Pierre Louys: The She-Devils

“That's what happens when you have so many hairs on your ass! When you sleep with Lib! I defy you to try that.”

The incident ended my violence and hastened the denouement of our little piece. Teresa didn't waste a minute in offering me her favors as a pardon for what I had done and she offered them without a word, with a facility of movement and coordination of body that smacked almost of the art of juggling.

Lying on her side next to me and taking my buttocks between her spread thighs, she put one of her hands beneath herself and did something that I couldn't see… Then directed my body as she wanted it.

The magic that some courtesans effect can often work some really incredible wonders… Like a young stage hero that awakens in the garden of a sorceress I could have sighed, “Where am I?” for my enchantress was lying absolutely still and I wasn't at all sure where I had entered. I kept silent to preserve a doubt that left me a little hope.' But both vanished with her first words.

“Don't bother with me,” she said. “Don't move. Don't try to prove that you know how to take me there. Ricette just told me all about it. I don't give a damn this evening. When you cornhole me I can come without touching myself, but now I'm going to cornhole myself. You'll see in a minute! I don't feel like coming tonight.”

“And if I'd rather you came than I did myself? If I decide to give you the works?”

“The works, eh? Be careful, young one, or I'll empty your balls with a twist of my asshole… There! There! There!”

She was maddening. The violence and agility with which she could use her ass surpassed anything I had ever experienced before. Her motion didn't last more than a moment, but it was enough to put me in serious trouble. Then she stopped and lay still again.

Despite the fact that she had me on the very brink of coming, I still did not want to separate our bodies; I wanted her to know that I did not like to be hurried.

I told her mat I thought she was beautiful and desirable, but that since I was twenty years old I was no longer a child; that I was not the type that liked to be run by a woman. I don't know how I ever managed to get all that out, for she had worked me up to a point where I could hardly hold myself in. She could have easily told me that she was just finishing something I had already started, but she said nothing, merely remained silent with a secret little smile that seemed to reflect some inner thought.

Then finally she said tenderly, “Don't worry, I won't break your tail. I'm sucking you. Can you feel it? I'm sucking you with my ass.”

I didn't know what she was doing, but it was true that her mouth couldn't have excited me more than her ass was doing. It was becoming difficult for me to speak at all.

She watched the reflection in my face of the sensations that were pouring through my body and, without ever needing to ask a question to find out how close I was, began to increase bit by bit the excitement of her loins to a slow crescendo. I think that I must have said, “Faster!” but that she refused. I have only a very vague memory of those last few seconds, for the spasm that she wrung out of my flesh was a sort of unconscious convulsion that I do not know how to describe.

The first question I could regain composure enough to ask her came after several full minutes of silence.

“What did you do to me?”

“A pretty little trick with my asshole,” she said, laughing. “But you've already cornholed so many women…”

“Yes, an hour ago. A pretty little girl that didn't do too badly either, but…”

“Not badly at all. She's got a muscle there, hasn't she? And she can really move.”

“But you…”

“But I'm the first one who ever sucked you with her asshole, eh? You want to know how I did it? I'll tell you tomorrow, but let me get up now. You want to know the reason for that too, I suppose? To put the little child to bed that you just gave me: the little sister of my three daughters.”

When she returned, arranging the hair at the nape of her neck, but still nude, my mouth failed to realize that she was less interested in repairing her coiffure than in showing off the breasts of which she was very proud.

I'm not one of those children who pine away for older women, but a thirty-six year-old seductress, when she's beautiful from head to foot and at all points between is what a sculptor would call a real “woman,” and what a lover would call a real “piece.”

“And which one was not this woman?” Put the question to a contest and she would have had the vote of every man in existence going both ways.

Nude, Teresa resembled an operatic mezzo. To a whore, in other words, you will say. But I answer, not at all. You murmur that it is much the same thing? No. Not unless night and day are the same. If the only way you know actresses is through smoking-room conversations, don't say any more.

The type of beautiful singer that practically lives in her bed, and the often even more beautiful women that sing out their inner souls on the primrose path have scarcely any more in common than their habits of walking around nearly nude and treating themselves like whores.

However, the woman of the theatre always aspires with all her heart to greater and yet greater freedom, while the woman of the bordello needs more than anything else to enslave herself. Of the two, the profession that seems the most servile is the first, but in most cases the woman who follows it does so out of a spirit of independence: in order to free herself from a family or a lover. The whore throws herself into her career out of a need to obey the caprices of others rather than in order to carve for herself the path of her “daily life.

From her first year at the conservatory, the daughter of the theatre also makes herself a student of every crudity of the language. She considers it great sport to group fifteen words around an idea that doesn't merit one, and it is one of her talents to detach each from the other according to the strictest rules of articulation. The whore, on the other hand, has neither the taste nor the talent to make a science of cynical language. Freedom of language tempts her as little as does freedom of life. Thus there is no mistaking your woman when you don't know where she comes from. It suffices simply to listen to her cries in the act of love to determine whether a woman comes from a bordello or a theatre. Many men are fooled solely because they fail to realize this.

I had more proof than I needed in order to guess in Teresa's case what no one had told me. Her body, the unrestraint of her character and the crudity of her expression all pointed in the same direction.

“Are you an actress?” I asked her.

“No more. I used to be, but how did you know? Did Mauricette tell you?”

“No. It's easy to see. Or hear. Where have you been on the stage?”

Without answering, she lay down next to me on her stomach. I replied a little maliciously:

“You'll tell me tomorrow.”

“Yes.”

“Stay here until then.”

“Until tomorrow morning? You want me to?”

She smiled and I thought she was going to accept. I was still a little weak, but she inspired me so that I was almost as ready to go as if I had not just finished. She lay stretched out next to me and said, “What do you want with me from now until tomorrow morning?”

“First to make love.”

“That's not hard.”

“Don't say that. You exasperate me. Why are you staying now, then?”

“Because my little work in the toilet would be ruined if I got up now. And then what would you want?”

“Everything.”

“How many times?”

“Oh, I don't know. With you I don't think I'd be keeping count. However, that shouldn't be hard either.”