I might even confess that I take a greater inner pleasure from my conviction that this reputation is extremely bad than I would reap from knowing it was good. Then those two minxes, laughing merrily, stepped up to me and soon had me in a state identical to theirs; whereupon Madame Delbéne’s kisses assumed a completely different character. The final 1797 version La Nouvelle Justine has never been published in English translation, although it was published in French in the permissive conditions of the late 1960s, as part of two rival limited-editions of the definitive collected works of de Sade: Jean-Jacques Pauvert's Oeuvres completes de Sade (1968, 30 volumes) and Cercle du Livre Precieux's Oeuvres completes du Marquis de Sade: editions definitive (1967, 16 volumes).

This book is worth reading for its gorgeous art alone, expressing a wide palette of feelings spread across members of this torn, but still loving, family.

Contrary to her sister Justine, Juliette is extremely cruel and sado-masochistic, willing to go to any length to gain pleasure; be it poisoning an entire town or betraying her fellow libertines. These are famous for being “incongruous,” since they’re bookended with orgies, and we don’t associate philosophy with orgies.

After having taught you how to deal with the remorse born of the pain one suffers from having done evil rather too conspicuously, it is of the essence, dear little friend, that you permit me now to indicate the manner of totally silencing that inner and confusion-breeding voice which, when thirsts have been slaked, wakes now and again to upbraid us for the follies into which passions have plunged us. Hence, in the light of the principles we have devised for our own individual use, we may equally well have cause to repent at having done either too much evil, or too little, or none. All the persons, all the creatures about you shall look to you like so many victims destiny has led up in fetters to sate your heart’s perversity. This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations. I am jaded and I require to be dealt with stoutly: I want to melt absolutely into fuck, fuck I want to become, if I am able I want to discharge twenty times over.Utterly lovely [and] pleasingly unhurried… Jourdy gives over whole pages to empty streets in springtime, or still lifes where you can almost feel the sunlight hanging in the air. Is it not so, for example, that the same acts the Chinese do not in any sense consider inadmissible would cause us to shudder here in France? The plot concerns Justine, a 12-year-old maiden ("As for Justine, aged as we have remarked, twelve") who sets off to make her way in France.