Pierre Louys - The She-Devils

“Do you want to come?”

“Sure; but not taking your virginity.”

“Yes. Why not take my virginity where I'm not a virgin!” She' laughed.

“What a kid you are! And what a laugh you have! Who is this? Not the same Ricette that has just been telling me stories of blood, sperm, incest, saphism, sadism…”

“Oh! And what else! Where did you get all those two-dollar words?”

“You're fourteen and a half? No. There are times when you're at least thirty-nine and others when you're about seven.”

“Mama too.”

This reply left me speechless. It was one of the truest and most extraordinary remarks I had ever heard. It seemed to me that Ricette was thinking, “You're more of a kid than I am if you don't know that that's true of all women no matter how old they are.” She might have thought it, but she would never say it, for young girls never want to believe that they're smarter than their lovers. Every excellence they attribute to their man they use as an excuse: who could resist being seduced by a person of so many perfections?

And, sure of the adornments they have given us in their own eyes, they cover us with qualities to our faces solely out of generosity.

Mauricette returned to her original idea. “You will have taken two cherries out of three, and I'd like to give you the third too, or rather the first… Anyway, the one I don't have any more… I mean the one I sold… The one in my behind… Do you understand?”

“You want to make it tight again with some alum water?”

“Oh, you dog!” she said laughing. “Don't think now that my cherry in front has been re-done. Cherries that have been fixed up aren't given away. They cost a lot of money.”

And she burst out laughing again at what she had just said. Then, rubbing her body against mine, she once again climbed to a point just between childishness and lasciviousness: two words that are practically synonyms.

“We'll play some more. Forget that you cornholed me a couple days ago. Forget it.”

“Can't remember a thing.”

“I'm just a kid again. Mama doesn't exist. I don't know anything, not even what a prick is. You're a satyr and you're going to rape me through the ass.”

“Rape you?”

“Don't you want to play? You just want to say no every time I try to do something with you? I use the word 'no' because I'm a whore. If I were a society girl I'd say 'shit.'“

“Listen, my dear little Ricette,” I replied laughing. “Don't go telling me now that you're a whore. I never understood better the young satyr that you are. You're as full of vice as an old magistrate. But, unfortunately, I'm incapable of raping a woman. Resistance freezes me instead of warming me up. To play at rape… if it's only a game, we'll do it… But it I fail you? I'd be despaired. I'll do it if you want…”

“But virgins who are being raped never resist! I'll just do like them. I'll cry into my arms and open my thighs.”

“But how will you know that I'm raping you?”

“How will I know it?” she repeated, gritting her teeth. “I've never been cornholed completely dry. You go ahead and do it and then ask me afterwards how I knew I was being raped. How do you think I could imagine I was losing my cherry back there?”

“All right, I'll do it if you want. But tell me again that you really want me to, that you'll like it. Otherwise, I swear to you, I won't be able to.”

“I want it! I want it! I want it!” she said softly, her eyes wide. “Rape me through the ass! And the more I cry that it hurts, the more I'll be saying that I love you!”

It's really more than painful for me to relate the following scene in detail. In fact, I cannot. It makes me ashamed of myself. I did not have the first instinct for the vice that Mauricette wanted me to satisfy. I've had to beat women that wanted to be beaten, but that's nothing, nothing at all after the memory of those terrible five minutes…

In short, when I “raped” Mauricette, I felt through my flesh more than I had ever understood in my mind how much both pleasure and pain were necessary to delight her senses. I remembered the last of her secrets, or rather her temptations and, as I would have stroked a woman who loved to be caressed, I crushed the lips of that virginity that so loved to be bitten. I crushed them between my fingers, slowly, unceasingly, and probably more cruelly than Teresa had bitten them, for after a few moments of an equally extraordinary endurance and sexual excitement, Mauricette burst out sobbing. I will never forget that moment as long as I live.

And it was nothing but an instant. Immediately, her body bleeding, but nevertheless turning towards me to hold me, she said, she cried, her mouth against mine, between twenty kisses:

“Oh, I'm sorry! I'm sorry I cried! I'm… but will you shut up! I'm the one that's ashamed! Ah! You tortured me so well! It was good! I came as if I were dying! And then… I don't know why… I started crying like a baby…! It's just that… It's just that…”

She sobbed and sucked in her breath until I thought that she was suffocating; then she burst out crying again, held me with all her might and with admiration in her voice she found this sentence to express her love:

“No one ever hurt me as much as you did!”

Thirty hours had passed since the preceding scene. Teresa and her girls had spent the night in a suburb at a relative's house, a woman who was also partially whore herself and who, for that reason, was the more impressed with them. However, I already knew that after a fairly long and heated discussion in which all four of them took part that Teresa had capitulated to Mauricette. I even knew the terms of the surrender. As Mauricette had foreseen, Teresa had finally cried, “I'd rather suck than sell your cherry, my child! I'd rather open my mouth beneath it than have to offer my hand at one side. And it won't prevent a thing, your adventure. I'll just glue it up again. You give the real one and later we'll sell the false. That way everyone will be happy.”

This sort of gift is the kind that generally proves expensive to the receiver. All moralists are in agreement on this point: when a young man lets a mother give him the cherry which sue had hoped to sell, he owes a pretty good present to the girl, a gift of equal importance to the mother, and thanks to God.

If the girl has two sisters it's even more amusing and even more expensive. Good luck, tripled like that, is enough to ruin a student inside of six weeks.

But, although many young men whose tiny fortunes have thus been dissipated retain the bitter feeling of haying been duped, there are just as many who are quite willing to squander their largess freely on those uncalculating courtesans who give everything, risk everything, seem to await nothing from us, but on the other hand spend on us some new tenderness every day. Ah! The tact with which they often receive that which they have not expected; the way in which they sometimes increase their gratitude as if to turn ours away; the manner in which they modify only their surprise in the face of our gifts; the supreme sensibility which I sometimes wonder if they really owe us.

The appointment had been fixed, not at my place now, but at Teresa's, where the installation of her goods had just been completed. I crossed the stair landing to her door at ten o'clock in the evening.

Mother and daughters all received me completely nude, a fact which surprised me less than it embarrassed me.

Can you think of a more pitiful situation than that of a young man shut into a room with four women to each of whom he has said, “I love you” and whom, therefore, he cannot greet with a respectful and distant deference for the very reason that by their nudity they have invited more personal attentions?