The day of the execution arrived; Prince Vibescu confessed, communicated, made his will and wrote to his parents. Then a young girl of twelve was led into his prison cell. This astonished him, but seeing that he was being left to himself, he began to paw her.
She was charming and told him in Romanian that she was from Bucharest and had been taken prisoner by the Japanese among the rearguard of the Russian army to which her parents were sutlers.
She had been asked whether she wished to lose her virginity to a Romanian sentenced to death and she had consented.
Mony lifted her skirts and sucked her plump little cunt as yet devoid of hair, then he spanked her gently while she was wanking him. Next he put the knob of his prick between the little Romanian’s childish legs, but could not gain admittance. She assisted him in all his efforts, by bucking her arse and offering her small breasts round as tangerines to the prince to kiss. He flew into an erotic frenzy and his prick at last penetrated the girl, finally ravishing her maidenhead, making the innocent blood flow.
Then Mony stood up and, since he had nothing more to hope for from human justice, he strangled the little girl after gouging out her eyes, while she uttered frightful cries.
The Japanese soldiers then entered and marched him out. A herald read the sentence in the courtyard of the prison, which was an ancient Chinese pagoda of amazing architecture.
The sentence was brief: the condemned man was to receive one stroke of the rod from each man in the Japanese army thereon encamped. This army comprised eleven thousand elements.
And while the herald read out the sentence, the prince recollected his hectic life. The women of Bucharest, the Serbian vice-consul, Paris, the slaughter in the sleeping-car, the little Japanese at Port Arthur, all of it reeled through his memory.
One fact became clear. He remembered the boulevard Malesherbes; Culculine in a spring frock was sauntering along towards the Madeleine and he, Mony, was saying to her:
—— If I don’t make love twenty times running, may the eleven thousand virgins or even eleven thousand rods chastise me.
He had not fucked twenty times in a row, and the day had arrived when eleven thousand rods were going to chastise him.
He was there still in dream when the soldiers shook him and led him before his executioners.
The eleven thousand Japanese were ranged in two rows facing each other. Each man held a flexible cane. Mony was stripped, then he had to march down this cruel road bordered by torturers. The first blows merely made him flinch. They fell upon a skin of satin and left dark red marks. He bore the first thousand strokes stoically, then fell in his own blood, prick erect.
He was then put onto a barrow and the doleful promenade continued, punctuated by the sharp slaps of canes biting into swollen and bleeding flesh. Soon his prick could no longer retain its jet of sperm and, jerking upward several times, it spat its whitish liquid into the faces of the soldiers, who beat this tattered relic of humanity harder still.
At the two thousandth blow, Mony gave up the ghost. The sun was dazzling. The songs of the Manchurian birds made the spring morning even more bright and gay. The full sentence was executed and the last soldiers delivered their single cane-stroke upon a shapeless mass, a sort of raw sausagemeat, none of it any longer recognizable save for the face, which had been sedulously respected and wherein the glassy eyes staring wide seemed to contemplate divine majesty in the world beyond.
At that moment a convoy of Russian prisoners passed close by the place of execution. It was halted, so as to make an impression on the Muscovites.
But a cry rang out, followed by two others. Three prisoners dashed forward and, as they were not chained, threw themselves on the body of the executed prisoner who had just received the eleven thousandth stroke of the rod. They fell on their knees and, shedding copious tears, kissed with devotion Mony’s bloodstained head. The Japanese soldiers, momentarily stupefied, soon realized that though one of the prisoners was a man, a colossus even, the two others were pretty women disguised as soldiers. It was in fact Cornaboeux, Culculine and Alexine, who had been captured after the Russian army’s catastrophe.
At first the Japanese respected their grief, then, aroused by the two women, they began to make free with them. Cornaboeux was left on his knees beside his master’s body and Culculine and Alexine, who struggled in vain, were de-bagged.
The fine white and rippling arses of these pretty Parisiennes were soon apparent to the wonderstruck gaze of the soldiers. Gently and passionlessly they set to thwacking these delightful posteriors which bobbed about like drunken moons, and when the pretty creatures were trying to get up, the fur on their yawning pussies was visible below.
The strokes swished through the air and, falling flat but not too hard, momentarily marked the firm and fleshy arses of the Parisiennes, but the marks soon faded, to regroup on whatever spot the cane had freshly landed.
When they had become suitably excited, two Japanese officers led them away to a tent and there fucked them ten or a dozen times in the manner of men ravenous after prolonged abstinence.
These Japanese officers were gentlemen from noble families.
They had undertaken espionage in France and knew Paris. Culculine and Alexine had no difficulty getting them to promise that Prince Vibescu’s body would be surrendered to them, since they claimed him as their cousin and passed themselves off as sisters.
Amongst the prisoners was a French journalist, a correspondent for a provincial newspaper. Before the war he had been a sculptor, not without talent, and his name was Genmolay.
Culculine sought him out to invite him to sculpt a monument worthy of the memory of Prince Vibescu.
Flogging was Genmolay’s main passion. All he requested of Culculine was to flog her. She accepted, and arrived at the appointed time with Alexine and Cornaboeux. The two women and the two men stripped naked. Alexine and Culculine disposed themselves on a bed, heads down and arses aloft, and the two brawny Frenchmen, armed with canes, started beating them so that most of the blows would fall on their arsecracks or cunts which, owing to the posture, jutted out admirably. They were laying about them, working themselves up. The two women were suffering martyrdom, but the notion that their pains would procure a proper sepulchre for Mony sustained them to the end of this singular ordeal.
Then Genmolay and Cornaboeux sat down and had their big sap-filled pricks sucked off, while with their canes they went on smiting the trembling buttocks of the two pretty girls.
The next day Genmolay set to work. He had soon completed an astonishing monument. The equestrian statue of Prince Mony surmounted it. On the pedestal were bas-reliefs representing the prince’s brilliant feats of arms. On one side he was to be seen leaving a beseiged Port Arthur by balloon, and on the other he was portrayed as patron of the arts that he had gone to study in Paris.
The traveller who crosses the Manchurian plain between Mukden[33] and Dalny suddenly notices, not far from a battlefield still strewn with bones, a monumental tomb in white marble. The Chinese who till the surrounding fields respect it, and the Manchurian mother, in reply to her child’s questions, tells it:
—— That’s a giant horseman who protected Manchuria against the devils of the West and of the East.
But the traveller generally prefers to ask the level-crossing keeper of the Transmanchurian. This watchman is a slant-eyed Japanese, in the uniform of a PLM employee. He replies modestly:
—— It’s a Nipponese drum-major who determined the victory of Mukden.
Yet if, curious to gain precise information, the traveller approach the statue, he remains long lost in thought after reading the verse carved on the pedestal:
Here lies Vibescu the Prince
Who made a unique lover for the eleven thousand rods Passers-by! far better, be convinced
To have unmade eleven thousand maidens with your rods