergarments with lightning speed. When I saw her thus the speed of my self-caresses increased considerably. I had thought my mother well-formed but Claire's body surpassed Mama's and surpassed any female figure I have seen since. The fullness of her creamy breasts, so firm and buoyant, tipped with large convex pink aureoles and spiked with red nipples; her delicate bone structure and slender shoulders accentuating her fullness all the more; her tiny waist and lovely navel; and the flaring fullness of her hips and buttocks; the inviting rosy openness of her magnificent sex, casually embowered with rich, dark flora; the flowing grace of her thighs and calves; the sight of her naked body filled me with awe, envy and desire.
She lay alongside me on the bed and took me into her arms. "Oh, Jacqueline," she sighed, "what a joy it is to take hold of you and feel myself flow into you. I thought such pleasure was lost to me forever."
So saying, she covered my mouth with hers and at the insistent prodding of her tongue I received it into my mouth-what new fevers shook my body then!
Her mouth moved down along my neck, sucking and biting the tender, sensitive flesh there until I shrieked with agonized delight. (The welt she left was there for a week). Her mouth moved down, down, along the gentle slope of my young breast. She seized the nipple with her mouth and sucked on it with her lips, her teeth subtly moving to complete the nerve-rending hold she had on me. I shrieked even louder and dug my nails into her back. Whatever small pleasure I had felt in fondling that hypersensitive nipple myself was overshadowed forever by the bite of that overripe mouth, the glide of her active tongue, the graze of her sharp teeth.
Her mouth moved downward, along my little belly to the cleft between my thighs, and there she planted another kiss, licking deeply, deeply with her tongue, sucking and probing until I thought I would faint with pleasure.
She found the most sensitive spot of all and concentrated on that as she had on my nipple. I just lay there moaning and writhing until the moment came when everything fell into place, I dug my nails into her neck as I screamed with joy, bucking up into her, pulling her head harder into me and finally wrapping my thighs around her neck. She bit into me firmly, her lips wrapped around her teeth at first and then bared, and I howled as I blacked out with pleasure.
When I woke up I was sucking on her breast. I kept on sucking and sighed. The world was brand new; I was reborn. For the first time, dear, Papa, I had tasted the explosive joys of sex. The nunnery had lived up to my expectations. I was but thirteen years old.
I proceeded to fall fiercely in love with Claire Marie, with all the innocent wildness and animal passion and total absence of inhibition that only a nubile child can feel in the throes of her first mad infatuation. What orgiastic nights we had in her little cell and in mine. What a dizzying surfeit of untrammeled pleasure I would feel when, my arms around her thighs and hers around mine, our heads, lips and tongues buried in each other, we would writhe with wanton and all-but-insatiable joy! What ecstasy! I couldn't get enough of her and her insidious, incredibly fluid hands and mouth all over my thrashing adolescent flesh. I became as skilled as she in the subtle arts of that land of impregnable delight, the isle of Lesbos.
Claire-Marie appointed me her assistant in the dormitory over which she had charge. Each evening, after the girls had gotten ready for bed, it was my duty to see that all the candles in each cell were extinguished and then to make sure that all the little aspiring nuns were fast asleep. When I was absolutely certain they were dead to the world I Would fix my bed to make it appear that I was asleep under the covers, and stealthily tiptoe into Claire-Marie's cell to her waiting arms and hot body, which welcomed me naked under the sheets.
Our love knew no taboos. Nothing was forbidden, no part of my body lay untouched by her hotly caressing hands, unkissed by her passionate lips, no orifice unprobed. Cursing the long days, when I was away from her, I thought of nothing but her body and her presence and her voice. When I repeated the Ave Maria over and over it was to Claire that I addressed my adorations.
Yes, Father, as much as I know you disapprove of the emotion, I was desperately and completely in love with my lovely nun. I thought of our liaison as permanent. I could not remember what life had been like before I met her; could not imagine what it might be like should we ever be separated.
But don't fear, Father, I'm not going to disgrace you. In the end I acted in a way fully worthy of you and your ideals. My trusting innocence and unqualified love were finally brought to an abrupt and bitter terminus one hot spring night. Claire-Marie and I lay locked in each other's arms, breathing heavily in the voluptuous lassitude that follows in the wake of satiation. The moon fell in a square on the floor on my discarded habit and the light spilled on our naked bodies perspiring against each other.
"Jacqueline," Claire whispered.
In answer I kissed her on the shoulder, biting the deliciously soft flesh.
"Jacqueline, you've made me tremendously happy these last months-you've brought me back from the dead."
I snuggled closer to her, cupping one of her breasts and letting my thumb slide back and forth across the nipple.
"But I can't stay here forever," she continued. "Neither can you."
"What do you mean?" I asked not yet following her line of thought.
"Well-I don't know how to put this, Jacqueline, but-you've given me such a love of life and an awareness of joy in my own body that-I'm renouncing my vows. I'll be leaving the nunnery in a matter of weeks."
"You've what!" I yelled, bouncing up and kneeling over her on the bed.
"Ssssssh. You'll wake them all up. Jacqueline, lie down alongside me, let me explain." She put her arm on my shoulder and attempted to pull me down, but I shoved her hand viciously away.
"You mean you're leaving me? Is that what you're trying to say?"
"Please, Jacqueline, I love you so much, you'll always mean more to me than-you'll always have a special place in my heart."
"Ha!"
"Listen, dear, I've never told you why I came here in the first place. It was because-because I felt completely dead to the world. I hated myself and my body and all men after ... after the incident. We were engaged to be married. He was fabulously handsome and with a fortune to match. I loved him desperately."
"Who cares about your cross-eyed love for some son of a bitch!"
"I was still a virgin," she said without paying attention to my interruption. "And even though we were engaged we were never left alone, there was always a chaperone. Mama or some old maiden aunt. Finally, he was taken sick, or so the story went, and I came to visit him with Mama. She waited down stairs. I was led to his room and entered. He seemed to be in a fitful sleep, tossing and turning under a silk sheet. I stood frozen at the door, staring at his gorgeous body as he writhed under the sheet. The sheet had slipped down to his hips. I couldn't take my eyes off his broad, powerful shoulders that I had touched so many times through stiff, confining clothing, his hard, massive chest with its light coat of dark down, his flat, slim waist that I had held so many times in the glare of the dance floor. Then I noticed the huge bulge below his navel, under the sheet, and heard him moan my name, as if in his sleep or delirium. I neared the bed."
At this point in Claire-Marie's narrative I lay back down on the bed and listened, forgetting for the moment the fact that I was mad at her.
"My nearness seemed to increase his restlessness, and he squirmed under the sheet, causing it to fall away altogether. I felt myself turning crimson, and I couldn't tear my eyes away from his crimson tower of flesh, which up to this point I had only touched under his garments in the most fleeting way. I wanted to throw myself on him then and there, rip off all my clothing, but the thought of his illness bade me instead to lean over him, take the sheet and begin to cover his magnificent body. But my long hair must have brushed his bare belly and he awoke.
"He looked up into my eyes and said, "Is this a dream, or are you really here?" Without hesitation he took me into his arms, pulled me onto the bed alongside him and kissed me feverishly on the mouth. I lay next to him, on my side and as we kissed he dexterously unhooked and unbuttoned my garments. I put up no resistance. I felt his naked body against mine and wanted nothing more than to be as naked as he.
"In short shrift he had removed every garment and we were locked hungrily together on the bed. His hot greedy mouth covered my body with bites and kisses. My breasts felt for the first time the licking tongue, the sucking lips, the grazing, biting teeth of a man. He was on top of me, his hands feverishly caressing my thighs, my sides, my buttocks as his mouth moved back up to my mouth. And slowly, gently, firmly, and with an irresistible force, he guided his massive, throbbing weapon into my virgin vagina. I wanted to scream out in pain, and he could feel me tighten and would withdraw slightly. This was delicious. Then he would probe deeper. Again I would tense. And again he would withdraw slightly as I sighed and relaxed; and again he probed deeper and deeper until he had immersed himself entirely. Slowly he began to move back and forth, in and out and soon I was caught up in his rhythm, moving with him, against him, all the pain gone, my whole body aflame with a pleasure that seemed infinite yet grew and grew with each new thrust, with each tingling pause. Oh, Jacqueline," she said, throwing her arms around me, "you can't imagine what delicious pleasure a man can give you! It makes our pleasures seem like children's toys!"
I grunted and turned over on my side, thrusting her hands away. Children's toys! From that moment on I hated her.
"We pumped hungrily away at each other, getting more and more frantic, more and more feverish, until finally I felt him flow into me in hot, violent spasms and I wanted to howl for joy as I dug my nails into his buttocks, thrusting my stiffened thighs against his, completely satisfied and happy for the first time in my life."
"So?" I asked, in the most bored way I could, although I was fascinated by her vivid description of the act.
"I wanted to stay with him forever, beginning then and there, but I knew Mama was getting impatient. I dressed hurriedly, and as I was doing so he confessed to me that he hadn't been sick at all, that his 'sickness' had been an excuse to be alone with me. When I came into the room, he admitted, he hadn't been asleep at all, but had been wide awake and fully conscious of what he was doing. When he told me this I slid my hand under the sheet, with which he had since covered himself, grabbed and squeezed him, and accused him of over-acting. He laughed and kissed me, and I could feel him getting excited all over again and thought it wise to leave before I, too, got carried away. I promised to come the next day and help nurse him back to health."
"So this is your big love, huh?" I asked.
"It was, Jacqueline. I came a few more afternoons after that, and then he told me he had to leave town for a few days. It was the last time I saw him."
"Left you high and dry, eh?"
"No, Jacqueline, he didn't. He had become involved with-" at this point she tried to lay her head on my shoulder. She was beginning to cry, but I pushed her away. "Oh, it was so terrible," she said. "It happened so suddenly. One minute he was alive, in love with me, waiting to marry me. The next minute he was dead." Here she began to sob.
"What happened," I asked, with all the viciousness I could muster, "he get syphilis from you?"
"Jacqueline, don't, please! He died in a duel with another man. They were fighting over-over-"
"Over you, I suppose," I said.
"No, dear, I'm afraid not. I was faithful. He wasn't. They were fighting over some slut that they had shared without knowing it. One of those ladies of the court who spend their entire lives disgracing themselves in amorous affairs."
"That's what I want to do," I said. "Disgrace myself in amorous affairs. But I'm going to be a little more selective in the future. I don't think I'll pick a nun again."
"Jacqueline, hear me out," she said with an edge to her voice. "He was killed in the duel, killed over that slut. It would have been terrible enough to have lost him. That would have broken my heart anyway. But to have lost him in a duel, and in a duel over another woman, a woman of ill repute, was more than my heart could bear. I wanted to die. I tried to kill myself. But my efforts were half-hearted. I suppose I didn't even care enough about my life to put enough energy into the taking of it. But I had been hurt so badly I resolved I would never allow myself to get into a situation in which I could be hurt again. And I thought that only the Lord is ever faithful to anyone."
"So here you are," I said.
"So here I am."
"So how come you want to get out all of a sudden? Am I that awful that the rotten old world you hated so much seems an easier torture than being stuck in a cell with me?"
"No, Jacqueline, no. That's what I've been trying to explain. Its because of you, because you've been so good to me and for me that I want to live again. You've awakened me to everything that's good in life. You've awakened my capacity for joy and love, and now I want to live while there's still a chance. You'll be leaving here too, very soon, and we would be parted anyway. You've given me the courage, the desire to leave before I've taken my final vows. If I wait until you're gone, it will be too late, they won't release me then."
"And what am I supposed to do after you're gone? Take up with Father Chetouille?" I asked. Father Chetouille was one of the priests in the convent, notorious for his lechery.
"Jacqueline, be patient," she said. "You have your whole life ahead of you. You'll be leaving very soon, and everything that life offers will be waiting for you. Besides, I don't want to spoil you and make a lesbian out of you."
"What's a lesbian?" I asked, being unfamiliar with that term.
"It's a girl who-who only likes to make love to other girls. She doesn't like men. She hates men."
"Well that's me, then. I only wanted you. I don't want old Chetouille!"
We continued arguing like that for some time until the moon had disappeared and the hazy glow of false dawn began to appear beyond the bars of the cell.
"You'd better be getting back to bed," Claire said.
"Yes, I'll go," I replied, rising and putting on my habit. "I'll go and never come back. I don't ever want to see you again, you-you lesbian!"
I stormed out and locked myself in my cell. Undressing hurriedly and throwing on the regulation nightshirt, I flung myself onto my cot and sobbed into my pillow until the bells began to ring, the signal for us all to roll out of bed onto our knees and say our stupid morning prayers.
For the next few days I sulked. When I wasn't feeling sorry for myself I was hating Claire Marie. I went over every word of our conversation that night, slitting my eyes and realizing what an ass I was ever to have believed anything she had said before. I was determined not to let her get away so easily. She wasn't going to take full advantage of me and walk out the door with a smile on her face and a song in her heart about how I'd shown her the way, the truth and the light, while I was left in a gloomy nun's cell which might well have been a jail room, praying to a non-existent god in the company of a flock of austere and pallid fanatics.
No, the only thing for me to do was to take my revenge on her. I couldn't hold her there, she was too much for me at that age, inexperienced as I was in the methods of cruel persuasion. But how was I to take revenge?
I couldn't very well go and confess our affair to the Mother Superior. Claire would certainly have received her punishment, but it wouldn't have done me any good. I'd be punished as well, no doubt ending in a dungeon; or worse, thrown out of the convent and sent back to a Mama hell-bent on locking me into solitary confinement for the rest of my life.
Accustomed already to thinking of Claire all day and all night, of lasciviously collecting our caresses and kisses and lappings and all our other exquisite exchanges, I continued now to think of Claire all day and night, though now, of course, with one object in mind-sweet revenge.
I hadn't visited her in over a week, since our fateful conversation, and when by chance we passed, even though my eyes were always downcast by convent rule as well as by inclination, I could still feel her gaze burning into me. Finally, she stopped me in the hallway of our building after the evening repast of bread and water. I still did not look up. Without speaking, she slipped a note into my hand and walked away. I clutched it into my fist until I reached my cell, and once secure in my bed I opened the note. It read: "I must see you. Please come to my cell at midnight. Claire-Marie."
I read the note over and over and over and over and over again. Should I or shouldn't I? What did she have up her habit? What did she want to see me again for? More simpering explanations? More encomiums to the joys of the male member? What did I care for that? Still....
I tossed and turned in my bed until the bells rang for confession. What a dreary tolling. I straightened my habit and headed for the little line that was forming for the march to chapel. For the time being I dropped all thoughts of Claire and directed my mind to sin-I had to dream up something to tell Father Chetouille.
When it was my turn the slide clicked back and the face of a middle-aged priest was at the grating, his lasciviously lusting eyes burning into my flushed cheeks. I made the sign of the cross and prayed Father Chetouille to bless me for I had sinned. Then I bowed my head and repeated the Confiteor numbly.
What were those sins again? I rattled off sins of covetousness, anger, gluttony (I'd filched an extra crust of bread at dinner), vanity, pride.
"Anything else, my child?" Father Chetouille asked. "Sloth, lust, cupidity perhaps?"
Lust! Of course! At last the inspiration had arrived! And everything was coming together in a rush, if only I could keep my head clear and say all the right things!
"I committed," I began, "I committed sins of impurity, father."
The priest dropped his fat lower lip and swallowed twice, breathing deeply.
"With yourself, my child?" he breathed.
"And ... with others."
"With ... with another girl, my child?"
"With a nun, father."
"With which nun, my child?" the priest asked.
"Sister Claire-Marie, father."
"And what sins were they, my child?"
I went into lively detail, describing slowly and sumptuously every last aspect of our delights. As I proceeded I could see Father Chetouille's hand move slowly under his robe and my confession was punctuated by his heavy breathing and rustling of his garment as it rubbed against his swollen member.
When I had finished I turned to him. He had finished too, and was breathing more easily now. "Anything else, my child?" he asked.
"No, father."
"How old are you, my child?"
"Fourteen, father."
"You are very young, my child," he said, "and let me implore you to give up that sin. It is a terrible one." He speed was picking up. This was apparently a prepared speech and there was a discrepancy between his words and the flushed, sensual look on his face. "It kills the body and the soul, and is the cause of many crimes and misfortunes. Give it up, my child, for God's sake. You cannot know where that wretched habit will lead you or where it will come against you." He closed his eyes as though he were talking to himself rather than to me. "As long as you commit that sin, my poor child, you will never be worth one soul to God. Pray to our mother Mary to help you. She will help you, my child. Pray to Our Blessed Lady when that sin comes into your mind. I am sure you will do that, will you not? You repent of all those sins. I am sure you do. And you will promise God now that by His holy grace you will never offend Him any more by that wicked sin. You will make that solemn promise to God, will you not?"
"Yes, father," I lied.
"And if ever, my child, that urge comes upon you again, do not allow it to get the upper hand. Come to see me first." Never that, I thought.
"And now, my child, when were you to see this vile, infamous woman again?" he asked.
"Tonight, father."
"Tonight? At what time?"
"At a little before midnight, father. It must be before midnight, just before midnight or she will lock the door."
"I am glad you told me this, my child."
I know you are, you lecher, I thought.
"I will take appropriate action," he added.
"I'm sure you will, father," I said, doing my best to suppress a chortle.
"Go now and pray," he said, and I rose to kneel in the nave, plotting my next move. So, tonight at midnight Chetouille the lecher would show up at Claire-Marie's. She'll be waiting for me, I thought. She'll be totally nude, and when she hears the door open she'll throw back the covers and open her arms and legs. In two seconds Chetouille will be stripped and in the bed with her. And what could she possibly do? Cry out? Scream? How would she explain it? She would just have to lie there and succumb to his greasy old embraces.
But that, of course, wouldn't have been enough. That was only the beginning. She might even enjoy old Chetouille, might get a charge out of getting fucked by a priest. No, there had to be something to finish it off, and, kneeling there in the nave, the idea came to me. I had Claire's note. On the way out of the chapel I took an envelope from the desk at the door and placed the note in it. Licking the envelope and sealing it I headed for the Mother Superior's residence. I knocked on the door. One of the servants answered.
"Would you please give this to Mother Superior immediately?" I said. "It's very urgent, and she must see it tonight."
The servant took the note and agreed to deliver it immediately. I rushed back to my cell and with a delicious sense of anticipation I waited for the fireworks to go off.
Of course, there was no guarantee that any of this would work. Father Chetouille might at this moment be spilling the beans to Mother Superior. Claire might already have been called up there to answer for her sins and I would be the next to face punishment. Expulsion, and solitary confinement for the rest of my life.
On the other hand, Chetouille might decide not to show up at all. Mother Superior might then arrive, dive into Claire's waiting arms and Claire would have a new, if somewhat frumpy, dumpy bedmate.
I waited. The bells tolled ten, eleven o'clock. Nothing might happen at all. Neither would come, I would have no revenge whatsoever and I'd be stuck alone in the nunnery without revenge.
Then I head what sounded like a door opening and closing at the end of the hall, at Claire's cell. I heard what seemed to be the rustle of clothing, a muffled sigh, the sound of flesh against flesh.
Was it my imagination? I wondered. Or had Chetouille actually shown up? Then the bells tolled midnight. I still thought I heard flesh slapping against flesh. Otherwise, silence.
Then, footfalls in the hall-Footfalls that could only be those of Mother Superior. The flicker of a candle. A knock on Claire's door. "Sister Claire-Marie?" I heard the Mother Superior whisper. Silence. Then she opened the door.
A scream pierced the sky loud enough to scare God out of heaven, and the bellow of Mother Superior's voice: "FILTH! DAMNATION! LECHERY! DISGRACE! BITCH! SLUT! WHORE! JEZEBEL! INFIDELS! You're both consigned to hell! Get up off that bed, Chetouille! Get some clothes on! No! Not your robes-you've disgraced them, wear that blanket. And you-slut!-can remain nude. The shame, the shame! Oh, how could you, how could you both so defile your vows! To dream that this could ever happen in my nunnery! Oh, oh!"
When they were finally led away, and the shouts and wails of Mother Superior faded away and the cell block fell silent again I found it impossible to get to sleep. Tossing and turning in my little cot I relived over and over the spectacle of Mother Superior surprising Chetouille and Claire at the height of their furtive act of carnal concupiscence.
What could their positions have been as the Mother barged in on them? Had Chetouille had time to dismount between the time of the knock and the entrance? Or was he poised in mid-thrust, petrified with panic, unable to move? I chose to view him thus. And chose to view Claire, overcome with fear and trembling, shamefully trying to cover her goose-pimpled nudity; overcome with shame, yes, but not so totally overcome that she wasn't aware of why this hideous disgrace had been visited upon her, and who had instigated it. Yes, I'm certain that at the moment of truth, when Mother Superior appeared at the door, that Claire was instantly aware that I was the architect of her sudden and total undoing. For there was now no chance that she might escape from the nunnery and renounce her vows. She'd be stuck there for the rest of her life, doing the most severe penance for this most grievous sin.
I wondered what she must have felt as the head nun ranted on and the full weight of what was going to happen to her began to sink in. Did she feel remorse for having driven me to such an extreme? Or hatred-hot, unmitigated hatred? I chose to believe the latter. I wanted her hatred then as much as I had formerly hungered for her love. It was with this delicious sense of sweet revenge that I spent my sleepless night.
The next day, after morning prayers, the entire convent was convened in military formation in the little square fronting the chapel. A small platform had been erected during the night before the chapel entrance, and once the formation was completed, Mother Superior mounted the steps and glared at the assembly.
"My fellow ascetiss," she declaimed in her stentorian voice, "it is with a heavy heart and a grievous conscience that I appear before you today. God our father created Adam and Eve free from sin. But the devil undid all that in Eden, and since then man and woman are born to sweat out the stench of damnation and putrefaction from their corrupted flesh. A convent such as this is often thought to be an oasis in the midst of spiritual drought, where young ladies can be educated to the true values implicit in the precepts of our Lord. Occasionally, however, as much as we trust our guardians, a viper is admitted to our midst, much as a worm insinuates itself into an apple, much as the wolf slinks its way into the fold, much as disease invades the defenseless body of an innocent child.
Such is the case with the two condemned sinners you will see before you today. They have committed unspeakable sins, the likes of which are unpardonable and consign them to the eternal tortures of hell as surely as gluttony results in diarrhea. As for him-" she pointed to Chetouille, who stood at the base of the platform, still clad in Claire's blanket, his head shaven, his eyes black and beady behind layers of flesh-"Chetouille will be sent to Rome, barefoot and clad only in that blanket, there to be sentenced before the appropriate ecclesiastical tribunal. Lead him away!"
These last words were spoken to a man on horseback, the gate-keeper, who had been put in charges of leading the hapless priest to Rome. He let fly his horsewhip on the unprepared Chetouille. The blow, landing on the priest's shoulder blade, tore the blanket, and from the looks of the first blow, the blanket wasn't going to last long.
"Move, dog!" the gatekeeper yelled, and Chetouille, whimpering, began to run toward Rome. As they disappeared over the hill and round the bend at a brisk trot, the gatekeeper could be seen to raise his whip again and again, bringing down hard on the nearly naked Chetouille, who was by then covered with welts.
"Now bring out the other sinner!" the Mother said, and Claire-Marie was led out of a building off the square. She was stark naked, her lovely, large breasts jiggling in the chill morning air as she walked, her delicious ass wiggling and twitching. Her pale skin was blotched red with welts from the beatings she had been subjected to during the night. Her face was crimson, her eyes swollen with tears. He head had been shaven, all those shiny dark curls ripped off, and her pubescent mound had been depilated as well. Her hands were manacled behind her back, throwing her shoulders back and causing her red-tipped breasts to jut out all the more. A steel collar had been affixed to her neck. She was led roughly by a chain attached to her neck, yanked by the toughest of the disciplinary sisters.
I could hardly contain myself, so overjoyed was I with the results of my treachery. When Claire-Marie had been hauled and pushed up onto the platform alongside the Mother, amid the mumbling and murmuring of the crowd, Mother called for silence and began to speak again.
"This filthy whore," she said, pointing at Claire who had lowered her bald head, "has committed as vile an act of carnal lust as has ever been performed since the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The fact that she has performed it within the pristine confines of this nunnery makes it infinitely more vile, infinitely more disgusting and worm-infested. Lest I corrupt your as yet innocent minds, I will not go into details. In later years you may brood back on this day and understand what has transpired, after you have done it yourselves, and draw there-from a moral lesson. For the present, it will be enough for you to witness the public flogging of this vile slut, and realize that the beating she is about to sustain is only a most minute, infinitesimal part of the eternal tortures of hell, tortures that you will all suffer unless you live according to the laws of the Church. The priest, that obnoxious, festering excuse for an animal, is not in my jurisdiction, so I have no real power of punishment over that overgrown maggot. Therefore I have sent him to Rome, as you have seen, where he will be dealt with as he deserves.
"This brazen harlot, however, is fully within my responsibility, and will suffer this crime for the remainder of her insult of a life." The Mother turned to the burly sisters guarding Claire Marie and shouted, "Unshackle the animal and prepare the dog for the whips!"
Claire-Marie's hands were freed of the manacles, raised high over her head and tied to the stake against which she was rudely shoved. She screamed with pain as the splinters from that ancient beam stuck themselves into her breasts, belly and thighs.
Mother Superior was handed a cat-o'-nine-tails, lifted it and lashed the thongs across Claire-Marie's lush, bare buttocks. She shrieked, and I felt a shiver of delight run down my spine as I watched red welts rise on that soft white flesh that I had kissed and bit so many peaceful times before.
"Let this be a lesson to you, hellish slut," screamed the Mother as she whacked the whip across Claire's tender ass. Again and again the whip came down amid the Mother's imprecations and Claire's pathetic moans, as I stood there smiling.
After fifty lashes had been administered, and Claire was covered from head to toe with welts, cuts, bruises and crimson trickling blood, she was untied and manacled once more.
Facing the crowd, she had to be held up by two sisters, the burly ones, or she would have collapsed. Their blows to the nape of her neck nearly made her do so anyway.
The Mother spoke again, more deeply, more solemnly: "This, my children, is a sample of the punishments meted out to sinners who follow the lustful ways of the flesh-But only a sample. We have other things in store for her-and at the end of the road, when we have finished torturing her here in the convent, when her vile corrupted flesh has finally putrefied forever, she may look forward to the eternal tortures of the inescapably damned." She turned to Claire-Marie. "What do you have to say for yourself, whore of Babylon!"
Claire-Marie looked up at the crowd, scanning her tearstained eyes across us, until her gaze met mine. She stared at me pathetically and suddenly burst out: "I was going to stay! I wanted to say that last night! I wasn't going to ... "
The Mother clubbed her on the back of the neck, and Claire staggered, nearly falling down. "What is this raving nonsense?" Mother said.
"Lock her up!" and Claire was dragged away by the chain as the crowd dispersed.
And what do you suppose, Father, my sentiments were when I returned to the solitude of my cell and had a chance to contemplate everything that had transpired during the previous twenty-four hours, from the delivery of the note to me all the way through to Claire's final confession that she had reversed her decision beforehand, and that I had had, in fact, no cause to seek revenge?
Do you suppose I then felt remorse at what I had done? Do you suppose I cursed myself for acting so rashly and fantasized the scene that would have occurred had I gone to Claire's cell instead of sending Chetouille and the Mother? What a night of riotous joy that would have been, after she broke the news that her love for me had won out, and she would stay in the nunnery forever and ever, so that she could enjoy another few months with me. A touching reconciliation.
If you find it possible to believe this about me, Papa, then you show yourself to have none of the respect and trust I so dearly wish to have from you.
But I am your daughter, and I felt at that moment no remorse whatsoever for what I had done, no vain, futile wish to go back and recapture the past that could have been.
No night with Claire could ever have replaced the uncontrollable delight I felt in watching Claire's tender flesh absorb the repeated lashes of the whip, and knowing that it was my treachery that had caused them to be inflicted, that I was, in a way, wielding the whip myself.
And the crowning delight, the climax, of all my joys that morning, had come from Claire's lips, from her own quivering lips: "I was going to stay! I wanted to say that last night! I wasn't going to...."
I repeated these words over and over to myself all that night as I recreated the whole scene, relived every lash of the cat-o'-nine-tails. Not only had I succeeded in getting her beaten before the community and completely disgraced, but I had ruined her life altogether, destroyed all her plans, consigned her to a life in a torture chamber with only the hope of pitchforks and the stench of the fiery furnaces to look forward to with any certainty.
The sweetest part, Papa, the sweetest part, of course was that last admission of hers that I had had no cause whatsoever for inflicting these tortures upon her. No real reason whatsoever. It was a gratuitous act of cruelty, and I could enjoy all the results of my treachery in all their purity, without being sidetracked by base, vulgar, logical motives.
I had had no motives, as it turned out. And far from feeling remorse, as you may have feared, I felt an orgasmic thrill in the sheer beauty of my excessive, unmotivated cruelty, just as the saints pat themselves on the back for uncalled-for acts of charity.
I do hope you've enjoyed this little episode of my adolescent life, Papa, and I shall look forward anxiously to your early reply.
Letter Four
Dear Papa, Thank you so much for your warm, touching, intimate and rather exciting letter. I'm delighted to learn that you found the description of my very first orgasm so exciting, and that it resulted in several emissions for you in the course of the following night. I only wish I could have been there to share each of them with you.
As to your objections, it would have been impossible for me to get a view of the exact positions of Chetouille and Claire to give you a blow-by-blow description of what transpired.
There was no access at all to the small window in Claire's cell, and I could hardly have hidden myself in the room without being detected-if not by Claire and Chetouille, certainly by Mother Superior when she searched under the bed.
Your further objection that I should have gone to Claire's cell that night alone, indulged in an orgy of reconciliation, and then set Chetouille and the Mother on her is a delightful one, and would have made everything even more delicious. But you must remember that I was only fourteen at the time, unaccustomed in the ways of the world and not yet attuned to all the nuances of cruelty that you pumped into my blood with your sperm.
But these questions are beside the point, since I'm not talking about what I might like to have done, but what I actually did. This is not a novel, Papa, written to satisfy your jaded lusts. It is not a not a masturbation fantasy for you, but fact, pure fact, the unadorned truth, and cannot admit of the embellishments of fantasy.
To move on back into the mainstream of my life, then, events at the convent after Claire's demise were relatively serene and unbearably dull. My lady-love's replacement as proctor was an old hag of more than fifty, about whom the less said the better. As to my studies, I took a special delight in reading over and over again the lives and the tortures of the early Christian martyrs. My intimate knowledge of their sufferings was eventually to come in very handy much later in my travels.
At the end of the following year, my education being completed, I returned home from the convent, not without some regret at leaving the place, but a thirst for the new experiences that the outside world stood ready to offer me.
I had been away for three years, and was rather surprised at the changes that had taken place in mother during that time. She now spent nearly all her time in her room, in bed. That edge of iron that I had fought throughout my childhood at home now seemed to have rusted away. She had lost weight and seemed gaunt and broken; an old woman although she was scarcely over thirty years old.
The Count had hardly changed at all. Besotted, bleary-eyed, his fat face-all splotched with little pink veins, his nose a bright, bulbous red, he spent his nights drinking and his days hunting.
Mother no longer dined with the Count. She took her meals alone in her room. I dined alone in the nursery, and the Count dined and drank alone downstairs in the banquet room, though often his hunting companions joined him for a few barrels of wine. As you perceive, we were a closely knit family.
Mother saw to the progress of my education by forcing me to read various moral and meditative guides, on which she would catechize me at length each morning and evening. A slap in the face was my reward if I missed an answer or if I hesitated.
We had no guests, save for the Count's cronies, and I was never allowed to leave the house and grounds except to attend Mass with mother each Sunday. There, I amused myself by closing my eyes and imagining it was Chetouille intoning the words, still dressed in his shredded blanket.
Life during those days was terribly dismal, father, and I felt myself slipping back into the lethargy and boredom of the days before I entered the convent.
But my young body was aflame with desires and lusts (I was then nearly sixteen) but no matter how much I pestered mother about introducing me to others my own age-or anyone, for that matter-her answer was always a shrug. I would ask her over and over again if she had yet done anything to arrange a match for me-to this her answer was, "Too young. The infamy of marriage is best put off until the last minute."
I amused myself by flirting with and teasing the Count's young valet and body-servant, Giton. A strikingly handsome and extremely well-formed lad of nineteen or twenty with mischievous dark eyes and a full pouting red mouth which I always imagined kissing and sucking my hot body, Giton was in and out of the Count's bedroom (adjacent to mine) at all hours of the day and night, as his post demanded. Whenever I passed him in the hall he would step aside, bowing slightly, his eyes cast down, down to about the level of my burgeoning breasts, and with the slightest suggestion of a sly smile playing across that red mouth. In his presence my blood raced with lust and I wanted to grab him, pull him into the room, strip off his clothes as he ripped off mine, and taste those pleasures of which Claire had been so enamoured, and which had led to her undoing.
But no such delights were in store for me, at least for the time being. Mother's surveillance of my every move, my every mood, was her major obsession. It seemed her only reason to go on living was to keep me a little girl for the rest of my life.
I became aware of Mother's diary quite by accident. I was approaching her room one evening for my catechism when I heard her whimpering behind the door. Uncertain as to what might be the cause of this unexpected show of emotion, I tip-toed up to the door and peered through the keyhole. She lay propped up in her bed, daubing her eyes with a handkerchief, while reading from a small black book. My curiosity was set all aflame. Could it be possible that that sexless monster whom I hated so, whose mention of the male sex was always accompanied by the most bitter imprecations, could it be possible that somewhere in the dark depths of her secret past she nursed the wound of a sad, lost love? I thought so. My one-track, sex-starved mind could see it no other way. Immediately on witnessing this little vignette through the keyhole I vowed to get that book at all costs and get the goods on Mama.
Without taking my eye from the keyhole I rapped on the door. At this sound she quickly closed the book and clutched it to her heaving bosom.
"Who is it?" she asked.
"It's I, Mama."
"One moment, Jacqueline," she said, and hastily crammed the book under her pillow. "Come in, child," she said, and I entered for my catechistic lesson, and daily punishment.
In order to get my hands on the book I would have to search her room, of course. The difficulty lay in the fact that she never left her room except on Sundays, when I accompanied her to Mass.
So the following Saturday, when I was awoken by the chambermaid, I moaned and groaned and griped of bellyaches and queasiness. Mama soon joined me at bedside, commiserated with me and ordered me to stay in bed the rest of the day.
By Sunday morning my condition was worse. I had actually developed a fever. In pretending to be sick I had given such a convincing portrayal that I had fallen for the act myself, and really was sick after all.
"I'd better stay here with you, child," Mama said, removing the hat and veil which she had already donned for her Sunday morning rite. "We may have to call in the doctor. I'm not going to leave your side until you've recovered."
I panicked. I'd acted a little too convincingly. "No, Mama, please," I said. "I'm getting better all the time, I know it. Please go and pray for me to get well. That's all I need. God will cure me if you pray for me. I'll be all better by the time you get back. I'll pray too, the whole time, and you'll see."
She was so touched by this sudden invocation of the Almighty, so happy to think that I'd finally gotten religion, that she kissed me on my rapidly cooling forehead, readjusted her hat and veil and went out the door smiling.
I waited until I had heard the carriage roll off, then turned to the maid who had been appointed to nurse me. "I think I'm beginning to get better already, and I'd like something to eat." I asked her to fetch me some food, and the moment she had disappeared down the stairs I jumped out of bed and raced down the hall to Mother's room. Nothing under the pillow. I began rummaging through all the drawers in her dressers, and found nothing, leaving only the desk, which was locked. I knew she kept the keys in a vase, which I emptied. Under the dried flowers were half a dozen keys and one of them opened Mama's Pandora's box. There, underneath a pile of letters and handkerchiefs and esoteric undergarments and a small, odd whip, lay the black book I had searched for so diligently. I hid it under my skirts, restored the room to its original order and dashed back to my room, crawling into bed only seconds before the maid rapped on the door and carried in a tray of rolls, coffee and fresh fruit.
I wolfed it down and told her to remove the tray, dismissing her for the rest of the day since I had fully recovered. Then I opened the little black book.
Innocuous enough at first. Her painful defloration by the Count. Her hatred of him. Her loneliness.
Then, suddenly, the Marquis de Sade arrives at our doorstep with enormous fanfare, the cheering of crowds, rose petals descending like snowflakes from the fiery clouds.
Oh, Father, if you could only have seen me when I read that passage-the passage I have already quoted to you in an earlier letter-depicting your seduction of Mother and the manner of my begetting. I was dissolved in ecstasy! Everything she said about you filled me with lust and awe-to feel in my loins that such a man as you was my father-and that in one riotous night you had created me and destroyed the silly bitch whom I hated so. I was delirious with joy.
I had to hide the book. A thorough search would be made when she discovered the loss. My room offered no sanctuary. I couldn't possibly take it outside now, either. Mother was due back any minute. So I ripped out each page of the diary and interspersed them in the large Latin Bible sitting on my desk, then burned the binding and covers in my fireplace.
Mother returned, was delighted her prayers had been answered so soon, and retired to her room.
I waited, my ears perked up for any sign of agitation. After fifteen minutes or so I heard the sound of rummaging-drawers opened and slammed shut, papers rustling, books thrown on the floor. Then the chambermaid came hustling down the hall. Mother's curses, accusations, the maid's denials. Sharp cracks of Mother's bony hand across the maid's face, whimpered denials. Giton, my heart's desire, was summoned. Louder accusations and harder slaps on his presumably naked ass.
In the course of the afternoon the inquisition continued. Every servant in the house was grilled and beaten. Finally Mother stormed into my room.
"All right, where is it?" she roared.
"Where is what, Mama?" I asked, wide-eyed and ignorant.
"You know exactly what I'm talking about, you little scamp," and she proceeded to tear my room apart, dumping wastebaskets, emptying drawers, pulling all my clothes onto the floor pulling up the rug. She even made me get out of bed and proceeded to tear it up, finally dumping the mattress on the floor.
"What's the matter, Mama, did you lose something? What was it? What are you looking for, maybe I can help you."
She said nothing, surveyed the room once more and stormed out. Practically the only object she hadn't ripped up was the Good Book. That would have been sacrilege.
Mother locked herself in her room when she had finally exhausted herself and everyone else in the house (save the Count, who was still sleeping off his last night's drunk). She refused to see anyone the rest of the week. She nearly stopped eating altogether, fearing, I guess, that the servant who stole her secrets might also try to poison her. Or maybe she wanted to starve herself to death. There were times during the following week when I would awake in the middle of the night and hear her crying to herself. It was music to my ears.
Then Sunday rolled around it was her turn to stay home. She couldn't get out of bed. We conversed through her closed door. I told her I would pray for her to get well, just as she had prayed for me. (Actually, I prayed for her to kill herself.)
"No need, my child," she said weakly and hoarsely. "It's beyond that. Prayers won't do me any good now. It's all in God's hands."
"Yes, Mama," I said cheerfully.
On the way out I stopped and extracted one of the pages from the diary and took it with me. On a sheet of paper I scrawled, with my ambidextrous left hand, the message, "We have received your manuscript, Madame de Prozinard, and we are rushing it through our printing factory. We hope to have the book distributed throughout France within the year, and would be interested to see more of your work."
I addressed an envelope to Mama and after the services I posted the letter in the village and headed happily back home.
The following morning I waited eagerly for the maid to deliver Mama's letters. They were late, late, late! But when they had come, and after she had had time, ample time, to open the better part of them, I heard a muffled shriek from her boudoir down the hall.
A few moments later, as I huddled in an empty room next to hers, I heard a gun go off and I knew instinctively that my prayers had been answered. Unable to restrain myself, ready to shriek with joy, I galloped into her room, nearly breaking the door down in my haste.
She lay on the bed, a smoking gun in her right hand, her brains and blood oozing out of her skull onto the white silk pillow.
Tossing the envelope into the fire and cramming the diary entry into my bosom, I shrieked for help.
My heart was throbbing with a murderer's excitement, and I couldn't take my eyes off all that blood.
Servants arrived, and the frantic anti-climax began to uncoil in the household.
I would like to take all the credit for her death. But in all honesty, I really can't. You, Father, deserve at least a pat on the ass for your seminal contribution to the climax.
Letter Five
Dear Papa, I am puzzled by your silence. I had expected some acknowledgement, at least, after that little account of Mama's undoing. Were you disappointed by the absence of any carnal concupiscence in the letter? Was that it? Are you so jaded that only explicit sexual description, even in letters from your own daughter, is the only thing that interests you? If so, this next episode of my defloration is quite likely to send you scurrying off to your cell to play with yourself.
With mother out of the way, I wasted no time in satisfying the most important of my desires.
The day of her demise was a hectic one, with the doctor, the priest, the carpenters building her coffin, the dressmakers fitting her funeral gown and the Count celebrating a one-man wake throughout it all.
When finally the priest had left, and the coffin was all fitted up, with Mama lying comfortably inside it, the Count finally collapsed, dead drunk as usual.
I listened as Giton carried the fat, snoring pile of flab up the stairs past my door, and into his room. A few moments later Giton, having put the count to bed, tip-toed past my door once more.
This time, however, it was open. I stood in the doorway, feigning tears, daubing my eyes with a silk handkerchief.
"Giton," I said pathetically, "is Papa drunk again?"
"Yes, mademoiselle," he said, averting his eyes. He had taken one quick glance at my body as he approached the door, and I guess he couldn't trust himself any further. Already his face was flushed and he didn't know what to do with his hands.
I had filched one of mother's garments that afternoon, perhaps the same one she wore when you ravished her and procreated me. It was a long, white nightdress of the sheerest lawn, so sheer it was virtually transparent. As I stood, slightly sideways in the doorway, the lamp in the lighted room must have silhouetted my body, stark naked beneath the filmy fabric, and brought every curve to light. I leave you to imagine it, father-lest I seem overly enamoured of myself. Suffice to say that I was, as you know, sixteen years old at the time, and was nearly fully formed. My breasts had grown considerably since my convent days, and were capable of bobbing up and down ever so slightly as I breathed. My sharp cherry nipples stood out in strong contrast to the carnation of my breasts and the white of my gown. My thighs were fully rounded out by then, as were my calves and hips, and my ass would have driven you mad with desire, Father, knowing your especial proclivity for perversities in that zone.
All this I displayed with great exhibitionistic titillation to my dumbfounded, and at least as equally titillated Giton, whose face was turning as red as my nipples.
"What will I do, Giton?" I asked, resting my arms on the lintel and my head on my arms so that he might drink in my exposed body from neck to navel, from ankle to ass, without embarrassment.
"I'm all alone," I went on, "All alone, Giton. I have no one."
"It must be very hard for you, mademoiselle," he said, taking a step toward me. His impulse must have been to reach out and touch me, but fear and the knowledge of his place got the better of him.
"It's awful," I sobbed, lifting my head and looking into his eyes, which by now were hungry with undisguised lust. "Giton," I said, taking his hand in mine, "Giton." His flesh was incredibly hot, almost feverish. "Giton, please come keep me company for a while. I'm all alone now."
He gladly obliged. I closed the door behind us and walked with him over to the bed. "Sit down, Giton," I said, motioning to the foot of the bed. He sat down gingerly on a tiny corner, holding his knees together and resting his palms on them, his round arms as stiff as lonely erections.
I lay down on my belly, my head facing the foot of the bed, only inches from his loins.
"Do you have a family, Giton?" I asked.
I began running my fingertip up and down his thigh, in the most innocent, child-like way, but I could see from the burgeoning bulge in his crotch that this was not having an innocent, child-like effect.
"I suppose so, mademoiselle," he said, turning slightly toward me so that he could see the slope of my arched back and the thrust and crack of my buttocks under he film of cloth. "But I haven't seen them since I was fourteen."
"Why not, Giton?" I asked, letting my hand stray closer and closer to the throbbing rod of his young and stiff manhood. Not one finger anymore, but the whole hand, up and down his thigh.
"I was sold into service then," he went on nervously, "and I haven't seen the family, any of them, since then."
"Poor Giton," I sighed, and rolled over onto my back. I could feel his eyes burning into my naked flesh through the thin veil of the fabric, and I suppose the sight of my sixteen-year-old body, so obviously ripe, so fiendishly exhibited, was too much for a hot-blooded, cocksure specimen like Giton. His hand stroked my hair, and when I offered no resistance to this act of affection he leaned his head down into mine, his dilated eyes pleading with me not to call my father like a genteel bitch, or to cry out, not to take it ill away now.
His lips, that I had studied for so long, came down onto mine, his tongue entered my mouth and licked, locked with my tongue. He slid down alongside me on the bed and took me into his powerful arms. His hands roved my hips, my sides, and grabbed my upthrust breasts. I moaned, boiling with desire; yes, I was burning with lust, I had to have his body at once, had to know what it felt like with a man, with Giton.
He squeezed and kneaded the nipples and I chewed on his hair, pulling loose his doublet and unbuttoning his shirt. He slid his hands down along my body as he kicked off his boots, slid off his trousers, exposing a magnificently stiff pink and crimson engine of the most beautiful proportions. As fascinated as I was to see and to touch it, my real interest lay in feeling it probe my depths posthaste.
His hands reached under my gown and slid up my legs, pushing the garment up above my navel. He slid his body down along mine and began planting kisses where his hands had been, along the insides of my thighs as his palms rubbed my bush and his thumbs dexterously rubbed the lips of my sex and then slid into my secreting vagina. As he rubbed I cried, "Kiss me there, kiss me!"
His mouth responded immediately, planting a sucking, licking kiss that encompassed everything as his hands pushed the gown up to my neck and squeezed both breasts. He lapped and slurped hungrily, tickling and probing with a lingual dexterity that surpassed even Claire's. As he squeezed my nipples and buried his head deeper between my upthrust thighs I felt in a blinding flash all I had felt with her, and more. I wanted more now, much more.
I raised him by the armpits up along my body and kissed his juicy mouth, reaching with my hand to grab and squeeze his hot, throbbing penis. He lifted his hips and I brushed the tip across the threshold of my own hungry genitals.
He groaned with desire and thrust himself forcefully into my moistened vagina. I let out a little shriek of pain as he rent the virgin cavern accustomed at this point only to fingers and to tongues. He withdrew slightly and raising himself over me so that his lean, hard muscular strength was directed at that one point, pushed in further, slowly sinking all the way in so that our thighs and pelvic bones and pubic hair were locked together rubbing and further exciting us. He tried to plant a kiss on my neck but the gown interfered.
"Rip it off!" I cried and he tore it from me so that our bodies were completely naked, locked together. He withdrew slowly, and then thrust in more deeply. The sharp, tingling piercing pain that had cut through my body on the first thrust had awoken long-sleeping nerves, nerves as capable of pleasure as of pain, and with each new thrust I felt a new sharpness, a new brilliance of sensation quake my body with an intense pleasure that mounted and mounted as he thrashed in and out, back and forth against my own thrashings, thrusting deeply in and then deeper still and then arching back all the way, nearly popping out, and suddenly plunging further still.
We bucked and moaned for what seemed like hours and then I felt it coming again-felt my body stiffen up against his in an absolute ecstasy of flooding blood and flashing fires. He felt me feeling this and drove himself all the harder into me as I cried out in ecstasy. Then he let himself go altogether, bucking like a wild stallion until I felt his thighs and buttocks stiffen against my dug-in nails, felt him thrust himself all the way up inside me and felt the wash of wave after wave of his hot, forceful juices shoot against the wall of my womb.
We lay a while together in the flickering candlelight, stroking each others' bodies, exchanging innocently affectionate caresses and kisses. Very soon, these lost their innocence as I felt, in my hand, his desire coming back with a renewed stiffness.
He slid his body on top of me and his weapon inside me a second time, more easily, more smoothly, more sweetly, less frantically and we began to pump against each other slowly in the warm rosy light, the thin skin between our bloodstreams gradually dissolving, as it seemed, and we became one thrashing beast hungry for satisfaction. It came rather more slowly this time, Papa, and more richly, and lasted longer.
And each successive time (we didn't sleep, we made love all night) the pleasure mounted to successively more intense plateaus.
After the tenth time the faint light of dawn began to appear at the horizon and Giton rolled wearily out of bed and put on his clothes.
"I'll be going to Paris with your father tomorrow," he said, sitting down alongside me on the bed and fondling my naked breasts. "We'll be back the day after. Will you wait up for me that night?"
I nodded. He leaned into me and kissed my lips languorously, planted a final row of biting kisses down my body to the feet and tip-toed out the door.
I lay back, beaming, gloriously happy and much more satisfied than I had ever been with Claire. It had been an eventful day. I thought of Mama, lying dead in her coffin directly under me. There would be no prying questions from her tomorrow. Shooting herself was the first nice thing she'd ever done for me.
The Count's purpose in taking off so suddenly for Paris was to fetch his sister, Charlotte La Radeuse, whom he hoped to persuade to return with him to the chateau, supervise the remaining details of the funeral and five with him at least until a suitable match had been made for me, while in the meantime she was to supervise my upbringing. Since to a certain extent the course of my life depended on her character, I spent every hour after the Count's departure wondering what sort of woman my aunt would turn out to be.
At last, in a cloud of dust, the Count's carriage came rolling into the drive. I watched as Giton dismounted in his tight pants and opened the door for her. Out she came, a short, rumpy woman in her late fifties, with bluish-silver hair. She was fashionably, even gaudily dressed and heavily made up, especially her mouth and cheeks.
I rushed downstairs to greet her in the salon. The Count introduced me to her and I curtsied smartly. She searched for her pince-nez, found them inside her dress at her bosom and held them to her eyes, rearing back her head. She studied me from head to toe and back again, very carefully.
"I accept the charge, Louis," she said, turning to the Count. "She'll do quite nicely."
"I'm glad you like her, Charlotte," he said, signaling Giton to fetch a bottle.
"Yes," she's quite lovely. How did you ever spawn anything like her? There's nothing of our family in her at all."
"Oh? I never noticed," said the Count. "Come, Charlotte, I'll show you your room. Giton, give that bottle to me. Bring in her luggage. Jacqueline, go to your room. You'll be dining with us tonight, so look your best."
I was immensely taken with Aunt Charlotte. At dinner, she attacked my mother fiercely (though her corpse still lay in the next room) and launched into an attack on the Count for having had the stupidity to marry her in the first place. She deplored the fact that Mama had raised me so strictly and vowed to undo that grievous mistake immediately. Furthermore, she was determined to make a match for me and have me married off within six months. That was long enough, she said, far too long in fact, to spend in such a dismal place as this.
The wine flowed freely, and Aunt Charlotte drank every bit as much as the Count, slowly overtaking him as the night wore on.
I was finally sent up to bed, rather drunk myself, and all aflame for Giton. Giddy as I was, I determined that I would experiment with some of the tortures that thrilled me so much in your seduction of Mama and that had given me so much pleasure in watching Claire-Marie receive her unjust punishment.
I removed all my clothing and then put on one of Mama's corsets, a black one which, while exceedingly tight, left my breasts completely free, accentuating their thrust tremendously. Ending at my hip bones, it left the lower half of my body completely naked.
I lay on the bed and waited. It was a long wait, as the Count and Charlotte went on drinking far into the night. Finally there was dead silence, and then the sound of Giton carrying the Count up the stairs.
A few moments later Giton rapped on my door.
"Come in," I said, spreading my legs slightly and inhaling deeply. He entered and closed the door. He approached me slowly, his wide eyes drinking in my naked breasts and thighs and my exposed sex. Kneeling before me, he planted a kiss between my legs, kissed my breasts and then held my head gently as he looked into my eyes.
"You're the most desirable creature in the world," he said, sliding his arms around my shoulders and pulling me toward him as he moved his lips toward mine.
I shoved him roughly away. "And you're a detestable servant who ought to be flogged and thrown out of the house," I hissed, sitting up on the edge of the bed and glaring at him.
"What? Jacqueline...." he whimpered as his face contorted with surprise and pain.
"You ought to be whipped. You stole my virginity on the day of my mother's death. You took advantage of my grief and innocence. No punishment would be too harsh for you."
"But Jacqueline, it was ... it wasn't ... I just ... I didn't...."
"You did! Take down your pants," I said ferociously. He froze.
"Take down your pants!" I repeated. "Do you want me to do it for you?"
"Ye-es," he stuttered.
I stepped up to him, unbuckled his belt, re moved it from his trousers and set it on the bed. Then I unbuttoned and pulled down his trousers. Whatever the reason-my costume, his sudden exposure to me, naked desire-he was as stiff as a flagpole.
"Raise your arms," I said, and he complied. "Turn around." He turned, exposing a round, pink, firm young ass. I took his shirt and doublet and pulled them up as far as they would go, so that his body was naked from the neck to the shins, while his head was covered.
Taking his heavy leather belt from the bed, I positioned myself behind him and whacked it as hard as I could across his buttocks. He let out a muffled scream and I watched his ass turn crimson where the belt had lashed across it.
Again and again I whipped those tender mounds until they were blotchy red all over. Another crack of the belt and the skin tore, a thin stream of blood trickled down onto the back of his thigh. I beat him until my arms were sore.
So excited by what I had done by that time, I couldn't wait any longer for my excitement to be satiated. Without untangling the shirt from his head and arms I pulled him toward the bed with me. He got tangled in his trousers and nearly fell on the floor, but I pulled him with me and we landed on the bed together. After a moment of awkward squirming and wrestling he was on top of me, as excited as I was. He groped for a moment with his hand and finding the mark, thrust himself all the way into me. He pounded away as fiercely and as savagely as I had beaten away at him, as though to pay me back in kind. But he wasn't inflicting any pain.
On the contrary, every harsh stab, every rending thrust sent shivers of sheer delight up and down my spine. Within a minute both of us had clawed up the mountain of satiety amid sucking howls and moans, strangleholds and deep scratches. Then it was over as suddenly as it had begun.
He disentangled himself from his clothing and stripped it away. "Why did you do that?" he asked. "Do what?"
"Before, when you whipped me."
"Didn't you like it?"
"It hurt."
"Didn't you like it?" I repeated. "I'm bleeding."
"Didn't you like it?"
He paused. "Yes," he finally said and bit me savagely on the nipple.
After seven or eight more forays that night, Aurora's rosy buttocks began to rise on the horizon, and Giton had to be off to work. He had a busy day ahead of him. Mother was being buried that day.
Every night after that Giton came to visit me, and every night I devised a new game for us to play. He was able to borrow several interesting kinds of whips from the stable and I left no part of his body unstripped, unpinched, unpricked, uncut. On his part, he didn't seem to be satisfied with receiving the whip; he wanted to wield it as well and I loved every stroke, every stripe.
Our lovemaking was exuberant and experimental. We explored every position, every orifice. He had a special predilection for anal sex, which hurt at first but which I grew to like and one night, to show him how it felt I strapped a heavy whip around my waist, greased the thick, heavy handle and mounted him. His shrieks were terrific as I pounded away but he must have loved it in the end, for when he arose afterwards he'd left a thick wet stain on the bed.
For all this, innocent spanking, flesh to flesh, remained my favorite in those rosy adolescent days. I remember one night in particular in which I let him spank me. I wore only my black corset, and Giton was completely naked, sitting erect on the edge of the bed. He stretched me across his lap, but in such a way that his erection immediately penetrated me. With each savage downthrust of his calloused hand, his hips and pelvis would push up into me with equal savagery. As the upthrusts increased in speed and force, so did the blows that his powerful hand walloped on my ass, until the two motions became one and we both rolled over moaning and satiated on the bed.
Satiated, that is, for the next five minutes.
In the meantime, Aunt Charlotte was putting me through a little school of her own during the day, designed to make me shed my provincial barbarities and take on the manners, tastes, speech, prejudices, frivolities and style of haut monde. I was an eager, docile pupil, and Aunt Charlotte was immensely pleased with my progress.
One day she said: "I've made a match for you, my dear. How does that strike you?"
It struck me like an orgasm, and I launched into praise and gratitude for the dear girl.
"I think you're ready to take care of yourself now," she interrupted finally. "The lucky man is the Marquis de Poitringle. He's immensely wealthy, and his family is one of the best connected in Paris. You may wonder why he is so anxious to make you his wife-you have an insignificant dowry, your family is unknown outside of this province, and he's never seen you in his life."
"Then why-" I began.
"My recommendation. And-another matter. Your respective ages. He's seventy-three years old. That's not an obstacle, I trust? Some six teen-year-old girls wouldn't want a seventy three-year-old husband. You weren't looking for one of these young stallions, I trust?"
"Oh, no," I said, bidding bye-bye in my mind to Giton.
"Good. You'll be able to have all the lovers you want on the side, anyway. The important thing is to marry for wealth and position. The Marquis has no male heir. He has, however, three daughters by his late wife. He can't live forever. If you want to get his fortune and property after he's wheezed his last breath, and be a rich young widow, you'll have to produce a son by him. Is that clear to you?"
"Yes, Aunt Charlotte."
"Do you know how one goes about that? Producing an heir?" She eyed me through her pince-nez.
"Why no, Aunt Charlotte."
Laughing and lifting her skirts, she took a wine bottle from the table and illustrated the act, providing a graphic running commentary. "I'm sure you won't have any trouble if you can get the old bastard up. If you can't give him an erection, though, I doubt if anyone can." ;
"I'll do my best, Aunt Charlotte," I promised.
"Good. We'll leave for Paris the day after tomorrow. There will be a few minor formalities-you'll have to meet him, for instance-and that will be that. Now, back to your English lesson."
I wasn't very good at English that day. I was too busy fantasizing Paris and the rose-colored life that awaited me there. Old Poitringle or whatever his name was would do as well as any other idiot husband, I thought; better than most, in fact, since his decrepit old age and infirmity would leave me free to do exactly as I pleased.
That night, as I lay clothed as usual in my black corset, waiting for the Count to collapse, I realized it would be my last night with Giton. He had been, after all, my first male lover and a glorious one, and it bothered me terribly to think we would merely say adieu like two casual acquaintances and let it go at that. Moreover, he was a servant and I knew I would never have to stoop to his class again, moving as I was into the larger world. He, for his part, was un-likely to make love to the likes of me again. What could I leave Giton that would make him remember me forever, that would burn my memory into his mind for as long as he lived, obliterating the thought of all other women?
I brooded for so long over this question that I didn't even hear Giton carry the Count upstairs, and his knock took me totally by surprise. He came in and walked slowly over to my bed, beginning to undress, looking more handsome than ever and oozing raw sexuality.
"What do you want me to do?" he asked, kicking off his boots and pulling off his doublet.
I realized I had forgotten to make up a game for the night-the whips and pins and clubs and knives and chains were all locked up in my trunk along with all the other toys.
"Nothing, Giton," I sighed, spreading my legs, "just come to bed and make love to me like it was the end of the world."
He pulled down his trousers and his penis, already erect, quivered in anticipation as I quickly unhooked and disposed of the corset. He dove into bed on top of me, taking one of my breasts in his mouth and chewing on the nipple until I could feel it going erect against his tongue. He moved upward, grazing his erect organ against mine.
"Take me quickly," I cried, and he responded instantly, thrusting his powerful monster into my hot squeezing cavern. We ground our naked hips and thighs together and slowly began thrusting in and out deliriously.
That night, he hardly let up at all-it was one ever-mounting crescendo dotted with new climaxes that seemed to be the highest peak attainable until the next one went shimmering through my body.
Finally, I felt Giton begin to tire, to sink toward fatigue, and I knew dawn was near. It was time for my game. I had been thinking about it all night, and had finally came up with one. It was also to be my memento to him. The game was called Rape.
Within seconds the Count was at the door, sword in hand, galloping toward the bed just as Giton, whom I had constricted with my thighs as long as possible, was dismounting, still fully excited.
The Count, half asleep and still half drunk, slashed at his valet with the sword. Giton tried to protect himself with his arms and hands, but it was useless. Papa was wielding the sword like a madman. He hacked into Giton's hip, lopped off a forearm, slashed a deep trough into his neck, and the poor boy fell screaming to the floor, still conscious, holding his genitals with his remaining hand. The Count hacked away at the hand until it fell apart.
My little game was turning out to be even better than I had expected. I watched the Count, who all along had been bellowing obscenities, sever poor Giton's testicles with his sword and then hurl them into the boy's face. He must have been unconscious with shock, but his eyes were still open.
"Let that be a lesson co you!" the Count screamed, and gave Giton the coup de grace by ramming the sword into the boy's heart.
The Count staggered over to the bed, and nearly fell on top of me. He began stroking my head with his bloodied hands.
"My poor baby," he said, "did he hurt you?" I felt a trickle of Giton's blood at my mouth, blood fresh from his severed testicles, and I licked it. It was still hot, and salty.
Letter Six
Dear Papa, I was delighted to receive your letter, although I must say that your nit-picking objections are, as usual, quite without foundation. Your suggestion that I would have gotten far more pleasure from murdering Giton and Mama may be true, but it shows a naivete on your part as regards the world's way of dealing with criminals, a naivete, I might add, which has kept you in prison for much of your life while I am, have been, and will continue to be, free as a judge.
Furthermore, In suggesting that I perform both murders myself you quite overlook that fact that I was, in any case, the real perpetrator of both deeds even if I used others as the instrument.
And finally, the pleasure I took in causing these deaths, the ecstasy I felt in watching the dismemberment of Giton, was altogether as great as if I had actually carved the flesh myself or, in the case of mother, blown out her brains.
I speak from close personal experience in these matters, experience which I'll gladly relate to you in juicy detail if you'll be so kind as to hear me out rather than criticizing and trying to devaluate everything I've done. I should think a man of your ilk would be delighted to have a daughter so anxious to receive your approbation for a life so like yours.
Where was I? My fiance. I met him for the first time at a dinner party at Aunt Charlotte's in Paris. The Marquis de Poitringle was somewhat more withered and ugly than I had feared he might be. He looked older than his seventy-three years, with his ashen, emaciated face, vacant eyes, his quivering, palsied hands and the crook in his back that made him stoop and seem even shorter than he was.
We were introduced, and he kissed my hand with those dry, leathery lips of his that I came to detest so much. He looked me over and I could see the old lecher's eyes light up with a dim reflection of long-lost and hazily recollected lust.
My first impulse was to head back home and take up when' I had left off with Giton. But Giton, of course, was underground now, his flesh a main course for maggots, and there was no returning to my childhood now. I'd have to forge ahead in the disgusting world. I quickly overcame that disgust and warmed up to the old Marquis.
When you are seventy-three, Papa, may you too have a sixteen year-old libertine as a bride.
Dinner, alas, was a catastrophe. The Marquis sat there ogling me, and paid so little attention to chewing his food that he choked on a piece of roast beef and had to be led coughing and wheezing violently from the table. This put such a strain on his heart that he had to be carried home, but not before Charlotte had extracted a final commitment from him that the marriage would take place in two months' time. My only fear then was that the old man wouldn't live long enough to make it to the wedding.
Fortunately, he survived, and we were married with peat pomp at St. Germain des Pres. His doctors advised him against a wedding trip, and we set up house in his mansion on the Faubourg St. Germain.
Our wedding night was a total disaster. When the time came for him to retire (the Marquis went to bed every night at eight) we adjourned to the master bedroom. While his valet went through the laborious business of preparing him for bed, I disrobed completely in my dressing alcove, covered my body with a faint but powerful perfume, a supposed aphrodisiac, I was told when I purchased it. I rouged my lips, my nipples and their surrounding conical aureoles, as well as the lips of my sex. I slipped on a transparent pink gown which I had had made especially short and loose for easy access.
The Marquis was already in bed when I walked slowly into the bedchamber and stood before him.
"Do you like your child bride?" I asked, turning slowly around so he could take in every inch of my body.
He started to say something, wheezed, and finally came out with: "Take off-take off that thing. Let me see how you look."
I reached for the hem of the garment and slowly raised it up over my head, discarding it on the floor. Then made a slow, casual pirouette in order to show him the flesh he'd just purchased, or rented.
He licked his withered lips and began to breathe more heavily. "Come here, my bride," he said, and I quickly complied, climbing in alongside him.
He wore a heavy woolen nightshirt which I un buttoned hastily while he feebly fondled my breasts. I caressed his bony thighs and moved up to the seat of his sex. After an intensive search I found what I was looking for. There wasn't the faintest sign of life there at all.
As he explored my body with his cool dry hands and lips I continued my efforts to arouse him manually-to no avail. He kissed my mouth, his dry, coarse tongue lasciviously working against mine.
I worked like mad to arouse him, frigging away until I got a cramp in my wrist. His engine had not stirred in the slightest.
So I slid down like a snake along his withered body and took his tiny, shriveled instrument in my mouth, licking, sucking, nibbling in a heroic effort to stir some life there. After nearly an hour he began to swell ever so slightly with desire.
His feeble moans indicated this might be the moment. I slid back up alongside him and pulled him on top of me, guiding his little device into the hot tunnel that so eagerly awaited something, anything.
He made a few fatigued, parrying thrusts and relapsed into turpitude. I prodded his ribs, his buttocks, played my nails across his back. He remained still.
Then he began to snore.
I dislodged him from me, thrust him over on his back and stormed from the bedroom into my dressing chamber. I rang for my maid and had her fetch me a decanter of cognac. Alone, I drank myself senseless and thought back over all the nights with Giton, culminating in his dismemberment. Using the neck of the bottle, I managed to satisfy myself several times before I passed out.
That first night was a foreboding of what was to follow night after night in our all too chaste bed. I tried every device that my already rather jaded imagination could conceive. I dressed in the most outlandishly erotic costumes-stockings and spurred boots in bed, suffocating corsets, hoods, belts, dresses with cutouts to reveal only my breasts and genitals; I dressed as a boy and offered him my asshole; I dressed as a nun, as an infant, as an old lady. I used my mouth, my hands, my breasts, my ass, my long hair to rub his enfeebled instrument, all to no avail. I whipped and slapped him and let him beat me any way he liked. But it was all useless. He just lay there like a dead fish.
I began to have serious misgivings about having married him at all. If he was totally impotent-and all the evidence pointed (or drooped) in that direction-then I had made a catastrophic mistake. I had wasted my trump card so far as the marriage mart was concerned-my supposed maidenhead-on an old dotard who could offer me nothing and whose fortune, when he finally dropped dead (if the minor change from living to dead in his body could in fact be detected by medical science) would go, not to me at all, but to his daughters by his first marriage. I would have nothing to show for my months of futile, disgusting labor in a cold, clammy bed.
His utter inability to perform in that bed had raised another problem as well. I had been accustomed for nearly six months to spending every night with Giton, and was accustomed to five, six, ten, fifteen orgasms without fail before the sun rose.
My failure of a husband hadn't been able to do it once in our three months of miserable marriage. I had, of course, planned, once I had entered Parisian society, to take my pick among the libertines cruising around the salons and the court. Charlotte had led me to understand that old Poitringle knew everybody and went everywhere.
He may have done so in his salad days, back before I-or you, Father, for that matter-was born, but his infirmity and decrepitude, his thousand and one diseases, and particularly his severe heart condition, prevented him from going out at all, and he refused to entertain.
I therefore found myself completely isolated with the old dotard, and a suspicious and vile old duenna, Madame Degoubiller, one of his maiden nieces, was appointed to chaperone me wherever I went.
As the empty days and the dry nights bore on I felt my life wasting away (I was nearly seventeen) and resolved to take more drastic steps.
Before doing anything, however, I decided to pay a visit to dear old Aunt Charlotte and seek out her discreet advice. Accompanied by the ever-present Madame Degoubiller, I called on the old girl one afternoon for tea.
Fortunately, there were others there besides the old deunna and I, so I was able to draw Charlotte aside and explain my plight to her.
"You've tried everything, my dear?"
"Everything, Aunt, everything. I have a vivid imagination, even a 'dirty mind' as it's sometimes called. I've employed it to extravagance. With not even the least result. I tell you, Charlotte, the man has no more potency than a poached egg."
"We could get you an annulment," she said.
"No, Charlotte, I've already put too much into this. To have the marriage annulled now wouldn't do at all. I'd become a laughing-stock. I'm willing to try anything. Surely there must be something...."
Her eyes flashed with an evil look that heretofore I had only seen in the mirror. "Anything, my child?"
"Anything whatsoever."
"It may kill the man."
"So much the better."
"Well then," she said, lowering her voice, "there is a stimulant that I can procure for you at a very, very dear price."
"Poitringle can afford it," I said.
"It will make your husband as potent as a bull," she went on. "The strain on his heart, however, for a man his age and in his condition to give it to him would be tantamount to murdering him."
My heart leapt at these words and I felt an overwhelming sexual excitation. I had to have that poison at all costs.
"How soon can you get it for me?" I asked.
"It will take me at least a week," she said. "Come back next week on this day, unless I send for you earlier."
I agreed to do so, and left shortly thereafter with my chaperone.
I had difficulty sleeping all that week, gloating ahead toward the night that lay in store for me and my fated husband. I gave up trying to stimulate him by natural means altogether and retired each evening to the divan in my dressing room where I kept company with my cognac bottle.
The following week, on the appointed day, I returned to Charlotte's, accompanied as always by the old duenna. During our first free, private moment together she slipped me the vial, suggesting that I administer it immediately before the old flea retired, as its effects were all but instantaneous, and in most cases, permanent.
After dinner that evening I dismissed the butler and explained to him I would serve our usual glass of port myself. Removing the vial from between my breasts I poured its contents into his glass and returned to the table, toasting our marriage.
I watched the old boy's reaction as he sipped on the port. He moved his mouth around some and puckered his already puckered lips even more, as though he noticed something vaguely odd, but his taste buds were so deadened and undependable that he could no longer trust them. He downed the rest of the wine in one gulp.
Color came to his cheeks and he sat upright in his chair. He turned to me, and his eyes were bright and burning.
"Jacqueline, I think I'll go to bed a little earlier tonight. Will you come with me soon? Rather than staying in your dressing room? I feel-I feel somehow different tonight."
"What's come over you, Gaston?" I asked ingenuously.
"Something very strange and wonderful," he said, his eyebrow arched like an old roue, and with a sly smile on his lips. "Come," and he rose, taking my hand in his and leading me to the bedroom.
When I slid my naked body beside his I found to my delight that he had foregone for the first time since our marriage his heavy nightshirt. He was naked, and his body was hot. The skin itself seemed to have tightened around what was left of his muscles, and in the dark, he almost could have been mistaken for a young man.
He pressed his lips to mine. The lips, too, were hot and firm, and as he kissed me, caressing my breasts and belly with more energy and passion than he had ever shown before, I felt the old man awakening in me a passion that I would have thought inconceivable up to that moment.
Then he pressed his thighs into my hip and I felt the stab of that instrument of his that I had disparaged for so long, had virtually given up on, pressing into me, throbbing with all the vigor of a satyr.
I grabbed it with my hand squeezing it and feeling its full roundness and surprising length as I kissed him hotly on the ear and drew him on top of me.
"Possess me, Gaston," I cried. "My husband, my lover." The words would have made me vomit before this, but I was carried away with his desire and with mine, and with the murderous effects it was going to have.
He thrust and writhed like an epileptic, his and grunting and gasping and sighing, bucking away like a stallion in heat. I was carried away by his enthusiasm and urged him on, digging my nails into his scrawny back and buttocks, grinding, contracting, releasing, rotating.
He thrust and writher like an epileptic, his body all out of control. He was gasping for breath, his frantic breathing sounding more like the cry of a wild bird that that of an old man in heat.
In a frenzy he pounded harder and harder into me and his gasps became shrieks and howls until he stiffened himself up into me and I could feel the tidal rush of his long-dormant potency wash into my body. He was screaming, one long, last dying shriek of death agony that dissolved into frenzied gasps. Then his body stiffened altogether. I squeezed him to me with all the force I could muster, and the air escaped from his lungs. Then, silence.
I wriggled out from under his corpse, laying him out on his back. He was dead, all right, but his member was as erect as it had been when we began that night.
I was about to get up to fetch the doctor to verify his death when, on a sudden impulse, I returned to the bed. I touched him. Still stiff as a staff.
My nerves tingling with the simultaneous pleasures he had already afforded me, I couldn't resist the impulse to enjoy one last time the husband I had murdered.
I sat on the corpse, straddling his hips and slowly slid the still stiff staff into my hot wet hole and began to quickly move up and down, in and out, my hands around his lifeless throat as though to strangle whatever life was left out of him. I was in a delirium that lasted for what seemed an eternity until I felt it coming-my whole body racked with wave after wave of all but unbearable pleasure. He was a better lover dead than alive. I lay there a long time, waiting for him to recede. But he didn't, he just got stiffer. So I dismounted and got dressed.
When the doctor arrived I was appropriately grief-stricken. He suspected the use of a drug and asked me if I had administered it. I was horrified at this suggestion, but remarked that the Marquis had seemed unusually active that night, after a long period of impotence. Then I began to bawl again and he pronounced the old man dead of a heart attack.
Madame Degoubiller took charge of the funeral arrangements, and for the next few days I found myself surrounded by Poitringle's leech-like middle-aged daughters, my step-children.
I was certain, absolutely certain that Gaston had impregnated me that night, and I confided this bit of news separately to Degoubiller and each of the daughters, inferring that the effort had cost the Marquis his life.
Their reactions to this were the same. First, shock that such a thing be mentioned about the dead man; then, after they had accepted the plausibility of it, imprecations that I had caused his death-"young hussy!" And finally, dismay and bitterness that there might, after all, be an heir to take away the fortune that each of them had been banking on.
To forestall the possibility of any rumors concerning adultery I went into the most austere mourning for the next four months, locking myself in the house with Degoubiller and locking everyone else out.
Once my pregnancy was firmly established I moved in with Aunt Charlotte and in due course, after a painless labor (vice is always so amply rewarded, don't you agree, Papa?) I was delivered of a girl.
That same night, in the town of St. Denis, on the outskirts of Paris, the theft of a newborn baby boy was reported.
A week later, on the bank of the Seine ten miles downstream from the Pont-Royal, a sack was found and opened. The children who found it were reported to have opened it and run away screaming, for it contained the partially decomposed remains of a newborn girl.
As soon as I had recovered from the birth of my child I left Paris by coach for the Chateau de Poitringle, with the new Marquis sleeping in my lap and the huge holdings of Poitringle dynasty at my fingertips.
Letter Seven
Dear Papa, Just what do you mean by that last remark, Papa? "We share a great affinity-in our love for our daughters." Why must you always be such a mean old man?
I was, however, heartened by your other remarks concerning your satisfaction in the murder of old Poitringle, and by your evident interest in having me continue these letters. Do remember, though, that masturbation can cause insanity.
... broke off, I believe, on our departure from Paris. The new Marquis was welcomed joyously by everyone at the Chateau, and in the surrounding village a feast day was proclaimed in his honor.
I wasted no time in liquidating the entire estate, transferring all assets to my own account in Paris. My lawyers had already seen that the massive cash fortune of the Poitringle dynasty was completely under my control and at my disposal. Only the lands-the Chateau and its piddling rents in the village, and the town house in the Faubourg St. Germain-were to be kept in trust for the heir.
I left the little toddle in the care of the servants at the Chateau, and I have not seen him since, nor ever intend to. Born a beggar to begin with, the lad can hardly complain at being left a land-poor Marquis.
Once these matters were settled I returned to Paris a fabulously rich widow, completely free of all husbands and parents-my own mistress. I was eighteen, my body was ripe for pleasure and I was bursting with the lust to enjoy it.
On my return I kicked out Degoubiller and fired all the old servants. In hiring new ones, my sole criterion after competence was established was whether or not I should like to sleep with that strapping lad or this lusty girl. Not that I intended to spend my nights rollicking in an orgy with the help, but I've always found it stimulating to have sexual objects at one's behest.
I spent tens of thousands of louis on an immense new wardrobe and completely redecorated, inside and out, the crumbling greyish-brown Poitringle town house. The improvements were in hideous taste, I realized when the job was finished, but with a bizarre charm all their own.
A year had passed since the death of Poitringle, and my period of mourning now over, I was ready to take on Parisian society. My whole intention from the first was to have as many lovers as my lusts and tastes desired (and society could supply), while maintaining a facade of the most rigorous respectability.
Aunt Charlotte was of immense help to me. She introduced me to the cream of Parisian society, and was most anxious to marry me off again. I complied with her designs as best I could, though I had no intention whatsoever of yielding up my freedom so quickly, and the long procession of bores she trotted out for my inspection and inevitable rejection would be too tedious to enumerate. (With one exception, Papa. The Chevalier de Braquemart, about whom, much more later.)
I quickly developed an aura of absolute prudery so far as the women were concerned, and one of invincibility before the Don Juans, dandies and the libertines.
I protected both of these images by pretending to accept only the attentions of those men whom
I detested-usually would-be husbands, but often, would-be lovers. Only with these obliging gentlemen would I ever be seen in public. I employed them usefully in gaining me the honors of prudery and resistance, while I yielded myself uninhibited to whichever accepted lover was waiting for me in private. In bed. But my feigned timidity never allowed that lover to accompany me into society. Thus the gaze of the company was always fixed on the rejected suitor.
There were many lovers at that time, Father, so many I can scarcely distinguish between them, so thoroughly does their flesh flow together.
I remember many faces, many bodies; many stiff male members of many shapes and sizes ramming into me and spilling over with joy; long nights rolling in the arms of some Adonis whose buttocks and back my hands remember but whose face I forget. Long winter afternoons in twilight and firelight making passionate love on the rug with a Count whose eyes I try in vain to remember. I see handsome faces, fair faces, dark faces, young faces, lined faces and bodies, powerful, thrusting thighs, thick broad chests, virile, any more, they all just merge into one and all night illuminated with the same explosive joys.
The affairs all ended identically too. Once I had had my fill of a man, had burned out every drop of joy I wanted to burn out of him, I threw him over with a venom that seemed to increase in proportion to the amount of pure love he had ejaculated into me.
And I kept my reputation-among the men and among the women. The precautions I mentioned above and the further ones of never writing and never giving up any proof of my infatuation may appear excessive, but they have never seemed to me sufficient.
I had descended into my own heart and I studied the hearts of others. There I saw that everybody keeps a secret in it which he must not allow to be revealed-a truth which antiquity appears to have known better than we and of which the story of Samson may be only a parable. Like a new Delilah I always used my power as she did to steal this important secret. Ah! How many of our modern Samsons are there whose hair I have cut with my scissors! I have ceased to be afraid of any of them; they are the only men I have sometimes let myself humiliate. With the others I was more pliant: a feigned friendship, an apparent confidence, a few generous actions, the flattering idea that each had that he was my only lover, those procured their discretion. Having foreseen the time when these methods would fail, I smothered with ridicule or calumny any credence these dangerous men might have obtained.
But I soon tired of these multitudinous affairs, and began to long for something with far more abandon, more pleasure, more libertinage, more cruelty, more life. I found all this with the Viscomte de Valseuses.
I first saw him one night at the Opera. He was seated in a box adjacent to the one in which our party-Aunt Charlotte and several of her friends-was seated. From time to time I would turn in his direction, and each time I could feel his eyes burning into mine. He was obviously a tall man, well over six feet, with a physique to match, a physique that announced immense power and potency. His face was cruel and arrogantly handsome, with flashing dark eyes and a heavy sensual mouth. He was dressed with the utmost elegance, and had the air of a man for whom pleasure is the supreme end.
I asked Charlotte who he was, and she identified him. "The man is an ogre. He's the most jaded libertine in Paris, and once he has a mistress in his power he specializes in ruining her, shaming her, rejecting her, destroying her heart and her soul.
"Oh, my," I said, fluttering my fan and glancing at the Viscomte.
"He treats a woman like a hawk treats a hen-he spots her, swoops down on her, flies oh', devours the parts he likes and drops the rest of her in the forest while he glides on with his 'eyes peeled for fresh game."
"You sound as though you know him well, Charlotte," I said.
"Not as well as you imply. I'm a little too old for him. Not that I mightn't be susceptible," she said, with a touch of wistfulness. "I know him well, as a matter-of-fact. He's been out of Paris for some time, and only returned a few weeks ago. I was one of the first people he visited. You'll undoubtedly meet him. But I'd advise you to keep him at arm's length if you value your self-respect, the reputation you've taken such care to establish, your future and your prospects of ever marrying another man. Become involved with him and you'll see them all go by the boards and probably wind up back in the nunnery. Numerous others have."
"Oh, my," I said, fluttering my fan and glancing at the Viscomte.
"One other thing," she said, noticing the flush in my cheeks. "I know you're a proud self-centered thing. Don't take my words as a challenge or even as a prophesy. They're hard, cold facts."
"Of course, Charlotte, I quite understand," I said, fluttering my fan and lifting my opera glasses as the curtain rose.
Throughout the performance Valseuses and I continued to exchange glances, and as Charlotte and I rose to leave, he was no more than a few steps from us. In a loud voice I confirmed to Charlotte that I would certainly be dining at her house the following Thursday.
When that day arrived I was exceedingly nervous and irritable, and I must have stripped and whipped half the servants in my household. .
Had Valseuses overheard me? Would he appear? My prayers to you were answered, Papa. He stood there surrounded by an aura of blatant sexual appeal when I arrived in one of a gown of the new fashion which decrees that almost the complete breast to be exposed.
I chatted briefly with Charlotte, and we were soon joined by Valseuses. She told him politely that she was happy to see him twice in succession at her days and he was only too anxious to reply that since Monday (the night at the Opera) he had altered a thousand plans in order to come this evening.
However, as I had to know for sure whether or not I was the cause of this flattering eagerness, I sought some further proof. Gaming had begun and Valseuses, I knew, was a compulsive gambler-next to lust itself this was his ruling passion.
I declared I should not gamble; and he on his part discovered a thousand pretexts for abstaining himself. Instead, he stood at my side exercising his glib tongue, and when drinks were passed around, he joined me on a settee. After the usual meaningless remarks, Valseuses soon made himself master of the moment and assumed different tones in turn to try to pierce my stiff, prudish, aloof and cold manner. He was gentle, I became harsh and ruthless. He became serious, I giggled like a tipsy nun. He exercised his wit at the expense of some dowdy frump, I defended her vigorously. Then he got personal.
"I'm extraordinarily surprised, Marquise," he said as we both took another drink.
"How so, Monsieur?" I asked.
"I always thought the Marquis de Poitringle to be a man of grotesquely bad taste. But I see from your appearance that I was entirely wrong. The Marquis must have had the most exquisitely perfect taste for beautiful women. Where on earth did he ever find such "a creature as you?"
"Did you know my late husband?" I asked, feeling my cheeks, throat and exposed, heaving breasts flush slightly at the compliment.
"I was acquainted with him. I understand he died in the most exquisite fashion. Any man might envy him."
"Please, Monsieur, we hardly know each other. It hardly behooves a stranger to speak of my husband's death in such a way," I said, continuing to blush.
"You must be quite a demanding woman," he continued, "if a man is willing to give his life to enjoy you."
"You're quite right, Monsieur," I rejoined. "I make no other demand on a man. His life is all I ask."
He laughed uproariously at this remark, with out realizing that I meant it with deadly seriousness.
Our tete-a-tete was interrupted by the announcement of dinner, and seated together as we were, Valseuses accompanied me to the dining room and planted himself next to me at the table. He showed great skill in keeping up our private conversation while appearing only to concern himself with the general bantering prattle, the whole weight of which seemed to fall on him. That a man with his wholly evil reputation seemed to be universally adored by the company certainly bears out once more what you've been saying in your letters, Papa, that vice is always richly rewarded, and virtue punished cruelly.
I had already made up my mind to take him as a lover. Charlotte's warnings only added new glitter to the prize. And I was determined to take him with my usual lightning speed, for it is not only more fun that way (I had long since abandoned coyness in the boudoir) but it is also infinitely safer. Your scandal mongers can detect passion in a woman far more easily before the act of consummation than afterwards. Once the conquest has been made, satiation diffuses a satisfied calm across one's mien and demeanor and the hard edge of desire is buried from the common view. I had, however, to be somewhat more circumspect than usual with Valseuses, because of his reputation, and because of the powerful desires he had already aroused in me, desires which, I knew, might lead me to any extreme of pleasure pain.
At dessert the conversation turned to a new play to be given the following Monday at the Comedie Francaise. I expressed some regret at not having my box. Charlotte offered me a place in hers, which I gladly accepted. When we returned to the drawing room Valseuses asked, predictably, for a place in the box as well, and when Charlotte (who treats him, contrary to moralistic judgment of him, like a spoiled child) promised it to him "if he were good" he made it the occasion for one of those conversations with a double entendre which our fashionable fops think so terribly witty these days.
He knelt down like an obedient child under the pretext of asking her advice on how to be a good boy, imploring her judgment on morality, and said many flattering and quite tender things which were only too easy to apply to myself, since he was continually flashing those wicked eyes at me during the intervals of general laughter.
When this little performance was finished he rejoined me on the settee, but the conversation was more general and less interesting. Our eyes, however, had frequent intercourse. I say intercourse. I ought to have said his eyes raped mine, for I had only one expression, that of demure surprise. He must have thought I was astonished and excessively preoccupied by the prodigious effect he was making on me. I think I let him very well satisfied. I was just as pleased.
The following Monday I went to the Comedie as we had planned. In spite of your literary curiosity I can tell you nothing whatsoever of the play except that Valseuses is a marvelous flatterer and that the play was undoubtedly far, far inferior to your own concoctions in the asylum.
It was with regret that I saw the evening ending, for it really gave me great pleasure. To prolong it I invited Charlotte to come and sup with me. This gave me the pretext to invite Valseuses, who avidly accepted.
As he was a stranger among my guests, who were not numerous that evening, he owed me the customary attentions. And so when we went to supper he offered me his hand. When I took it I was malicious enough to make mine tremble slightly and to walk with lowered eyes and more rapid breathing, which caused my exposed breasts to heave slightly. I appeared to foresee my defeat and fear my conqueror. He noticed it perfectly, and the traitor immediately changed his tone and behaviour. He had been gallant, he became tender. Circumstances compelled him to much the same remarks, but his gaze became less sprightly and more caressing, the inflection of voice softer and his smile was no longer that of artifice but of contentment. In his talk he gradually subdued the fire of his sallies, and delicacy replaced wit.
After supper I took advantage of the time when Charlotte was telling one of the long-winded, boisterously obscene stories she always launches into when she gets drunk, and draped myself on a chaise lounge in the languid attitude caused by a tender reverie. I was not sorry that Valseuses should see me thus, and indeed he honored me with obsessive attention. As you may suppose, my timid glance didn't deign or dare to seek my conqueror's eyes; but when directed towards him in a more humble way they soon informed me that I had obtained the very effect I wanted to produce.
Eventually Charlotte finished her story and the roaring laughter from every corner of the room ended my posture of a trance. Charlotte arose, wobbled over to me and announced she would have to be leaving. But before taking leave of her, I asked her plans, to have a pretext to tell her my own and to let it be known I should be at home on the day after the morrow. After which everyone left.
Then I began to reflect. I had no doubt that Valseuses would make use of the sort of rendezvous I had given him; that he would come early enough to find me alone and that the attack would be sharp; but I was a o quite sure that with my reputation he would not treat me with that brusque ness which men of any experience only employ with women who have had numerous intrigues or with those who have had no experience at all. And I saw my success was certain if he uttered the word Love; above all, if he tried to obtain it from me. However, I was in for a surprise.
I awoke early on the appointed morning and had Michette and Zelmire, two of my chambermaids, and Celadon, a young household page, bathe and massage my body, shampoo and brush my hair, manicure and buff my finger and toenails and then dress me in a gown of transparent black lawn so low cut in front that my breasts threatened to spill out with every breath. One of the rules of my house was that all those who attended me in my bath were to be as naked as I, and although Celadon had a great deal of trouble keeping his mind on my feet, he did his job admirably. I could hear the three of them splashing around in the bath after I had left. Of such carryings-on among the help I heartily approved, just as long as it didn't interfere with their slavish devotion to me.
With new silk sheets on the bed and the rich scent of an aphrodisiac perfume in the air, I climbed back into that temple of potential delight and readied myself for the onslaught.
I gave specific instructions to the chambermaid, Angele. First of all, she was to remove all undergarments from beneath her skirts. She blushed slightly for a moment, then admitted that she never wore any. This she confirmed by lifting her skirts as high as they would go and exposing one of the rosiest, roundest, plumpest asses you would ever want to see, Papa. I next instructed her that I was expecting a gentleman very shortly and that she was to show him directly into my bedroom (after warning me of his arrival) without knocking. I would appear to be asleep, and would be awakened by her entrance. I would fly into a rage, and she must act as though everything were her fault-she would receive some punishment, but would be well recompensed for the ruse. She heartily agreed, and retired to the hallway.
Some minutes later she warned me of Valseuses' arrival. I pulled the bedcovers down to my navel, arranged my gown so that my breasts were shown to their utmost advantage, lay my head back on the pillow, and feigned sleep.
Angele marched quickly into the room with Valseuses at her heels, and acting her part beautifully, let out a squeaky squeal on discovering me in deshabille. I awoke on cue, screamed, flew into a rage at Angele while Valseuses backed off some, his eyes fixed on my heaving bosom.
Cursing Angele for interrupting my slumber, for allowing a gentleman caller to intrude into my boudoir, I demanded she lean face-down on the bed and present her fanny. This she did almost a little too avidly, whimpering all the while, and as she did so I reached for the scourge which lay on my bedside table.
Valseuses, the lecher, looked on from the sidelines, his face turning red with lust as I kneeled over Angele's rosy ass, one of my breasts already having freed itself from the gown. I lifted the scourge and swatted Angele's buttocks. She screamed as the red stripes rose and I raised the switch again and again until I could see Valseuses' eyes going bloodshot with excitation.
At last I threw down the scourge and dismissed Angele with another barrage of insults and imprecations, ordering her to have Zelmire bring tea for two. Rearranging my gown and tucking in the unencumbered breast, I jumped back in under the sheets and sighed.
I apologized to Valseuses for the unspeakably gauche behavior of my servant, but he made every apology for the girl pleading her cause with a great deal more heat than I had ever heard any servant's cause pleaded in my life.
Changing his tone, he offered in the most cool and perfunctory way to retire from the scene, having caused me such a disturbance so early in the day.
Somewhere in the depths of my sense of noblesse oblige I found cause for him to stay. I offered him the seat nearest my bed, where he could get a good look at the object that was his for the taking that morning, and he sat down next to me as Zelmore wheeled in the tea service.
It was with the utmost effort that Valseuses controlled himself during the banalities of the inane conversation that accompanied our repast. He was chomping at the bit, and seeing this, I felt no great pressure to rush things along. I lingered over my tea and nibbled lovingly at a biscuit while Valseuses, his eyes feasting on my bare arms and shoulders and breasts and barely veiled nipples and navel, crossed and recrossed his legs, coughed, stammered and fairly burst with lust.
At last I decided to prolong the preliminaries no longer, and rang for Zelmire. She had no sooner wheeled out the service than Valseuses was on his knees alongside the bed, his hands clutching one of mine.
"Madame," he groaned, "it is unlike me to be so abrupt. Utterly unlike me. I'm completely beside myself. I'm ravished, utterly ravished by you."
"Your vocabulary is very vague, monsieur, your use of words is 'terribly imprecise."
He eyed me oddly. I went on: "Please, Monsieur, I've already granted you far too many liberties in allowing you to remain here at all. Please don't make an absolute boor of yourself," I concluded, but neglected to withdraw my hand from his. He must have taken this as least token compliance.
"I too enjoy the little cat and mouse games we play these days," he said, smothering my hand with kisses, "and should like to continue it forever, to wring out the last drop of pleasure before the event. But at my back I always hear ... how does it go? Circumstances, Madame ... forgive my abruptness, I'm beside myself with desire. I must have you now."
So saying, his strong hand went to my breasts, one of which he cupped fully and teasingly caressed, his thumb rubbing the red nipple, which had begun to react under the burning excitement his touch gave in spite of my strong attempts to remain at ease. He moved his head toward mine and took my mouth with his before I could squirm away. Working his hot insistent tongue between my lips, he forced it into my mouth as he raised himself onto the bed alongside me, putting his arms around me and crushing me to him.
He had caught me completely off guard-that is, his timing had done so. I had been accustomed to more pleasantries, and preliminary verbiage from these Parisian gallants, and had always determined the exact moment of copulation. Hi's roughness and strength, his ruthlessness and lightning speed not only had set fire to my tinderbox body, but had awakened a resultant panic as well. I had not planned things this way, I had wanted to stretch out his lust to the breaking point.
I pulled back, twisting my head away from him. "No, Monsieur, I must order you to leave at once, this is unthinkable. I shall have to ring for my servants," and I actually leaned over to reach for the bell-cord.
But his arms were too strong for me and thrust me back onto the far side of the bed. He pinned down my shoulders and planted a burning kiss on the tender skin of my throat, moved his mouth in hot biting kisses to the exposed creamy flesh of my breasts.
I could have screamed out-nothing was preventing me. Except, of course, for my own raging desires which were not becoming absolutely thrilled at the thought of being ravished-raped-abused-brutalized.
His hands tugged at my gown, ripped it completely away from my breasts. He caressed them savagely with his strong hands and took one of those creamy oversensitive mounds into his mouth, sucking and licking and then moving his active lips and tongue around my hard burning red nipple, grazing it with his teeth, biting into it as his hands moved up my thighs.
"No, Monsieur, please, consider my reputation," I said, "I'm a respectable widow, pray have mercy!"
Somehow, these words had no meaning for him, he paid no attention to my rigorously moral protests mouthed while I writhed with savage desire for my hearty rapist.
He ripped the gown from me altogether and I lay completely naked before him on the bed. I made a half-hearted and totally unsuccessful effort to cover myself with two open hands as I lay there with all the terrified, blushing voluptuousness that I could muster. He kissed my belly, my navel, my abdomen, and buried his mouth in the hot, seething seat of my sex. He licked and sucked and nibbled on the lips until he had me moaning.
"Please, Monsieur," I cried, "more, more!"
Then he kicked off his boots and without removing his mouth he stripped off his trousers and kicked them onto the floor as well.
Completely naked from the waist down, he rose and kneeled over me on the bed. Never have I seen such an engine of love! Such length and such a rosy head! So stout, and how it throbbed with desire!
He tossed off his doublet and lowered his powerful chest onto my throbbing breasts as again he seized my mouth with his and ran his hands all over my tingling body. He raised his hips, dangling his hot, erected sex over me, brushing the lips of my already excited sex with the tip of his head. I ran my nails over his hard, broad back and dug them into his powerful buttocks, begging him to take me now, now!
And with a wicked thrust he plunged his member all the way down into the hot cavern that so joyously welcomed him. What ecstasy! What fulfillment already-and he had barely started.
Like a rutting bull he thrust and pulled back, thrust deeper and harder and rolled his hips with mine. What transports I felt then, like nothing ever before! More and more savagely our pelvises ground and writhed until, amid shouts and cries and fits, shuddering, we both exploded and our satiated, stiffened, erected bodies slowly sank into torpid ecstasy.
While Valseuses lay panting on the bed I arose, went to my dressing room and put on a long silk dressing gown. I returned to the bedroom to find him, still naked and in bed, sitting propped against the pillows and grinning like a schoolboy.
"It's time you were dressed and left, Monsieur. I'm expecting guests, and shouldn't like them to find you here in the bedroom naked and still dripping."
He laughed and said, "You're marvelous, Jacqueline. May I call you Jacqueline?"
You've taken every other liberty. I don't see why you should have any qualms about the least of them."
He laughed again, swinging out of bed, and stretched his proud muscular body, immensely pleased with himself. He had, after all, thrown over the citadel on his very first attempt, and conquered it decisively.
I was considered, you must remember, invincible. As far as anyone in Paris knew, I had never had a love in the nearly two years since the death of Poitringle. I was a prude, and a heartless, excessively respectable woman. Few of my scores of lovers, humiliated as most of them had been, or their dark secrets hidden away in my bureau drawer, had ever spoken of me afterward and those that had had been scoffed at as windbag braggarts by the gossip-mongering old hags who constituted the first line of my defense.
But if he had triumphed, at least for the moment, it was only through my design. I had done the seducing, and he had pounced. I had been seduced myself, of course, by his reputation as much as he had been seduced by mine. I had given him every opportunity to move in on me and he more than took advantage of every opening, every orifice.
He had pleased me immensely. Had I been an ordinary woman, I most certainly would have loved him in an ordinary fashion. And met the fate of all those other poor things of whom Aunt Charlotte had spoken. But I loved him in my way, Father, in your way. Our way.
I wanted to beat him to the punch. I wanted to destroy him.
"May I come tomorrow, Jacqueline?" he asked.
"Quite out of the question. I never receive guests on Thursdays." , "Then Friday."
"I'm completely booked up for weeks. And I'm afraid it's unthinkable for you to call on me privately here again. This has been a gross disappointment, a terrible mistake and I prefer to forget it-and you."
"At my place then. A late supper tomorrow night. When you're finished whatever you're doing."
"You know that would be worse than seeing you here. And quite frankly, sir, I don't want to."
"You exaggerate, Jacqueline. You protest too much."
"Perhaps. But I've never had a lover before, and I'm not sure I want one. In any event I must take precautions. I'm a respectable widow with many dear friends, a son, and a family name to protect. I must think of them first, and not such petty, insignificant frivolous dalliance with a crude rapist such as yourself."
"You put it well, Jacqueline," he said, laughing as he finished buttoning his doublet. "You know, I'd be willing to bet you're not the prude you make yourself out to be."
"How so?" I asked.
"You're aware of my reputation, are you not?" he asked, taking my hand. "Somewhat," I replied.
"Are you aware of my Chateau in Valesuses-the sort of parties I throw there?"
"Somewhat," I replied. (They were orgies, Father, riotous orgies to make even you blush.)
"Well, since you're afraid your immaculate reputation might be besmirched if you were to see me in Paris, perhaps you'd like to come out to Valseuses the weekend after next. How does that sound? Would you like to come?"
"Perhaps."
He proceeded to give me the directions, kissed me long and lovingly on the mouth, and departed only minutes before I received my next visitor.
It was my dear suitor whom I mentioned earlier, the Chevalier de Braquemart, and after several hours of intense entreaty he finally persuaded me accept his hand in holy matrimony.
Ten days later explaining that I must return to Poitringle to tie up certain important matters concerning my estate, I interrupted the preparations for my wedding to pack a bag and take my carriage to Valseuses, accompanied by Michette and my coachman, Antoine.
It was a bumpy trip, and after having travelled all day, we arrived at the Chateau towards nightfall.
I had already been warned by Charlotte (in whom I had confided) to wear a domino-cloak, hood and mask-if I didn't wish to broadcast my presence. Apparently, the Viscomte invited many people from Paris for these weekends, all of whom, or at least the ladies, wore such masks, while the unsuspecting invitee (the Viscount had neglected to mention this little detail to me) was exposed to the ridicule of the libertines and subsequent infamy in Paris.
Charlotte had, of course, flown into a rage when I confided my plans to her. "You must be out of your mind, Jacqueline. How can you be such a fool-don't you understand what this man is?"
"He seemed quite harmless to me," I replied.
"Well you'd better stop now while you're ahead. You've had him once, haven't you? You've had your little triumph over him. If you drop him now you'll have done more than any other woman ever has. Why can't you be satisfied with that? The Chevalier...."
"I want to see what his house is like," I said.
"Do you realize what goes on in that house?"
"I've heard rumors."
"The most perverse libertines in Paris frequent those orgies. The women are like yourself-beautiful, brainless young things looking for adventure and finding only gross humiliation."
"They sound charming. Do they like girls as well as men?"
"Please, Jacqueline. That's not all. He has teams of procurers and procuresses combing the whole of France and abducting the fairest and purest young men and women in the land. He keeps large harems of these on hand at all times. Girls twelve to twenty-five and boys the same age. Those creatures are used mercilessly, and they seldom leave the premises alive once the Viscomte has had his fill of them."
"I don't see how that should trouble me. After all, I'll be able to enjoy them too, won't I?"
"It should trouble you, for the Viscomte often fails to distinguish between his guests and his victims. More than one of our young ladies has disappeared in the depths of his dungeons, or so rumor has it."
"Dungeons?" I asked, my ears perking up.
"Unspeakable things are performed there. Anything might happen to you-from torture to imprisonment to death itself."
"Come, come, Aunt, you exaggerate."
"What of your marriage, Jacqueline? How can you dare risk endangering it now? Any scandal would ruin you for life. What can you possibly hope to achieve?"
"Charlotte, my prospective marriage means nothing to. I'm merely playing with the darling boy, leading him along. I like his company, he thinks I'm so innocent. In any event, that won't happen for at least six months..
"Much can happen in six months."
"Aunt, this is becoming tedious. I deeply regret having confided in you," I said, rising to leave. "It was a mistake to do so, and I really must be leaving now."
"Well, Jacqueline," she said resignedly rising to meet me and taking my hands, "since you've made up your mind, I can only give you my blessing and hope you return in one piece. And you'd better get fitted for the domino immediately."
Buttoned up in my cloak, the hood hiding my hair and the mask my face, I entered the Chateau. The porter asked for my name so that I might be announced. I adamantly refused, demanding to see the Viscomte at once. The porter disappeared through a side door and I took a seat on the divan.
The walls of the large room intrigued me, covered as they were with murals depicting in life-size, explicit detail every sex act imaginable. The most gorgeous, god-like Renaissance youths cavorted with beautiful nymphs in every variety of oral, genital and anal act. I looked up at the high ceiling and there, too, the gods were going at it among the clouds. I became so intrigued studying these murals that I didn't notice Valseuses enter the room.
"Ah, Madame," he said, startling me as he approached and kissed my hand. He was dressed in an elaborately designed floor-length Chinese dressing gown. He greeted me effusively, and then confessed he couldn't immediately place my identity because of the mask.
I laughed, demanded he guess. He rattled off a long list of names-ladies whom I never would have suspected of joining in his orgies. At last he lit on my name, and I confirmed his guess.
He suggested I remove my cloak. I told him I wore nothing under it. He smiled and opened his robe, revealing all his hard masculine charms in their native state and explained that his guests paid no heed to such superficial pruderies as clothing. Then he led me into the main hall.
I was surprised, and delightfully shocked. Never have I seen such an orgiastic spectacle, nor even come close to imagining it. The room was a tableau vwant of the murals outside.
The center of the hall was interspersed with large couches and adjacent tables. The tables were piled high with food of every variety, wines and liquors, and the couches were filled with debauchees in various stages of intercourse, foreplay, after play, tickling and torture. The company was waited on by hordes of young servants-girls and boys in their early and mid-teens. Apparently these pretty things were required to serve not only food and drink, but their own bodies as well, should one of the libertines require it, for one of the carousing libertines, spotting a pretty serving girl, disengaged himself from the young woman with whom he'd been copulating and grabbed the young girl, hurling her tray of crockery to the floor and pulling her onto the couch with him. He sandwiched her between himself and his previous mistress and entered her violently while the neglected lady covered the whimpering girl's body with kisses and caresses.
At the far end of the hall was a stage, where an entertainment was being offered for those voyeurs not otherwise occupied. With music from a chamber orchestra, a ballet seemed to be in progress. The scenery indicated a sylvan scene. The two lead dancers, a young man and woman of magnificent classical proportions, were dressed with a few flowers in their hair, and the male dancer, otherwise naked, was in a state of manly excitement. From time to time their two bodies would meet in the dance, and the boy would enter the girl with his member, lift her off the ground and pirouette a few times. The girl would disengage herself, spin away and the chase would continue at its own elegant pace until the next penetration and pirouette.
The subaltern dancers had it better. On pedestals of different levels a dozen couples copulated in a dozen different positions, sitting, standing, lying, standing on their hands and even standing on their heads, constantly changing positions and offering a spectacle of endless variety, much to the delight and applause of the idle voyeurs in the crowd.
"You must be getting a little warm in that cloak," the Viscount said.
"Perhaps I am," I replied.
"Maybe we'd better have one of the servants unbutton you," he said. "This way."
He led me over to the side of the great hall, where there were smaller chambers opening like little chapels into the larger area. In many of these chapels lay the members of the harems, individually and in two's and three's. They were all naked, and I have never seen such a prodigious variety of perfect beauty in the human form. There were young, pre-pubescent girls and boys with the faces and tender young bodies of angels, older mignons and mignonettes in their later teens, fully developed, yet still bearing the rosy hues and charming innocence of adolescence. And there was an even larger supply of ripe, voluptuous girls in their early and middle twenties, well-corrupted and ready for anything; and young men the same age, strapping, tough, handsome, tall, powerful, each of whom seemed to have been chosen as much for the enormous size and durable stiffness of his member as for the beauty of his face and physique. And all were naked, all slaves to the whims and caprices of the assembled guests.
We stopped before a chapel in which a boy and girl, apparently both having just been used by a libertine, lay languishing on the bed. They were in their mid-teens, the prettiest creatures I have ever seen, and I was determined that they should bare my body to the incense-laden air.
The Viscount summoned them over and stood and to watch as the girl, already fully developed, exquisitely beautiful, with delightful round breasts and rosy-red nipples, walked up to me. The boy, a veritable cupid, with the most luscious mouth imaginable, stood alongside, semi-aroused.
"Madame is hot," Valseuses said to them, "Unfasten her cloak."
The mignonette raised her hands to unbutton the top button, and as she did I raised mine to cup and caress her young, firm breasts. My thumbs on her nipples, I could hear her take in her breath sharply and begin to blush. The nipples, with that hypersensitivity so common in young girls, were rapidly swollen and erect.
She had opened the cloak almost to my navel when I took her hands and guided them to my own breasts. Her touch was exquisite, she had been trained well. I sighed, and sought to kiss her young, cool, fresh mouth. She offered it up to me, and we kissed passionately and elaborately, caressing each others breasts with accelerating fervor.
My eyes were closed, and I felt a rustling about my things, felt the cloak open there altogether, felt the boy's curly locks between my thighs, his mouth to my sex, his insidious tongue probing, licking, his lips and teeth nibbling and sucking, his delicate touch caressing my thighs and buttocks, pushing me further into his face, and I moaned with pleasure.
The incredible agility of those two children quickly induced a pounding and climactic pleasure to rush though my blood, which they sensed and so withdrew their mouths and retired to their couch to await further instructions from anyone else who might wish to use them for any purpose whatsoever.
My black cloak now hung open, but I still felt somewhat confined and, in this company, even a little overly modest to be wearing anything at all. I shrugged it from my shoulders into Valseuse's waiting hands. He handed it, together with his own robe which he had removed in order to fondle himself during the unbuttoning scene, and handed them to a waiting servant.
"Let us find a little chapel, Jacqueline," he said, taking my arm and glancing down at my bouncing breasts as we walked.
I glanced down myself and saw that his lust was at a high peak. It would be nice to find a free chapel immediately We passed several of them, each occupied. In one a powerfully built middle-aged man was violently ravishing one of the youngest nymphettes to be seen, no more than eleven or twelve. The girl's cries joined in a pleasant dissonance with the loud obscenities of the older man.
In another a distinguished judge was taking his violent pleasure in the posterior of one of the prettier young boys; in another, a lady whom I thought to be the Presidente de Lispoquer was having herself serviced by two of the mature studs; in a third a dowager lesbian was being tickled by a half dozen of the little girls.
At last we came upon an empty chamber-empty, that is, except for an Adonis, a powerful, muscular young man of twenty-five or so who lay on his back in a state of throbbing excitement, watching the switching positions of the ballet.
The sight of his huge, high member and his naked, perfect body immediately aroused all ipy lusts to the fever pitch, and I had to have him at once.
"Feel free to join us," I whispered to Valseuses over my shoulder as I disengaged myself from his arm and virtually dived into bed with the Adonis. As totally keyed up for pleasure as I was, there was no need for any preliminaries whatsoever. I jumped on top of him and enveloped his massive rod, wriggling as I shoved it into me, letting my breasts shake and graze across his hard brown nipples. How well we fit together! His penetrating thrusts and gyrations rapidly grew more and more violent and I was about to be jolted into a glorious climax from below when I felt my back being covered by a massive male chest and my orifice back there being poked and lubricated with a sleek pomade. Then Valseuses was biting my shoulder as he penetrated me all in one rending stab, his heavy weight bearing down upon me and his thick member piercing my innards.
I cried out with pain-I was being attacked from both sides now!-but soon Valseuses had stretched those little muscles and I felt the most exquisite pleasure as he and the nameless Adonis beneath me were able to work out a magnificent rhythm-one would nearly withdraw as the other drove in and I felt suspended like the sea between the sun and moon. There were wild shouts and riotous exclamations all around as the three of us, ravenously driving and writhing, reached the stiff golden goal of that violent avidity, and then came dripping back down to earth.
Valseuses now insisted he have me from the front, and I quickly complied. I rolled over onto my back, spread my thighs and welcomed him home. As he pumped away he signaled for the Adonis to get the pomade and spread it over his own rump and to mount him. The young man quickly complied, climbing aboard, and the three of us writhed away in orgiastic debauch well into the evening.
As soon as Valseuses had caught his breath he declared himself hungry as a young stallion, and ordered one of his "little suppers" to be served. The company slowly disengaged themselves from each other and the members of the harems and began to assemble on the couches of the central hall.
Throughout the meal (fifty courses in all were to be served, accompanied by fifty of the most magnificent wines to be found in Europe), the company was free to retire to the chapels for any purposes they wished. The harems, who took their meals before and after the orgy, were all there ready and waiting for any inspired debauchee.
After a dozen courses I was so taken with one of the serving girls that I had her accompany me to one of the chambers, where we discovered one of the studs misbehaving with a boy of thirteen or fourteen. I admonished them for this infraction of the rules and gave them each a whipping with a handy scourge.
Then I settled into the bed with my lovely lit tie flower. As she probed my pudenda with her active tongue and lips she pulled my thighs apart so that the bleeding Adonis, whose member was of astonishing proportions, could take me from behind. I amused myself in the meantime by tasting the fine, fierce juices of the young lad, who, I discovered rapidly as he sighed and cooed, was already extremely sensitive and thoroughly potent.
I returned to table, where the twenty-third course was being served, only to discover that Valseuses had followed my example and had also disappeared. Some minutes later he returned to our couch, however, breathing heavily and beaming.
"So, Jacqueline, how are you enjoying our little soiree? Quite nice, no?"
"Viscomte, you entertain adorably. If only more of our fashionable gentlemen had your Catholic tastes, the world might just be a better place to live in."
Caressing my breasts and pressing himself against my body, he said, "I'm glad you agree, Jacqueline. I like you immensely. You add luster to the place."
"It's marvellous, Monsieur. The whole thing is marvellous, and the food is delicious."
Up on the stage, the musicians were still playing, dinner music now rather than the ballet, and the dancers had taken a break.
"I'm so glad you could come, Jacqueline," he went on, biting into the last bit of meat of his pressed duck. "This is only the beginning, isn't it? We have such marvelous things in store for us. I have an idea."
"An idea? What is it, tell me, quickly."
"You shall become my mistress."
"How nice. Who told you?"
"My dear, it's inevitable. Our liaison was made in hell."
"I told you in Paris I have no wish to enter into an affair."
"In your boudoir," he said, gesturing broadly, "Not in mine. Any second thoughts?"
"None whatsoever."
"I like everything about you, Jacqueline, particularly your body." I could feel his erected manhood pressing against my hip. The plates were taken away and, sipping wine, we awaited the thirty-fourth course. Valseuses slid on top of me, penetrated, and slowly began to copulate as our neighbors looked on approvingly.
"I have a great deal to offer you, Jacqueline, a great deal."
"I'm fully aware of that," I said, constricting him with my thighs.
"Not merely that. You're like me, a libertine. I can tell. The way you're moving under me now, the way you enjoyed the harems earlier, the look in your eyes. Look at me. There."
There was an electricity in our eyes, a magnetism, that all my disingenuousness couldn't re strain. We looked at each other for a long while as we continued to rotate our hips. Then the next course came, imported American maize in a butter sauce, and we disengaged.
"Isn't this for pigs?" I asked.
"At a dinner such as this, everyone's a pig," he replied. We finished our maize and resumed our positions on the couch, I on my back, he lying on me in the classic sex position.
"Here's what I offer you, Jacqueline, to be more direct and not coy. I know you have an elaborately wrought reputation as a prude to maintain, for what reason, God knows. But if that's what you want, more power to you. So you don't wish to be seen in public with me, don't want it to be known that we're lovers. You want to be seen with that little pup of yours that you're supposed to be engaged to. Tant mieux. I'd rather not see you in public either. I have a reputation, too, I've got to be seen with known whores."
"I thought you were going to be direct," I said sharply, shifting the position of my hips. "Get to the point."
Breathing a. little more deeply, he went on: "You don't wish to entertain me at your house, and that's understandable, and I certainly wouldn't entertain you at mine with my wife returning next week from the maternity hospital."
"I didn't know," I said.
'Neither did I. Anyway, here's what I pro pose. I have a number of houses in town, and on some I collect rent while others remain idle. Many of the idle ones are in outlying sections where neither you nor I nor anyone else in the haut monde is recognized. You could have one of these houses and equip it according to your own tastes, which I'm sure are grotesque."
"Now just a minute...."
"You could have the run of the harems here, and take as many as you like along as servants, houseboys, body servants, studs, human licking baths-whatever you wish to do with them. And remember, I get a new supply from the provinces every six weeks. We'd both have a key to the place and we could get together whenever you like, have orgies private parties, even have an occasional tete-a-tete to ourselves. No demands and no restrictions. How does that strike you?"
It excited me tremendously, and I was about to tell him so. We were both thumping away rather energetically by now but we were interrupted by the next course. Pulling apart, we lay our napkins in our tingling laps and attacked the food, a rather gamy, tubular sausage.
"What is this, Monsieur?" I asked.
"A saucisse franofort, imported from Germany. Quite tasty, don't you think?"
"Would you pass the mustard, please?"
Valseuses finished his first and lay back on the couch as I finished the last few bites of mine. This time I mounted him, remaining in an upright position and doing all the work as he just lay back and digested his food. It was all quite delicious, this languorous lovemaking between the courses, and I wanted it to go on for as long as it felt good.
"So tell me, Jacqueline," he said, lighting a cigarette, "how does my proposition strike you? Does it fit in with your plans?"
"Well, Viscomte-what is your name, by the way? It seems so awkward to call you Viscomte at this point."
"Jean-Baptiste."
"Jean-Baptiste. Well, Jean-Baptiste, I accept. Your proposition is thoroughly seductive. How soon will the house be ready?"
"That's up to you. We can go for a drive when we return next week and you can choose the house that appeals to you. I'll provide the money to have it decorated, stocked with food, drink, harems whatever else you deem necessary. It shouldn't take more than a few weeks."
"We'll have our first orgy in three weeks," I said lovingly, rubbing my palms across his hard pectorals. He slid his hands from my hips, where he'd been helping me to bob up and down, and slid them up to my breasts and around my shoulders, pulling me down toward him until our mouths met in a wet kiss. He rolled me over onto my back, reversing positions, and began to pound away more energetically.
"Let's seal our bargain with an orgasm," he whispered, and proceeded to launch into a feverish attack. The two of us came within moments of each other, disengaged and wiped ourselves off just in time for the next course. It was sort of a filler before the next meat course, a large helping of pommes frites.
Letter Eight
Dear Papa, Thank you so much for your note, and as you request, I'll continue with the narrative immediately and not waste space quarrelling with you.
Three weeks later, on schedule, our house of assignation was ready. It was a secluded, quiet, run-down mansion near Port Orleans, just within the Paris city limits. There were no neighbors to speak of and the wooded grounds were guarded by a ten-foot wall patrolled by ferocious dogs. A team of carpenters, architects, decorators, masons and gardeners had prepared the house and grounds for our orgies in record time, working nearly twenty-four hours a day at exorbitant rates.
Charlotte, of course, was incensed. "What are you trying to prove, my dear girl?"
"Live my life."
"Ha!"
We were sitting in her parlor. It was teatime, and we used her grand silver service and nibbled on religieuses, brushing the crumbs on the floor. It was impossible to try and explain anything to Charlotte, not only because of the difference in our ages and temperaments, but because she saw things according to reason, order, visible values and conventional wisdom, while I operated according to my own lights, invisible to her. Evil has its own rewards, as you so often say, Papa, and this was incomprehensible to her. Nevertheless I enjoyed her company and humored her by pretending to argue with her.
"And when is this whore house scheduled to open?"
"The day after tomorrow, if the finishing touches go as planned. May I have some more tea?"
Charlotte refilled our cups, adding three sugars and a jigger of rum to hers. "What are you trying to prove?" she repeated. "I simply cannot understand what your generation is coming to!"
"My generation! What does the generation have to do with it? I've never even known anyone my own age, much less be influenced by them."
"Ah, my dear the influences are more insidious than that. Your generation is the most corrupt and dissolute in the history of France. The permissiveness is absolutely shocking! There's no more respect for elder, why even the King himself isn't above the insults of the rabble. Why, they're even talking of revolution!"
"Now, Charlotte, you mustn't get yourself all worked up. It's mere talk and braggadocio. There could never be a revolution in France. The King's army is too strong. And his police force...."
"His police force! Why, my dear, a person can't even walk the streets any more without being assaulted by those offensive beggars asking for bread."
"Charlotte, I really don't see what this lecture about beggars and revolution has to do with Valseuses and me."
"You don't?" she asked. "It's perfectly clear to me. The entire fabric of our society is crumbling, dissolving in this wanton permissiveness. The clothes you wear, the books you read, your promiscuity, your filthy language, your revolutionary politics, your lack of respect for the King and Queen and your parents."
"My parents?"
"I wasn't speaking of you in particular, dear. Merely your generation as a whole."
"Charlotte, this isn't at all like you. You were never this way before. I think you're just getting old and jealous."
"What are you trying to prove?" she repeated a third time.
"Why not sit back and enjoy my life as a spectator, Charlotte, instead of fighting it was a moralist? You are too old to do any of this yourself, so why not just take your vicarious pleasure and let it go at that?"
"Because, my child, I'm the only person who ever cared about you. Your father was hardly aware of your existence and your mother, may she roast in hell, detested you from all I can gather. I don't want you to fritter away your life in a dull orgy with a jaded, half-crazed libertine who's only out to destroy you, particularly with your marriage hanging in the balance. A young man like Braquemart doesn't come along every day, you knoW
"Marriage! What do I care for marriage! My parents...." I felt a tremendous wave of bitterness and hatred wash over me. I glared at Charlotte. "You're not my aunt, by the way."
"Whatever are you talking about, child?"
"Your brother is not my father."
"Come, come, child, have some more tea. A little rum, perhaps?"
"I'm not the daughter of that fat drunk back in Frozinard. He is not my father, therefore you are not my aunt. My father is the Marquis de Sade!"
"That madman? I thought they locked him up. What has gotten into you?"
"I'll tell you what's gotten into me! His hot semen, his genes, his blood. His lust for flesh-to seduce, possess, traduce, torture and to kill!"
I stood up triumphantly. Charlotte, alarmed, arose as well. "Jacqueline, my dear. Is there anything I can get you? Smelling salts perhaps?"
I ignored her. "You asked me three times what I'm trying to prove. Now I'll tell you. One thing only: that I'm his daughter, his daughter utterly, in flesh, mind, soul, spirit. That I'm his offspring completely. That's all." I turned to leave. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm already late for my orgy." I stormed out, exhilarated to have announced my heritage at last and gloating with pride over the shock value the mere mention of your name in polite society always has.
Two days later, after the sun had fallen, my coach pulled up at the side entrance of our fully refurbished petite maison. I alit from the coach, clad in a new scarlet domino with a floor-length cape and sounded the bell. The door was opened by a charming maid dressed in a pink hair ribbon, a pink sash around her waist with a bow in the back over her buttocks, black stockings that stopped in the middle of her creamy thighs, black high-heeled slippers and nothing else.
"This way, Madame. Monsieur le Viscomte awaits you. I followed her down the corridor, watching her lovely pink buttocks twitch and roll as she walked. We entered the grand salon, where Valseuses, dressed in black leather boots and vest rose to greet me with open arms. We embraced, and I removed my mask as he undid my cape and tossed it aside so that I was naked save for my scarlet evening slippers.
"You look ravishing tonight, my dear, perfectly ravishing. Come, lie here on the couch with me. We tumbled onto the huge couch and Jean-Baptiste, fully roused, penetrated me immediately. We tore away at each other and very quickly achieved the first orgasm of the evening, the housewarming, as it were. He rang for the maid and she appeared with a huge ice bucket filled with dozens of bottles of the finest champagne.
Raising toast after toast, we finished off most of the wine, and Jean-Baptiste called for more. "I have a present for you, my dear, a little trinket." He then produced an enormous diamond bracelet shaped like a snake, with the largest diamonds nearly an inch in diameter, with rubies for eyes and elaborate golden fangs."
I was excessively pleased, and smothered him with kisses-on his mouth, his shoulders, his chest, his belly and, when he became aroused, around his genitals, finally introducing his huge throbbing organ in my mouth and guiding him swiftly and expertly to satisfaction.
When he had caught his breath and slaked his thirst with more champagne, he said, "And now another present. To prove to you that I'm not, as I promised, a jealous man, that you're free to do as you please."
He led me to a side door and down a short corridor to another room where, on a huge bed a dozen or so strong studs, some of whom I recognized from the chateau in the country, lay in a state of ready repose, some asleep, a few playing cards others chatting and drinking. At our entrance the young men stopped what they were doing and waited to be put to use.
"Go ahead, Jacqueline, enjoy yourself."
I dove in the middle of the middle of the bed, reaching out with my hands and mouth for the flesh that was there at my disposal and was quickly surrounded and penetrated by those potent sex machines. The first one took me from the front, in the conventional manner. Then I felt one penetrate me from the rear, and begin to penetrate and recede in unison with his fellow on the other side. I looked up, and squatting over me was a third, insinuating his pelvis between my face and the young man facing me. He pushed forward, and I seized his member with my mouth, nearly gagging from the sheer size of it when he thrust it into my waiting mouth. With my hands I searched and found one, then two aroused standards and began to frig them furiously.
Somehow, in that mass of tangled flesh above, beneath, alongside and all around me, another cock insinuated itself into my armpit, and then a second and finally, feeling a brushing against my feet, I responded by cupping them and making yet another orifice there.
My eight lovers thrashed and pounded away and for the first time in my life I regretted I wasn't blind in order to provide two more opportunities for these lusty young stallions.
After an intense, hot, restless, blinding, delectable fifteen minutes or so those volatile young men began to go off like Chinese fireworks and I was bathed in the hot, slippery essence of their virility.
When all of them had finished, and I was still tingling with a contrapuntal climax of my own, I arose and joined a smiling delighted Valseuses, who had himself been serviced, sandwiched between two of the other studs as he watched. We withdrew into the other room and after another round of toasts settled down for a delicious supper.
We met there perhaps two nights a week from then onward, when it was feasible for both of us. Of course, I had the run of the place to myself whenever the impulse presented itself to me and I often took advantage of it.
That first night was, with the exception of Jean-Baptiste's fleshly gift, a private one, as not too many other of our nights there were. I needed and craved variety, a craving which even Jean-Baptiste's procurers and procuresses could hardly satisfy. We threw tremendous orgies with endless variations and you might be surprised, Papa, at some of our guests-judges, nobles, generals and the most fashionable and respectable ladies in the capital.
After several months, Jean-Baptiste began to get a little bored with the varied fare and participated less and less in the general, indiscriminate lovemaking. More and more, he directed his attentions at me, almost as though he were saving his potency for me.
I think I even felt a gravitation in that direction myself at the same time, a wish to be alone with him from time to time, but I fought it incessantly. It frightened me, this intimacy akin to love that was developing between us in spite of all our resistance.
I loved Valseuses as a companion, as an accomplice, as a bedmate, but the thought of becoming attached to him in any emotional way made me tremble with panic. The power that he would have over me then! The options I would be forsaking! To love him and to let him know that I loved him-why, I might not even be able to enjoy our orgies any more.
Furthermore, the fixed date of my marriage was coming closer and closer. If I actually did go through with it-and the escape it offered was becoming more and more tempting as Jean-Baptiste continued to usurp the free and empty spaces of my heart-I would certainly have to break off with Valseuses, at least for the time being. He wasn't as yet aware of the betrothal, since Braquemart was well out of his circle and I never spoke of it myself.
Would I be able to escape, though? Even if I were able to decide for myself, would Jean-Baptiste let me go? If he were as powerfully attached to me as it seemed, and as ruthless as he was capable of being, could he stand the blow? Mightn't he incarcerate me, torture me, kill me rather than let me go free with his heart and balls in my hand?
I continued to procrastinate for as long as it was possible, refusing to see him alone for private suppers and tete-a-tetes, throwing wilder and wilder orgies during which I made love to everything in sight save him and conveniently passing out before the night was over.
With the coming of spring and the marriage only two weeks away, there was no longer any time to play with. I had to make my move. Valseuses was giving a huge orgy at his country place to celebrate the coming of the warm weather, and I left for there in my coach with Michette and Antoine.
Everything was as usual, with new dancers going through the old routine, and an new horde of beautiful bodies in the harems.
During the sumptuous dinner I lay with Jean-Baptiste on his couch. "I remember the first time I was here," I reminisced. "It was so exciting, I was simply overwhelmed with lust."
"And now?" he said, pressing against me and reminding me of his own lust.
"Now I'm afraid I'm jaded. It doesn't excite me all that much. I really do need a change." I looked around the room at the carousing guests, eating, playing with each other, copulating. "I'm going to miss it all a great deal, though, I'm sure of that. I hope you'll let me return some day."
"Why, of course, what's to prevent you? What's all this talk, anyway, about a change, and missing the place. What are you getting at?"
"Perhaps I've picked the wrong time to tell you, Jean-Baptiste, but-I'm going to remarry very soon. And I doubt very much if I shall ever be able to see you again-here, or in Paris. Especially in Paris."
He sat up on the couch, choking on his foot and spitting it into his napkin. His eyes widened and his face was flushed with anger. "Remarry! what kind of talk is that? And why so suddenly? Why didn't you mention anything about this to me earlier? I thought you were dead set against marriage. I thought we both agreed on that."
"We did, but I've changed. I've been a widow for too long. I need something permanent now, before it's too late."
"But that's absurd! How can you be such a fool? You're young, and rich, and beautiful. You'll be young, and beautiful, and rich for fifteen more years, at the very least. You're a widow, and free. What possible reason could you have to chain yourself to a husband? You have lusts-wild lusts-I've seen them in action. I offer you the freedom to enjoy them here, and in our house in Paris. You want a change? You're getting tired of the same people, the same scenery? Fine, I'll buy you another house-in London, Rome, Barcelona, wherever you like, where you can do anything you please with whomever you please. I'll hire more procurers, I'll lay my wife's fortune at your feet...."
"Money is insignificant," I said, "I have all that I need already."
"I know that. But you're such a ravishing woman, Jacqueline, I must have you. You're the first woman who's ever moved me inside, whom I've felt was an equal, the only woman whose mere presence delights me and fills me brimming with desire. I tried not to show the effect he was having on me. I tried to hypnotize myself, not to give in to the abominable weakness that was filling my heart with desire to throw myself into his arms and give myself up to him.
"It's no use, Jean-Baptiste, I said numbly. "I've made up my mind."
"But Jacqueline, what can any other man possibly offer a woman of your tastes that I can't? I offer you freedom, unlimited objects for your lusts, passionate love of my own, and the deep security of friendship and affinity. And you must know my reputation. You must feel flattered to have conquered me. You have, you know, conquered me. What does your little whelp-I won't even ask his name-offer you? What could he possibly offer you that I can't?"
I had to think fast, and I made a fatal decision. "I blush to tell you, Jean-Baptiste. It may not seem important to you in the full spectrum of vices. But it is of supreme importance to me. The man, of course, is a prize catch. He is young, handsome, intelligent, fabulously rich, indulgent, witty, well-built and extraordinarily good as a bedmate. His family is one of the oldest and best-connected in France. But of course there are numerous such men around. By those standards I should certainly prefer you as a lover, with all the other things you offer which he never could. My real reason for marrying him is peculiar to me and, I am afraid, was not only strongly imbued into my character during childhood and adolescence, but is congenital as well."
What is this marvellous aberration?" he asked.
"I must make the man I love suffer. In every way, but especially physically. I must beat him daily until the blood flows, and he must love it, need it, crave it, and worship me for inflicting this torture on him. My fiance more than fulfills this requirement. Without it, all these debauches are as nothing to me."
Valseuses had sat wide-eyed and silent through all of this, and when I had finished, he remained silent. Then, as I had expected, his native pride rose up and overtook him.
"I'll be damned!" 'he said. "Is that all? Why, I've endured more tortures at the hands of luscious females in a day than that cub ever could in a decade."
He rose from the couch, offering me his hand. "Come with me, Jacqueline, we'll skip dessert. I want to show you something."
He led me out of the main hall and down a long corridor lit only by flickering candles. Taking the last one of these for a light, he turned off into a narrower and totally dark hallway that wove its way into the bowels of the old chateau.
At last we arrived at a dead end. He fumbled in his dressing gown for a key and opened an enormous oak door, closing it behind him.
The room was a musty library lined floor to ceiling and wall to wall with huge, mouldy books which must have all been hand-copied centuries and centuries ago. He felt along the cob-webbed shelves until a section of the bookcases swung open, baring a small closet-like enclosure. Bending down, he pulled up a trap door-I was nearly overcome by the stench that exuded from that orifice.
He led the way down a rickety old staircase, uttering hushed words of warning that echoed and re-echoed throughout the dungeon. When we reached the dank dirt floor he lit several lanterns, and I could hear the shuffle of large numbers of rats trying to get out of the light. In the darkest corners, I could see their beady eyes watching us.
Valseuses showed me around the vast, festering cellar. He explained that the room was originally used by his family centuries ago as a torture chamber, and was still being used to this day by him for the same purpose. There were racks of all sizes and at all angles, garrotes, chains, lead collars, tarred ropes, ovens, axes, spiked wheels, all manner of scourges and whips and sundry other instruments of torture too numerous and gruesome to mention.
"Well, Jacqueline, what would you like to see me undergo?" he asked with a smirk. "Take your pick. The rack?"
"A good whipping will serve me beautifully. I really have very simple tastes." I noticed a collar and manacles hanging from the center of the ceiling. "Why don't we get you into these?" I asked.
"Wonderful," he said, stripping off his robe like a gladiator about to enter the arena. I locked his neck into the collar and had to stand on an old trunk to fasten his hands in the manacles, which hung high over his head.
Then I selected the longest, thickest and roughest cat-o'-nine tails I could find, stripped off my cloak and hood to allow my arms more free dom, and clad only in my black mask, raised the whip and slashed it across Jean-Baptiste's broad bare back. The blow immediately raised red stripes across his flesh, but he had uttered no sound whatsoever save a sharp intake of breath. I raised the whip and slashed him across the back again, and again. I continued attacking his back until the skin was gone, demanding continually that he ask for more, more!
"More, more!" he would scream with a Herculean effort, to be followed immediately by a groan. But I could tell that he was becoming less and less enthusiastic about the contest.
I slashed again and again at his buttocks and the backs of his thighs-and finally it was too much for him.
"Please, Jacqueline, enough, enough! No man can take this. Your pup wins. Let me down now."
"No, Valseuses, I have faith in you," I replied moving around to get a good look at his contorted face. To my delighted surprise I noticed that, in spite of all the pain he was undergoing, no doubt because of it, he was quite aroused, and he made a lovely picture, his enormous standard extended more than I had ever seen it, as he hung from the chains in the wall.
"Perhaps it will feel better from this side," I roared, lifting the whip again and slashing it across his powerful chest. He screamed out, his eyes burning like those of a wild animal in a trap, about to be slaughtered. He pleaded, he begged, he howled, he shrieked; but all his pitiful imprecations only made me hit him all the harder.
I switched the whip across his thighs and moved up, slashing it across the base of his testicles and suddenly, with a roar, he was discharging, yes he was having his greatest orgasm under the whip. I too was coming like I had never done before, as I beat him in rhythm with the pulsating in my blood. I wasn't about to stop now, no, not until I had beaten the skin off his flesh and the life out of his body.
When this had been accomplished I threw down the blood-soaked whip and put on my cloak. I took the key and the candle and ascended the staircase. Even as I did so, before I had slammed the trap door behind me, I could hear the rats regrouping underneath.
Locking the library door behind me, I found my was back to the main hall, where the orgy was reaching outlandishly obscene stages. I was about to leave when I bumped into a nude Adonis whose high, hard charms were irresistible, particularly since I was already so unbearably excited. I enjoyed him several times on the floor, on a couch and on a bed with several others. Eventually I managed to extricate myself from the elaborate grouping that had formed on the bed, found my cloak and fled through a side door. Michette and Antoine, whom I had instructed to stay in the coach instead of joining the other servants, so as to keep them from gossiping of my presence and to have them always ready to leave, were embarrassed to be interrupted, but quickly got their clothes back on and set off for Paris.
Letter Nine
Dear Papa, You amaze when you say I should have accepted Valseuses' proposition because he seemed to be a "nice man," the "right one" for me.
What can you possibly mean by this? Why this sudden paternal interest in the men in my life, Papa? I know perfectly well what I've done with my life, what I'm doing with my life and what I'm going to do with it, and I don't need your advice or anyone else's, after the fact, to tell me what I should have done!
As though I could go back to that dungeon, put the pieces back together and revive the man from the dead!
The fact is, Father, and I'm sure you must realize it, I enjoyed killing him far more than anything else I've ever done, because I loved him (in our way) and because he offered me everything I've ever wanted. Had I accepted his proposition I should have been disgustingly happy. By killing him at once I was able simultaneously to enjoy the prospect of this proffered happiness as well as the destruction of it by my own hand rather than by fate, chance, ineptitude or folly.
Do you follow me, Father? Or is your addled brain so befuddled by decrepitude and incarceration that you're incapable of understanding a statement perfectly clear to anyone but an imbecile?
Well, I killed Valseuses and it filled me with overflowing joy. Where was I?
-Returning to Paris, I completed the arrangements for my wedding. By now you must be curious about this Chevalier de Braquemart. I have already described him as young, handsome, intelligent, fabulously rich, indulgent, witty, well-built and extraordinarily good as a bedmate, as well as being a slavishly willing whipping boy.
The last he was not, as far as I knew-that was merely a ruse to excite Valseuses to commit an act of foolish pride.
As for my Gilbert's agility in bed-I had no idea, though I suspected the best. His approaches were all entirely proper and painfully respectful. He was, as far as I knew, a virgin. He wanted my hand in marriage, had been pursuing me for months before I granted it, in spite of his family's objections (objections, I should point out, entirely based on their misconceptions concerning my control over the Poitringle monies, and entirely dispelled after I had accepted the boy's hand and made clear to them the vast extent of my personal wealth).
He was nineteen, the same age as myself. He was just over six feet tall and had the lean but broad-shouldered and sinewy-muscled body of a young athlete. Blond curly locks, blue eyes, his innocence and beauty, his happiness and gaiety all wiped away my dreadful past and gave my life a freshness I had never had, an openness in which I could afford to feel helpless for the first time in my life, helpless and vulnerable.
Unlike Valseuses, he never really touched me where it hurt, inside, there was no real danger of my going overboard with him. I could project all my fantasies into him and not have to worry about their coming back distorted by his personality. He loved me with all the infatuation and innocence that goes with first love, and I cherished him for being the first friend I had ever had.
I can feel you cringing, Father. ALL RIGHT! I married him for his money and family connections! Does that make you happy? Is that cynical enough for you? Do you want me to say I murdered him or our wedding night? That his testicles are in a jar of formaldehyde on the mantle?
Had I married him for his money and family connections, I would have had excellent cause to do so. He was the eldest son of the Due de Braquemart, and in line for the vast inheritance that accompanied that title.
When I met him he was just beginning a five-year commission in the army, and when I finally accepted his hand, he was about to leave for Italy as an aide to the Military Attache at the Vatican. It was this appointment that forced my hand in accepting his. Had I turned him down then, I doubtless never would have seen him again.
And he did turn out to be an extraordinarily good playmate under the covers, Papa, easily as well equipped as Valseuses and with even more stamina than Giton.
I remember vividly our wedding night-the poor boy, as it turned out, was a virgin after all. We went up to our room and as soon as the door was closed he took me into his arms and kissed me, nervously and passionately. It was the first time that our tongues had touched in a kiss. His arms went around me and crushed me into him. He clung to the kiss, standing there in the middle of the room, not knowing what to do next. I broke the kiss and walked over to the bed, beginning to undress. I asked him to unhook me in the back, and to lift my gown over my head. The same with all my undergarments until I sat stark naked on the bed before him. His face was red as my nipples. He was trembling, and finding it difficult to breathe. I told him to undress, and he did so with a rapidity that the naked eye couldn't follow.
And when he had undressed I had difficulty taking my eyes off of him. What a monument of the male anatomy! So tall, and such a sweet circumference! Such a graceful curve, and such a rosy hue! I lay on my back and beckoned him to me with my hands, hungry for the imminent moment when that monster should probe the nerve endings of my heart.
A special element that heightened my lust was the fact that we were alone. It had been many months since I had made love with one man, alone with him in a room. After so many huge orgies with so many people participating and watching, it seemed almost unnatural, immoral, to do it in private.
He crawled alongside me and I slid under, taking his pulsating penis with my hand and guiding it into me. And what do you think, Father? No sooner had he plunged all the way up into me than his whole body stiffened and shook on the rack of pleasure; I felt wave after wave of his abundant seed slam into me. It had taken no more than two seconds, the mere contact had set him off utterly.
But this was no sickness or deformity on his part-on the contrary, merely the hypersensitive exuberance of a boy in the throes of his first love. Without missing a beat the lovely lad began to pump away again, and soon I, too, had come to my climax and relaxed, let him continue to drive on to his delight again. Which he did, admirably, lovingly and violently. He lay atop me without withdrawing. I felt the need for further pleasure, compounded orgasm, so I rolled over on top of him. Now I did the work and he provided his aroused and mighty presence, passive at first then slowly swinging back into the rhythm with me again.
So it went throughout that first night with him, Papa, with scarcely a break. And so it has gone since our marriage. I had broken him in at just the right time, and his potency was, and is, absolutely unlimited.
We left for Rome shortly after the wedding trip, and installed ourselves in a comfortable villa near the Vatican. Without connections or a knowledge of the language, you can imagine that my life was rather dull there at first, but fortunately Gilbert kept me awake most of the night and I was able to sleep most of the day.
Soon, however, we began to become acquainted with more and more people and our social life blossomed accordingly. The clergy are the greatest sensualists in the world, the finest connoisseurs of fine food, drink and flesh, and their parties were always delightful.
At many of these parties a dark-haired man of very strong and undetermined spiritual beauty was present. He dressed in a monk's habit of an order I did not recognize, and wore a medium-sized, well-trimmed beard. I suppose he was in his late thirties. He seemed to bear a striking resemblance to someone I had seen before, perhaps only in a painting, but I never was able to place him.
I asked a friend about him and she answered that no one seemed to know who he was, exactly, or what his real function was, but as he seemed to be in communication with the Pope and several other eminent personages in the Church hierarchy, he was automatically invited everywhere.
I suppose it was his eyes more than anything else that fascinated me. Brilliantly dark, they radiated immense power and depth of insight. They exercised a hypnotic appeal over me, and I felt myself irresistibly drawn to the man.
One night my curiosity got the better of me and I walked directly up to him and introduced myself.
He was enchanted to meet me, he said, and confessed that he had often seen me at gatherings and had been most anxious to make my acquaintance. I was flattered by this and told Sig nor Lampedusi (for that was what he called himself) that I, too, had been fascinated by him. He asked about Paris and I rattled on and on inconsequentially about the life there, all the while studying his fascinating, lively eyes.
Then he asked me and Gilbert to lunch the following day. I had to refuse, explaining that my husband was leaving for Padua that morning on a diplomatic mission and wouldn't be back for some weeks.
"Then you are going with him?" he asked.
"Why, no," I replied, "I'll be staying here in Rome."
"Then perhaps you'd like to come by yourself. I assure you it will be a most enjoyable luncheon."
After a few further perfunctory refusals, as required by propriety, I accepted, and dinner was announced.
The following afternoon I arrived at Lampedusi's house, which was isolated on a high hill with vast, overgrown gardens which looked as though they hadn't been tended for years. The door was answered by the hall porter, one of those astonishingly beautiful young Romans who are living embodiments of the statues of gods and gladiators, and seemed to have just stepped down from their pedestals, so perfectly proportioned are their bodies.
He led me into the sitting room where Lampedusi rose to greet me. He was clothed in his usual strange cut of robe, but today it was an immaculate white rather than his customary black. I looked around the room for other guests. There were none.
We chatted for a while, then he suggested we go in for lunch. I asked him what had happened to the other guests.
He looked around the room for a moment. "Where?" he said. "What other guests?"
I looked at him for a moment moving my lips, trying to think of a logical answer to his question.
"There are none," he said flatly, "if that's what you mean. "Does this bother you?"
"Not at all, not at all," I answered, wondering what was coming next.
Pietro, the young man who answered the door, also served the meal. Apparently, Lampedusi did not keep a large staff of servants, and I asked him about this.
"I don't need jabbering lackeys prying into my affairs. Pietro more than serves my simple needs, and I have a cook bring in the meals."
During the course of the luncheon, and over the coffee that followed, the conversation, or rather Lampedusi's monologue, slowly drifted toward the heroism of the early Christian martyrs.
"The blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church, my dear. That's what I always say." He motioned Pietro to refill my brandy snifter and leaned back in his chair, folding his arms. "Those were the days. To be a Christian then was to be a subversive, a criminal. It took tremendous courage and all-powerful faith to become a Christian in those days, and then to stand up for your faith once they caught you! Not like today. They had to stand up and be counted in those days. Look at St. Lawrence, who was roasted alive on a gridiron. Do you think he whined, or bellowed, or reneged on his faith? No, ma'am. He suffered in silence, never giving in, never crying out in pain, and when his skin was sizzling, dripping fat from the back of his neck to the backs of his ankles, he cried out, 'Turn me over, boys, I'm done on that side!' Yes, those were the days. How about St. Marcus, who was covered with honey and hoisted up in a basket to the top of a flagpole, where he was stung to death by bees, or St. Sanctus, who had to run the gauntlet first-those were steel gauntlets, and those Romans were strong in those days-and then he was cooked in a sealed iron chair where he choked on the fumes of his own roasting flesh. Or St. Artemis, who was ground between millstones in the arena and the crowd could hear his bones broken with a loud splitting and cracking-can you imagine that? Those were the days. Those are the men I admire, not your present-day Christian, too willing to submit to the flesh."
Slowly he nodded, as if agreeing with himself, digesting the import of what he had said, and sighed.
"Yes," I said, embarrassed by the sudden silence. Those certainly were the days."
He looked up and stared at me for a moment, opened his mouth as if to say something, looked away, then spoke: "Madame, perhaps I am being a little-how shall I say-perhaps I am rushing things a little. But I think I can trust you. I felt this the first time I saw you."
"I think perhaps you can trust me, Signor Lampedusi," I answered. "And just what might it be that you wish to entrust in me?"
"For some time-" he began, then trailed off into silence. "You may have gathered much about me from our conversation. I have the need-my faith has the need-to be tested. To the extreme. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
"I think so, Signor. As in the good old days?"
"Exactly. Up until now, I've only had Pietro here to administer the tests. With your assistance, however, I am certain my faith will be infinitely strengthened."
"Signor," I said, already quite intrigued at the possibilities and casting a glance at Pietro, who would, of course, be my accomplice in torturing his master, "there is nothing I would rather do than strengthen your faith."
"Let us go, then," he said, rising from the table. We left the dining room and stepped into a spacious, sparsely decorated hall, at the end of which were a tall stake and a full-sized, roughhewn cross. Pietro stepped into a side room as Lampedusi and I continued toward the far end of the room. A few moments later we were joined by Pietro. I took in my breath sharply when I saw him, for he had removed all of his clothes and now really did resemble one of those statues, though with far more generous equipment than I have ever seen in stone. He carried a large, tightly strung bow, and a sheath of arrows was slung across his shoulder.
"Perhaps Madame would feel freer if she, too, were free of her clothing," Pietro said.
"Perhaps Madame would," I said, and hastily retired to the anteroom. A few moments later I returned completely nude. Almost from the moment I emerged from the door, I could see Pietro's unconcealed engine rise with unabashed lust.
Lampedusi began to tell of the ordeal of St. Sebastian-how he was stripped of all his garments and tied to a stake; how an archer shot dozens of arrows into his body, but all of them calculated to miss the vital organs, so that he would not die instantly, but expire, rather, by the slow agony of bleeding to death.
When he had finished with his long, drawn-out narrative he stepped back and Pietro moved into action. He began slapping his master, shouting out obscenities, calling him "pig" and "Christian dog!" I joined in the fun, hitting Lampedusi as hard as I could, shouting every vile imprecation I could think of and stripping his clothes off, tearing them to shreds. I noticed strange marking all over his body, and realized they were targets for Pietro to shoot at, the spots of the body where severe pain could be inflicted, but no permanent damage done.
Pietro walked off twenty-five paces while I lashed our victim to the stake still cursing him and urging him to recant his faith. He too was getting a little excited in his lower parts, particularly as I pulled the ropes tighter and tighter, cursing him the while and demanding that he recant, recant.
"No, never!" he would shout.
With Lampedusi tied securely to the stake, I joined Pietro and we gave "Sebastian" his last chance. He refused like a good Christian martyr. Pietro strung the arrow, flexed his rippling muscles, and let the missile fly. It struck our saint halfway between his right shoulder blade and nipple, and he let out a piercing cry as it tore through the muscle. He was becoming uncontrollably excited now.
Pietro strung another arrow and it struck home to the mark. Another, and another, cursing "Sebastian" all the while, as the saint adamantly upheld his faith.
When a dozen arrows had been shot into Lampedusi's flesh, Pietro walked up to him and examined his handiwork. I followed close behind him and when he stopped at the stake I had become so excited that I threw my arms around him, grinding my breasts and thighs into his back and reaching around to grasp his stiff member with my hand.
"Let's show the Christian dog, who renounces our pagan rites, what he's missing."
Pietro turned slowly around, took me in his arms and gently lowered me to the floor at our saint's feet. With a vigorous thrust he penetrated the seat of bodily pleasure and I cried out with deep delight. We frolicked there for some time until we had both taken our pleasure from each other. When I looked up I saw to my surprise and glee that the saint had also had his complete fill of pleasure from merely watching us while enjoying penetration of the arrows.
Lampedusi signalled for them to be removed and we did so, after which we cauterized the openings with hot wax, a practice of which he was exceedingly fond.
I dressed, gave my assurances that I would return in two days, ane left.
In the succeeding days I paid many more visits to Lampedusi. There seemed to be no end to the tortures he could undergo. The St. Catherine's wheel, the rack, branding, water torture, suspension by the thumbs one day, big toes the next, massive pin-pricks, weights; he seemed able to endure anything.
However, all these tortures were carried out under the most rigorous limitations-specifications designed by him to give maximum dramatic effect to his mind and minimum torture to his body. Even though these little scenes excited me terrifically (and Pietro more than sated my excitement each day) I quickly grew bored with Lampedusi's little routines and longed for something genuine, something that would truly put him to the test, perhaps for good.
One day, as we entered the torture chamber and he began to recite the history of some obscure saint whom he might well have invented, for all I knew, I interrupted and asked if he ever used the cross.
He seemed somewhat startled at first, and replied that it would be an act of spiritual pride, that he was far from being ready for such an ordeal.
I argued that he was certainly ready, that the ordeals he had suffered had certainly prepared him for it, and that there was no question of spiritual pride, since many martyrs in addition to our Lord and Savior had suffered the same delicious fate.
Pietro, who I had sounded out on the subject earlier, heartily agreed and eventually succeeded in talking his master into it.
Lampedusi, however, wanted another day to make the necessary preparations, so I excused myself and returned the next day a little earlier than usual. Pietro told me at the door that there would be no lunch as his master was fasting, and that he was ready for the ordeal whenever I was.
We retired to the dressing room and began taking off our clothes.
"Pietro," I said, as he unhooked my upper undergarment and slid his hands around to my naked breasts, "how would you like to come and work for me?"
"I would love to, Madame. There is nothing in the world I would rather do," he said, pinching my nipples, "than serve your needs."
"Good," I said, turning to him as I removed the last shred of clothing from my hips and turned to face him, pressing my nipples into his bronze chest. "You must be as tired of these little games with your master as I am."
"That I am, Madame, excepting the part we perform together," he said, pressing his naked thighs against mine and rubbing his stiffened penis against my abdomen.
"Then promise me you'll go along with everything I do today, and that you'll leave with me as soon as we've finished."
"That I promise."
We kissed to seal the pact and emerged into the main hall. There, Lampedusi, girded in a loincloth and wearing a crown of thorns, was trudging around the room, the cross on his back. Pietro picked up a handful of stones from a pile on the floor and began hurling them at his master, shouting blasphemous obscenities. I joined in, though my aim wasn't quite as good as Pietro's.
When we had thrown all the stones at him, shouting, "Crucify him, crucify him!" we secured the cross sturdily and led the martyr up a set of makeshift stairs where he spread out his arms along the crossbeam and tried to look like Christ.
Pietro handed me the hammer and spikes. I noticed that our martyr had marked the spot on his palm where he wanted the spike to enter, but somehow I managed to miss this harmless spot and drive the spike through a thicker part of his palm where there were all kinds of interesting little bones, arteries and tendons. He let out a blood-curdling scream, demanding I remove the spike at once.
"It's all right," I said, "it will all be over in a day or two."
So saying, I nailed his other hand to the cross with equal disregard for his markings and got the same bellowing response out of him.
Pietro and I descended the stairs amid Lampedusi's screams and protests and howls, all to no avail. We pulled the stairs away so that he was suspended only by the spikes through his palms.
"Recant!" I yelled, but the martyr, in spite of his unwonted agony, refused.
Pietro handed me more spikes and I secured his feet, again missing the spots he had marked out, and again being rewarded by his hideous shrieks.
"Renounce your faith!" I shouted. "No!" he screamed.
I threw down the hammer and took Pietro in my arms. We slid to the floor and there, at the foot of the cross, we made love to excess, violently, savagely, deliciously, to the accompaniment of the martyr's roars of pain and (for he had become inordinately excited, too) uncontainable pleasure.
But it soon became evident that the pain was reaching the unbearable point for him, and he cried out to be led down, that the time limit had already been exceeded.
I demanded once more that he recant. He protested, pleaded to be released, that he had stood the trial.
"Not until you deny your God," I insisted.
After a long, agonizing pause, he screamed, "All right, all right! I renounce my God! I deny the Christian faith! Now please let me down! It hurts!"
I looked up at him sternly and shook my head disapprovingly. "I m shocked at you," I said. "A man with such weak faith doesn't deserve to live."
He began to bawl like a child, and Pietro grabbed some cloth, mounted the cross from behind, and gagged him.
"You're going to die here," I continued, "just as you've always dreamed of doing. But it won't be a martyr's death, since you've already renounced God and Christianity. Your prayers will go unheard and you will go straight to hell when you give up the ghost-in about a week."
Pietro and I then turned and walked briskly out of the room, leaving Lampedusi to die on the cross.
Letter Ten
Dear Papa, I cannot tell you how happy your letter makes me! At last, after so long, to know that I have my own father's blessing, that in re-reading all my letters you find unmistakably the stamp of a kindred spirit and the path of a life that vibrates on the same chord as your own!
You make me happy, father, supremely happy. I am only sorry that I can do very little to satisfy the intense curiosity you have expressed in my further adventures, as the incidents I have related so far bring me almost up to the present.
After leaving Lampedusi hanging there, I brought Pietro home with me, and we indulged in a riotous orgy for some days, culminating when we received the news that Lampedusi's corpse had been discovered.
The following morning, thoroughly spent, I received word that Gilbert would be returning within the week, and I decided to get rid of Pietro.
Fearing that the authorities might well be on his trail, and that his discovery might implicate me, I gave him money for the passage to Paris, giving him also an address where he might find aid until my arrival there, at which time he would be, I told him, employed in my household service.
Unfortunately for the poor darling, the address I gave him was that of Madame Tapineuse, keeper of the most notorious male whorehouse in Paris. I have just heard that Pietro, after several attempts at escape, has resigned himself to his fate and is a great favorite with both sexes. On my return, Madame Tapineuse paid me her usual generous bounty.
I had already decided I had had enough of Rome, and when Gilbert returned from Padua I began complaining of morning sickness and gave him every other false impression that I was pregnant.
I could, of course, have simply told him that I wanted to leave, but I had grown so used to deviousness and lies that I had to dream up some false excuse for everything.
In any event, he immediately applied for a transfer, and it was granted. He is now garrisoned just outside the city, and is altogether delighted that a third party was merely a false alarm and is not yet about to interfere with our riotous nocturnal frolics.
But I am looking forward to bearing a little duke to Gilbert someday, Father, and perhaps hordes of others. One of the family chateaus is in the Midi, right on the Mediterranean. I have been there several times, and once Gilbert has served out his commission we plan to establish there. It is a beautiful spot, and I look forward so much to ripening there, maturing and even growing old with my Gilbert and our eventual brood.
Do I seem sentimental, Father, or overly soft? Perhaps it is because I feel so much loved, for the first time in my life perhaps, by Gilbert and now, especially, by you.
My life has been such a constant orgy of adventure and destruction up to now, Father, not that I renounce or regret any of it, but it all made me so miserable-it all seems so empty and childish and insane alongside the rich world of love I feel inside myself and all about me now.
Letter Eleven
Dear Father, How could I have been such a fool as to listen to you, Father? Or even to write you in the first place? What motive could you possibly have had in order to put such an idea into my head?
Well, it is over, and I think I shall go mad, quite mad. I have done what you said. Yes, I have done it. It wasn't easy. It took me a week to reconcile myself to it, a week of agony worse than any of my lucky victims has yet suffered, but I have done it, in the end I found it perversely irresistible.
I have done it and I hope you are proud of me, I hope it makes you happy.
Once I had decided, once I had been seduced by your cruel words-O, Father, you have the tongue of a scourge-everything fell easily into place, quite easily.
I had known Colonel Tracassin, of course, ever since Gilbert joined the Colonel's command and a dinner was given in his honor.
I knew that Colonel was attracted to me from the start, and I had cultivated his interest in a perfectly innocent, flirtatious way, as I do with all attractive men, without the slightest intention of ever going further than smiles and flattering conversation.
When, finally I decided to act according to your instructions it was all too easy to push matters much further.
At a dinner party I mentioned to the Colonel that I was angry at him for making Gilbert Officer of the Guard later that week. He asked me what the trouble was, and I replied that I got terribly lonely, sitting in that great house by myself. He jokingly offered to send over some of his men to stand guard, but I told him that that was not what I had in mind at all. His eyes lit up at this and he asked me just what it was I was thinking of.
I patted his hand and said, "Now, Colonel, you know better than to ask a question such as that of a lady."
He smiled his lecherous smile and said he would see if he couldn't do something about it.
The following evening, after Gilbert had departed, the hall doorbell rang and the porter, as I expected, presented the Colonel's card.
Having already prepared myself for bed, and seeing no reason to make things difficult for him, I greeted the Colonel in my boudoir, dressed in my sheerest gown, through which every pore of my perfumed body was visible.
The Colonel wasted no time. He was rapid and skilled operator. A few kind words from his chair, then he was kneeling on the floor, kissing my hand. Soon he was perched on the edge of the bed, and it was my shoulder he was kissing now, my neck, my mouth. He wasted no time in baring my breasts, which he fondled, kissed, nibbled, sucked and bit. I moaned obligingly. He pulled down the covers and his hands were on my thighs, around my buttocks, between my legs. I protested perfunctorily. His boots were off, he returned to the attack, pants and doublet gone, he was quite naked then. He crawled in alongside me, hot and lascivious, with his mouth and hands all over my body. He stripped off the gown so I was naked too.
He crawled atop me, his member at present arms, and shoved it into me. We pumped away, pumped away, the job was done.
He was so pleased with himself, I asked him to leave, he dressed and preened, asking to come the next day and I agreed.
How could you have talked me into it? Such a bore, such an immense bore. He came several other afternoons, and I did my best to find some proof against him, as you suggested, that would not implicate me.
I was racking my brains for just such a proof one morning when a note arrived from Charlotte announcing the death of the Count de Prozinard, my supposed father. Carlotte informed me that her coach would leave the following morning, and would call for me sharply at nine unless she heard from me by then.
At first I had no intention of going. There was no reason to go now that Charlotte knew my true parentage. Then I realized that the trip could provide me with the opportunity I was looking for. When the Colonel called that afternoon I met him in mourning, told him of the death of my father and asked him to write me a tender note telling me of his love, and to mail it to me at Prozinard so that I would have something to look forward to in the mail, and something to sustain me during the ordeal of closing down the family estate.
The days at Prozinard, which I spent mostly in my old room, were sheer hell, Father. I won't go into what I felt there, because I know you don't give a damn about my feelings; but let me just say I had ho difficulty feigning tears before, during and after the funeral of that bloated drunkard whom I despised.
On the day of the funeral, the letter arrived. It was exactly what I wanted-passionate, subjective, general, with no mention whatsoever of any specifics.
I returned with this letter to Paris, and several days later, showed it to Gilbert, explaining that I had just received it, that I had no idea what the Colonel could possibly have in mind.
Breaking into tears and clinging to him, I bawled that certainly I had never given the Colonel any hint, any indication that I even knew he existed, save for what social obligations and common decency required. I cried on and on, finally feigning nervous hysterics and imploring Gilbert, as you instructed, not to do anything drastic, "as a man of passionate feelings might be inclined to do."
That did it, and he was off. He wrote a scathing note to the Colonel that evening, announcing that he would meet him at the Bois de Vincennes gate in the Village of Saint-Mande, and that he, Gilbert, would bring the pistols.
It is true that our love was richer and deeper and more glittering, more spectacular that night than ever before. And I cursed myself that I had brought this damnable state of affairs into existence, that I had followed your instructions and they were working with nightmarish, diabolical effectiveness.
Gilbert left early, before dawn. A few hours ago word was brought to me that he had killed the Colonel in one shot, but that the Colonel had severely wound Gilbert in the stomach as well, piercing several vital organs.
I rushed to the hospital but was not able to see him. It is un-likely that I shall ever see him alive again. He is not expected to live, and if he does, will face a court-martial and almost certain execution by a firing squad.
Was this your idea of a joke, Father? If I cannot control my laughter, if the paper is spotted with phlegm from my horse-laughs, please forgive me.
I think I must be mad to have even considered your suggestions, orders rather. I have lost Gilbert irrevocably, and with him, any chance of happiness. I am quite resigned to that. I swallow my tears as readily as if they were blood.
But of course, I have my freedom again, as you rightly pointed out. I am no longer shackled to a sentimental and stifling marriage where all my real values, all my diabolical ties to you were severed. Yes, I am free again. And what would you have me be now, Father? An out-and-out whore? I'm quite capable of that, you know. I have big tits, and a very servicable cunt. You've taken over the direction of my life now, so tell me what in hell's name to do with the worthless thing.
Please, Father, at least write to me soon. I've done all this to hold your love and esteem. Don't turn on me now, or I shall have nothing.
Letter Twelve
Dear Father, I don't know what to make of this latest letter of yours. I don't know what to make of it. I don't. Don't.
For what reason can you have turned my letters over to the Police, Father, FOR WHAT REASON!?
You're fully aware, of course-you couldn't possibly be anything but fully aware-that the evidence in any one of those letters is enough to send me to prison for the rest of my life.
How can you turn such evidence over the police, who have hounded you and locked you up for so many long years? My letters were written in confidence to you, out of my love for you, to share my life with, to give you some pleasure in what must be a terrible, claustrophobic life for you. I deliberately embellished all the sexual parts to give you some excitement, a little titillation in your confinement. And you take my confidences, all my confessions, and turn them over to the law!
This is the last, crushing blow for me. It was not enough for you to entice me into ruining my one chance for happiness, no! You had to cut off my freedom as well, cut me off from life itself.
I curse you, Sade, and the black day you fucked my mother!
And now I am going to cast about for some nice way of murdering myself before the trial. What would you suggest? Shall I have myself dragged through the streets of Paris by my feet until the cobblestones have beaten me to death? Shall I have the cook hack me apart with a meat cleaver-or have him grind me alive into a hash, feet first? If only you were here, perhaps you could think of some delightful way of getting rid of me before the hideous trial.
The trial-but, of course, there isn't going to be a trial, the authorities would never allow a trial in a case like this, they never do-the Valseuses, the Braquemarts, the Poitringles are all too powerful ever to allow a public trial. They'll simply do with me as they do with all such scandalous cases-cast me into Charenton.
CHARENTON! Father! Is that what you planned? Is that what you wanted? Is that why you turned me in-so you could have me with you? Do you desire me that much? Do you want me that much? I'm still beautiful, dear Father, you won't be ashamed of me, you won't be disappointed, you'll like me, I'll satisfy you, I know, I'll do anything you want, anything you say-that knocking, Michette informs me, is Inspector Marais, he wants to see me, there are several gendarmes-will I have time to change? Perhaps this letter will reach you before I arrive. Or perhaps I'll be able to read it. to you in bed, in your cell.
My life rounds itself out so soon. Yes, I shall be at home in the madhouse with you.