You will have no trouble realizing, my dear lawyer, that having now to answer out of my assets for the sums drawn from my wife’s dowry (one hundred sixty thousand livres), this separation is going to be my financial finish, which is what these monsters are after. Alas, great God! I’d thought seventeen miserable years, thirteen of them in horrible dungeons, would expiate a few rash follies committed in my youth. You see how mistaken I was, my friend. The rage of Spaniards is never appeased, and this execrable family is Spanish. Thus could Voltaire write in Alzire: What? You have a Spaniard’s look—and you have the capacity to forgive?
NOTES TO LETTERS
LETTER I
1. Laure-Victoire-Adeline de Lauris, born in Avignon on the 8th of June, 1741, was exactly one year younger than Sade. Hers was one of the most illustrious houses of Provence, tracing its lineage back to the thirteenth century. Although it has long been known that, prior to 1763, the year of his marriage, the fiery-tempered Sade had not often lacked for objects of his amatory dalliance or affection, the existence of Mademoiselle de Lauris as one of them remained unknown to Sade scholars and students until recently. It was the indefatigable Gilbert Lely who, in 1949, discovered the present letter among the unpublished correspondence of the Sade family which Maurice Heine bequeathed to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.
2. Sade was married to Mademoiselle de Montreuil on May 17th of this same year. Thus his ardent letter to Mademoiselle de Lauris predates his marriage by less than six weeks.
3. Sade had gone to Avignon, ostensibly to await the arrival of his mistress and wife-to-be. But following his departure from Paris, either Mlle. de Lauris had a change of heart or, perhaps, family pressures were brought to bear against the marriage.
4. Although Sade’s father apparently acquiesced to his son’s demands to marry Mademoiselle de Lauris, it is known that he far preferred the much more advantageous alliance with the Montreuil family. Sade’s sentence here would seem to suggest that someone, perhaps his father acting alone or in collusion, sent him to Avignon under false pretenses, the real motive being to separate him from Laure.
5. Lely speculates, not unreasonably, that the “c . . .” may refer to the “picturesque term which, still today, is used in popular language to designate gonorrhea. Indeed, in a letter from the Count de Sade to his sister, the Abbess de Saint-Laurent (Bibliothèque Nationale MS. 24384, no. 1936) mentions that the Marquis is ‘more in love than ever’ with Mlle. de Lauris, who apparently ‘made him ill.’ And there would seem to be little doubt about the matter when one compares this remark to the allusions earlier in Sade’s letter where he admonishes Laure: ‘Take care of your health; I am working to restore my own. . . .’”
6. The fact is that Laure de Lauris never married. There is also evidence that Sade’s feelings for her persisted long after his marriage to Mademoiselle de Montreuil, as suggested by a letter Sade subsequently wrote to Laure’s father, reproaching him for not inviting Sade to a ball Monsieur Lauris was giving. In this letter, Sade speaks of “My absolutely irreproachable conduct since everlasting bonds [i.e., his marriage to another] have prevented me from forming those which were destined to make my happiness.” Lely further speculates, without the slightest evidence however, that Sade may have had a later liaison with Laure, after his marriage, during the years he was living at La Coste. The only basis for his speculation is the proximity of La Coste and Vacqueyras, the seigneury of the Lauris family, which were only twenty miles apart.
LETTER II
1. One month to the day after Sade was incarcerated in Vincennes Keep.
2. From 1773, when he escaped from the fortress of Miolans, until his arrest on February 13, 1777, in Paris, Sade was either traveling incognito abroad or hiding in France. In late January of 1777, by means of messages reporting the grave state of his mother’s health, Madame de Montreuil succeeded in luring Sade to Paris: arriving there (on February 8) he learned the Dowager Countess had died three weeks previously. And on the 13th, Inspector Marais, armed with a lettre de cachet obtained by Madame de Montreuil, arrested the Marquis in his hotel and conducted him to Vincennes.
3. Joseph-Jérôme Siméon of Aix-en Provence was attorney for the defense when in 1778 Sade appeared before the Parliament of Aix to face charges of having poisoned some prostitutes in Marseilles in 1772. Inculpated that same year, the Aix court had condemned Sade—then in flight—to be burned in effigy. The search for him continued: he was at last overtaken at Chambéry. It was in connection with the Marseilles episode that Sade was imprisoned at Miolans, and then in Vincennes.
4. To our knowledge, the identity of the person in question has so far eluded all Sade scholars.
LETTER III
1. Undated letter which from internal evidence would seem to have been written in July, 1783. It was dispatched from Vincennes where, after standing trial in Aix, Sade had been imprisoned (for the third time) since September 7, 1778.
2. Goodie Cordier: Madame de Montreuil.
3. Fouloiseau was Madame de Montreuil’s factotum.
4. In another letter, cited by Lely, Sade remarks: “’Tis for having taken disrespectful liberties with the ass of a whore that the father of a family, separated from his children, must risk the loss of their affection, must be snatched from the arms of his wife, from the care of his lands, must be robbed, ruined, dishonored, doomed, must be prevented from bringing up his children to enter into the world, and from appearing in it himself, must be the plaything of a gang of jailers, the prey of three or four other villains, must waste his lifetime, lose his health, be despoiled of his money, and be for the past seven years shut up like a lunatic in an iron cage.”
5. Albaret: another of Madame de Montreuil’s factotums.
6. The Présidente’s full name was: Marie-Madeleine Masson de Plissay, Dame Cordier de Launay de Montreuil.
7. Madame de Sade’s Christian name was, as we have noted, Renée-Pélagie. The Montreuils owned a property called d’Échauffour.
LETTER IV
1. Letter written from Vincennes, undated but clearly belonging to the same period as Letter III.
2. Concerning the “numbers,” the “signals,” the “ciphers” Sade again and again refers to in his letters (and in his “Note Concerning My Detention”), Gilbert Lely writes (L’Aigle, Mademoiselle. . ., pp. 153–54): “In almost all of Sade’s letters of this period one meets with allusions to more or less comprehensible numbers which he often calls signals. What does this curious arithmetic signify? Imprisoned in Vincennes by lettre de cachet, that is, utterly at the mercy of his persecutors’ discretion, Sade found himself in tragic ignorance of how long his detention was to last; wherewith he contrived a system of deduction based upon calculations which, while they may appear ludicrous to us, were in his mind of a nature to reveal the wildly yearned for day of his liberation. . . . Actually, the Marquis’ troubling arithmetical operations constitute a kind of defense mechanism, a partly unconscious struggle to ward off the despair which, he dreaded, were it to gain the upper hand, would lead to the overthrow of his reason. Absolutely in the dark as to his captors’ concrete intentions, Sade is led ‘to ferret out the most unexpected points of departure for his calculations,’ writes Maurice Heine. ‘To his eye everything has the look of a hint of his fate, or perhaps of a mysterious indication that has escaped the censor’s notice. His mind fastens desperately upon the number of lines in a letter, upon the number of times such and such a word is repeated, even upon a consonance which, spoken aloud, suggests a figure.’ But his efforts are not confined to trying to discover the date of his return to freedom; he also seeks for clues regarding his life while in prison: upon exactly what day will he again be allowed to take exercise? When will Madame de Sade visit him? His wife’s letters are the major source from which he mines the elements for his reckonings, and sometimes when the deductions he extracts from them have a baneful or contradictory look, he accuses Madame de Montreuil of having suggested to the Marquise such signals as might demoralize
or throw him into perplexity.”
An example: “This letter has 72 syllables which are the 72 weeks remaining. It has 7 lines plus 7 syllables which makes exactly the 7 months and 7 days from the 17th of April till the 22nd of January, 1780. It has 191 letters and 49 words. Now, 49 words plus 16 lines makes 59 [sic], and there are 59 weeks between now and May 30. . .”
Another: “On March 28 he sent to borrow 6 candles from me; and on April 6, 6 others whereof I lent only 4. . . . Thursday the 6th of January, 9 months after the borrowing of the candles, on exactly the same day 25 were returned to me instead of the 10 I had lent, which seems very plainly to designate another 9 months in prison, making 25 in all.”
And finally: “I know of nothing that better illustrates the sterility of your imaginations, your dearth of imagination, than the unbearable monotony of your insipid signals. What! nothing but valets forever sick of cleaning boots! or else workers reduced to enforced idleness! And most recently, because you had to find a 23 from somewhere, this: promenades restricted to between 2 and 3. Presto! there’s your 23.—Astounding! Sublime! What! What quickness of wit, what genius, what brilliance! But, these signals of yours, if you must make them, at least do so with an honest intent and not as so many vexations.”
3. Martin: a police sheriff.
4. Mr. 6: that is, Sade himself. He occupied Cell No. 6 at Vincennes.
LETTER V
1. Written from Vincennes, probably in early November, 1783.
2. Les Confessions du comte de***, published in 1742, is less a novel than a gallery of portraits and a collection of anecdotes.
3. François Olivier (1493-1560), Chancellor of France under François I and Henri II.
LETTER VI
1. Gaufridy was a notary public and procurator in the little town of Apt near La Coste, Sade’s favorite residence in Provence. Gaufridy’s father had handled business affairs for the Comte de Sade; the Marquis entrusted his own to the younger Gaufridy, who for twenty years supervised the management and finances of his estates at Mazan, Saumane, and Aries as well as at La Coste.
LETTER VII
1. Sade is referring to his Catalogue raisonné des œuvres de l’auteur, which he had drawn up in the Bastille on October 1, 1788, and to which we refer elsewhere in the present volume.
2. In 1781 Madame de Sade had taken up quarters at Sainte-Aure, a Carmelite convent in Paris, where she was to remain up until and after the time of her legal separation from the Marquis.
Note Concerning My Detention (1803)
I observed that the situation wherein I was being kept and the pranks being played upon me were forcing me to mistake true and authentic happenings for events produced by the imbecile spitefulness of the scoundrels who had me at their mercy; the effort to render myself insensible to those arranged by artifice had the further result of rendering me insensible to those of fate or of Nature, in such wise that for the sake of my inward peace, I preferred to credit nothing and to adopt an attitude of indifference toward everything. Whence there developed the terrible and dangerous situation of being ever ready to discount as a deliberate falsehood any announcement of some unpleasant truth, and in the interest of tranquillity, to rank it among the lies that were multiplied to foster or give rise to situations; nay, it may fairly be said that nothing did greater hurt both to my heart and to my character. To undo my mind was the aim of all this. It failed; knowing me well, my persecutors ought to have known that my mind was too strong and too philosophical to yield to such nonsense. But it did nonetheless have a hardening effect upon my heart, a souring effect upon my character: effects both pernicious and harmful to produce, and which testified to naught but the crass stupidity of these teasings, worthy of the crass dolts who inflicted and who recommended them. And what were the dire effects further produced upon me by the denial of the good books I wanted to read, by the obstacles created to hinder me from composing the good books I wanted to write! But what had one not to expect from people who, forming ciphers and signals, had, through sending me to Bicêtre, sacrificed my honor and my reputation?
That system of signals and ciphers those rogues utilized while I was in the Bastille and during the last of my detentions, wrought yet another and grave damage upon me through accustoming me to cling to any such fantastic notion or phantom as might shore up my hope and to any conjecture capable of nourishing it. Thus did my mind take on the sophistical cast I am reproached for in my writings.
By way of final remark, how, I wonder, can inconsistency be carried to the point of saying that if I wrote Justine, ’twas at the Bastille, and of thrusting me back into a situation worse still than the one in which I, as it is alleged, composed the work in question? Here is the plainest demonstration that everything done and uttered concerning me proceeded from the fanaticism of pious idiots and from the flagrant stupidity of their henchmen. . . . Oh, how right was Sophocles when he said: A husband almost always meets with his downfall either in the woman he takes for his wife or in the family he allies himself to.
Consecutive to the foregoing remarks I think it best to join a few touching on Justine, remarks I submit to the thick-skulled Ostrogoths who had me imprisoned on account of it.
Only a small amount of common sense were needed (but have incarcerators any at all?) to be convinced that I am not and could not be the author of that book. But, unfortunately, I was in the clutches of a flock of imbeciles who always use fetters for arguments and bigotry instead of philosophy, and that for the great good reason that it is always much easier to impound than to ponder and to pray to God than to be useful to mankind. In the one case some virtues are required; only hypocrisy is required in the other.
After having been once upon a time suspected of a few extravagances of the imagination similar to those depicted in Justine, I ask whether it were possible to believe that I would go and put pen to paper in order to reveal turpitudes which would necessarily bring my own to be recollected. I am guilty of those turpitudes, or else I am not: it must be the one or the other. Had I committed them, assuredly I would wrap them in the thickest silence all the rest of my life; and if I am only suspected of them without ever having committed them, what have I to gain from divulging them when this piece of folly would have for its unique result to draw questioning eyes my way? It would be the height of stupidity. And my hatred for my tormentors is such I am unwilling to resemble them in that respect.
But still another more powerful reason will, I hope, speedily convince anyone that I cannot be the author of this book. Read it attentively and one will see that through inexcusable clumsiness, through a manner of proceeding that was bound to set the author at loggerheads with wise man and fool alike, with the good as well as with the wicked, all the philosophical personages in this novel are villains to the core. However, I myself am a philosopher; everyone acquainted with me will certify that I consider philosophy my profession and my glory. . . . And can anyone for one instant, save he suppose me mad, can anyone, I say, suppose for one minute that I could bring myself to present what I hold to be the noblest of all callings, under colors so loathsome and in a shape so execrable? What would you say of him who were deliberately to go befoul in the mire the costume he was fondest of and in which he thought he struck the finest figure? Is such ineptness even conceivable? Is the like anywhere to be seen in my other works? On the contrary, all the villains I have described are devout because the devout are all villains and all philosophers decent folk, because most decent folk are philosophers. Let me be permitted a reference to the works I speak of. Is there in Aline et Valcour a better-behaved, more virtuous, more dutiful creature than Léonore? And at the same time is there a more philosophical? Is there anyone in the world more devout than my Portuguese? And does the world contain a greater villain? All my fictional persons have this tint; I have never departed from this principle. However, I repeat it, the complete opposite is manifest in Justine. Therefore it is not true that Justine is my doing. I go farther: it cannot possibly be. That is what I have just
proven.
I shall here add something better still: how very odd it is that all the pietistic rabble, all the Geoffroys, the Genlis, the Legouvés, the Chateaubriands, the La Harpes, the Luce de Lancivals, the Villeterques, how odd that all these trustees of the shaveling corporation should have flown furiously out at Justine, when that book does nothing but plead in their favor. Had they paid someone to write a work denigrating philosophy, they’d not have been able to buy anything so well done. And by all that I hold dear in the world I swear I shall never forgive myself for having been useful to individuals whom I so prodigiously despise.
No greater error could there be than to attribute to me a book . . . a book violating all my principles and of which, by all conceivable evidence, I cannot be the author; and, what is more, to make such a to-do over a work which, rightly considered, is but the final paroxysm of a diseased imagination with the ravings whereof they stupidly excite everyone’s mind by crying it up as they do.