Letters From Prison by Marquis de Sade

  The second event that sealed his fate with the long-suffering Madame de Montreuil began to unfold in the afternoon of June 23, 1772, when Sade and his valet Latour set off from La Coste for Marseilles, ostensibly to attend to some business there. In fact, he and La-tour spent the next five days visiting the city’s bordellos. On the fifth day Sade ordered his valet to round up several girls—all prostitutes— and a “meeting” was scheduled for ten o’clock in the morning at the house of one of them, Marie Borelly, on the rue d’Aubagne, for Sade rightly judged that to indulge the fantasies he had in mind he needed privacy. There Sade and Latour proceeded to hold a matinal debauch involving five prostitutes, all of whom whipped the gentlemen and were whipped by them in turn, with Sade dictating the action and sometimes reversing roles, calling his valet “Marquis” and referring to himself as Lafleur, and, in one further strange twist, keeping a concrete count of the beatings he had received.8 But the heated action, which went on for at least two hours, was not the cause of Sade’s impending downfall: from a little gold-rimmed box he had in his coat, he took out some aniseed candies, whose sugar coating was soaked with the extract of what is commonly known as Spanish fly, and tried to force them on the girls. Only one, Marianne Laverne, ate any, though another pretended to but spit them out. That same evening he amused himself—alone this time—with another prostitute, Marguerite Coste, whom he convinced to down even a greater quantity of the aniseed candies. The following day, his sexual appetite presumably satiated, Sade and Latour peacefully returned to La Coste by postal coach. But the pastilles he had fed the two girls were having an effect that would cost the marquis dearly. The most severely afflicted was Marguerite Coste, who fell ill the same night she had been with Sade and whose condition worsened over the next two days, during which she was wracked by terrible vomiting. A doctor was summoned, and when he heard the source of her illness he reported it to the police. Convinced the man with the pastilles had tried to poison the girls, the police had the vestiges of the girls’ regurgitations—plus two untouched pastilles found at Marie Borelly’s place—analyzed and found absolutely no trace of poison. Puzzled, the police never thought of Spanish fly, which can be dangerous if taken in more than moderate doses. Sade’s doses were clearly immoderate, and Marguerite Coste came close to death, so close in fact that she was administered last rites. The police took depositions from all six girls, and on July 4 a warrant was issued for the arrest of both Sade and Latour. Before it could be carried out, however, someone came to La Coste to warn the marquis of the impending danger, adding that one of the “poisoned” girls had died and now the marquis and his manservant would be arrested for murder. Sade and Latour beat a hasty retreat. Anne-Prospère de Launay, Renée-Péelagie’s younger sister by eleven years, who had been visiting at La Coste for some time, also disappeared, and one could only suppose she had, inexplicably, followed the marquis into hiding. When she resurfaced several days later, she was in a state of great agitation. Thus Renée-Pélagie was left by herself to face the music and deal with the police, who arrived in large numbers, headed by the bailiff of Apt. Finding neither of the accused, and being told by one and all—the marquise, the notary Fage, the townspeople, the servants—that both men had been “away” for a good week now, the police finally left. As usual, in her despair Renée-Pélagie turned to her mother for help and succor, but the présidente wanted no part of this new development. She had bailed out her son-in-law for the last time, she declared, not because his conduct this time was even worse than the others, but because she had by now learned from good authority what she had feared but refused to believe before, namely that Sade had done the unthinkable, even for him: he had seduced her young daughter, Anne. To his many other crimes against not just society but, far more important, the family, he had now added the unthinkable: incest. To make matters worse, Renée-Pélagie, her formerly docile elder daughter, seemed to accept this quite unacceptable situation. As for Anne-Prospère, Anne-the-Pure, Anne the canoness, she had apparently fallen madly in love with her mad brother-in-law.

  The seduction and debasement of Anne-Prospère was the third event, and the one that finally pushed Madame de Montreuil over the edge, that caused her to shift her allegiance and expend all her energies henceforth to isolate and incapacitate her son-in-law, to have him put away where he could do the family no more harm. Henceforth, if she had her way, they would lock him up and throw away the key.

  Unlike her mother, however, Renée-Pélagie was far from ready to give up on her husband. That was, and remains, one of the great Sadean mysteries: How, after such conduct, with clearly not the slightest remorse on his part, could she remain so attached to the man? So faithful to him? So in love with him? In any event, in early August she managed to round up four thousand livres and set off for Marseilles where, enlisting the help of a local notary, she managed to buy off Marguerite Coste and Marianne Laverne, both of whom agreed to withdraw their charges. A victory, yes, but after several days in Marseilles she returned to La Coste in shock, for while there she had heard all the gossip, seen the scandal sheets, listened to all the wild rumors about her husband—one of which maintained that the marquis had poisoned his wife because he had fallen in love with her younger sister. The port city seethed with stories about and hatred for her husband, whose latest case seemed to be all anyone was talking about. The story was fast escalating into fantasy, and the magnitude of the marquis’s crime exploded with each retelling. Memories of Arcueil resurfaced. Why had he been let off so leniently then? It was true that there were two levels of justice, one for the aristocrats, another for common folk; a scapegoat had to be found, if only to appease the popular anger, which was growing day by day.

  Later that month Renvée-Pélagie’s father arrived at La Coste, presumably to visit his two daughters, salvage Anne-Prospère if he could, see what he could do to keep the lid on this latest scandal, and use his personal connections among the judiciary to influence its decision regarding his son-in-law. Monsieur de Montreuil was an excessively passive man—la présidente ruled the roost almost single-handedly—and at sixty he surely did not come all the way from Paris, a journey of several days, on his own. He came at the instigation and demand of his wife, to seal Sade’s doom.

  On September 2, the royal prosecutor handed down his decision. Sade was found guilty of poisoning and he and Latour were both found guilty of sodomy.9 Both were required to “expiate their crimes at the cathedral entrance before being taken to the Place Saint Louis, where a scaffold was to be erected, and there Sade was to be beheaded and Latour hanged or strangled until he was dead, after which their bodies were to be burned and their ashes scattered to the wind.” On September 11 the Parlement of Provence confirmed the prosecutor’s sentence, and the following day both Sade and Latour were burned in effigy on the Place des Prechêurs in Aix. Though the act was symbolic, for Sade it had grave repercussions, because he was stripped of his civil rights. From a libertine and dissolute, the Marquis de Sade was henceforth a marked man, a fugitive from justice, his name and acts linked in infamy in the press and in the minds of the public. Though he would escape the verdict of the Marseilles court, he would be guilty, fettered even if not behind bars, condemned for the rest of his life. To make sure, Monsieur de Montreuil had set off for Aix-en-Provence on September 7 to confer with the authorities of the appeals court to which the Marseilles sentence had been referred and to try to accomplish a dual and delicate task: make sure the case was handled in such a way as to bring no dishonor to the family name and see to it that his son-in-law was, once and for all, prevented from doing any further damage.

  But it was already too late. Sade had decamped, fleeing as fast as the Provençal coaches could take him, to Italy, where he traveled under the name of the Count de Mazan.10 The damage he was inflicting even more deeply on his wife’s family—not to mention his wife herself—was his choice of companion, for Anne-Prospère de Launay had fled with him. They went first to Venice, thence on to several other Italian cit
ies. Then, abruptly, and for reasons still unknown, Anne left her brother-in-law—and all her baggage—and returned to La Coste on October 2, roughly a month after their idyllic flight had begun.

  What of this incestuous relationship between Sade and Anne-Prospère? How could a well-brought-up young lady who, barely past twenty and presumably pure not only of heart but of body—she was a canoness when she appeared at La Coste to visit her sister and brother-in-law—engage in such a total act of folly that she must have known would ruin her relations with her sister, her parents, and endanger her own future? Sade’s every act was now followed avidly, and this most juicy tidbit could scarcely be kept out of the press.11 There is no simple answer, but there are some reasonable surmises. At thirty-two, Sade was still attractive, possessed of an undeniable charm, and highly seductive. Anne-Prospère could also see that her sister, once submissive and unassertive, had taken on a new air: despite all her husband’s myriad escapades and betrayals, all the scandal surrounding him, it was obvious that Renée-Pélagie still loved the man and was ready to defend him to the last ounce of her energy, to such a degree in fact that she was fully prepared to stand up even against their tyrannical mother. What manner of man could have wrought such change in her older sister? For the young canoness, the temptation to be seduced, to taste those forbidden pleasures that had had such a tonic effect on Renée-Pélagie, must have been strong, especially there in the confines of La Coste, where the marquis felt completely at ease and could be his most charming, seductive self. From Sade’s point of view, the temptation must have been even greater, although he knew—as he surely did—that he was courting trouble. One senses that, if anything, the threat of trouble, of unredeemable scandal, acted on him as an aphrodisiac far more powerful than Spanish fly.

  After Anne-Prospère deserted him, Sade left Italy and settled in Chambery, then a part of Piedmont and Sardinia. After roughly a month of secluded existence in an isolated house he had rented outside that city, Sade, who was still traveling incognito under the title the Count de Mazan, was arrested one evening upon a warrant from the king of Sardinia and incarcerated in Fort Miolans, which was known as the Bastille of the Counts of Savoy. How had the marquis’s real identity been discovered, and why had a foreign king issued a warrant for his arrest? Very simply, the présidente, to whom Sade had rashly written a letter revealing his whereabouts, immediately set about having him clapped behind bars. For the next four months he remained at Fort Miolans as the most famous, but also the most closely watched, prisoner in the keep. In March, the indomitable Marquise de Sade journeyed to Savoy disguised as a man and made desperate efforts to visit her husband, to no avail. On the night of April 30, by as clever a ruse as the novel or theater has ever invented, Sade, another prisoner, the Baron de l’Allee, and Sade’s manservant Latour escaped from the impregnable fortress. Thence Sade and Latour made their way back to La Coste.

  For the better part of the next four years Sade remained in and around La Coste, with occasional discreet forays to other French cities, as well as venturing abroad on another extended trip to Italy. Early in 1774, Madame de Montreuil made an abortive effort to have Sade arrested at La Coste, but the marquis had his loyal local informants, who forewarned him in time to go into hiding until the arrest party had given up and departed. Though master of his domain, Sade was still very much a fugitive. He and his wife made efforts to have the Marseilles sentence quashed, and to that end she made several trips to Paris, though with scant success. Sade’s name was too hot, and the Montreuil influence and money too powerful, for any minister or magistrate to rule in his favor. In fact, after the death of Louis XV on May 10, 1774, one of the présidente’s first acts was to request that the lettre de cachet issued by the late king, which was no longer valid, be reinstated by the new regime. In the fall of that year a new lettre de cachet, ordering Sade’s arrest and incarceration in the prison of Pierre-Encize, was duly issued by the court of Louis XVI.

  Despite that, it is possible—not probable but possible—that if Sade had behaved reasonably at this point in his life—and each would have to define for him - or herself the precise meaning of that term— further prison might never have been his lot. The présidente’s secret attempt to have him arrested in January had cost her a small fortune— over eight thousand livres—and she may not have been of a mind to mount another such expensive expedition in the near future. Still, feeling himself constantly menaced in France, Sade decided in March to emigrate to Italy, leaving Renée-Pélagie behind to handle his affairs and pursue his legal appeals. After several months there, however, plagued by a shortage of money and bored for lack of language and “activity,” he returned to France in late September, meeting his wife in Lyons. There he—or perhaps they together—sowed the seeds of the fourth scandal, which would irrevocably seal both their fates. In that city and despite their groaning finances, the Sades engaged several servant girls, plus a young male secretary for the marquis, for their needs at La Coste. One of the girls, Anne Sablonnière, also known as Nanon, was twenty-four; the others were probably no more than fifteen or sixteen. Given their age, her husband’s known predilections, and the fact that she had just pawned the family silver to raise money, one has to wonder why Renée-Pélagie ever allowed herself to be involved in their hire, for she had to know that nothing but trouble lay ahead. All we can assume is that by now, stripped of any illusions about her husband she might ever have harbored, she had become his full and willing accomplice.

  Precisely what went on at La Coste during the winter months of 1774-1775 is not known, for little evidence remains. Much of what we know stems from Sade’s “Grand Letter” to his wife, but since this letter is largely self-justification, it can hardly pass for fact. In it Sade does maintain, and is probably right, that Nanon was a well-known procuress in Lyons, and that since the other servants were in turn either hired or approved by her, they all had to be aware of what they were getting into. In other words, despite their tender age he looked upon all six as prostitutes and felt he could treat them as such. We do know that during that several-week period in December and January Sade and his little menagerie rarely left the chateau. Darkness fell early, and few if any locals were invited inside, probably to keep prying eyes and wagging tongues distanced. In a letter to his attorney Gaufridy, in the late fall of 1774, inviting him to dinner—which was to take place at three o’clock sharp—Sade painted a saintly picture of himself, totally immersed in his work, which consisted of research and writing, and of domestic tranquillity on the part of Madame de Sade and her staff. In all likelihood, however, Sade was really spending the greater part of his time in those dark months indulging in two of his favorite pastimes: the theater and erotic play. His libertinage far from stilled, his status as fugitive very much in his mind, he literally closed the chateau doors to the outside world and created within the close confines of La Coste his own fantasy drama, with himself as director and leading man. In all probability, Renéee-Pélagie was also involved, but in what role and to what extent it is hard to say. She had been married to the man for more than eleven years now and knew him as no other did: his insatiable appetites, his uncontrollable willfulness, his obsessions, his profligacy (demonstrated anew by his hiring so many servants without any notion how they would be paid), his arrogance, his pride, his egocentricity, his seductive charm, his tireless energy. However much he tried her patience, however much he abused her, betrayed her, took advantage of her, she loved him unconditionally. If her role was to be long-suffering, so be it. If it was to pick up the pieces after him, she would stoop to that, too. If his heedless propensity for getting into trouble led him to the precipice, she would pull him back. At least, she must have thought as winter closed in around La Coste, no matter what he dreams up as fantasy entertainment, he is here with me, I know the cast of characters we are involved with, which is better than not knowing where he is or what new mischief he is up to.

  That cast included, in addition to the new hires from Lyons, a coupl
e of servants already in place: Sade’s valet Carteron, also known as La Jeunesse, and his mistress, a Swiss chambermaid, Gothon Duffé, whom Sade describes in one of his letters from prison as being possessed of “the most beautiful a------that ever managed to escape from the mountains of Switzerland in over a century.” Rounding out the troupe were a Mademoiselle Du Plan, a former ballet dancer from Marseilles, who bore the title of governess (though there were no children to govern, unless one includes the new teenage recruits); a young lady from Montpellier named Rosette; and Nanon’s niece. Plus a number of cooks and scullery maids who had not necessarily been chosen for their culinary talents. A considerable and varied cast, and it is natural to conclude, both by imagining and from the known repercussions, that Sade put virtually everyone to good exotic use, their exact roles in the winter orgies depending less on their age or experience than on their presumed position. There is no doubt the five Lyons girls were flagellated, as there is clear evidence they were not returned to their parents until their wounds had healed. For those horrified by such an admission, it must be noted that in those days flagellation— often referred to as “the English vice”—was fairly common practice among libertines, as police reports attest. But Sade, like most of his peers, did not employ that erotic stimulus indiscriminately. As far as we know, Sade never subjected his wife or any of his mistresses to any form of flagellation. That rite was reserved for whores, with whom anything went. If one was paying, one could choose whatever one wished, and if the poor girl complained to the authorities, the examining magistrate would ask her if she had received money; if her answer was yes, she was sent packing. And in Sade’s view, since he had hired the Lyons servants through a “well-known procuress” there, they were fair, unrestricted game, no matter their age. Nonetheless, once again Sade’s rampant sexuality and provocative personality was dragging him ineluctably into the snares of the law.