Preface
The fantastic journal printed within these pages is not altogether unknown to a select few of the literary searchers after the bizarre and the antique. It still exists in the Bibliotheque Enfer, the forbidden rare book section of the French National Library in Paris. Marked with the word "Secret de'l' Etat (State Secret) in the handwriting of the Emperor Napoleon himself, it was probably penned about the year 1775. The succeeding heads of the French government had evidently opened it, for it bears the autographs of very highly placed persons, among them Napoleon the Third. When it fell beneath my observation, it was opened, and had evidently been for some years unread.
The journal was remarkable example of sexual intimacy and described the writer's series of lewd and deviate sexual acts. But the attempt, wretched as it was, which appeared under another form and under another title, -was so absurdly abortive, so far as it was intended to illustrate and explain the motives which led up to the commission of the extraordinary crimes and extravagancies there detailed, that it was like putting before a select company the flavorless meat without the sauce. It was rendered valueless as a literary production by a bashful suppression of all the most important portions, -of those parts which alone could render the whole intelligible. It was the narration of the material facts without any attempt, -save here and there a lewd intimation, -to afford a tangible clue to the reasons which prompted them. A mere enumeration of crimes in themselves bizarre and exceptional and certainly inexplicable, except when taken together with the portions of this diary which have been hitherto suppressed.
The reader of these pages will have no occasion to complain of any similar omission on my part. I have endeavored closely to mirror the original journal, which my predecessor owns himself unable to have done, having no thorough knowledge of the written idiom of France at that time, -a manuscript, written, in the faded and delicate hand of the Countess herself, written from time to time as the incidents occured, and containing, in the broadest and crudest verbiage, a damning record of her most secret actions. I have omitted only the dry details which were uninteresting, and have supplied the necessary links from extraneous sources to make the narrative succinct and clear. Only in parts have I departed from the employment of the first persons singular, and that because I preferred to omit the gross expressions in the French tongue, which are so profusely scattered throughout, and to soften down many of the vulgarities, the reproduction of which serve no useful purpose to the student of this curious, physiological history.
Such as it is, I submit it to the judgement of the reader. It relates to a bye-gone age; its Heroine has long passed away; all traces of its incidents have become obliterated by the ruthless hand of Time. It can stir no feeling of remorse or revenge, and wring no heart among those which beat in the long-ago when its pages were freshly penned. It is simply now a curious study of the depravity of manners which followed the reign of the infamous Louis the Fourteenth, the "Sun King", and as such I must leave it to speak for itself.
Lucian Moreau Ph. D. Paris, France