Pierre Louys - The She-Devils

I lost and regained consciousness before it happened, and as I re-opened my eyes I saw Chariot kneeling, holding out her cupped hand… I can't finish the sentence. She was triumphant; she was crazed; she cried out to her mother: You see!” You see!”

And then she licked her hand clean with her tongue before returning once again to Teresa.

She shook her head and cried again, “Your come, mama! The come that you have left in your ass! Shit it into my mouth while I finger myself in so he can call me a slut when I come.

“In front of him?” teased Teresa.

“Yes! Yes! In front of him! Fill my mouth,” cried Charlotte, looking at me with haggard eyes.

A person crazed by love is the most tragic sight of which the mind can conceive. Where is the man so gross that he doesn't shudder at the obscene songs of Ophelia? And what other man or woman could fail to understand why, in the middle of the following scene, I suddenly saw my face as white as a shroud in one of the room's mirrors?

I'm trying to re-order my memories…

Teresa was more worried about me than about her daughter, and without listening to my feelings, said in a low voice, “Well? You saw that? Eh? Well go ahead and tell her that you saw… No? Why not? You came didn't you? Can't you see what this means to her? If she disgusts you, say so: it'll excite her.”

Excite her! 'The girl was already half crazed with excitement!

Standing, Charlotte stuck the dildoe into her behind and began working it with her left hand while she beat herself off in front with her right. She had her legs spread and her stomach working like a young madwoman masturbating herself in front of an unknown visitor to her cell; that it to say that she was using her finger, facing me directly, with an expression combining impudence and unhappiness on her face.

When I was fifteen I saw… I'm telling this to try to put off the end of this horrible narrative a little… I saw a girl fingering herself in a garden once, and she was facing me in the same position, but gayly, mockingly. I didn't know at the time that it was a gesture of the mad. I know it now.

Charlotte, still standing, still with her finger in her cunt, was spouting filth in a jerky, staccato voice. I'll let them pass. She finished like that.

“For two hours I've felt like… He doesn't want… My month disgusts him… Show him, mama… How I could have taken it under him… The way I learned… without staining anything.”

When I heard those miserable words “The way I learned… without staining anything…” But why emphasize a scene such as that one. The words she had just spoken seemed to me among the saddest I had ever heard, and yet Charlotte had spoken them with a real fervor.

She finally went into the bathroom, lay down on the ceramic-tiled floor, the top part of he body supported by a single elbow, her head thrown back, her mouth open, and began to masturbate frenziedly. She didn't seem to feel the cold of the tile floor.

The more she fingered the more avid she became to vilify herself. I used to have the words she uttered at this time written down, but I've just ripped up the page. I don't even have the courage to re-read it to the end. There are two things my reader will never know: the words that Charlotte spoke on this occasion and the haste with which I am finishing this chapter.

Scenes taken from life are much more difficult to relate than those invented by the author because the logic inherent in life is less clear and less easily seen than the logic of a tale. Do you think that the culminating point of this narration ought to be the act which I just witnessed? I don't. And I don't know if I will be able to properly explain why.

First of all I was there for a quarter of an hour and the things I imagine are generally more interesting than reality. Besides that, I can justly say that the most infamous role of the performance, Teresa's, was played with a prodigious feminine address. I consider it undescribable, probably only because my faculties for expression are limited.

Teresa had a remarkable body, as I've already said several times. She was the daughter of two acrobats, as you will learn, and she handled herself exactly like a gymnast rehearsing an exercise with her partner. And all this time she looked at me the calm expression of one performing a classic among exercises; a classic that seemed to her more natural than to my troubled mind…

Five minutes later I was alone.

I slept soundly for nine hours and awoke with irresistible desire to… Finish the sentence if you are young or if you ever have been.

Excesses of love lend more to the sexual drive than do long periods of inactivity and arc much easier to take up once more on the next day than several weeks after. Everyone know? that. You can see, therefore, why I was in top form that morning. As the patriarch who was loved by Ruth said, it was a “triumphant"' morning; but triumphant though it was, I scarcely found it agreeable, for I still had this irresistible desire to… Do you understand? I think that if you have been following this story page by page through the seven preceding chapters you can guess what I did at the time during which the eighth opens.

Bathed, shaved, combed, and dressed in little more time than it takes to tell, I hurried towards the rooms of one of my closest girlfriends in the Latin Quarter. Fortunately, she was alone, and since she was dressed only in a slip, it took her less time to undress than it took me to slip off my tie. The more beautiful breasts a girl has, the more her slip weighs her down.

However, she was alarmed at my nervous state.

“What's wrong? What do you want? What's the matter with you?”

“My pretty little Margot, I want to make love.”

“Me too… and maybe if we know the right people in the government we might sleep together a while.”

“And… listen! I want to make love from the front, my little Margot! From the front!”

“From the front? For God's sake, I hope so!”

“Through here, you see? Through here. You get me? Not from back there.”

“You're nutty as a squirrel cage,” said Margot with a bewildered expression.

She was reassured little by little as her embrace calmed me, gave me the relief I sought like the glass of cool, fresh water that slakes the thirst alcohol has left. Still haunted by my recent adventure, I felt my head. I couldn't believe that this time at last… but simple little Margot wasn't mistaken. I doubt that she has ever known since a pleasure equal to the one that was ours that morning.

That evening I returned to my apartment alone. I had a few things to write.

However, just when I had gotten undressed, there was a loud knock oh the door. I opened it: it was, to my surprise, Teresa, dressed in a pink dressing gown with a flower in her hair.

I was still in a bad mood from what I had seen the previous night, and I took her by the arm and drew her into my room.

“So, it's you!” I cried. “Good! Now you can listen to the words I wouldn't speak to Charlotte. You're the one who's lowest of all sluts! The worst of whores! The…”

She burst out laughing and, taking the tone that a woman of thirty-six can take when speaking to a young man of twenty, she said, “I might as well have saved myself the trouble of providing you with all those adventures last night for all the thanks I get, eh? You've cornholed my three daughters and their mother; we gave ourselves in relays so that you could shoot your wad seven times in an evening, and the next day when you see me what do I get? You start calling me whore and…”

“That's because…”

“I'm not as nutty as Charlotte. I don't finger myself in front of your dick and I don't have to be called whore to make me come.”