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And yet the symptom of classical amorous psychology is surely a silent language of the body, which means that the body is inhabited by a “voice” (of truth, or awareness of feeling, or even nature). This unwanted tenant, this parasite, this killjoy, is what the libertine body evicts. The libertine body can admit of an Other inside the body only at the cost of losing control (and therefore sexual gratification), for it cannot serve two masters. The libertine’s body can never contain any secret, any mystery, any inside to which external bodily changes might be attributed.

Eugénie, how many inches remain outside? Eugénie — Scarcely two. Dolmancé — Then I have eleven in my ass! 26 At a more implicit level, the incredibly absurd work of taking these measurements, a task presupposed by all this precise numerical information (unless we assume, on the basis of his vast experience, that the libertine has a good eye), allows us to infer a sexual pleasure in enumeration. On the whole, realist texts use details in the service of a denotative system whose aim is to conceal the order of discourse under the order of the referent, but a totally different economy is at work here.

It goes without saying that nothing resembling an encounter could ever make its appearance in the domain of this entertaining, unyielding accountancy. Adding. If bodies are quantified, so are their acts, at least their acts of love, which moreover are reduced to sexual relations. Here again, the lyrical collapses under the arithmetical. 30 Right in the middle of her orgy with Clairwil, at the monastery of the white friars, Juliette is totaling up figures: Each eight-man platoon loosed two volleys, bringing first one of us, then the other, under fire, and the constituents of each changed posts; thus it was we each underwent eight such assaults, and when they were over we declared ourselves satisfied and at our hosts’ disposal; they might do what they wished with either of us and to their hearts’ content.