The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings
“‘The moment my eyes have closed forever, go and seek out my husband. Tell him that, amongst my many crimes, is one whereof he is ignorant and which I must finally confess. You have a sister, Courval. . . . She was born a year after you. . . . I doted on you, and was afraid this girl might be a menace to you, that her father, at the time of her marriage, might settle a dowry upon her, using part of the inheritance which should have been yours alone. In order to keep your legacy intact, I resolved both to get rid of this girl and to make certain that in the future my husband would cull no further fruits from our marital bonds. My disorders led me into other sins, and prevented me from feeling the effects of these new crimes by causing me to commit even more terrible ones. But as for my daughter, I determined absolutely to murder her. I was about to put this infamous plan into effect, in concert with the wet nurse, whom I had amply compensated, when this woman told me that she knew a man who, married for years, was childless, though he wanted nothing more than to have children. Why didn’t I kill two birds with one stone, she said to me: get rid of my daughter and perhaps make the man happy?
“‘I straightway accepted her suggestion. That same evening, my daughter was placed on this man’s doorstep, with a letter in her cradle.
“‘The minute I am dead, fly to Paris and ask your father’s forgiveness for me, beg him not to curse my memory and to go fetch that child and bring her back home into his own house.’
“With these words, my mother embraced me . . . and tried to calm the frightful agitation into which I had been plunged by all she had revealed to me. . . . Oh, Father, the following day she was executed. I was felled by a terrible illness, which reduced me to the edge of the grave, where I hovered for two years between life and death, with neither the strength nor the courage to write you.
“Upon recovering my health, my initial act was to come and cast myself at your feet, to beg forgiveness for your poor, unfortunate wife, and to discover to you the name of the person who can give you news of my sister: Monsieur de Saint-Prât.”
Monsieur de Courval faltered, his senses began to fail him and grow benumbed, he was nigh unto unconscious. . . his condition became truly alarming.
As for Florville, who had been suffering the tortures of hell for the past quarter hour, she arose with the tranquillity of someone who has just come to a decision.
“Very well, Monsieur,” she said to Courval, “do you now believe there exists somewhere in the world a criminal more atrocious than poor Florville? . . . Let me tell you then who I am, Senneval: at once your sister, the girl you seduced in Nancy, the murderer of your son, and the loathsome creature who dispatched your mother to the gallows. . . . Yes, gentlemen, these are my crimes: no matter which of you I cast my eyes upon, I see only an object of horror. Either I see my lover as my brother, or I see my husband as the author of my days. And if I look at myself, I see naught but the execrable monster who stabbed her own son and was the instrument of her mother’s death. Do you think Heaven can have a sufficient store of torments for me? Do you think, given the tortures wherewith my heart is laden, that I can go on living a moment longer? No, there remains but one further crime to commit, a crime which will avenge all the others.”
And so saying, the poor girl leapt forward, snatched up one of Senneval’s pistols, and blew out her brains before either of them had time to realize what she was about. She died without uttering another word.
Monsieur de Courval fainted. His son, stunned by the scenes he had just witnessed, called for help as best he could. Florville was beyond all help: already the shadows of death were overspreading her bloodstained face, whose features were now convulsed not only because of her violent end but also because of the sentiments of despair which filled her heart at the moment of her death.
Monsieur de Courval was transported to his bed, where for two months he lingered close to the grave. His son, in an equally cruel state, none the less was fortunate enough to see his tenderness and loving care rewarded by his father’s recovery.
Both of them, however, after having suffered such cruel and manifold blows of misfortune, resolved to withdraw from the world. A rigorous, self-imposed solitude has removed them forever from the eyes of their friends, and there, in the bosom of piety and virtue, they are peacefully living out the thread of their sad and painful days, of their lives which were given them only to convince both them and all who read this unhappy tale that ’tis only in the darkness of the grave that man can find the peace which the wickedness of his fellow men, the disorder of his passions, and above all the fate decreed unto him, will deny him eternally here upon this earth.
PART THREE
The 120 Days of Sodom (1785)
On the 22nd of October, 1785, Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade, for more than seven years a prisoner of the Royal dungeons, and since February of 1784 confined in the Bastille, began the final revision of his first major work, which he entitled The 120 Days of Sodom. There are those who consider it his masterpiece; there can be no doubt that it is the foundation upon which the rest of his achievement reposes.
If this was the first major work, it was also the decisive step: three years earlier Sade had written the Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man in which the ferocity of his atheism and the rigor of his vision were evident, but with The 120 Days he moved further, much further, into a realm of philosophic absolutism from which there could be no retreat. Sade was here declaring all-out war on the society that had judged and imprisoned him, and on that virtue which it preached as the ultimate good. If, up to this time, he had been drawn instinctively to the twin poles of pleasure and vice, now the full power of his intellect entered into the fray. Henceforth he would do all he could to “outrage the laws of both Nature and religion.” Sade was out to shock, as no writer had ever tried to shock his readers before in the history of literature. He was fully aware of what he was about. After describing his main characters and his plan of action in the opening pages of The 120 Days, the author warns:
I advise the overmodest to lay my book aside at once if he would not be scandalized, for ’tis already clear there’s not much of the chaste in our plan, and we dare hold ourselves answerable in advance that there’ll be still less in the execution. . . . And now, friend-reader, you must prepare your heart and your mind for the most impure tale that has ever been told since our world began, a book the likes of which are met with neither amongst the ancients nor amongst us moderns. . . .
If Sade was cognizant of the importance of the work he was undertaking, he was also aware of the dangers of seizure to which such a manuscript was constantly subject, given the conditions and place of its composition. He therefore devised a method which, he thought, would at least minimize the chances of having the manuscript lost or taken from him. Using sheets of thin paper twelve centimeters wide, he pasted them together into a kind of scroll just over twelve meters long, which he thought would be relatively easy to conceal. From the 22nd of October on, he worked for twenty consecutive evenings, from seven till ten, at the end of which time he had covered one side of the scroll with a microscopic writing; he then continued on the other side, until he had completed the manuscript1 by the 28th of November. But all his precautions were in vain: when the Bastille was stormed, most of the manuscripts Sade had left behind were lost or destroyed, and neither the notes nor the roll itself ever came into the author’s hands again. It must have been especially to the scroll of The 120 Days that Sade was referring when he wrote to his steward, Gaufridy, in May, 1790, that its loss had caused him to shed “tears of blood”:
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; now tha
t 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 worth 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. . . .2
Justine, Juliette, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and La Nouvelle Justine all represent attempts by Sade to reconstitute, in one form or another, the elements he had expounded in The 120 Days of Sodom, which he assumed lost forever. But, though Sade would never know it, the precious roll had not been destroyed. It was found, in the same cell of the Bastille where Sade had been kept prisoner, by one Arnoux de Saint-Maximin, and thence came into the possession of the Villeneuve-Trans family, in whose care it remained for three generations. At the turn of the present century, it was sold to a German collector, and in 1904 it was published by the German psychiatrist, Dr. Iwan Bloch, under the pseudonym of Eugene Dühren. Bloch justified his publishing the work by its “scientific importance . . . to doctors, jurists, and anthropologists,” pointing out in his notes the “amazing analogies” between cases cited by Sade and those recorded a century later by Krafft-Ebing. Bloch’s text, however, as Lely notes, is replete with “thousands of errors” which hopelessly denature and distort it.
After Bloch’s death, the manuscript remained in Germany until 1929, when Maurice Heine, at the behest of the Viscount Charles de ***, went to Berlin to acquire it. From 1931 to 1935, Heine’s masterful and authoritative text of the work appeared in three quarto volumes, in what must be considered the original edition of the work.3 This is what Heine had to say of The 120 Days:
It is a document of singular value, as well as the first positive effort (aside from that of the father-confessors) to classify sexual anomalies. The man responsible for having undertaken this methodical observation, a century before Krafft-Ebing and Freud, fully deserves the honor bestowed upon him by scholars of having the gravest of these psychopathic conditions known by the term “sadism.”4
And Lely, on The 120 Days:
Despite the reservations one has to make,5 The 120 Days contains some of the most admirable pages the Marquis de Sade ever wrote. The texture, the breadth, the sweep of the sentences, all seem more allied to his correspondence . . . than to his other works. The Introduction, wherein we see deployed to full advantage the resources of his art, in its newest and most spontaneous form, is without doubt Sade’s masterpiece. . . .6
There are other works more finished, of greater literary merit and with a philosophic content more developed, but Messrs. Heine and Lely are correct: The 120 Days of Sodom is the seminal work in all Sade’s writing. It is perhaps his masterpiece; at the very least, it is the cornerstone on which the massive edifice he constructed was founded.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Portraits of principal personages
Statutes
A speech by the Duc de Blangis
Dramatis Personae: A recapitulation
PART THE FIRST
THE 150 SIMPLE PASSIONS COMPOSING THE NARRATION OF MADAME DUCLOS FOR THE MONTH OF NOVEMBER
The First Day (The company rose the 1st of November. . .)
The Second Day (The company rose at the customary hour . . .)
The Third Day (The Duc was abroad at nine o’clock. . .)
SCHEDULE OF WORKS TO BE ACCOMPLISHED DURING THE REMAINDER OF THE PARTY
The Fourth Day (Being full eager to be able to distinguish. . .)
The Fifth Day (That morning it was Curval’s duty. . .)
The Sixth Day (It was Monseigneur’s turn to assist. . .)
The Seventh Day (The friends had ceased to participate. . .)
The Eighth Day (The previous day’s examples having made a deep impression. . .)
The Ninth Day (That morning Duclos expressed her opinion. . .)
The Tenth Day (The farther we advance, the more thoroughly we may inform . . .)
The Eleventh Day (They did not rise till late that day, . . .)
The Twelfth Day (The new mode of life I was about to begin, . . .)
The Thirteenth Day (The Président, who that night lay . . .)
The Fourteenth Day (It was discovered upon that day that the weather. . .)
The Fifteenth Day (Rarely would the day following correction . . .)
The Sixteenth Day (Our heroes rose as bright and fresh . . .)
The Seventeenth Day (The terrible antipathy the Président had for Constance . . .)
The Eighteenth Day (Beautiful, radiant, bejeweled, grown more brilliant. . .)
The Nineteenth Day (That morning, after having made some observations . . .)
The Twentieth Day (Something very humorous indeed had occurred . . .)
The Twenty-first Day (Preparations for that ceremony were started early. . .)
The Twenty-second Day (As a result of these all-night bacchanals. . .)
The Twenty-third Day (“But how is it possible to shout and roar. . .”)
The Twenty-fourth Day (Piety is indeed a true disease of the soul . . .)
The Twenty-fifth Day (However, a new intrigue was quietly taking form. . .)
The Twenty-sixth Day (In that nothing was more delicious . . .)
The Twenty-seventh Day (The denunciations, authorized on the previous day. . .)
The Twenty-eighth Day (‘Twas a wedding day, . . .)
The Twenty-ninth Day (There is a proverb. . .)
The Thirtieth Day (I am not sure, Messieurs,. . .)
MISTAKES I HAVE MADE
PART THE SECOND
THE 150 COMPLEX PASSIONS COMPOSING THE NARRATION OF MADAME CHAMPVILLE FOR THE MONTH OF DECEMBER
PART THE THIRD
THE 150 CRIMINAL PASSIONS COMPOSING THE NARRATION OF MADAME MARTAINE FOR THE MONTH OF JANUARY
PART THE FOURTH
THE 150 MURDEROUS PASSIONS COMPOSING THE NARRATION OF MADAME DESGRANGES FOR THE MONTH OF FEBRUARY
NOTES, SUPPLEMENTS
ADDENDA
INTRODUCTION
The extensive wars wherewith Louis XIV was burdened during his reign, while draining the State’s treasury and exhausting the substance of the people, none the less contained the secret that led to the prosperity of a swarm of those bloodsuckers who are always on the watch for public calamities, which, instead of appeasing, they promote or invent so as, precisely, to be able to profit from them the more advantageously. The end of this so very sublime reign was perhaps one of the periods in the history of the French Empire when one saw the emergence of the greatest number of these mysterious fortunes whose origins are as obscure as the lust and debauchery that accompany them. It was toward the close of this period, and not long before the Regent sought, by means of the famous tribunal which goes under the name of the Chambre de Justice, to flush this multitude of traffickers, that four of them conceived the idea for the singular revels whereof we are going to give an account. One must not suppose that it was exclusively the lowborn and vulgar sort which did this swindling; gentlemen of the highest note led the pack. The Duc de Blangis and his brother the Bishop of X***, each of whom had thuswise amassed immense fortunes, are in themselves solid proof
that, like the others, the nobility neglected no opportunities to take this road to wealth. These two illustrious figures, through their pleasures and business closely associated with the celebrated Durcet and the Président de Curval, were the first to hit upon the debauch we propose to chronicle, and having communicated the scheme to their two friends, all four agreed to assume the major roles in these unusual orgies.
For above six years these four libertines, kindred through their wealth and tastes, had thought to strengthen their ties by means of alliances in which debauchery had by far a heavier part than any of the other motives that ordinarily serve as a basis for such bonds. What they arranged was as follows: the Duc de Blangis, thrice a widower and sire of two daughters one wife had given him, having noticed that the Président de Curval appeared interested in marrying the elder of these girls, despite the familiarities he knew perfectly well her father had indulged in with her, the Duc, I say, suddenly conceived the idea of a triple alliance.
“You want Julie for your wife,” said he to Curval, “I give her to you unhesitatingly and put but one condition to the match: that you’ll not be jealous when, although your wife, she continues to show me the same complaisance she always has in the past; what is more, I’d have you lend your voice to mine in persuading our good Durcet to give me his daughter Constance, for whom, I must confess, I have developed roughly the same feelings you have formed for Julie.”
“But,” said Curval, “you are surely aware that Durcet, just as libertine as you . . .”
“I know all that’s to be known,” the Duc rejoined. “In this age, and with our manner of thinking, is one halted by such things? do you think I seek a wife in order to have a mistress? I want a wife that my whims may be served, I want her to veil, to cover an infinite number of little secret debauches the cloak of marriage wonderfully conceals. In a word, I want her for the reasons you want my daughter—do you fancy I am ignorant of your object and desires? We libertines wed women to hold slaves; as wives they are rendered more submissive than mistresses, and you know the value we set upon despotism in the joys we pursue.”