Love (22)

Madame de Saint-Ange: The most entire liberty, Eugenie. On my side, I did everything I wished without his raising any obstacles, but I took no lover: I was too fond of pleasure for that. Unluck woman, she who is attached; she needs but take a lover to be lost, while ten scenes of libertinage, repeated every day, if she wishes, vanish into the night of silence instantly they are consummated. I was wealthy: I had young men in my pay, they fucked me incognito, I surrounded myself with charming valets, assured of tasting the sweetest pleasures with me upon condition of discretion, certain they would be thrown out-of-doors if they so much as opened their mouths. You have no idea, dear heart, of the torrent of delights into which, in this manner, I plunged. Such is the conduct I will always urge upon every woman who would imitate me. During my twelve married years I have been fucked by over ten or twelve thousand individuals… and in the company I keep I am thought well-behaved! Another would have had lovers; by the time she exchanged the first for the second she would have been doomed.
– (predictably) the Marquis de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom (La Philosophie dans le Boudoir), France, 1795

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