Hot showers,
flagellations with compressed air,
suction with cupping glasses.
Beauty treatments could perfectly well come from Sade's imagination.
Geneviève Dormann and Jacques Brissot
saw in them the tortures of Justine.
Permit me to conceal my name and birth, Madame.
Without being illustrious, they are distinguished,
and my origins did not destine me to the humiliation
to which you see me reduced.
Why lament your fate? For it is only in your power to remedy it.
Strip naked! I exclaimed.
Oh Heaven,
what do you require?
If, in a word, Nature moves herself, what do we want with a motor?
And if the motor acts upon matter by causing it to move,
how is it not itself material?
Holy Majesty, Saintly One,
Thou Who in this dreadful moment
deign to flood my soul with a celestial joy,
O my Protector and my Guide,
I aspire to Thy bounties,
I implore Thy clemency.
I aspire to Thy bounties.
Ah, Thérèse!
If only you knew this fantasy's charms
and understood what one experiences from the illusion of being a woman!
Incredible inconsistency.
If we dare complain,
it is of being neglected.
I was absorbed in these musings when suddenly,
I heard the door to my cell open.
You make me tremble.
Where then are you leading me?
Kind treatment is sweet indeed
when for so long one has experienced naught but the most
odious.
These doctrines are dreadful.
Oh, Father!
Oh Heaven!
Is it possible to be transported to such excesses!
What infernal place is this!
Only those spirits who are deep-learned in the heart of man
might be able to account for this consequence of an aberration.
Look ye, friend,
a girl's a pretty thing, eh?
That is how you will be treated, bitch, when you lag at the job.
But whether through habit, or courage,
or dread of incurring treatment yet worse,
she has enough strength to master herself,
and about her nothing is visible beyond a few shivers
and spasmodic twitchings.
The unheard of sufferings this luckless creature has experienced
have something too extraordinary
for me not to open my eyes upon my own self.
These caprices of Heaven's hand are enigmas
it is not for us to sound.
Farewell, Monsieur.
The last mark of your friendship I ask
is that you institute no perquisitions
to discover what shall have become of me.
I await you in a better world.
May the atonements I make to expiate my crimes, in this place where I go
to spend the unhappy years that remain to me
permit me to encounter you again
someday.