Justine 淑女的眼泪 Chapter 13

So obscure were these speeches I knew not how to answer: however, reply to him I did, on a chance, as it were, and perhaps with too great a facility. Must I confess it? Alas ¹! yes; to conceal ² my shortcomings would be to wrong your confidence and poorly to respond to the interest my misfortunes have quickened in you. Hear then, Madame, of the one deliberate fault with which I have to reproach myself.... What am I saying, a fault? It was a folly ³, an extravagance... there has never been one to equal it; but at least it is not a crime, it is merely a mistake, for which I alone have been punished, and of which it surely does not seem that the equitable ⁴ hand of Heaven had to make use in order to plunge ⁵ me into the abyss which yawned beneath me soon afterward ⁶., ,Whatever the foul ⁷ treatment to which the Comte de Bressac had exposed me the first day I had met him, it had, all the same, been impossible to see him so frequently without feeling myself drawn ⁸ toward him by an insuperable and instinctive ⁹ tenderness. Despite all my recollections of his cruelty, all my thoughts upon his disinclinations toward women, upon the depravity of his tastes, upon the gulf ¹⁰ which separated us morally, nothing in the world was able to extinguish this nascent ¹¹ passion, and had the Count called upon me to lay down my life, I would have sacrificed it for him a thousand times over. He was far from suspecting my sentiments... he was far, the ungrateful one, from divining the cause of the tears I shed every day; nevertheless, it was out of the question for him to be in doubt of my eagerness to fly to do his every bidding, to please him in every possible way, it could not have been he did not glimpse, did not have some inkling of my attentions; doubtless, because they were instinctive, they were also mindless, and went to the point of serving his errors, of serving them as far as decency ¹² permitted, and always of hiding them from his aunt. This behavior had in some sort won me his confidence, and all that came from him was so precious to me, I was so blinded by the little his heart offered me, that I sometimes had the weakness to believe he was not indifferent to me. But how promptly ¹³ his excessive disorders ¹⁴ disabused ¹⁵ me: they were such that even his health was affected ¹⁶. I several times took the liberty to represent to him the dangers of his conduct, he would hear me out patiently, then end by telling me that one does not break oneself of the vice ¹⁷ he cherished., ,"Ah, Therese!" he exclaimed one day, full of enthusiasm, "if only you knew this fantasy's charms, if only you could understand what one experiences from the sweet illusion of being no more than a woman! incredible inconsistency I one abhors ¹⁸ that sex, yet one wishes to imitate it! Ah! how sweet it is to succeed, Therese, how delicious it is to be a slut to everyone who would have to do with you and carrying delirium ¹⁹ and prostitution to their ultimate period, successively, in the very same day, to be the mistress of a porter, a marquis, a valet, a friar, to be the beloved of each one after the other, caressed ²⁰, envied, menaced, beaten, sometimes victorious ²¹ in their arms, sometimes a victim and at their feet, melting them with caresses ²², reanimating them with excesses.... Oh no, Therese, you do not understand what is this pleasure for a mind constructed like mine...., , ,Thus the Count expressed himself, celebrating his eccentricities ⁴³; when I strove to speak to him of the Being to whom he owed everything, and of the grief such disorders caused his respectable aunt, I perceived nothing in him but spleen and ill-humor and especially impatience ⁴⁴ at having to see, in such hands and for so long, riches which, he would say, already ought to belong to him; I saw nothing but the most inveterate ⁴⁵ hatred ⁴⁶ for that so gentle woman, nothing but the most determined ⁴⁷ revolt against every natural sentiment. It would then be true that when in one's tastes one has been able so formally to transgress ⁴⁸ that law's sacred instinct, the necessary consequence of this original crime is a frightful ⁴⁹ penchant ⁵⁰ to commit every other., ,Sometimes I employed the means Religion provides; almost always comforted by it, I attempted to insinuate ⁵¹ its sweetnesses into this perverse ⁵² creature's soul, more or less certain he could be restrained by those bonds were I to succeed in having him strike at the lure ⁵³; but the Count did not long tolerate my use of such weapons. A declared enemy of our most holy mysteries, a stubborn critic of the purity of our dogmas, an impassioned antagonist ⁵⁴ of the idea of a Supreme ⁵⁵ Being's existence, Monsieur de Bressac, instead of letting himself be converted by me, sought rather to work my corruption ⁵⁶., ,Alas,the truth is less romantic.然而，真理很少带有浪漫色彩。,He had to conceal his identity to escape the police.为了躲避警方 ，他只好隐瞒身份 。