Count de Bressac attacks Justine with hunting dogs

Count de Bressac attacks Justine with hunting dogs after discovering that she has tried to warn his aunt, the Marquise, about his plans. The assault is more than a reprisal: it reverses the terms of Justine’s earlier kindness, punishes her for refusing complicity, and leaves her alive but exposed to a fresh campaign of accusation and legal danger.

The trap and its cause

The Count first intercepts the Marquise’s messages and becomes convinced that Justine has betrayed him. He conceals his anger, resumes his familiar cajoling manner, and invites her to meet him at five o’clock near the park, promising to explain a new method for achieving their objectives. Justine does not realize that he has discovered the Marquise’s secret arrangements. Although she feels uneasy, she believes herself protected and goes to the meeting.

The rendezvous is a calculated deception. The Count delays discussing his supposed plan, saying that they may be observed, and gradually leads Justine into the woods. As they approach the place where she had once been bound, she recognizes the danger. Her earlier refusal to help the Count harm his aunt has supplied him with the accusation he now uses against her: he casts her attempt to protect the Marquise as a betrayal of the person to whom, in his view, she owes her happiness.

The attack

At the scene, ropes hang from one tree, and three large mastiffs are restrained at the others. The Count’s associate is there to guard them. The Count tells Justine that he has intercepted the messages and accuses her of choosing the worse of two crimes by informing against him. He also claims that she has risked her own life without saving the Marquise. His accusation distorts the moral choice she made: he treats refusal to aid a crime as the offense, and obedience to him as the proper course.

The Count and his associate seize Justine, strip her, and tie her to a tree with enough slack for only limited movement; her arms remain free. The Count then has the dogs released and excites them to attack. Justine tries to ward them off, but the animals repeatedly assault her. The scene ends when the Count orders them restrained and leaves her at the tree. His conduct makes the attack a deliberately staged punishment, not an attempt to bring her before the law.

A life spared, a danger renewed

After the dogs are tied up, the Count loosens Justine’s bonds and mocks her for having chosen virtue at such a cost. He orders her to dress and leave, and says he will not take what money she has left. This limited concession does not amount to protection or reconciliation: he makes clear that she must never return to any of his houses, in the city or the country.

He also dismantles the safety Justine thought she had gained. The authorities, he says, have not ended her case; the warrant for her arrest remains in force, and she had been left at liberty so her conduct could be observed. Worse, the public will regard her as the Marquise’s murderer. If the Marquise is still alive, he intends to ensure that she carries this belief to her death, and the household will share it. Justine therefore leaves the encounter alive but facing both the unresolved legal case and the Count’s power to make her appear guilty.

Moral conflict and narrative consequence

The Count’s language turns the episode into a contest over what virtue costs. He insists that Justine should have refused his proposed crime rather than agree and then betray him; she answers that she did not choose the lesser evil. His reasoning treats complicity as loyalty and disclosure as treachery, while the events expose the coercion behind that standard: he claims authority over her because he once spared her, then uses that supposed debt to justify punishment.

Justine does not threaten retaliation. She says she acted against him only because his aunt’s life was at stake, and that she will not act against him when only her own suffering is involved. Her prayer for him and farewell contrast with his calculated cruelty, but do not undo its consequences. The episode leaves her wounded, expelled from the Count’s protection, still subject to arrest, and publicly marked by an accusation he says he will sustain. It sharpens the novel’s recurring reversal: Justine’s commitment to virtue does not secure her from harm; her attempt to act rightly instead gives a powerful adversary another means to persecute her.