Marquis de Sade by Marquis de Sade

Author:Marquis de Sade
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

*And that for the sole reason that sensitivity proves weakness, and libertinage strength. (Author's note)

JULIETTE, OR VICE AMPLY REWARDED

A reading of Justine and the encounters with its gallery of monsters may give the impression that Sade's vision of horrifying human behaviour had reached its limit. A reading of Juliette dispels any such idea at once. If his messages do not vary in their defence of crime in all forms, their dismissal of religion, their insistence on sexual activity in total freedom, combined with cruelty if required, Sade now found darker colours, even blacker shades of black, with which to work.

Justine is always alone, protected only occasionally by a few women who employ her as a chambermaid, while other women cheat and rob her. Men invariably abuse her, and when not forcing her into their sexual orgies they may occasionally offer her work as a procuress. If she initiates a good action, she invariably suffers as a result.

Her elder sister Juliette never doubts for a moment the 'prosperities of vice', always arranges protection for herself and any action she takes is destructive, often murderous. However, she makes one mistake. She is introduced to Saint-Fond, a minister, and when she hears his plan to depopulate France she shudders with horror. He rebukes her, she realizes her mistake: 'O fatal virtue,' she cries, 'I have once been deceived by you.' She does not let it happen again.

She does not lack close friends, notably the English Lady Clairwil who conducts Juliette further along the path of wickedness by introducing her to a society known as The Friends of Crime. Most of Juliette's adventures are long in the telling and difficult to present out of context, but one of them expresses the message Sade intends to convey. After she has been Saint-Fond's mistress for barely two years Juliette has amassed a fortune and likes to masturbate as she contemplates her jewels and her riches: she reaches orgasm as she thinks over this strange idea.

I love crime, and see all the means of crime at my disposal. O my friends, how sweet is this thought, and how much sexual juice has it made me lose! If I needed a new jewel, a new dress, my lover, who never wanted to see me more than three times in the same clothes, satisfied my wish immediately . . . and he did all that without demanding more from me than disorder, frenzy, libertinage, and the most excessive care in the arrangements for his daily orgies. It was therefore by appeasing my tastes that all my tastes were in fact served; it was in giving myself over to every irregularity of my senses that my senses were intoxicated. But in what moral situation had so much ease placed me? That is what I dare not say, my friends, but I must all the same come to an agreement with you about it. The extreme debauchery in which I plunged myself every day had deadened the reactions of

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