Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings

  Let us see how well the crime corresponds to the punishment. It seems established that Sade gave a spanking to a whore in Paris: does that fit with a year in jail? Some aphrodisiac sweets to some girls in Marseilles: does that justify ten years in the Bastille? He seduces his sister-in-law: does that justify a month in the Conciergerie? He causes no end of bother to his powerful, his redoubtable in-laws, the Président and the Présidente de Montreuil: does that justify two years in a fortress? He enables several moderates to escape (we are in the midst of the Terror): does that justify a year in Madelonnettes? It is acknowledged that he published some obscene books, that he attacked Bonaparte’s entourage; and it is not impossible that he feigned madness. Does that justify fourteen years in Charenton, three in Bicêtre, and one in Sainte-Pélagie? Would it not strongly appear as if, for a whole string of French governments, any and every excuse sufficed for clapping him behind bars? and, who knows, as if Sade did about all he could to get himself imprisoned? Perhaps; one thing however is certain: we know that Sade ran his risks; that he accepted them—that he multiplied them. We also know that in reading him we are possibly running risks of our own. Here am I, free to think what thoughts I will about that descendant of the chaste Laure de Noves,2 to wonder what there may have been that was good in him, and at any rate delightful; to muse upon that extreme distinction, upon those blue eyes into which, when he was a child, ladies liked to look; upon that faint hint of effeminacy about his figure, upon those sparkling teeth;3 upon those wartime triumphs; upon that violent bent for pleasure; upon those repartees, impetuous but subtle and perhaps tinged with something of cockiness and vainglory; upon the young Provençal nobleman whose vassals come to do him homage, and who is accompanied wherever he goes by the too faithful love, the love-in-spite-of-everything of that tall and somewhat equine and rather boisterous Renée—his wife—at bottom a good and gentle woman.

  Sade paid, and paid more than his share

  III. THE DIVINE MARQUIS

  I shall leave aside the special efficacity Duclos had in mind when he spoke of “those books you read with only one hand.” Not that it isn’t interesting, and to a certain extent sensational: more than one very serious and even abstruse writer has dreamed that his writings might exert a similar influence, generate similar repercussions (on other levels, of course). But touching all this there is not much to be said, since such results are usually unpredictable. Then, too, it is usually agreed that veiled language and allusion (or if you prefer, teasing and smuttiness) are more apt to produce them than forthright and unadorned obscenity. Now, veiled language and allusion are rare in Sade, and smuttiness nonexistent. Indeed, that may be what is held against him. Nothing is further from him than that kind of smug smile, of malicious innuendo which Brantôme displays in his tales of thoroughbred distractions, which Voltaire or Diderot show in their spicy passages, and that mincing deviousness which Crébillon, in his stories of alcoves and sofas, brings to discouraging perfection. There is in literature a freemasonry of pleasure, whose winks and nods and half-spoken enticements and ellipses are known to all its members. But Sade breaks with these conventions. He is as unhampered by the laws and rules of the erotic novel as was ever an Edgar Allan Poe by those of the detective story, a Victor Hugo by those of the serialized novel. He is unceasingly direct, explicit—tragic too. If at all costs he had to be classified, it would be among those authors who, as Montaigne once said, castrate you. Surely not among those who titillate you. And there is another sort of device he spurns.

  It is the one we must term the literary device. Many a famous work owes its value—and in any case its renown—to the incorporation of an intricate system of literary allusions. Voltaire in his tragedies, Delille in his poems evoke in every line, and take credit in evoking, Racine or Corneille, or Virgil, or Homer. To cite only the nearest rival of Sade (and, as it were, his competitor in the domain of Evil) it is fairly obvious that Laclos is steeped to saturation in a literature—whereof, moreover, he makes the cleverest, the most intelligent use. Les Liaisons dangereuses is the joust of courtly love (for everything consists in finding out whether Valmont will succeed in meriting Madame de Merteuil), waged by Racinian heroines (neither Phaedra nor Andromache is lacking) within the lists of the facile society painted by Crébillon, by Nerciat, by Vivant-Denon (for everything proceeds straight and briskly to the bedchamber—everything at least is envisaged with this denouement in view). Such is the key to its mystery: discreetly wrapped up inside Les Liaisons is a little course on the history of literature for grownups. For the most mysterious authors are generally the most literary, and the strangeness in their writings is owing precisely to the disparate elements they contain, to this yoking together of characters come from the remotest milieux—and works—who are quite astonished to encounter one another. Laclos, moreover, was never able to reproduce his prodigious feat again.

  Neither a pornographer nor a littérateur

  But Sade, with his glaciers and his gulfs and his terrifying castles, with the unremitting onslaught he delivers against God—and against man himself—with his drumming insistence and his repetitions and his dreadful platitudes, with his stubborn pursuit of a sensational but exhaustively rationalized action, with this constantly maintained presence of all the parts of the body (not a one of them but somehow serves), of all the mind’s ideas (Sade had read as widely as Marx), with this singular disdain for literary artifices but with this unfaltering demand for the truth, with this look of a man forever animated and entranced by one of those undefinable dreams that sometimes take rise in the instinct, with these tremendous squanderings of energy and these expenditures of life which evoke redoubtable primitive festivals—or great modern wars, festivals of another sort perhaps—with these vast raidings of the world or, better still, this looting he is the first to perpetrate on man, Sade has no need of analyses or of alternatives, of images or of dramatic turns of events, of elegance or of amplifications. He neither distinguishes nor separates. He repeats himself over again. His books remind one of the sacred books of the great religions. From them emanates, for brief instants caught in some maxim—

  One of those dreams whose source is in instinct

  Dangerous moments there are when the physical self is fired by the mind’s extravagances. . . .

  There is no better way to familiarize oneself with death than through the medium of a libertine idea.

  They declaim against the passions without bothering to think that it is from their flame philosophy lights its torch. . . .

  —(and what maxims they are!) that mighty and obsessing murmur which sometimes arises from literature, and is perhaps its justification: Amiel,4 Montaigne, the Kalevala, the Ramayana. If it be objected that these I include among sacred books have never had their religion nor their faithful, I shall begin my reply by saying that it is a very good thing and that we should be glad (thereby being in a freer position to judge the books on their own merits instead of by their effects). Upon further thought, I shall add that I am not so sure after all, and that the religion in question was by its very nature condemned to clandestinity—but able, from hiding, to address an appeal to us now and then: three lines out of Baudelaire:

  Who hide a whip under their trailing robes

  And mingle, in the dismal wood and lonely night,

  The foam of pleasure with the flow of tears.

  Joseph de Maistre’s remark: “Woe unto the nation that were to ban torture”;5 Swinburne’s phrase “the martyred Marquis”; Lautréamont’s “Cruelty’s delights! They are delights that endure”; Pushkin’s observation upon “the joy we are hurled into by whatever heralds death.” As for Chateaubriand—I am wary of the somewhat murky pleasure that Chateaubriand, among others, derives from the death of women who once loved him, of regimes he fought for, of the religion he believes the true one. And there are reasons, though they are not easily elucidated reasons, why Sade has so often been designated as the Divine Marquis. Whether or not he actually was a marquis is open to q
uestion; but there is no question that a certain number of persons, and apparently respectable persons, held him to be divine—or properly diabolical, which is something akin.

  Sade divine if not a marquis

  Still, on this score a doubt does assail me. I wonder, when today I behold so many writers struggling so hard and so consciously to avoid literary artifice in their treatment of an indescribable event of whose erotic and at the same time frightful character we are given every assurance, mindful in all circumstances to misconstrue Creation, and busy looking for the sublime in the infamous, the great in the subversive, demanding furthermore that every work commit and compromise its author forever in keeping with a kind of efficacity (which is not without its resemblance to the wholly physiological and local efficacity I referred to earlier), I wonder if one is not compelled to recognize, in a terror so extreme, less an invention than a remembrance, less an ideal than a nostalgia, and in short if our contemporary literature, in that area where it seems to us most alive—most aggressive, in any case—is not oriented entirely toward the past and, to be precise, dominated, determined by Sade as eighteenth-century tragedy was by Racine.

  But my aim was only to talk about Justine.

  IV. THE SURPRISES OF LOVE

  Well, Justine possesses every virtue, and for each of them she finds herself punished. Compassionate Justine is robbed by a beggar. Pious, she is raped by a monk. Honest, she is fleeced by a usurer. She refuses to become the accomplice in a larceny, a poisoning, an armed assault (for ill luck and poverty cast her into strange company), and it is she, the clumsy one, who is charged with theft, with brigandage, with murder. And so it goes with her throughout. And yet, against villainies of every description the only weapons Justine knows how to use are a pure heart and a sensitive soul. They prove inadequate: to whomever abuses her she brings good fortune, and the monsters who torment her become a minister, surgeon to His Majesty, a millionaire. Here’s a novel which bears every resemblance to those edifying works in which vice is seen punished every time, and virtue rewarded. Except that in Justine it’s the other way around; but this novel’s failing, strictly from the viewpoint of the novel (which is our viewpoint), remains the same: the reader always knows how things are going to end. Now Justine’s ending fails even of the triteness which finally made an unduly virtuous conclusion one of the conventions of the novel, a convention hardly less tried and true than a novel’s division into chapters or episodes. Sade, from all evidence, takes his unhappy denouements extremely seriously, and shows himself taken unaware by them every time. And the strangest thing of all is that they take us unaware too.

  The riddle of the Gothic novel

  This surprise ending poses a singular problem. Singular, for Sade will have none of the facilities that were commonly being employed at about the same period by his rivals, the Gothic novelists. Amazing the reader is too easy when, like Mrs. Radcliffe or Matthew Lewis, you enlist the help of phantoms, supernatural events, infernal machineries, all inherently startling. However, it is with man alone Sade wishes to deal; and, he specifies, with natural man such as he had been painted by, for example, Richardson or Fielding.6 Therefore no ogres or wizards, no angels or demons—above all no gods!—but rather the human faculty which forges these gods, angels, or demons, rather the vices or virtues which, when they lead us into startling situations, set this faculty to work. The riddle thus posed has two or three words, the first of them being a very plain and everyday one: modesty.

  It is a curious thing that the eighteenth century, to which we owe the most cynical descriptions of manners in our literature, also gave us two great portraitists of modesty: one of them, as everybody knows, was Marivaux. The other, and it is beyond me why everybody persists in not knowing it, was Sade. It is curious, or rather it is not curious at all. So much fear and trembling in the face of love and so much defiance of fear, so many self-respects to preserve and so many withdrawals into the self, and this refusal to use one’s eyes and ears which reveals and at the same time protects everything that was finally to go under the title of marivaudage—for Marivaux shares with Sade the dubious distinction of having left his name to a certain form of amorous behavior: and I am not sure, indeed, that the attribution is any more correct or better understood in the case of Sade than in that of Marivaux; that shyness and that dread of being hurt are only explicable, only understandable if there are chances of being hurt and if, in sum, love is a perilous affair. Marivaux’ heroines are modest to such a degree one would think they had read Justine. While Justine herself . . .

  Sade, painter of modesty

  Whatever befalls her, Justine is unprepared for it. Experience teaches her nothing. Her soul remains ignorant, her body more ignorant still. One cannot even allow her an occasional flutter of the eyelashes, a hint of a smile. Never will she take the first step. Even when in love, it does not occur to her to kiss Bressac. “Although my imagination,” she says, “may sometimes have strayed to these pleasures, I believed them to be chaste as the God who inspired them, given by Nature to serve as consolation to humans, engendered of love and of sensibility; very far was I from believing that man, after the example of beasts . . .” Each time she is amazed when upon her are performed operations whose meaning she scarcely suspects, and whose interest she fails totally to comprehend. She is the image of the most heart-rending virtue—and, alas, of virtue most heartlessly rent. “Modesty,” they used to say in those days, “is a quality you put on with pins. . . .” But as worn by Justine, the pins go through into her flesh and bring forth blood when her dress is removed. Shall it be said that it requires considerable good grace on the part of the reader to let himself be surprised and hurt along with her? No; for that reader is free to interpret as moral and sentimental anguishes all the very physical anguishes displayed before him. In its movement Justine is kin to those fairy tales where we are told Cinderella is shod in glass slippers—and we understand immediately (unless we are a little dull) that Cinderella walks with infinite caution. And then too we live on the verge of the strange. What, when you come down to it, is more strange than at the end of one’s arms to have these queer prehensile organs, reddish and wrinkled, one’s hands, and little transparent gems at the divergent extremities of these hands? Sometimes we catch ourselves in the act of eating, wholly absorbed in grinding fragments of dead animals between the other gems that stud our mouth. So it is with the rest; and among all the things we do there is perhaps not a single one which will brook prolonged attention. However, there exists a domain wherein strangeness enters neither by chance nor exceptionally, but where it is constant and the rule.

  For, when all is said and done, we are not greatly bewildered by eating: we have (vaguely) the impression that our present meal is the sequel to a thousand past meals, which it strongly resembles and which serve as its guarantee. Whereas each time we fall in love again, it seems to us—so incomparable and so indescribable is every feature of our beloved—that we have never loved before. Poets speak of cool fountains, of bowers of bliss, of hyacinths and roses; they speak in vain, for they evoke hardly more than a faint reflection of the greatest surprise life reserves for us.

  Love and pleasure are unpredictable

  On another plane, the same surprise stamps the expressions and proverbs used when in common speech the secret organs are referred to as “little brother,” “little man,” “little friend,” “the little creature that lives under a bush and lives on seed.” What in the world can they have done to us, these organs, that we are thus unable to talk about them simply? Ah, they do at least this: they refuse to be treated with familiarity. In such sort that the prose writer, regarding them, can only record surprise and bewilderment?

  Yes, doubtless. Or else he may each time vary and renew the reasons for this surprise, so that it is ever fresh for the reader and never, instead of suggesting the wonderful to him, imposes bewilderment upon him. Thus does Sade proceed, in his own manner. For what finally do such a multitude of approaches to pleasure
and so many different and curious ways of making love signify if not that the ways of love and pleasure perpetually amaze us, are perpetually unpredictable? Justine, I have said, reads—or should be read—like a fairy tale. We may add that it is a tale solely concerned with that particular feature of love, paradoxical and in itself nigh unto incredible, which drives lovers, as Lucretia put it, to ravage the bodies of those they love.

  However, there is one final word to the riddle.

  V. JUSTINE, OR THE NEW OEDIPUS

  Sade did not wait until he reached prison before beginning to read. He devoured the favorite books of his age. He knew the Encyclopedia by heart. For Voltaire and Rousseau his feelings were a mixture of sympathy and aversion. The aversion was on grounds of logic: Sade considered those two thinkers incoherent. Inconsequent, that was the word for it then. But he accepted their exactingness, their principles—and their prejudices. Of which this is the gist.

  The eighteenth century had just made a discovery, and was not a little proud of it, that a mystery is not an explanation. No, and that a myth isn’t an explanation either. On the contrary, it was noticed that no sooner is a myth forged than, in order to stand, it needs another myth to support it. The Indians hold that it is upon the back of a tortoise that the world is carried. So be it; but upon whose back is the tortoise borne? It is God that created the world. All right; but who created God? To be sure, this discovery (if it deserves the name of one) had been made earlier; but the Encyclopedists now excel in giving it this popular and, at the same time, fashionable form. Henceforth, all talk of God will be for memory’s sake; and it will be of a God against whom Voltaire—and later Sade—range man alone, man (they go on to say) who is nothing other than man. Man (Voltaire adds) who is not noble. Natural man, man minus the Fable.