PRIEST—At that rate there is no great need for me to talk to you about religion.
DYING MAN—True, but why not anyhow? Nothing so much amuses me as this sign of the extent to which human beings have been carried away by fanaticism and stupidity; although the prodigious spectacle of folly we are facing here may be horrible, it is always interesting. Answer me honestly, and endeavor to set personal considerations aside: were I weak enough to fall victim to your silly theories concerning the fabulous existence of the being who renders religion necessary, under what form would you advise me to worship him? Would you have me adopt the daydreams of Confucius rather than the absurdities of Brahma, should I kneel before the great snake to which the Blacks pray, invoke the Peruvians’ sun or Moses’ Lord of Hosts, to which Mohammedan sect should I rally, or which Christian heresy would be preferable in your view? Be careful how you reply.
PRIEST—Can it be doubtful?
DYING MAN—Then ’tis egoistical.
PRIEST—No, my son, ’tis as much out of love for thee as for myself I urge thee to embrace my creed.
DYING MAN—And I wonder how the one or the other of us can have much love for himself, to deign to listen to such degrading nonsense.
PRIEST—But who can be mistaken about the miracles wrought by our Divine Redeemer?
DYING MAN—He who sees in him anything else than the most vulgar of all tricksters and the most arrant of all impostors.
PRIEST—O God, you hear him and your wrath thunders not forth!
DYING MAN—No my friend, all is peace and quiet around us, because your god, be it from impotence or from reason or from whatever you please, is a being whose existence I shall momentarily concede out of condescension for you or, if you prefer, in order to accommodate myself to your sorry little perspective; because this god, I say, were he to exist, as you are mad enough to believe, could not have selected as means to persuade us, anything more ridiculous than those your Jesus incarnates.
PRIEST—What! the prophecies, the miracles, the martyrs—are they not so many proofs?
DYING MAN—How, so long as I abide by the rules of logic, how would you have me accept as proof anything which itself is lacking proof? Before a prophecy could constitute proof I should first have to be completely certain it was ever pronounced; the prophecies history tells us of belong to history and for me they can only have the force of other historical facts, whereof three out of four are exceedingly dubious; if to this I add the strong probability that they have been transmitted to us by not very objective historians, who recorded what they preferred to have us read, I shall be quite within my rights if I am skeptical. And furthermore, who is there to assure me that this prophecy was not made after the fact, that it was not a stratagem of everyday political scheming, like that which predicts a happy reign under a just king, or frost in wintertime? As for your miracles, I am not any readier to be taken in by such rubbish. All rascals have performed them, all fools have believed in them; before I’d be persuaded of the truth of a miracle I would have to be very sure the event so called by you was absolutely contrary to the laws of Nature, for only what is outside of Nature can pass for miraculous; and who is so deeply learned in Nature that he can affirm the precise point where her domain ends, and the precise point where it is infringed upon? Only two things are needed to accredit an alleged miracle, a mountebank and a few simpletons; tush, there’s the whole origin of your prodigies; all new adherents to a religious sect have wrought some; and more extraordinary still, all have found imbeciles around to believe them. Your Jesus’ feats do not surpass those of Apollonius of Tyana, yet nobody thinks to take the latter for a god; and when we come to your martyrs, assuredly, these are the feeblest of all your arguments. To produce martyrs you need but have enthusiasm on the one hand, resistance on the other; and so long as an opposed cause offers me as many of them as does yours, I shall never be sufficiently authorized to believe one better than another, but rather very much inclined to consider all of them pitiable. Ah my friend! were it true that the god you preach did exist, would he need miracle, martyr, or prophecy to secure recognition? and if, as you declare, the human heart were of his making, would he not have chosen it for the repository of his law? Then would this law, impartial for all mankind because emanating from a just god, then would it be found graved deep and writ clear in all men alike, and from one end of the world to the other, all men, having this delicate and sensitive organ in common, would also resemble each other through the homage they would render the god whence they had got it; all would adore and serve him in one identical manner, and they would be as incapable of disregarding this god as of resisting the inward impulse to worship him. Instead of that, what do I behold throughout this world? As many gods as there are countries; as many different cults as there are different minds or different imaginations; and this swarm of opinions among which it is physically impossible for me to choose, say now, is this a just god’s doing? Fie upon you, preacher, you outrage your god when you present him to me thus; rather let me deny him completely, for if he exists then I outrage him far less by my incredulity than do you through your blasphemies. Return to your senses, preacher, your Jesus is no better than Mohammed, Mohammed no better than Moses, and the three of them combined no better than Confucius, who did after all have some wise things to say while the others did naught but rave; in general, though, such people are all mere frauds: philosophers laughed at them, the mob believed them, and justice ought to have hanged them.
PRIEST—Alas, justice dealt only too harshly with one of the four.
DYING MAN—If he alone got what he deserved it was he deserved it most richly; seditious, turbulent, calumniating, dishonest, libertine, a clumsy buffoon, and very mischievous; he had the art of overawing common folk and stirring up the rabble; and hence came in line for punishment in a kingdom where the state of affairs was what it was in Jerusalem then. They were very wise indeed to get rid of him, and this perhaps is the one case in which my extremely lenient and also extremely tolerant maxims are able to allow the severity of Themis; I excuse any misbehavior save that which may endanger the government one lives under, kings and their majesties are the only things I respect; and whoever does not love his country and his king were better dead than alive.
PRIEST—But you do surely believe something awaits us after this life, you must at some time or another have sought to pierce the dark shadows enshrouding our mortal fate, and what other theory could have satisfied your anxious spirit, than that of the numberless woes that betide him who has lived wickedly, and an eternity of rewards for him whose life has been good?
DYING MAN—What other, my friend? that of nothingness, it has never held terrors for me, in it I see naught but what is consoling and unpretentious; all the other theories are of pride’s composition, this one alone is of reason’s. Moreover, ’tis neither dreadful nor absolute, this nothingness. Before my eyes have I not the example of Nature’s perpetual generations and regenerations? Nothing perishes in the world, my friend, nothing is lost; man today, worm tomorrow, the day after tomorrow a fly; is it not to keep steadily on existing? And what entitles me to be rewarded for virtues which are in me through no fault of my own, or again punished for crimes wherefor the ultimate responsibility is not mine? how are you to put your alleged god’s goodness into tune with this system, and can he have wished to create me in order to reap pleasure from punishing me, and that solely on account of a choice he does not leave me free to determine?
PRIEST—You are free.
DYING MAN—Yes, in terms of your prejudices; but reason puts them to rout, and the theory of human freedom was never devised except to fabricate that of grace, which was to acquire such importance for your reveries. What man on earth, seeing the scaffold a step beyond the crime, would commit it were he free not to commit it? We are the pawns of an irresistible force, and never for an instant is it within our power to do anything but make the best of our lot and forge ahead along the path that has been traced for us. There is not
a single virtue which is not necessary to Nature and conversely not a single crime which she does not need and it is in the perfect balance she maintains between the one and the other that her immense science consists; but can we be guilty for adding our weight to this side or that when it is she who tosses us onto the scales? no more so than the hornet who thrusts his dart into your skin.
PRIEST—Then we should not shrink from the worst of all crimes.
DYING MAN—I say nothing of the kind. Let the evil deed be proscribed by law, let justice smite the criminal, that will be deterrent enough; but if by misfortune we do commit it even so, let’s not cry over spilled milk; remorse is inefficacious, since it does not stay us from crime, futile since it does not repair it, therefore it is absurd to beat one’s breast, more absurd still to dread being punished in another world if we have been lucky to escape it in this. God forbid that this be construed as encouragement to crime, no, we should avoid it as much as we can, but one must learn to shun it through reason and not through false fears which lead to naught and whose effects are so quickly overcome in any moderately steadfast soul. Reason, sir—yes, our reason alone should warn us that harm done our fellows can never bring happiness to us; and our heart, that contributing to their felicity is the greatest joy Nature has accorded us on earth; the entirety of human morals is contained in this one phrase: Render others as happy as one desires oneself to be, and never inflict more pain upon them than one would like to receive at their hands. There you are, my friend, those are the only principles we should observe, and you need neither god nor religion to appreciate and subscribe to them, you need only have a good heart. But I feel my strength ebbing away; preacher, put away your prejudices, unbend, be a man, be human, without fear and without hope forget your gods and your religions too: they are none of them good for anything but to set man at odds with man, and the mere name of these horrors has caused greater loss of life on earth than all other wars and all other plagues combined. Renounce the idea of another world; there is none, but do not renounce the pleasure of being happy and of making for happiness in this. Nature offers you no other way of doubling your existence, of extending it. —My friend, lewd pleasures were ever dearer to me than anything else, I have idolized them all my life and my wish has been to end it in their bosom; my end draws near, six women lovelier than the light of day are waiting in the chamber adjoining, I have reserved them for this moment, partake of the feast with me, following my example embrace them instead of the vain sophistries of superstition, under their caresses strive for a little while to forget your hypocritical beliefs.
NOTE
The dying man rang, the women entered; and after he had been a little while in their arms the preacher became one whom Nature has corrupted, all because he had not succeeded in explaining what a corrupt nature is.
Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795)
The year 1795 was a fruitful and auspicious one for Sade. Almost miraculously, he had survived the Reign of Terror and, just six weeks after the execution of Robespierre, was once again set free, on October 15, 1794. Sade’s printer, Girouard, who had published Justine and, before his arrest under the Terror had been preparing Aline et Valcour for publication, had not been so lucky: on January 8, 1794, he went to the guillotine.
After Sade regained his freedom, he managed to retrieve that portion of Aline et Valcour which Girouard had already printed prior to his arrest, and by mid-summer of 1795 the first edition of this four-volume work, which Sade acknowledged, was published.
This same year there also appeared a small format, two-volume work, of anonymous authorship, enticingly entitled La Philosophie dans le boudoir. Although anonymous, it was offered as a “posthumous work by the author of Justine,” a subterfuge Sade was to utilize two years later for the publication of La Nouvelle Justine. The place of publication of the original edition was given as Londres, aux dépens de la Compagnie, and besides an allegorical frontispiece, it contained four erotic engravings. The epigraph of the original edition is La mère en préscrira la lecture à sa fille (Mothers will make this volume mandatory reading for their daughters). A second edition, in two octavo volumes of 203 and 191 pages respectively, appeared ten years later, in 1805, with the added subtitle—for which Sade, then in the Charenton asylum, can scarcely have been responsible—ou les Instituteurs immoraux (or The Immoral Teachers). Curiously, the epigraph of this second edition appeared—whether the change was intentional or not is a moot point—as La mère en proscrira la lecture à sa fille (Mothers will forbid their daughters to read it).
Together with the Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man, the Philosophy in the Bedroom is the only other nontheatrical work of Sade’s written in the form of dialogue. Consisting of seven “Dialogues,” in which philosophical speculations and dissertations on morality, history, and religion commingle with typical Sadean sexual fantasies, this work is one of the most specific, eloquent, and least redundant of Sade’s major fictions. The four protagonists are Eugénie de Mistival, a chaste fifteen-year-old, a virgin and neophyte who is to be initiated into the mysteries of sensual pleasure; twenty-six-year-old Madame de Saint-Ange, a woman “of extreme lubricity’”; her brother, the Chevalier de Mirvel, also a debauchee of considerable talents but who, unlike his sister and the fourth protagonist, Dolmancé (“The most corrupt and dangerous of men”), draws the line at the boundary of cruelty. All three of the initiators, with the possible exception of the Chevalier, who is still wrestling with his soul on the question of inflicting cruelty, would qualify as Sade’s Unique Beings, of whom Maurice Blanchot makes mention in his Introduction. And, by the end of the day, Eugénie too, the aptest of pupils, is well on her way along the path of libertinage, that is (in Sade s canon), of freedom.
The economy and disposition of the four principal characters enable Sade to expound his views both positively and negatively, for teaching, initiating the neophyte, is not only instructing but also disabusing: one must rid Eugénie’s pretty little head of all the false notions of religion, morality, and virtue which a hypocritical mother and false society have instilled in her since birth.
The long “Fifth Dialogue” of this work contains the well-known “Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans,” which Le Chevalier reads aloud. Although it may detract from the otherwise considerable unity of the work, this “pamphlet”1 is a work of considerable force, and perhaps the most eloquent refutation to those who accuse Sade of, or simplistically assimilate him to, the forces of evil and darkness which our century has spawned: fascism. The scope and complexity of Sade’s ideas—independently of their individual merit or lack of merit—are such that they abound in contradictions and paradoxes, and may be quoted to prove or demonstrate a vast spectrum of opinion. But one thing is certain: Sade was for fewer laws, not more; for less restrictive social restraints on the individual, not more oppressive ones. As Maurice Heine has noted:
It is with the individual, with the countless individuals who go to make up human societies, that Sade has placed the only organic strength these societies may possess. . . . He offers a withering criticism of any social restraints which reduce to whatever slight degree the activity of the incoercible human element. In his eyes, the only thing which will lead him to accept not a social pact but a social compromise—which can be denounced and renewed at any time—is the self-interest of the individual. For him, any society which fails to understand this fundamental truth is destined to perish.
In the light of Krafft-Ebing, Freud, or the detailed case histories of Wilhelm Stekel, the Philosophy in the Bedroom may appear somewhat less audacious than it did to previous generations (or those select few of the earlier generations who clandestinely were able to read it). That it is one of Sade’s most seminal and compelling works there can be no doubt. It possesses another virtue: from one end to the other, there reigns a humor—a black and often grotesque humor, admittedly—which one looks for in vain in his strictly theatrical productions, and which perhaps exists nowh
ere else in his writing with such éclat, save in his extraordinary letters.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TO LIBERTINES
DIALOGUE THE FIRST
DIALOGUE THE SECOND
DIALOGUE THE THIRD
DIALOGUE THE FOURTH
DIALOGUE THE FIFTH
DIALOGUE THE SIXTH
DIALOGUE THE SEVENTH AND LAST
TO LIBERTINES
Voluptuaries of all ages, of every sex, it is to you only that I offer this work; nourish yourselves upon its principles: they favor your passions, and these passions, whereof coldly insipid moralists put you in fear, are naught but the means Nature employs to bring man to the ends she prescribes to him; harken only to these delicious promptings, for no voice save that of the passions can conduct you to happiness.
Lewd women, let the voluptuous Saint-Ange be your model; after her example, be heedless of all that contradicts pleasure’s divine laws, by which all her life she was enchained.
You young maidens, too long constrained by a fanciful Virtue’s absurd and dangerous bonds and by those of a disgusting religion, imitate the fiery Eugénie; be as quick as she to destroy, to spurn all those ridiculous precepts inculcated in you by imbecile parents.
And you, amiable debauchees, you who since youth have known no limits but those of your desires and who have been governed by your caprices alone, study the cynical Dolmancé, proceed like him and go as far as he if you too would travel the length of those flowered ways your lechery prepares for you; in Dolmancé’s academy be at last convinced it is only by exploring and enlarging the sphere of his tastes and whims, it is only by sacrificing everything to the senses’ pleasure that this individual, who never asked to be cast into this universe of woe, that this poor creature who goes under the name of Man, may be able to sow a smattering of roses atop the thorny path of life.