Justine 淑女的眼泪 Chapter 29

"O Heaven!" said I to my companion, trembling with horror, "is it possible to be transported to such excesses! What infernal place is this!", ,"Listen to me, Therese, listen, my child, you have not yet heard it all, not by any means," said Omphale. " Pregnancy ¹, reverenced ² in the world, is the very certitude of reprobation ³ amongst these villains ⁴; here, the pregnant woman is given no dispensations: brutalities, punishments, and watches continue; on the contrary, a gravid condition is the certain way to procure ⁵ oneself troubles, sufferings, humiliations, sorrows; how often do they not by dint ⁶ of blows cause abortions ⁷ in them whose fruits they decide not to harvest, and when indeed they do allow the fruit to ripen ⁸, it is in order to sport with it: what I am telling you now should be enough to warn you to preserve yourself from this state as best you possibly can.", ,"But is one able to ?", , ,"We have here as well," my instructress continued, "certain dependencies and alliances of which you probably know very little and of which it were well you had some idea; although this has more to do with the fourth article with, that is to say, the one that treats of our recruitings, our retrenchments, and our exchanges I am going to anticipate for a moment in order to insert the following details. "You are not unaware ¹¹, Therese, that the four monks ¹³ composing this brotherhood ¹⁴ stand at the head of their Order; all belong to distinguished ¹⁵ families, all four are themselves very rich: independently of the considerable funds allocated ¹⁶ by the Benedictines for the maintenance of this bower ¹⁷ of bliss ¹⁸ into which everyone hopes to enter in his turn, they who do arrive here contribute a large proportion of their property and possessions to the foundation already established. These two sources combined yield more than a hundred thousand crowns annually ¹⁹ which is devoted ²⁰ solely ²¹ to finding recruits and meeting the house's expenses; they have a dozen discreet ²² and reliable women whose sole task is to bring them every month a new subject, no younger than twelve nor older than thirty. The conscriptee must be free of all defects and endowed with the greatest possible number of qualities, but principally with that of eminent ²³ birth. These abductions, well paid for and always effected a great distance from here, bring no consequent discomfitures; I have never heard of any that resulted in legal action; their extreme caution protects them against everything. They do not absolutely confine themselves to virgins ²⁴: a girl who has been seduced ²⁵ already or a married woman may prove equally pleasing, but a forcible abduction has got to take place, rape ²⁶ must be involved, and it must be definitely verified; this circumstance arouses them; they wish to be certain their crimes cost tears; they would send away any girl who was to come here voluntarily; had you not made a prodigious ²⁷ defense ²⁸, had they not recognized a veritable fund of virtue ²⁹ in you, and, consequently, the possibility of crime, they would not have kept you twenty-four hours. Everyone here, Therese, comes of a distinguished line; my dear friend, you see before you the only daughter of the Comte de * * *, carried off from Paris at the age of twelve and destined ³⁰ one day to have a dowry of a hundred thousand crowns: I was ravished from the arms of my governess who was taking me by carriage, unoccupied save for ourselves, from my father's country seat to the Abbey of Panthemont where I was brought up; my guardian ³¹ disappeared; she was in all likelihood bought; I was fetched hither by post chaise. The same applies to all the others. The girl of twenty belongs to one of the noblest families of Poitou. The one sixteen years old is the daughter of the Baron ³² de * * *, one of the greatest of the Lorraine squires ³³; Counts, Dukes, and Margraves are the fathers of the girls of twenty-three, twelve, and thirty-two; in a word, there is not one who cannot claim the loftiest titles, not one who is not treated with the greatest ignominy. But these depraved men are not content to stop at these horrors; they have wished to bring dishonor into the very bosom ³⁴ of their own family. The young lady of twenty-six, without doubt one of the most beautiful amongst us, is Clement's daughter; she of thirty-six is the niece of Jerome., ,"As soon as a new girl has arrived in this cloaca, as soon as she has been sealed in here forever to become a stranger to the world, another is immediately retrenched ³⁵: such is our sufferings' complement ³⁶; the cruelest of our afflictions is to be in ignorance of what happens to us during these terrible and disquieting ³⁷ dismissals. It is absolutely impossible to say what becomes of one upon leaving this place. From all the evidence we in our isolation ³⁸ are able to assemble, it seems as if the girls the monks retire from service never appear again; they themselves warn us, they do not conceal ³⁹ from us that this retreat is our tomb, but do they assassinate ⁴⁰ us? Great Heaven! Would murder, the most execrable of crimes, would murder be for them what it was for that celebrated ⁴¹ Marechal de Retz,#p#分页标题#e#, ,Smoking during pregnancy increases the risk of miscarriage.怀孕期吸烟会增加流产的危险
。,The name of Albert Einstein is still reverenced by the scientists all over the world. 爱因斯坦的名字仍然受到世界各地科学家的崇敬。 来自互联网