Had I been given Mr. 64 to cure, I’d have proceeded very differently, for instead of locking him up amidst cannibals I would have cloistered him for a while with girls, I’d have supplied him girls in such good number that damn me if after these seven years there’d be a drop of fuel now left in the lamp! When you have a steed too fiery to bridle you gallop him over rough terrain, you don’t shut him up in the stable. Thereby might you have guided Mr. 6 into the good way, into what they call the honorable path. You’d have brought an end to those philosophical subterfuges, to those devious practices Nature disavows (as though Nature had anything to do with all this), to those dangerous truancies of a too ardent imagination which ever in hot pursuit of happiness and never able to find it anywhere, finishes by substituting illusions for reality and dishonest detours for lawful pleasure. . . . Yes, in the middle of a harem Mr. 6 would have become the friend of woman; he would have discovered and felt that there is nothing so beautiful, nothing so great as her sex, and that outside of her sex there is no salvation. Occupied solely in serving ladies and in satisfying their dainty desires, Mr. 6 would have sacrificed all his own. Susceptible of none but decent ones, with him decency would have become a habit, that habit would have accustomed his mind to quelling penchants which had hitherto prevented him from pleasing. The whole treatment would have ended with our sufferer appeased and at peace; and lo! see how out of the depths of vice I would have enticed him back to virtue. For once again, a little less of vice is virtuousness in a very vicious heart. Think not that ’tis child’s play, to retrieve a man from the abyss; your mere proposal to rescue him will cause him to cling tight to where he is. Content yourself with having him conceive a liking for things milder in their form but in substance the same as those he is wont to delight in. Little by little you will gradually hoist him up from the cloaca. But if you hurry him along, jostle him, if you attempt to snatch everything away from him all at once, you will only irritate him further. Only by slow steps is a stomach accustomed to a diet; you destroy it if you suddenly deprive it of food. True enough, there are certain spirits (and of these I have known one or two) so heavily mired in evil, and who unfortunately find therein such charm, that however slight it were, any reform would be painful for them; ’twould seem they are at home in evil, that they have their abode there, that for them evil is like a natural state whence no effort to extricate them might avail: for that some divine intervention would be necessary and, unhappily, heaven, to whom good or evil in men is a matter of great indifference, never performs miracles in their behalf. And, strangest of all, profoundly wicked spirits are not sorry for their plight; all the inquietudes, all the nuisances, all the cares vice brings in its train, these, far from becoming torments to them, are rather delights, similar, so to speak, to the rigors of a mistress one loves dearly, and for whose sake one would be aggrieved not to have sometimes to suffer. Yes, my fairest of the fair, by God’s own truth, well do I know a few spirits of this kind. Oh, and how dangerous they are! May the Eternal spare us, thou and me, ever from resembling them, and to obtain His mercy let us both before we lay us in our beds, kneel down and recite a Paternoster and an Ave Maria with an Oremus or two in honor of Mr. Saint [lacuna in MS.]. (’Tis a signal.)
With a great kiss for each of your buttocks.
I would remind you that you have sent me beef marrow in the past when the weather was just as warm as it is at present, and that I have none left; I beseech you to send me some without fail by the 15th of the month. Also, two night-ribbons, so as not to have to wait when one needs replacing: the widest and darkest you are able to find.
Herewith the exact measurements for a case I would be obliged if you would have made for me, generally similar to the other you sent me but with these dimensions, to be observed to the sixteenth of an inch and with a top that screws on three inches from the end. No loops, no ivory clasps like the last time, because they don’t hold. This case (since your confessors must have an explanation for everything) is to store rolled up plans, prints and several little landscapes I’ve done in red ink. And I believe indeed [one or two words obliterated in MS.] were it for a nun, ought to put [several words obliterated in MS.]. Kindly attend to this errand as soon as possible; my plans and drawings are floating loose everywhere about, I don’t know where to stick them.
Those who tell you I have enough linen are wrong. I am down to four wearable shirts and am completely without handkerchiefs and towels. So send me what I have requested, will you please, and put a stop to your silly joking upon this subject. Send me linen, plenty of linen—bah, never fear, I’ve plenty of time ahead of me to wear it out.
LETTER V (1783)
To Madame de Sade1
Good God, how right he is when M. Duclos tells us on page 101 of his Confessions2 that the witticisms of barristers always stink of the backstairs. Allow me to go him one better and say that they smell of the outroom, of the outhouse: the brainless platitudes your mother and her Keeper of the Tables invent are of an odor not to be suffered in any proper salon. And so you never weary of their drivel and their pranks! and so we are to have buffoonery and lawyers to the bitter end! Well, my chit, feed on that stuff to your heart’s content, gorge yourself on it, drink yourself high with it. I am wrong to wish to teach you nice manners, quite as wrong as were he who would attempt to prove to a pig that a vanilla cream pasty is better than at. . . . But if you give me examples of obstinacy, at least forbear from criticizing me for mine. You cleave to your principles, eh? And so do I to mine. But the great difference between us two is that my systems are founded upon reason while yours are merely the fruit of imbecility.
My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking for others! My manner of thinking stems straight from my considered reflections; it holds with my existence, with the way I am made. It is not in my power to alter it; and were it, I’d not do so. This manner of thinking you find fault with is my sole consolation in life; it alleviates all my sufferings in prison, it composes all my pleasures in the world outside, it is dearer to me than life itself. Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness. The reasoning man who scorns the prejudices of simpletons necessarily becomes the enemy of simpletons; he must expect as much, and laugh at the inevitable. A traveler journeys along a fine road. It has been strewn with traps. He falls into one. Do you say it is the traveler’s fault, or that of the scoundrel who lays the traps? If then, as you tell me, they are willing to restore my liberty if I am willing to pay for it by the sacrifice of my principles or my tastes, we may bid one another an eternal adieu, for rather than part with those, I would sacrifice a thousand lives and a thousand liberties, if I had them. These principles and these tastes, I am their fanatic adherent; and fanaticism in me is the product of the persecutions I have endured from my tyrants. The longer they continue their vexations, the deeper they root my principles in my heart, and I openly declare that no one need ever talk to me of liberty if it is offered to me only in return for their destruction. I say that to you. I shall say it to M. Le Noir. I shall say it to the entire earth. Were the very scaffold before me, I’d not change my tune. If my principles and my tastes cannot consort with the laws of this land, I don’t for a moment insist upon remaining in France. In Europe there are wise governments which do not cast dishonor upon people because of their tastes and which do not cast them into jail because of their opinions. I shall go elsewhere to live, and I shall live there happily.
The opinions or the vices of private individuals do not harm the State; through their morals only public figures exert any influence upon the general administration. Whether a private person believes or does not believe in God, whether he admires and venerates a harlot or treats her with kicks and curses, neither this form of behavior nor that will maintain or shake the constitution of a State. But let the magistrate whose duty is to see the victualing of a town double the price of commodities
because the purveyors make it worth his while, let the treasurer entrusted with public funds leave hirelings to go unpaid because he prefers to turn those pennies to his own account, let the steward of a royal and numerous household leave the luckless troops to die of hunger whom the King has introduced into his palace, because that officer would have a hearty feed at home the Thursday before Shrove Tuesday—and from one end of the country to the other the effects of this malversation will be felt; everything falls to pieces. And nonetheless the extortioner triumphs while the honest man rots in a dungeon. A State approaches its ruin, spake Chancellor Olivier3 at the Bed of Justice held in Henry II’s reign, when only the weak are punished, and the rich felon gets his impunity from his gold.
Let the King first correct what is vicious in the government, let him do away with its abuses, let him hang the ministers who deceive or rob him, before he sets to repressing his subjects’ opinions or tastes! Once again: those tastes and opinions shall not unsteady his throne, but the indignities of those near to it will overthrow it sooner or later.
Your parents, you tell me, dear friend, your parents are taking measures to prevent me from ever being in a position to claim anything from them. This extraordinary sentence is all the more so for demonstrating that either they or I must be knaves. If they think me capable of asking them for anything beyond your dowry, I am the knave (but I am not; knavery has never had entrance among my principles, it’s too base a vice); and if, on the contrary, they are taking measures in order never to give me that upon which my children must naturally count, then they are the knaves. Kindly decide which it is to be, the one or the other, for your sentence leaves no middle ground. You point your finger at them? I am not surprised. Neither am I surprised at the trouble they encountered marrying you off, or at the remark one of your suitors made: The daughter, I’m nothing loath; but spare me from the parents. My surprise shall cease at the fact they have been paying me your dowry in vouchers that lose two-thirds on the market; no more shall I marvel that those who were concerned for my interests always used to warn me: Have a care there, you’ve no idea whom you are dealing with. People who take measures not to pay the dowry promised to their daughter, none of the doings of such people ought to cause surprise; and I have long suspected that the honor of having sired three children upon you was going to be my ruin. It’s doubtless to secure it that your mother has so often had my house entered and my papers filched. It won’t cost her but a few louis to have some documents now disappear out of the notaries’ files, to have some notes to Albaret falsified: and when at last I emerge from here I shall be perfectly able to beg in the streets.—Well, what’s to be done in the face of that? To me three things shall always remain as consolation for everything: the pleasure of informing the public, which is not fond of the foul tricks lawyers play upon noblemen; the hope of advising the King by going and casting myself at his feet if need be, to ask restitution for the roguery of your parents; and should all that fail, the satisfaction, to me very sweet, of possessing you for your own sake, my dear friend, and of devoting the little that shall still be mine to your needs, to your desires, to the charm unto my heart unique of seeing you owe everything to me.
DE SADE
LETTER VI (1790)
To Monsieur Gaufridy1
The 12th of April 1790
I came out of Charenton (whither I had been transferred from the Bastille) on Good Friday. The better the day the better the deed! Yes, my good friend, ’twas upon that day I recovered my freedom; wherefore have I decided to celebrate it as a holiday for the rest of my life and instead of those concerts, of those frivolous promenades custom has irreligiously sanctified at that time of year, when we ought only to moan and weep, instead, I say, of all those mundane vanities, whenever the forty-fifth day after Ash Wednesday brings us around to another Good Friday, you shall see me fall to my knees, pray, give thanks . . . make resolutions to mend my ways, and keep them.
Now to the facts, my dear lawyer, for I see you about to echo what everybody tells me: It’s not talk we want, Sir, but facts—to the facts then: the facts are that I landed in the middle of Paris without a louis in my pocket, without knowing where to go, where to lodge, where to dine, where to procure any money. M. de Milly, procurator at the Châtelet, and who has been supervising my interests in this part of the country for twenty-six years, was kind enough to offer me a bed, his board and six louis. Unwilling to overstay my welcome or become a burden, after four days at M. de Milly’s, with three louis left of the original six, I had to set forth and find for myself everything—inn, domestic, tailor, my meals, etc.—with three louis.
My circumstances being what they were I made request of Madame la Présidente de Montreuil, which lady graciously consented to instruct her notary to advance me a few louis upon condition I write to you at once for the wherewithal first to reimburse the borrowed sum, and second to stay alive. I do therefore conjure you, my good lawyer, to dispatch to me without delay of any sort the preliminary sum of one thousand crowns, the sum I asked you for the other day and whereof my need is no less extreme than the promptitude of your response to it essential.
LETTER VII (1790)
To Monsieur Gaufridy
I have just this instant come into receipt of your letter of the fourteenth: as it arrives too soon to be in answer to mine, I am master of my disappointment at not encountering here one of those charming notes which by far outvalue love letters, and with which one obtains money immediately.
You must not doubt that if I did not write to you during my detention, ’twas because I lacked the means to do so; I cannot well forgive you for supposing my silence due to anything else. I’d not have bothered about business details, what would have been the use in my position? But I would have inquired after your news, I would have given you my own, upon the chains lading me we might have dropped an occasional flower. But my captors would not have it so; I did venture a letter to you in that vein, it was returned to me, flung back at me, after that I wrote no more. Therefore, my dear lawyer, I repeat it, I cannot forgive you for having doubted my feelings in your regard. We have known one another since childhood, I need not remind you of it; a long-standing friendship made it natural that it be you in whom I placed my trust when long ago I besought you to take on the management of my affairs; what motive could I have had for changing my attitude? ’Twas not your fault I was arrested at La Coste, ’twas mine, I was too sure I was in safety there and I knew not with what an abominable family I had to contend. It goes without saying, and I assume you will have understood already, that when I speak here of family I am referring to the Montreuils; you have not, cannot have, the faintest conception of the infernal and anthropophagical manner in which these people have conducted themselves with me. Had I been the last of the living and the lowliest, nobody would have dared treat me with the barbarity I have suffered thanks to them; in fine, it has cost me my eyesight and my chest; for lack of exercise I have become so enormously fat I can scarce stir my body; prison slew in me the very faculty of sensation; I have no more taste for anything, no liking, no love; the society I so madly regretted looks so dull to me today, so forlorn and sad! There are moments when I am moved by a wish to join the Trappists, and I cannot say but what I may go off some fine day and vanish altogether from the scene. Never was I such a misanthrope as since I have returned into the midst of men; and if in their eyes I now have the look of a stranger, they may be very sure they produce the same effect upon me. I was not idle during my detention; consider, my dear lawyer, I had readied fifteen volumes for the printer;1 now that I am at large, hardly a quarter of those manuscripts remains to me. Through unpardonable thoughtlessness, Madame de Sade let some of them become lost, let others be seized; thirteen years of toil gone for naught! The bulk of those writings had remained behind in my room at the Bastille when on the fourth of July, I was removed from there to Charenton; on the fourteenth the Bastille is stormed, overrun, and my manuscripts, six hundred books I owned, two thousand pounds wor
th of furniture, precious portraits, the lot is lacerated, burned, carried off, pillaged: a clean sweep, not a straw left: and all that owing to the sheer negligence of Madame de Sade. She had had ten whole days to retrieve my possessions; she could not but have known that the Bastille, which they had been cramming with guns, powder, soldiers, was being prepared either for an attack or for a defense. Why then did she not hasten to get my belongings out of harm’s way? my manuscripts?—my manuscripts over whose loss I shed tears of blood! Other beds, tables, chests of drawers can be found, but ideas once gone are not found again. . . . No, my friend, no, I shall never be able to figure to you my despair at their loss, for me it is irreparable. Since then, the sensitive and delicate Madame de Sade holds me at arm’s length, won’t see me. Another would have said He is unhappy, we must dry his tears away; this logic of feelings has not been hers. I have not lost enough, she wishes to ruin me, she is asking for a separation. Through this inconceivable proceeding she is going to legitimate all the calumnies that have been spewed against me; she is going to leave her children and me destitute and despised, and that in order to live, or rather to vegetate deliciously, as she phrases it, in a convent2 where some confessor is doubtless consoling her, giving her to see the merits and the practicability of the path of crime, of horror, and of indignity down which her behavior is going to drive us all. When ’tis my most mortal enemy who has her ear, the advice my wife is receiving could not possibly be worse, nor more disastrous.