Letters From Prison by Marquis de Sade
This has been an extremely long letter, has it not? But I owed it to myself, and promised myself to write it at the end of my fourth year of suffering. Those four years have now expired; here is the promised letter, written as if in the article of death, so that if death were to overtake me before I had the consolation of holding you once again in my arms, I could, as I breathed my last, refer you to the sentiments I expressed in this letter, as the final thoughts addressed to you by a jealous heart whose desire is to go to his grave knowing you hold him in your esteem. You will forgive the letter’s disorder; it is neither studied nor witty; all you should look for in it are naturalness and truth. I crossed out a few names mentioned earlier on, so that the letter will get through, and I most earnestly beg that it be delivered to you. I do not ask you for a detailed reply, all I ask is that you let me know you have received my grand letter: that is how I shall call it; yes, that is how I shall call it. And when I refer you to the sentiments it contains, ’tis then you shall reread it . . . Dost thou understand me, my dear friend? Thou shalt reread it and thou shalt see that he who will love thee unto the grave was moved to sign it in his blood.19
de Sade
[Attached note:]
’Tis not often that I write letters of this great length or one as important when it comes to vindicating myself; and ’tis certain ‘twill not happen again. Consequently, I beg those through whose hands this letter must pass to be so kind as to make sure it reaches my wife safely. I trust they will do so, and that they would not like to give me reason to believe that they detain letters of the importance of this one; in a word, letters in which I set forth my position; for were they to seize them and thus prevent them from reaching their intended party, then they would have to agree I would have every right to take legal action one day against such methods and expose them, demonstrating the well-established interest they had in keeping me in prison, since they opposed any means I had at my disposal to vindicate myself and thus shorten my sentence.
1. To escape the censor’s possible charge of blasphemy, Sade gives us no clue to which deities he refers.
2. That is, his writings, which he carefully sent on to his wife for safekeeping and often for her opinion, which he frequently derided but inwardly cherished.
3. The so-called Arcueil affair, which, claims Sade, would never have amounted to anything if the présidente had not been so worried about it sullying the Montreuils’ presumed good name.
4. Sade means his first Vincennes detention, before he was taken to Aix for the appellate trial.
5. Procuress. Not only did Nanon provide Sade the young whores he requested, she came with the package and joined the hardy little group of revelers at La Coste during the winter of 1774-1775.
6. Rose Keller.
7. Procuring.
8. A nearby town.
9. Nanon.
10. Which of course he did, using pen instead of sword.
11. A young man named Andre, probably no more than fifteen, whom Sade and his wife hired as “secretary” for the marquis during their trip to Lyons in early October 1774. Andre was one of seven servants the Sades hired that month to come with them to La Coste. At a time when their finances were desperate, the hiring of seven new servants was strange to say the least—not so much for the profligate marquis but certainly for the level-headed, thrifty marquise.
12. The royal prosecutor in Lyons.
13. The royal prosecutor in Marseilles, who signed a warrant for Sade’s arrest on July 4, 1772, perhaps a trifle prematurely, because the evidence, especially concerning the poisoning, was not yet in
14. The unnamed witness he swears on his word of honor to produce is in all probability a figment of his imagination.
15. Juniperus sabina, an evergreen shrub whose shoots yield an oil used medicinally.
16. Probably Dr. Barthélmy Mesny, whom Sade visited in Florence in 1775. Dr. Mesny, however, was no “little doctor”: physician to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, he was also a well-known naturalist and archaeologist.
17. Sade is citing the complaint against him; therefore the “you” refers to himself.
18. A friend of Sade’s father and commander-in-chief of the Carabiniers, one of the most distinguished units of the royal army. He was helpful in getting the marquis a commission in the cavalry where, as we have seen, he served honorably for several years.
19. In his closing sentences, Sade addresses Renée-Pélagie in the familiar “tu” form. One presumes, too, that, literally, he used his own blood in writing these final lines of his “grand letter” of explanation and justification.
35. To Madame de Sade
[March 4, 1781]
I don’t know what you mean by the Beaumarchais prospectus. I haven’t heard of it, and surely you must not have sent it, for they are always punctilious in bringing me everything you send. If the purpose of all these little acts of kindness is to give me something more to worry about, doubtless not stopping to think that in my frightful situation I have enough subjects for worry, you are simply wasting your time. For I swear to you that I have never worried about, nor shall I worry about as long as I live, the packages or prescriptions you send. All that’s a lovely machine, the mechanism of which must be left to unwind in due course; in consideration of which I warn you that from now on, whenever I hear all this talk about worries or prescriptions or consignments, of what has become or not become of this thing or that, when, I say, I hear all this claptrap, I shall never respond with the least word. I shall keep asking for an object as long as it has not been sent me, I shall acknowledge its receipt as soon as I have received it. Furthermore, I have nothing to say to you upon this subject except what I have already told you three or four times over: buy me the book, I shall be happy to have it: this is the last time I shall mention it.
They came this morning, the 4th, to talk to me again about my walks. This may be nothing but another piece of tomfoolery, as it was the last time they came for the same thing six months back. They assure me, however, that it is not. Upon this subject, I must confess to you that sometimes when I am comfortably ensconced in my castles in Spain, putting as far from my mind as possible that revolting notion of signals, which may well be the most odious act of folly that has ever got into a prude’s head since Nature first began creating prudes—I keep saying to myself: they have kept me confined, taken away my walks, doubtless for some positive reason; I am badly off, but ‘twill end sooner, and this thought would give me some slight comfort. But no, not at all. ’Tis but one period of signals; back they come again, and, what’s more, so furiously and so relentlessly that they try to convince me that the only reason I lost my walks was because some prison flunkey, the most contemptible of creatures on the face of the earth, had been paid off by the présidente de Montreuil to become insolent with me. A flunkey is insolent with me and it’s I who am in the wrong! Can one cover one’s scurvy little manias with pretexts as odious as those! That woman must be possessed of a fury, she must have a bottomless pit of malice, wickedness, and baseness in her soul! Yes, I repeat, I am convinced that she would have died of despair if I had not been captured and she had been deprived of distilling her venom over such a long period of years. What a veritable attack of indigestion! Good God, what an eruption! What abundance! Oh! she’d have died a thousand times over, that much is clear. And that a government exist in this world that is willing to tolerate such infamies, a government that, without examining, without inquiring, without any attempt to clarify, and only because that’s grease for the wheels of the machine, sacrifices to such a woman a person who, if I may be so bold, is a thousand times more deserving than she of this government, which he has served and which she dishonors; what am I saying? Such horrors do exist and one does not want to go off and dwell amongst the savages! Oh! this is something I simply cannot conceive.
And so this is another signal. Wonderful. All right, you can put it away with the others, I don’t understand it any better, nor shall I try to. On that I give you my wo
The time of my absence: this is what I refer to as the date when we were separated from each other. 1.
All the prisons and nothing else: Vincennes the first time, Aix, and Vincennes the second time. 2.
Only two Vincennes. 3.
The two Vincennes, plus the thirteen days’ travel time being taken back there. 4.
The return alone, minus travel. 5.
And the return alone, plus travel. 6.
All that, as you see, leads to very different conclusions and absolutely rules out any possibility either of establishing anything, or, consequently, of spending any time on your conundrums. Thus you are completely defeating your purpose. And by having chosen to do too much, you have accomplished nothing. That is what always happens to those schooled in the art of mischief and wickedness. For, after all, these signals can have only two purposes: either for me to understand them or for me not to understand them. If ’tis the former, make them clearer, and give me at least one point of reference, tell me what your starting point is; if ’tis the latter, why are you sending me any signal at all? For you must be familiar enough with the liveliness of my mind to know for sure that I shall never waste an hour tarrying over anything I realize is absurd. If, when she organized all this, your mother, instead of giving full vent only to her rage, and instead of relying upon no one but valets who laugh at her behind her back as soon as they have pocketed her money, had had the common sense to have entrusted the job to a man of wit, one might have dressed it2 in such a form that I would have worked night and day trying to solve it, and, what is worse, I would have been incapable of tearing myself away from it for a single instant. And, had I been in her shoes, this is what I would have done. Everybody knows how absorbing geometry is: the example of Archimedes, who during the siege of Syracuse was slain without lifting his eyes from his sheet of paper, is the most convincing proof. Now what about a geometry problem whose solution would include the discovery of what a man was most interested in finding out? That would, quite literally, drive him crazy. I therefore would have wrapped my riddle in all the solid trappings of a real mathematical problem. The constant truth would have been placed at the end; the only question would have been how to arrive at it; but the principles would have been solid and true; hence no danger of the whole thing ringing false, as it inevitably would in this case for anyone foolish enough to try to study it. And the fascination would become such that one would be held in its thrall. That way it would at least have been bearable, whereas what she has done is the very height of stupidity. But to do what I suggest she would have had to seek the help of some intelligent man. In any case, I am most grateful to her that she didn’t, for instead of wasting the total of four months I lost during the two detentions3 I would have spent my entire life trying to solve the riddle, and I would have been all the more sorry for all the lost time. “Oh,” I know you are going to reply to me, “it’s not at present you’re supposed to solve the riddle, it’s only after you’re out, it’s so one can have the pleasure of saying to you, ‘What? You mean you didn’t see that? You didn’t guess that?’ etc.” I have already had the honor of telling you, and I say it again one last time on the matter, that anyone who takes it into his head to mention these platitudes to me once I am out can either expect to receive serious abuse from me or else I shall never see that person again. ’Tis the one thing about which I declare I shall refuse to hear any banter so long as I live. Forewarned is forearmed: if you care about me at all, make sure you steer clear of any such riddles.
Moreover, I thank you most sincerely for having my walks restored; unfortunately, I am forced to linger on in this disgusting detention, ’tis better for me to enjoy this pleasure while I am here, rather than be without it. Words cannot express to you how badly I need them. I cannot write two lines without the blood rushing to my head, to a degree you cannot even conceive; and I would frighten you out of your wits, I’m sure, if you were to see me. Right now, as I write these lines to you, I’m obliged to stop after each sentence. Fresh air, and no longer making a fire, will, I hope, make me feel a little better.
The towels should not be of cotton, but of linen: they’re for the razor and not for the powder; La Jeunesse knows that very well.
1. By point of departure Sade, always on the lookout for signals, or seeing them when they do not exist, is asking the marquise for the key to the code, which of course she does not have.
2. The signal, real or imagined.
3. His first detention in Vincennes in 1763 as a result of the Jeanne Testard affair, and the second in the chateau of Saumur in 1768 following the Rose Keller scandal.
36. To Madame de Sade
[Toward March 28, 1781]
Good Lord, dear friend, how much I admire Father Massillon’s1 sermons! They lift my spirits, they enchant me, they absolutely delight me. ’Tis no bigot, this man who is speaking to you and who, framing truths on all sides that the impious deny, using not the point but the flat side of his sword to make his point. ’Tis no pedant bristling with sophisms and who is trying to win you over solely by frightening you to death. ’Tis to the heart this preacher directs his maxims; ’tis the heart he seeks to win over and the heart he constantly enthralls. With each word one finds a gentle father looking out for the welfare of his children; each sentence is one that a friend might address to a friend he sees on the brink of the precipice. What purity! What moral power! and what a happy blend of strength and simplicity! At times his swift eloquence is like a stream that sweeps away all the soul’s blemishes; the next moment, his tender compassion, as if frightened by the great commotion it has just produced, now covers the wounds with naught but a sweet and soothing balm, wherewith he wins over both the heart and mind. Great God! how was it possible that Louis XIV had so many millions of his subjects’ throats cut in the Cévennes2 while Massillon was saying to him, “Sire, kings are given us by the Eternal to be the salvation of their people; comfort them, you will be their father and twice over their master; be a peacemaker, Sire, the most glorious conquests are those that win over hearts.” And during that period not a day went without a dozen or fifteen poor wretches being broken on the wheel in Nîmes or in Montpellier, merely because they refused to believe that one had to go to Mass. And there you have the effect of the most beautiful and the holiest truths upon the heart of the man dominated by his passions! Nothing can alter their impetuousness, and when he is forced to blush because of them, ultimately his pride, coming swiftly to the rescue, furnishes him with shameful excuses to color them with a pious zeal . . . And what an example I have before my eyes! Are we not going to see, two weeks from now, the torturer of my life draw nigh to the altars, there to receive her God, just as calmly, just as serenely, as if her soul, drunk with a desire for revenge, did not bring disgrace upon itself every day by sacrificing her daughter, her son-in-law, and her unhappy grandchildren! Yes, we shall see her approach with impunity the God she outrages, and not tremble at the sacrilege; we shall see her impious lips, those same lips that daily dare utter forth the dishonor of her entire family, receive the heavenly host which becomes at the same time the condemnation of the guilty and the comfort of the just; and, coloring her crimes with the specious sophistries of an evenhandedness whose mask she adopts only to appease her conscience, she will dare say: I am righteous like the Divinity, because like Him I punish. Horrible, bane of Nature, dost thou dare carry blasphemy thus far? Wilt thou dare see in the Divinity naught but a tyrant? Wilt thou dare mold Him in thy sullied soul? And wilt thou blind thyself to the point of believing thou dost imitate His justice when thou dost but follow the infernal impressions of th