Juliette

Product Information

But let us take the word in its most elementary and most common acceptation: in this case, guilt—that is to say, what prompts the utterances of the inner mechanism we have just designated as the conscience—in this case, guilt is a perfectly useless debility, a weakness whose grip upon us we have got to break with all possible dispatch and with all the determination we can muster. Novels by the Marquis de Sade, which (more than any of his confessed violent crimes) ruined his life, are legal and easy to obtain.

This story subscribes to the real-life "Pacte de Famine" conspiracy theory, which alleges that the French government orchestrated a series of famines throughout the 18th century to cull the population. The final two volumes were translated by John Crombie, but for contractual reasons the name "Pieralessandro Casavini " was retained for this volume. Even had it meant being dragged over the precipice, it seemed to me I should have preferred definitive ruin at her side to celebrity in another’s sight. This is not only extremely convenient; it’s intimately related to how perfectly fictitious everything in Sade’s universe is designed to be. First published in 1797, this is a sequence of bizarre sexual adventures punctuated by philosophical and theological premises on total egoism and human liberty.Justine (Thérèse or Sophie in the first version) and Juliette were the daughters of Monsieur de Bertole. In Lars von Trier's 2011 film Melancholia, the main character, played by Kirsten Dunst, is named after de Sade's Justine. In Fay’s good-hearted novel, Irene Van Beck, Millie Martin, and Henry Weiss jump from a moving train in 1921 to escape the burlesque show where they’re employed and its dangerous henchman and head to Hollywood. In 1973, the Japanese director Tatsumi Kumashiro filmed an adaptation of Justine as part of Nikkatsu's Roman Porno series. A retelling in contemporary terms is The Turkish Bath, a 1969 novel published by Olympia Press, allegedly by Justine and Juliette Lemercier in an autobiographical format.

If thus the paths conducting the one to virtue and the other to vice are equally bestrewn with briars, why is it that we subject ourselves to such vexations in selecting between these ways, why do we not consult Nature and loyally observe her directives?It hardly matters that her characters are often inarticulate: she has the skill to make their faces speak fathomless volumes. A preoccupation with sexual violence characterizes novels, plays, and short stories that Donatien Alphonse François, comte de Sade but known as marquis de Sade, of France wrote. In Fay’s latest novel, four sisters take to the road in pursuit of vaudeville fame and fortune, but soon find the journey bringing them closer to each other and their own personal desires than it does to riches and celebrity. For feelings of guilt, once again, are nought but the distillations, the effluvia of a prejudice produced by fear of what may befall us for having done any conceivable kind of thing forbidden for who knows what vague or flimsy reason.