Juliette

Juliette is a novel by the Marquis de Sade, first published in French in 1798.

Real people in Juliette

A long audience with Wikipedia:Pope Pius VI is one of the most extensive scenes in Juliette. The heroine shows off her learning to the Pope (she usually calls him by his secular name "Braschi") with an exciting catalogue of immoralities committed by his predecessors. The audience ends, like every other scene in Juliette, with an orgy.

Soon after this scene, the male character Brisatesta narrates two scandalous encounters. The first is with "Princess Sophia, niece of the King of Prussia", who has just married "the Stadtholder" at the Hague. This looks like Wikipedia:Wilhelmina of Prussia, Princess of Orange, who married William V of Orange in 1767, and was still alive when Juliette was published. The second encounter is with Wikipedia:Catherine the Great, notorious Empress of Russia.

Sade was proud of these pen-portraits, as his footnotes show, but they are disappointing sexually. Stories of such people had fed Sade's own sexual imagination, as demonstrated throughout the book. When, finally, he comes to describe them and give them their own sexual individuality, he has nothing left.

• 
• 
•