"Sade, Marquis De - The 120 Days Of Sodom 1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Marquis de Sade)

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
them, of extending them, of itemizing them, of graduating them, and of
running a story through it all, to provide coherence and amusement. Such
was the decision adopted. After innumerable inquiries and investigations,
they located four women who had attained their prime - that was necessary,
experience was the fundamental thing here - four women, I say, who, having
spent their lives in the most furious debauchery, had reached the state
where they could provide an exact account of all these matters; and, as
care had been taken to select four endowed with a certain eloquence and a
fitting turn of mind, after much discussion, recording, and arranging, all
four were ready to insert, each into the adventures of her life, all the
most extraordinary vagaries of debauch, and to do so in such an order and
at such a pace that the first, for example, would work into the tale of her
life's activities the one hundred and fifty simple passions and the least
esoteric or most ordinary deviations; the second, within the same
framework, an equal number of more unusual passions involving one or more
men with one or several women; the third was also to introduce into her