The 120 Days of Sodom (63 page)

    THE 13TH. 67. A great connoisseur of the ass, he declares his love for a girl and, having arranged a boating party, lures her upon the water in a small boat, the which has been prepared for the outing, springs a leak, founders; the girl is drowned. He sometimes pursues his objective by different means: will, for example, lead a girl out upon a high balcony, have her lean upon the railing, which gives way; and once again the girl dies.

    68. A man, while making his apprenticeship in life, was content first to whip and then to embugger; now, having reached a mature age, entices the girl to enter a specially prepared room; a trap door yields beneath her step, she falls into a cellar where the rake awaits her; he plunges a knife into her breasts, her cunt, and into her asshole as she lies stunned by her fall. Next, he casts her, dead or still alive, into another cellar, over which a stone drops into place; she tumbles upon a heap of other corpses, and she expires in a great fit if life has not already departed her sorebeset frame. And he is very careful to administer delicate stabs, for he would prefer that she live a little and finally perish in the cellar mentioned latterly. Prior to all this, he of course embuggers and flogs her and discharges; 'tis coolly and with utmost method he proceeds to her undoing.

    69. A bugger has the girl mount astride an untamed, unbroken horse which unseats her, drags her along a rocky terrain, and finally pitches her over a precipice.

    70. Martaine's hero of the 18th of January whose juvenile passion was to distribute little mounds of gunpowder upon the girl's body, has made significant progress. He lays the girl in a special bed; when properly tucked in, the bed gives way, dropping her into a large brazier of live coals, but she is able to scramble out of it; however, he is standing by and, as she repeats her attempts to escape the fire, he drives her back, wielding a pitchfork and with it aiming stout blows at her belly.

    71. The gentleman she mentioned on the 11th, who likes to burn down poorhouses, endeavors to lure a beggar, whether a man or a woman, from out of one and into his own home, upon the pretense of bestowing charity; he embuggers his victim, then breaks his back and leaves him thus discomfited to die in a dungeon.

    72. He who was wont to defenestrate a woman, hurling her upon a dung heap, the same man of whom Martaine spoke, by way of second passion executes the following one: he allows the girl to sleep in a room she is acquainted with and whose window she knows to be not far above the ground; she is given opium, when in a deep slumber she is conveyed to another chamber, identical with the first but having a window high above the ground which, on this side of the house, is strewn with sharp rocks. Next, the libertine enters where she lies sleeping, makes a dreadful noise, terrifies her; she is informed that she is about to die. Knowing the drop from the window to the ground to be short, she leaps through it, but falls thirty feet and lands upon the murderous rocks, killing herself. No one has so much as laid a finger upon her.

    In the character of a woman, that great histrionic, the Bishop, marries Antinoьs, whose role is that of a husband, and also weds Celadon, whom he takes to be his wife, and 'tis that evening the child is embuggered for the first time.

    This ceremony celebrates the festival of the fifteenth week; to complete the holiday, the prelate wishes to expose Aline to some severe vexations, for his libertine rage against her has been quietly but steadily mounting: she is hanged, then quickly cut down, but while seeing her however briefly aloft, everyone discharges. Durcet opens her veins, this treatment restores her to life; the next day she appears none the worse for wear, but suspension has added an inch to her height; she relates what she experienced during the ordeal. The Bishop, for whom everything is an occasion of jollity and everyone the object of game that day, cuts one of old Louison's nipples clean off her breast; whereupon the other two duennas see very clearly what their fate is to be.

    THE 14TH. 73. A man whose simple taste was to flog a girl, perfects it by every day removing morsels of flesh the size of a pea from the girl's body, but her wounds are not dressed, and thus she perishes over a low fire, as it were.

    Desgranges announces that she will now deal with exceedingly painful murders wherein 'tis the extreme cruelty which comprises the main element; Messieurs more strongly than ever urge her to furnish abundant details.

    74. He who was fond of letting blood daily relieves his victim of a half ounce of it, continuing till she is dead. Messieurs greet this example with hearty applause.

    75. He who was wont to prick the ass with many pins every day administers a more or less superficial gash with a poignard. The blood is stanched, but the wound is not treated, neither does it mend, and thus 'tis a slow death she dies. A fustigator (75) quietly and slowly saws off all four limbs, one after the other.

    76. The Marquis de Mesanges, of whom Duclos spoke in connection with the shoemaker Petignon's daughter, bought by the Marquis from Duclos, and whose first passion was to undergo four hours of flogging without discharging, for a second passion places a little girl in the hands of a giant fellow who holds the child by the head over a large charcoal brazier which burns her very slowly; the victims must be virgins.

    77. His first passion: little by little to burn the breasts and buttocks with the flame of a match; his second: over every part of the girl's body to plant a forest of sulphur-coated slivers, which he lights one by one. He watches her die in this way.

    "Nor is there anymore painful way to die," observes the Duc, who then confesses to having surrendered himself to this infamous pastime, and to having discharged vigorously thanks to it. They say that the patient lives six hours, sometimes eight.

    Celadon's ass is made generally available that evening; the Duc and Curval indulge themselves heavily. Constance's pregnancy is still on the President's mind; he suggests that she be bled, and bleeds her himself while discharging in Celadon's ass, then he lops off one of Therиse's nipples while embuggering Zelmire, and the Duc sodomizes the duenna during the amputation.

    THE 15TH. 78. Once beguiled by the charms of a mouth to suck and saliva to swallow, he is now of sterner stuff: every day he inserts a funnel into the girl's mouth and pours a small dose of molten lead down her throat; she gives up the ghost on the ninth day.

    79. First a finger-twister, he currently breaks all her limbs, tears out her tongue, gouges out her eyes, and leaves her thus to live, diminishing her sustenance day by day.

    80. A perpetrator of sacrilege, the second one Martaine mentioned on the 3rd of January, he secures a beautiful youth to a tall cross, binding him with cords and leaving him there as food for ravens.

    81. An armpit-sniffer and -fucker, to whom Duclos alluded, binds a woman hand and foot and hangs her by a rope looped under her arms; he goes every day to prick some part of her body so that the blood will attract flies; her death is by slow degrees.

    82. A passionate admirer of asses rectifies his worship: he now seals a girl in an underground cave where she has food to last three days; before leaving her, he inflicts several wounds upon her body, thuswise to render her death more painful. He wishes to have them virgins and spends a week embracing their asses before organizing their destruction.

    83. Formerly he loved to fuck very youthful mouths and asses; his later improvement consists in snatching out the heart of a living girl, widening the space that organ occupied, fucking the warm hole, replacing the heart in that pool of blood and fuck, sewing up the wound, and leaving the girl to her fate, without help of any kind. In which case the wait is not long.

    Still wroth with the lovely Constance, Curval maintains that there is no reason under the sun why one cannot successfully bear a child even though one has a broken limb, and therefore they fracture that unlucky creature's arm the same evening. Durcet slices off one of Marie's nipples after she has been well warmed by the lash and made copiously to shit.

    THE 16TH. 84. A fustigator refines his passion: he learns and then practices the art of gently removing flesh from bones; he then extracts the marrow, usually by sucking it out, and pours molten lead into the cavity.

    At this point the Duc loudly exclaims that he'll not fuck another ass while he lives if that isn't the very ordeal he has had in mind for his beloved Augustine; that poor girl, whom Blangis has been embuggering for some time, utters cries and sheds a torrent of tears. And as thanks to her misbehavior she interferes with his discharge and frustrates it effectively, he withdraws, takes hold of his engine in one hand, and while with the other he gives her a dozen slaps which resound through that wing of the castle, he manages his discharge very satisfactorily by himself.

    85. A bugger uses an ingenious machine to chop the girl into small pieces: this is a Chinese torture.

    86. Weary of his early fondness for girls' pucelages, his latest passion is to impale a girl upon the point of a sharp pickaxe introduced into her cunt; there she sits, as if upon a horse, he ties a cannon ball to each of her legs, the pick works deeper, and she is left to her own devices and a slow death.

    87. A fustigator flays the girl thrice over; he soaks her fourth layer of skin with a devouring escharotic which brings about death accompanied by hideous agonies.

    88. His first passion was to sever a finger; his second is to pluck up some flesh with a pair of red-hot tongs, to cut off the flesh with a pair of scissors, then to burn the wound. He is quite apt to spend as long as four or five days whittling away a girl's body piecemeal, and she ordinarily dies while the cruel operation is still advancing.

    Sophie and Celadon have been found amusing themselves together and are punished that evening; both are whipped over their entire bodies by the Bishop, whose chattels they are. Sophie loses two fingers to the shears, Celadon as many; but he recovers very quickly. The Bishop is no less eager to use them in his pleasures, however they be maimed.

    Fanchon returns to the center of the stage. After having been beaten with a bull's pizzle, the soles of her feet are burned, each thigh, before and behind, is burned also, her forehead too, and each hand as well, and Messieurs extract all her remaining teeth. The Duc's prick is almost continually wedged into her ass throughout this lengthy operation.

    Mention that it has been prescribed by law that a subject's buttocks shall be left intact until the day the said subject reaches the end of his career.

    THE 17TH. 89. Martaine's gentleman of the 30th of January and the same one she herself described on the 5th of February, pares away a girl's breasts and buttocks, eats them, and upon her wounds puts plasters which so violently burn the flesh that they are her undoing. He also forces her to eat her own flesh, which he has had grilled.

    90. A bugger cooks up a little girl in a double boiler.

    91. A bugger: he has her roasted alive on a spit directly after embuggering her.

    92. A man whose initial passion was to have little girls and boys embuggered in his presence by massive and ponderous pricks, impales the girl, a spear in her ass, and leaves her thus to die while he studies her contortions.

    93. Another bugger: attaches a woman to a wheel, it is then set in motion and, without having done her any previous harm, he allows her to die a very pretty death.

    That evening, the Bishop, his spirits in a great ferment, wishes to have Aline tormented, his rage against her has reached its fever pitch. She makes her appearance naked, he has her shit and embuggers her, then, without discharging, he withdraws in a towering fury from that enchanting ass and injects a rinse of boiling water into it, obliging her to squirt it out at once, while it is still boiling hot, upon Therиse's face. After that, Messieurs hack off all the fingers and toes Aline has left, break both her arms and burn them with red-hot pokers. She is next flogged, beaten, and slapped, then the Bishop, still further aroused, cuts off one of her nipples, and discharges.

    Wherewith they transfer their attentions to Therиse, the interior of her vagina is seared, her nostrils, tongue, feet, and hands are all burned too; then she is given six hundred lashes with a bull's pizzle. Out come the rest of her teeth, fire is introduced into her throat. A witness to these harsh proceedings, Augustine falls to weeping; the Duc lashes her belly and cunt until he has drawn a suitable amount of blood therefrom.

    THE 18TH. 94. A flesh-sacrifier in his early days, his adult entertainment consists in quartering girls by bending four saplings, attaching an arm or leg to each, and releasing the trees, which spring back erect.

    95. A fustigator suspends her from a machine which lowers a girl into and immediately lifts her out of a fire, then repeats the operation until there is very little left of the patient.

    96. He once loved to extinguish candles by snuffing them out upon flesh; today, he envelopes her in sulphur and uses her for a torch, being careful to prevent the fumes for choking her.

    97. A sodomist: rips the intestines from a young boy and a young girl, puts the boy's into the girl, inserts the girl's into the boy's body, stitches up the incisions, ties them back to back to a pillar which supports them both, and he watches them perish.

    98. A man who was fond of inflicting light burns, improves his passion: he now roasts his victim upon a grill, turning him over and over again.

    Michette is, that evening, exposed to the libertines' fury; all four begin by whipping her, then each tears out one of her teeth, they cut off four fingers (each friend amputates one), her thighs are burned in four places, two in front and two behind, the Duc manhandles one of her breasts until it is truly unrecognizable, sodomizing Giton in the meantime.