Pierre Louys - The She-Devils

“Can't say that I do.”

“As if you didn't know that we all beat ourselves off right after lunch! But I… You'll see if I like to suffer when I'm coming! I smear my snatch with mustard and then I finger myself all awkwardly so it rubs in. But pimento salad is the best. When I can get it I always use pimento salad.”

God! This one was the worst of the three! She was completely mad! I asked one last question. “And what do you let men do to you?”

“Oh! Not what mama does! Nothing but whips and rods with men.”

She started to smile, but lowered her eyes and said in a sad little voice, “Poor Charlotte! If you could see us next to each other at times like that! I get all excited and stick out my behind. But she, from the first stroke of the whip, starts crying; and since I love her I can't hit her any more when she does that. They hardly ever take us together any more because of that. But they always want to take me with mama because, for that, mama and I are exactly the same. You know it as well as I do.”

“I know it as well as you do?” I asked uncomprehendingly. “Oh!”

Mauricette's cry was so frankly indignant that you would have thought that I'd lied to her. She sat up quickly on her heels, her hands on her knees.

“I have to teach that to you too? The day before yesterday when mama came back from here she said that you grabbed her pubic hair and hurt her so much that she almost came.”

“If you think I did it for that, you're crazy!”

“And she told me this morning that she finally got you to hit her, but that it was so…”

“Oh, I socked her a couple of times on the shoulder, but that's got nothing to do with flagellation.”

“Maybe not for you! But for mama, yes! You mean to say that you have slept with her three times and you still don't know what she likes?”

“Her daughters.”

“You don't know how right you are! She has to have one of us under her when she's being whipped, and then you can do anything to her you want to! It's frightening. She cries, she comes, I've got blood in my hair and come in my face…!”

She was wild-eyed and excited, and she interrupted herself to shake her head and throw herself onto me.

“If you really love me, if it was the truth, I'll take her place. I'll get on top of her and you can cornhole me in my blood while she sucks me off. Then it will be her turn to have my blood in her hair and my come on her face while your prick is in my behind!”

I had never seen Ricette in so excited and exalted a state, and I thought that she had reached her peak when her exaltation suddenly leaped even higher as she thought of a new infamy.

“No!” she cried. “You can take my cherry dog-fashion while she catches the blood and come with her face from underneath!”

And what a tone of voice she said that in! At that instant I knew what it was to receive an order.

She spoke curtly and warmly as she continued.

“I know you'd rather fuck me than cornhole me. I'd rather have you cornhole me and hurt me while I'm beating off, but since you like to fuck, we'll fuck. I know better than you do why you don't want to take my cherry. It's because you never try to buy them from girls and you think that mine is for sale, so you don't want to steal it. Well, it isn't for sale. I'm going to tell mama this evening that I'm giving it away and that she'll see who's getting it soon enough because she'll have her mouth underneath when it happens.”

Shaking her head and hair, she smiled, and then she had an explosion of sincerity that revealed to me something I had never suspected.

“You think that she will be angry? You think that she will say no? Ha! She'll be only too happy, the cow! When I tell her that you are going to fuck me on top of her, that she'll have her mouth full of blood and come, she'll be beating herself off for fourteen hours at the very thought… Did I tell you that I loved her? Yes, I love her tongue, her finger, her body, and she excites me. And I told you that she wasn't a whore, didn't I? Well, she isn't. She's a slut!”

Mauricette's outburst surprised me much less than Charlotte's had before her. First of all it was a second changed viewpoint that I had unearthed. That is the trouble with memoires: they get monotonous. In a novel, this kind of repetition can never be excused, but in life it has to be accepted. As M. Ingres once said, “Bread and pencil are one and the same.” For a novelist, these words of a painter should be dogma. For those who write memories they should not. In the latter case, the pencil should never change life to conform to the interests of dramatics.

Secondly… But you have to know the two girls. There was to be found in them a series of contrasts that you wouldn't have the patience to listen to if I had it to write them down. At the age of fifteen, Ricette pranced through every word she spoke, while Charlotte, at twenty, was languor itself. The precocity of the younger girl left less room for surprises than the tired, passive, character of the sad Charlotte.

However, I don't think this is the place for me to keep a distraught silence in order to better deliver an exercise on the psychology of comparison and parallel.

I must get on with the story. I have digressed long enough already.

A young girl had come to offer me her virginity as if it had been gold or myrrh or incense.

Eternal misunderstanding. Young girls always overestimate the pleasure that we take in receiving such a gift; and young men rarely understand that if their virgins, through an error caused by innocence, think that their present is worth all the young men's love and that they are offering it to them with all their heart, then it is worth what they think it is and should be received accordingly.

I had proven to this girl that imprudence had separated us forever, and she had discovered a way to circumvent the difficulty. The method was as extravagant as a theorem in spatial geometry, but, at first sight, it was irrefutable. Irrefutable, that is, unless I brought into play the principles of chastity, something I could never again do except out of audacity, or rather out of ridicule. I therefore agreed with all the tender eagerness and thankfulness that one demonstrates through one's kisses in situations such as this.

The calm tone of the remarks I have made here are simply out of distraction (for this story excites me as little as if I were explaining to you how I finally learned Greek grammar)… In fact, I am becoming so distracted that I have now begun to start sentences without knowing how to finish them, something that never happened to me before. For the beauty of the example, I will not strike anything out.

To resume, you have probably forgotten by this time that we left Mauricette in a state bordering on delirium, a Mauricette changed into bacchante — disheveled, purple, convulsive, spitting out insults and obscenities against her mother that she wouldn't have dreamed of an hour ago.

My “yes” changed the current of her nervous system from one pole to another. Contrary to the ancient philosophy of which Renan speaks, and in which the sperm, once excited, mounts to the brain. Mauricette's desire now left her imagination and took possession of her flesh.

“I feel like, fucking,” she murmured. “I feel like fucking because you like to fuck and so that you can give me a taste for it. Did I really swallow your come? Is it true that I drank the come of a man for the first time and that it was yours? What's fucking after that? And don't be afraid of hurting me! When mama is fucking me I can't feel anything but her tongue unless I want to; but for you the more you hurt me and tear me the more I'll come.”

Suddenly, with her facility for metamorphosis, she raised her head and reminded me with a phrase of her real age.