The 120 Days of Sodom - Marquis De Sade [15]
Aline, Julie's younger sister and really the daughter of the Bishop, possessed habits and defects and a character very unlike her sister's.
She was the most youthful of the four, she had just become eighteen; she had a fetching, exuberantly healthy, and almost pert little countenance; a little turned-up nose; brown eyes full of expression and vivacity; a delicious mouth; a most shapely though somewhat tall figure, well-fleshed; the skin a bit dark but soft and fine; ass rather on the ample side but well-molded, a pair of the most voluptuous buttocks that ever a libertine eye may behold, the love mound brown-haired and pretty, the cunt a trifle low or, as they say, а l'anglaise, but as tight as one might wish, and when she was presented to the assembly she was thoroughly a maid. And she still was at the time the party we are to chronicle got under way, and we shall see in what manner her maidenhead was annihilated. As for the first fruits of her ass, the Bishop had been peacefully plucking them every day for the past eight years, but without, however, arousing in his dear daughter much of a taste for these exercises: she, despite her mischievous and randy air, only cooperated out of obedience and had never hinted that she shared the slightest pleasure in the infamies whose daily victim she was. The Bishop had left her in the most profound ignorance, scarcely did she know how to read or write, and she had absolutely no idea of religion's existence; her mind was natural, it was that of a child, she would give droll replies, she liked to play, she loved her sister a great deal, detested the Bishop out of all measure, and feared the Duc as she dreaded fire. On the wedding day, when she discovered herself naked and surrounded by the four men, she wept, and moreover did all that was asked of her, acting without pleasure as without ill-temper. She was sober, very clean, and having no other fault but that of laziness, nonchalance reigned in all her movements and doings and everywhere about her person, despite the liveliness announced by her bright eyes. She abhorred the President almost as much as she hated her uncle, and Durcet, who treated her with no excess of consideration, nevertheless seemed to be the only one for whom she appeared to have no repugnance.
These were the eight principal characters in whose company we are going to enable you to live, good reader. It is now time to divulge the object of singular pleasures that were proposed.
It is commonly accepted amongst authentic libertines that the sensations communicated by the organs of hearing are the most flattering and those impressions are the liveliest; as a consequence, our four villains, who were of a mind to have voluptuousness implant itself in the very core of their beings as deeply and as overwhelmingly as ever it could penetrate, had, to this end, devised something quite clever indeed.
It was this: after having immured themselves within everything that was best able to satisfy the senses through lust, after having established this situation, the plan was to have described to them, in the greatest detail and in due order, every one of debauchery's extravagances, all its divagations, all its ramifications, all its contingencies, all of what is termed in libertine language its passions. There is simply no conceiving the degree to which man varies them when his imagination grows inflamed; excessive may be the differences between men that is created by all their other manias, by all their other tastes, but in this case it is even more so, and he who should succeed in isolating and categorizing and detailing these follies would perhaps perform one of the most splendid labors which might be undertaken in the study of manners, and perhaps one of the most interesting. It would thus be a question of finding some individuals capable of providing an account of all these excesses, then of analyzing