Sade knows this. “And what if luck should turn against you?” Justine asks him. Sade’s reply is to delve deeper into his system and demonstrate that to him who casts his lot wholeheartedly with evil, nothing evil can ever happen. This is the basic tenet, the very cornerstone of his work: to Virtue, nothing but misfortune; to Vice, the reward of constant prosperity. There are times, especially in the early versions of Justine, when this assertion seems to be a simple meretricious hypothesis which the author, always adroitly maneuvering the tale to suit his own needs, advances as proof. One has the impression that Sade is spinning fables and being taken in by them when he entrusts matters to a black Providence whose function it is to shower blessings on all those who have opted for evil. But in La Nouvelle Justine and in Juliette everything changes. There can be no doubt that Sade is profoundly convinced of at least this: that the man of absolute egoism can never fall upon evil days; better, that he will, without exception, be forever happy, and happy to the highest degree. A mad idea? Perhaps. But with Sade the idea is allied to forces so violent that they finally render irrefutable, in his eyes, the ideas they support. In actual fact, the translation of this conviction into doctrine is not at all that simple. Sade resorts to several solutions, he tries them endlessly, although none can really ever satisfy him. The first is strictly verbal: it consists in repudiating the social contract which, according to Sade, is the safeguard of the weak and, theoretically, constitutes a grave menace for the powerful. In practice, however, the Powerful One knows full well how to utilize the law to consolidate his advantages. But if he does this, then he is powerful only through the law, and it is the law which, in principle, incarnates power. Except in time of war, or during a period of anarchy, the Sovereign is merely the sovereign, for even if the law helps him to crush the weak, it is nevertheless through an authority created in the name of the weak that he becomes master, substituting the false bond of a pact for the naked strength of man. “My neighbors’ passions frighten me infinitely less than do the law’s injustices, for my neighbors’ passions are contained by mine, whilst nothing constrains, nothing checks the injustices of the law.” Nothing checks the inequities of the law for the simple reason that there is nothing above it, hence it is always superior to me. This is why, even if it serves me, it also oppresses me. This is also why Sade, whatever affinity he may have had for the Revolution and however much he was able to identify himself with it, was drawn to it only to the extent that it constituted for a short time the possibility of a regime without law, since it represented a transition period from one set of laws to the other. Sade gave voice to this idea in the following curious observations:
The rule of law is inferior to that of anarchy: the most obvious proof of what I assert is the fact that any government is obliged to plunge itself into anarchy whenever it aspires to remake its constitution. In order to abrogate its former laws, it is compelled to establish a revolutionary regime in which there is no law: this regime finally gives birth to new laws, but this second state is necessarily less pure than the first, since it derives from it. . . .
Actually, Power adapts itself to, and refuses to acknowledge the authority of, any regime; in the midst of a world denatured by law, it creates for itself an enclave in which all law is silenced, a closed place wherein all legal sovereignty is ignored rather than contested. In the statutes of the Société des Amis du Crime, there is one article which prohibits all political activity.
The Society respects the government under which it lives, and if it places itself above the law it is because one of its principles specifies that man does not have the power to make laws in conflict with the laws of Nature; but the disorders of the Society’s members, being always interior, must never scandalize either the governed or the governments.
And if in Sade’s writings it sometimes does come to pass that the Power undertakes some political action or becomes involved in a revolution—as is the case with Borchamps who conspires with the Loge du Nord to overthrow the Swedish monarchy—the reasons which lead him to do so are quite unrelated to any desire to emancipate the law. “Why do you so loathe Swedish despotism?” one of the conspirators is asked. “Jealousy, ambition, pride, despair at the thought of being dominated, my own desire to tyrannize others.” “But does the happiness of the people have no bearing upon your opinions?” “All I am interested in is my own.”
If pressed, Power can always maintain that it has nothing to fear from the ordinary man, who is weak, and likewise nothing to fear from the law, which it refuses to recognize as being legitimate. The real problem is the relationship of the powerful among themselves. These peerless men, who come from the highest as well as the lowest echelons of society, necessarily meet: the similarity of their tastes brings them together; the fact that they are exceptions, by setting them both apart, also brings them together. But what relation can there be between exceptions? Sade certainly pondered this question at great length. As always, he moves from one possible solution to another until finally, at the end of his chain of logic, he brings forth from this enigma the only word that matters to him. When he devises a secret society governed by strict conventions, the purpose of which is to curb excesses, he can cite the precedent of numerous similar societies then much in vogue. For Sade lived at a time when the freemasonry of libertinage and freemasonry itself led to the emergence, in the midst of a society in ruins, of a great number of secret societies, clandestine “colleges” founded on the complicity of passions and on a mutual respect for dangerous ideas. The Société des Amis du Crime is an effort of this kind. Its statutes, studied and analyzed at great length, forbid its members from indulging in any displays of ferocious passion among themselves, stipulating that these passions can only be satiated in two seraglios which are to be peopled by members of the virtuous classes. When they are in each other’s company, the members must “give themselves over to their freest fantasies, and do everything”; but, says Sade, “no cruel passions allowed.” We can easily see why: it is a question of avoiding at all costs the encounter, on a terrain where evil would become their undoing, of those who expect only pleasure from evil. Superior libertines are allies, but never meet.
Such a compromise cannot satisfy Sade. It must therefore be pointed out that, although the heroes of his books are constantly drawn into close alliance with one another by the conventions which determine the limits of their power and superimpose order on chaos, the possibility of betrayal is forever present: between accomplices there is a constantly mounting tension, so much so that they ultimately feel themselves less bound by the oath that unites them than by the mutual need to violate this oath. This situation makes the final part of Juliette extremely dramatic. Juliette is a woman of principle. She respects libertinage, and when she meets an accomplished criminal, the perfection of the crime for which he is responsible and the power of destruction which he represents not only induce her to join forces with him but, what is more, lead her to spare his life if she can, even when this alliance becomes dangerous for her. Thus, even though she is in danger of being killed by the monster Minski, she refuses to have him murdered. “This man is too great a scourge to humanity for me to deprive the world of him,” she says. And then there is another character, the author of veritable masterpieces of lubricity: yes, him she finally does destroy, but only because she has noticed that, upon emerging from these orgies of blood, he has developed the habit of retiring to a chapel to purify his soul. Is the perfect criminal therefore presumed to be exempt from the passions in which he indulges? Can it be that there is a principle, an ultimate principle, which guarantees that the libertine can never be either the object or the victim of his own libertinage? “You have told me a hundred times,” Madame de Donis says to Juliette, “that libertines never harm one another. Do you care to refute this maxim?” The reply is clear: Juliette does indeed refute it; Madame de Donis is sacrificed. And gradually the most beloved confederates in crime, the most respected companions of debauchery perish, victims either of th
eir own fidelity or their perjury, or of the lassitude or the ardor of their feelings. Nothing can save them, nothing excuses them. Scarcely has Juliette sent her best friends to their death than she turns toward new allies and exchanges with them vows of eternal confidence. Vows they themselves find risible, since they know full well that the only reason they assign any limitations to their excesses is in order to be in a position to harvest the pleasure which comes from exceeding them.
The following exchange of conversation among several masters of crime fairly describes this situation. One of the criminals, Gernand, says of his cousin Bressac: “You know, he is my heir. And yet I dare say he is not in any hurry for my life: we have the same tastes, we think in the same way, he knows that he has a sure friend in me.” That’s all very true, says Bressac, I shall never harm a hair on your head. And yet this Bressac points out that another of their relatives, d’Esterval, who makes a specialty of slitting the throats of passing travelers, had come close to murdering him. “Yes,” says d’Esterval, “but as a relative, never as a companion in debauchery.” But Bressac remains skeptical, and, indeed, they concur that this consideration almost failed to stop Dorothée, d’Esterval’s wife. And what does this Dorothée reply? “Your praise is in your death warrant. The terrible habit I have of immolating the men who please me means that your sentence is passed and inscribed right next to my declaration of love.” All of which is quite clear. But under these conditions what becomes of Sade’s proposition concerning happiness through Evil? What happens to that certainty that the man of all vices will always be happy, as he who has but a single virtue will perforce be plagued by misfortune? Actually, Sade’s work is strewn with the corpses of libertines struck down at the very pinnacle of their glory. Justine is not alone in her wretchedness; misfortune strikes the strongest and most energetic of Sade’s heroines as well, the superb Clairwil, as it strikes Saint-Fond, murdered by Noirceuil, and the licentious Borghese, who is hurled headlong into the crater of a volcano; as, indeed, it strikes literally hundreds of perfect criminals. Strange denouements, singular triumphs for these perverse men! How can Sade’s mad reason remain blind to all these many contradictions it contains? But it is precisely these contradictions which, for Sade, provide him with his proof, and this is why:
A cursory reading of Justine can be deceiving; one may erroneously think it no more than a rather coarse and vulgar piece of fiction. We see this virtuous girl who is forever being raped, beaten, tortured, the victim of a fate bent on her destruction. And when we read Juliette we follow a depraved girl as she flies from pleasure to pleasure. It is hardly likely that we shall be convinced by such a plot. But the point is that we have overlooked the book’s most important aspect: the reader who is merely attentive to the sadness of one and the satisfaction of the other has neglected to remark that the two sisters’ stories are basically identical, that everything which happens to Justine also happens to Juliette, that both go through the same gantlet of experiences and are put to the same painful tests. Juliette is also cast into prison, roundly flogged, sentenced to the rack, endlessly tortured. Hers is a hideous existence, but here is the rub: from these ills, these agonies, she derives pleasure; these tortures delight her. “How delicious are the irons wrought by the crime one adores.” Not to mention those uncommon tortures which are so terrible for Justine and which, for Juliette, are a source of pure delight. In one scene set in the château of a wicked magistrate, poor Justine is subjected to tortures which are truly execrable. Her pain is indescribable. The reader is taken completely aback by such injustice. And then what happens? A thoroughly depraved girl who has witnessed the scene and become inflamed by the spectacle demands that the same torture be inflicted on her, right there on the spot. And from it she derives the most exquisite pleasure. Thus it is true that Virtue is the source of man’s unhappiness, not because it exposes him to painful or unfortunate circumstances but because, if Virtue were eliminated, what was once painful then becomes pleasurable, and torments become voluptuous.
For Sade, sovereign man is impervious to evil because no one can do him any harm. He is a man possessed of every passion, and his passions are slaked by any and every thing. We have had a tendency to take Jean Paulhan’s conclusions that Sade’s sadism conceals a contrary propensity as a paradox too witty and too clever to be true.1 But we can see that this idea is the very heart of Sade’s system. The absolute egoist is he who is able to transform everything disagreeable into something likable, everything repugnant into something attractive. Like the bedroom philosopher, he declares: “I love everything, I enjoy everything, my desire is to commingle all kinds and contraries.” And this is why Sade, in his Les 120 Journées, has set himself the gigantic task of drawing up the complete inventory of anomalies and aberrations, listing every kind of human possibility. In order to be at the mercy of nothing, it was necessary for him to experience everything.
You shall know nothing if you have not known everything, and if you are timid enough to stop with what is natural, Nature will elude your grasp forever.
One understands why the sorrowful Justine’s objection: “And what if luck should turn against you?” cannot upset the criminal soul. For if indeed luck does reverse itself and turn into misfortune, the latter will actually be no more than another facet of fortune itself, as much to be desired and as satisfying as the former. But you are risking the gallows! You may end in the most ignominious of deaths. “That,” replies the libertine, “is my most cherished desire.” “Ah, Juliette,” Borghese says,
if only my transgressions can lead me like the last of creatures to the fate to which their wild abandon conducts them. The gallows itself would be for me a voluptuous throne, and there would I face death by relishing the pleasure of expiring a victim of my crimes.
And another:
The true libertine loves even the reproaches he receives for the unspeakable deeds he has done. Have we not seen some who loved the very tortures human vengeance was readying for them, who submitted to them joyfully, who beheld the scaffold as a throne of glory upon which they would have been most grieved not to perish with the same courage they had displayed in the loathsome exercise of their heinous crimes? There is the man at the ultimate degree of meditated corruption.
Against a Power such as this, what can the law do? It believes it is punishing him, and actually it is rewarding him; it exalts him by debasing him. Similarly, what can the libertine do, what injury inflict upon his peer? He may one day betray and destroy him, but this betrayal is the source of savage pleasure to him who is the victim of it and who views such a betrayal as the confirmation of all his suspicions and can die reveling in the thought that he has been the occasion for yet a new crime (not to mention other joys).
One of Sade’s most curious heroines is named Amélie. She lives in Sweden, and one day she seeks out Borchamps, the conspirator whom we have already mentioned. Borchamps, hoping for a gigantic massacre, has just betrayed all his fellow plotters and delivered them into the hands of the king. This betrayal has fired Amélie’s enthusiasm. “I love your ferocity,” she tells him.
Swear to me that I shall one day be your victim. Since the age of fifteen, my mind has been ablaze, obsessed with the idea of perishing a victim of libertinage’s most cruel passions. I do not wish to die tomorrow, no doubt; my extravagance does not go that far. But in no other manner do I wish to die: to become, in expiring, the occasion of a crime is an idea that makes my head spin.
Strange head, full worthy of this reply: “I love your mind to the point of madness, and I believe that you and I will do splendid things together.” Then: “There’s no denying it: she’s rotten, putrefied.”
Thus, everything begins to grow clear: to the integral man, who is at his fullest, there is no possible evil. If he injures others, the result is voluptuous; injury endured at their hands is sheer delight. Virtue pleases him because Virtue is weak and he crushes it; Vice pleases him because he finds pleasure in the chaos that results from it, even though it
be at his expense. If he lives, there is no circumstance, no event that he cannot turn into happiness. And if he dies, he finds an even greater happiness in his death, and in the knowledge of his destruction he sees the crowning achievement of a life whose sole justification lay in the need to destroy. He is therefore inaccessible to others. He is impervious to all attacks, nothing can rob him of his power to be himself and to enjoy himself. That is the primary meaning of his solitude. Even if he in his turn seemingly becomes a victim and a thrall, the violence of the passions he knows how to slake in any situation assures him of his sovereignty and makes him feel that in any circumstance, in life as in death, he remains omnipotent. It is for this reason that, despite the analogy of the descriptions, it seems only fair to leave to Sacher-Masoch the paternity of masochism, and the paternity of sadism to Sade. The pleasure Sade’s heroes find in degradation never lessens their self-possession, and abjection adds to their stature. Shame, remorse, a penchant for punishment—all such feelings are foreign to them. When Saint-Fond says to Juliette: “My pride is such that I should like to be served by persons kneeling, and never speak to that vile scum called people save through an interpreter,” she replies, without a trace of irony, by asking: “But don’t the caprices of libertinage compel you to come down from such heights?” To which Saint-Fond replies: “For minds as organized as ours, that humiliation serves as an exquisite flattery to our pride.” And Sade adds in a note: “This is readily understood; one does what no one else does; one is therefore unique.” On the moral level, the same prideful satisfaction in the feeling that one is an exile from humanity: