Return to the Chateau Read Free Page A

loved-who watched her with the help of a one-way mirror and a microphone hidden in the wall-the same kind of exhibitions that Sir Stephen demanded from O: surrender to complete strangers, recruited by him, imposed by him. No, I did not copy her story: no, she did not model her own actions after the one I wrote. But once having taken into account the fair share played by the fantastic and fanciful, and by the endless repetition, in the assuagement of obsessions (the endless repetition of pleasures and brutality being as necessary as it is absurd and impossible to achieve) everything blends together faithfully, dreamed or experienced, everything unfolds as being commonly shared in the universe of a like madness-and if you manage to look at them squarely-horrors, wonders, dreams, and lies-everything there is conjuration and release.

PAULINE REAGE
I
    Thus, everything seemed to be settled: September was just around the corner. In the middle of September O was to return to Roissy, taking Natalie with her, while Ren=E9, after his return from a trip to North Africa, would take Jacqueline-at least he intimated as much. How long Natalie would be kept there, and how long O, would doubtless depend, for O, on whatever decision Sir Stephen might make, and, for Natalie, on what masters, or master, fate would hold in store for her at Roissy. But in this calm of well-laid plans O felt uneasy, as though she had some foreboding of danger, as though fate was being tempted, about this selfsame certainty that everyone around her felt that things would come to pass just as they had planned. Natalie’s happiness was equalled only by her impatience, and there was, in that happiness, a fair measure of the na=EFvet=E9 and confidence that children display when they have been promised something by adults. It was not the sway that Sir Stephen held over her, and that O freely acknowledged, that might have awakened the slightest suspicion of doubt in Natalie: O’s submission was so absolute and so constantly immediate that Natalie was quite incapable of conceiving, so great was her admiration for O, that anyone might ever contradict or disagree with Sir Stephen, since O knelt down before him. No matter how happy O may have been, and precisely because she was happy, she was reluctant to believe it, not did she dare to temper Natalie’s impatience, or to dampen her joy. From time to time, though, when Natalie would begin humming or singing softly to herself, O would make her stop, in order to ward off fate. She was careful never to step on the cracks in the floor, never to spill any salt, cross knives, or walk under ladders. And what Natalie did not know, and O did not dare to tell her, was that, if she took such great pleasure in being whipped, it was-aside from the physical enjoyment she derived from it to some degree-because of the happiness she experienced at being surrendered to a will above and beyond her own-beyond this point she paid for it as it were in pain and humiliation-humiliation because she could not cry out and beg for mercy even as she was experiencing pleasure, thereby perhaps superstitiously guaranteeing that the flogging would not be cut short. Ah, to remain motionless so that time stops too! O loathed dawn and dusk, when everything shifts, when everything exchanges one shape for another, so sadly, so perfidiously. Didn’t the fact that Ren=E9 had given her to Sir Stephen, as well as her own ease at shifting from one to the other, make it just as likely that Sir Stephen might also change? Standing naked one day in front of her having punished her afterward, as though his very purpose in prostituting her had been to find a pretense to punish her. But the day after the ball he had not. Was it that the shame O felt in being taken by someone else in Sir Stephen’s presence might have appeared to him to represent sufficient redemption in itself? What she had so unflinchingly accepted when it had happened with Ren=E9 rather than with Sir