Letters From Prison

  Your wrongs consist of: 1) Having told me that I have no friends. Three months ago I replied to you in great detail upon that point and proved to you that misfortune rarely leaves a man any; I shall not harp again on what I have already said, for nothing bores me as much as repetitions. 2) Having tried to persuade me that my mother-in-law was the cause of my second detention. Whether she was or not, ’tis wrong for you to try to work up my feelings against her. If I believed her innocent, ’tis because my wife, writing to me at La Coste, asserted in no uncertain terms that she was; consequently, your remark tended on the one hand to make me look upon my mother-in-law as suspect and, on the other, my wife as a liar. Is it befitting for you to play this role? 3) Having tried to deceive me by giving me false hope for this spring. At La Coste I told you that the worst torture in the world was that of a wretch to whom hope is given then taken away. I maintain that there is no torture in the universe to equal it, and were one to delve into the cause of all suicides, twenty-nine out of thirty would stem from that alone . . . ‘Twas proven long ago, and if I were called upon to do so I could cite a thousand examples. Although you knew very well from me that I considered it a horror, an abomination, you did it. At this point I ask but one thing: if they are of a mind to beat me . . . is it for you to furnish the rod or the staff? I have been insistent on this subject, perhaps even violent, insolent, dishonest, harsh, whatever you like, but there was nothing I wouldn’t have done, no matter what the risk or peril, in order to find out whether they were lying to me and in order not to push the error to its extreme; I know what it once cost me in order to do that . . . what I suffered from it . . . what I felt . . . and I do not want to go through that ever again. I have already suffered near fatal traumas from my past misfortunes, and I’m now at the point where it would perhaps take but one more, whether the news be good or bad, to kill me off. Here is one recent example to prove my point. Yesterday night, they came into my room at an ungodly hour, ‘twas for a perfectly simple matter but one I was not expecting. For three-quarters of an hour thereafter I was ill over it. And so ’tis not a figment of my imagination, a mere caprice, a misplaced curiosity that makes me want to find out how long my term is to be, ’tis life, ’tis nothing but life I am asking for. But, to that you will reply to me, twenty-four hours’ notice is quite enough. I agree; strictly speaking, that is all I ask, and if it appeared I was anxious to know further in advance—and I’ve told you so a thousand times—’tis in order to profit from this period of retreat and spend it improving my mind or my attitude, something absolutely impossible for me to do when this constant feeling of uncertainty leaves me troubled and in a state of perpetual agitation. At long last you gave the lie to this springtime fantasy, for which I am grateful. You would have played me a fatal trick had you left me believing it until the last moment. What I do dislike is the ridiculous way—allow me the expression—you chose to destroy it. “Had you been less cantankerous, had you not written,” etc. So I am to be punished like a little boy whose hands are beaten when he has not recited his lesson properly? There is yet another very stupid course: I have told you so often enough, ’tis not by using such methods they’ll make me any better. Severity embitters me, period. Do they really think I shall be made to love a government, which in this case is acting unjustly toward me, by keeping me arbitrarily in prison, and respect a tribunal that has no jurisdiction over me? Do they truly believe, I say, that prolonging my detention will result in my improvement? They are mistaken. If they kept me here for life I’d still say the same thing and always talk in the same way. I am both firm and courageous. Blase when it comes to misfortunes, I have little or no fear of whatever new stroke of fate might befall me, and the threat of the scaffold does not turn me into either a rogue or a traitor, nor does it humble me. And despite this unshakable resolution, this solid character of which I pride myself, a mere nothing, a mark of real friendship, a proof of confidence would turn me into whatever they wanted me to be; with kindness I could be made to move mountains; severity could make me dash my brains out against a wall. Such is my personality, which has never changed since I was a child—Amblet, who brought me up, can attest to that—and will surely never change. I am too old to make myself over. So let them abandon their project of maturing my mind: twenty years from now ‘twill be no more mature than it is today, on that you have my word . . . more unruly perhaps, but certainly not more settled. Only let me out of here, offer me a show of friendship and trust, and you will see an altogether different man emerge. Let them not tell me: we tried it and it did not succeed. I shall prove that though they pretended to be trying it, all they were really doing was setting traps for me, to have the pleasure of crushing me once I fell into them . . . At any rate, the die is cast, I am not to be set free this spring . . . Come now, do admit that it was wicked on your part to have tried to persuade me I would be, and ridiculous of you to come and tell me now, “Oh, you would have been freed if you had been better behaved. . .” Oh! good God, my dear friend, you must think me both stupid and credulous, simply because I have the misfortune to be behind bars!

  Your fourth and final wrong is to have told me that horrible contradiction about my children at the feet of the king,1 sufficiently discussed in my last letter so as to require no further comment here. There are all your wrongs: mere trifles in the outside world, they become exceedingly serious vis-a-vis a poor wretch who sees nothing, hears nothing, and for whom letters are the only horoscopes wherein he can try and read his fate. The excuse I give for them is this: you have been seduced by my torturers, and you have been so stupid as to believe, as they do, that all those little pesterings to which they subject me were to bring about in me the most wonderful effects. Weakness and credulity, they are the origin of your wrongs. I forgive them. Let us renew our love for each other, let us resume our correspondence, and let bygones be bygones. But do not use such weapons in the future: you can see how useless they are. If you love me, do not risk the bitterness and inevitable chilliness that must emanate therefrom. I shall be set free when God so chooses. If you care to tell me when that is to happen, it will please me no end; otherwise, tell me nothing; I would prefer knowing nothing than to be deceived; and there’s the origin of my phrase, let there be silence, which shocked you so. Let them speak the truth or let there be silence, that is what I said, and say again, and so saying I see neither the slightest harshness nor the slightest dishonesty. Moreover, if all you implied in your last letter is true—which I must believe, since you maintain it is—invoking the truth, your candor, etc., then I am most unhappy. I must now anticipate a very lengthy detention, and I can clearly see that I have been made a sacrificial lamb. In that case, I am wrong to have blamed you for having told me what you did; I can only praise your candor; there are certain truths that must be expressed bluntly and without mincing words; that is one of them . . . That you did the right thing . . . But if ’tis true that my fate is as ghastly as you tried to intimate to me, why did you announce to me that my freedom was around the corner? And if indeed it was, why did you offer me the picture of so many swords still suspended above my head? I keep coming back to the same point; be frank as long as you like, but be consistent, for inconsistency is the surest emblem of deceit.

  As for your reproach, “he says everything,” you will explain it to me whenever it suits you, for I do not understand it, nor do I understand any better the ways you say you have used to get through to me. The only others I know are the deleted lines: ’tis from there I have taken everything I have said. This I am ready to prove. If it pertains to something else, then I do not understand what you mean, and indeed do not believe there is even any possibility of something else. If there were, or were it to come to pass, I swear to you that I would be the first to divulge it, knowing full well there is never any change in the rules except to impose one more torture. I have learned it all too well from harsh experience to seize the bait anymore, and I do not advise anyone to put me to any such test, for I would very quickly ferret ou
t what was afoot Here I gloss over a very cruel invective on your part: “Your friendship has tarnished my good name.” Mademoiselle, I have the highest opinion of your good name. But I am not yet fallen so low as to fear that my friendship might tarnish it . . . You may perhaps have had some other friends, before me, who. . . How is your health today, Mademoiselle Rousset? You see where all these empty amenities must lead us both: to bitterness, and thence in the long run to hatred. I am therefore right in declaring to you that no matter what you may say or reply to that, I shall hold my tongue. In general, that is what I plan to do in the future; therefore receive from me the most solemn oath, and overlook this letter and the one I am going to write in response to Madame de Sade. I hereby declare to you that I intend to limit myself to asking for things I absolutely need and to talking about the weather. Go back to the first of April; examine my letters written during that period, and if they do not bear out what I say, you can call me all the names in the book. If I am to be caned like a schoolboy, at least it will not be for my letters, and I shall eliminate that pretense from my torturers. You want to deprive me of the single consolation I still have in the midst of my misfortunes, that of believing there is a fixed date to my term . . . 1) ’Tis a foul thing to do. Why break a child’s toy? 2) ’Tis false to tell me the contrary, because there is nothing more clear and obvious in the world; of that I have the most compelling proofs, and were you not yourself convinced of that I’d convince you in short order with unanswerable arguments . . . But when is the fixed date? Ah! that is what I know not, and what I do not flatter myself that I do. Thus you may without fear say on that subject that my calculations are wrong, for I have given up making any. What you tell me that I should say about my mother-in-law is precisely what I have said, and all you have done is ape me. You overly complicate, change, demolish, augment my sentences as you see fit, and all that simply to annoy me and worry me to death, isn’t that so? Well, I say to you once again that you will not succeed. And in the future, my profound silence will demonstrate how greatly I scorn all these half-starved little subterfuges that I regard as the effect of the hysteric vapors to which the people of that house are sorely prone. They make fun of your threats, you add, nor do they fear them . . . That I believe. However, the proof that they do indeed fear me is shown by the tight leash on which they keep me; one does not keep chains on people you despise. I want to call Peter to account for cheating Paul. . . That’s a rich one! What! do you fancy that because I am in prison my business advisers have had the right to rob me blind without my calling them to account? Think again; I shall call them most severely to account, and if they have stolen from me I shall get rid of them, that I swear to you. I conclude not with Mademoiselle but with my dear friend, and to that I add a further most urgent request not to leave without me, no matter how long they may keep me here; I beseech you in the name of that friendship of which you assure me some spark still remains in you; I beg of you to restore it to me in full, and as proof thereof to wait for me, and not to increase my misfortunes and my despair by this threat and by the bitterness of your letters.

  1. There was a plan afoot that, if all else failed in the efforts to have Sade released, all three children would be dispatched to Versailles to beseech the king to do so. Sade was appalled at the idea.

  16. To Madame de Sade

  May 16, 1779

  I have no idea what all this endless repetition is about, nor why, when I ask you for objects that would make my life a trifle easier, all I get in response are crossed-out lines. You must be very weary of all those platitudes, for they are very boring. The fact is, I still am without everything I asked you for, and there is nothing to suggest that ’tis about to be granted to me. If my former room1 is unavailable as you indicate in your crossed-out lines, let them give me another. That one or another one, I care not. ’Tis not to the room I was attached, for most assuredly it was dreadful, but to the view and to the fresh air one could breathe there. Any room on the same floor will have the same advantages, and I am very sure that many of them on those floors are empty. I have already told you twenty times over that this past winter in the room where I presently am I suffered all one can suffer; that it is extremely humid and unhealthy, that from this room you can barely see the sky, and that its air passages have been stopped up for fear that the prisoner might fly out of them. For in here ’tis the one thing they fear most. And so I ask, and ask most urgently, to be shifted to another. I ask for a room on the upper floors, I don’t care which, provided one can have a fire there in winter, which is impossible in this one, and that it have air and light; that is all I ask of it. As for the walk, which you say cannot be granted to me more than four times a week, one should start by giving me my walk four times a week, for at present ’tis only three; but even assuming there were four, I would still complain, considering that, for my health’s sake, I have the most urgent need of fresh air at least an hour each day, and that is what I am asking for. For the past fifteen nights in a row—I took the trouble to count them—I have not had a wink of sleep, or at most what they call a cat nap each night, and I hope and trust I shall soon be ill from it. If ‘twere the death of me, nothing would suit me better. Farewell. I tried to drink some barley water, my stomach couldn’t take it, I had to cease and desist.

  And so I very urgently request that I be allowed at least an hour of fresh air every day. Why are some granted this favor, and not me along with the rest? Oh! verily, I am well aware that those are the commandant’s2 little pet doggies and that for having spoken out too truthfully I’m not one of the happy few. Let him take his little revenge, but he still does not have leave to allow a man to die! When one asks for more frequent walks, they raise the objection—or so you tell me—that ’tis out of the question because there are so many prisoners. ’Tis an outrage that the vigilant eye of the minister does not take steps to remedy the shameful and odious abuse that goes on here in this regard. Why, given the miserable little courtyard of this dreary dungeon, which is about as big as your hand, does the worthy commander begin by walling off three-quarters of it, and then forbid anyone to set foot in it? That’s the kind of horror they perpetrate here and nowhere else. In all the prisons one can name the wardens have gardens—nothing more simple, they take therefrom whatever is produced—but they are open to the prisoners, who are allowed in them as much as they like. And ’tis this abominable constriction of space here that makes the prisoners’ walks so few and far between. With the little land there is, divided as it is, four prisoners guarded by sentinels as everywhere else—and not by the employees who serve the food, which is another abuse that explains why walks cannot be granted more often—could have walks four at a time, and if I were in charge here, even with thrice as many prisoners I’d have all of them out walking twice as much as they do now.

  Does the commandant fear that his apples and pears may get eaten? I do not say that hunger cannot sometimes tempt one to such an act, but one would have to be what is known as a very ill-bredfellow to go and steal the fruit from a garden where one has been allowed to walk. Such a fear most assuredly does not attest to the high opinion of the people he is accustomed to have here. It seems to me that if I were in his shoes I’d have a very strong aversion to eating any fruit from a garden whose preservation I knew was being bought by the health of some miserable inmates. Those pears may aptly be called choke-pears. Such then, my dear friend, are some of the little infamies which, together with a good many others, put me in such ill humor this past winter, at this very moment, and will continue to do so—a little more fruitfully, I hope—anent this odious place, and which makes me say and say again that amongst all the methods your mother has used against me, the one I am least apt to forget is that of having allowed herself to be blinded by the entire clique that has an interest in stocking this house, and of having had me incarcerated here. It seems to me that I have written enough about it from Aix so that at least they ought to have put me somewhere else, since I was destined to suffer even mo
re. But in a word, I beseech you to obtain for me the objects I have so often asked you for in my more recent letters, or at least to have me transferred to another prison, since I absolutely cannot cope with the abominable existence in this one, suffering as I am here like one of the damned.

  The breeches fit me very nicely; the little cookies are as always excellent, and ‘twill be quite some time before I tire of them: please keep sending them and feel free to increase the quantity; the pens are detestable: I ask you for big quills from “Griffon’s,” 3 which cost a penny; Griffon’s does an excellent job of sharpening the points. The sponge cake is not at all what I asked for: 1) I wanted it iced everywhere, both on top and underneath, with the same icing used on the little cookies; 2) I wanted it to be chocolate inside, of which it contains not the slightest hint; they have colored it with some sort of dark herb, but there is not what one could call the slightest suspicion of chocolate. The next time you send me a package, please have it made for me, and try to have some trustworthy person there to see for themselves that some chocolate is put inside. The cookies must smell of chocolate, as if one were biting into a chocolate bar.4 And so in the very next package: a cake like the one I have just described, 6 ordinary ones, 6 iced, and two little pots of Brittany butter, but well and carefully selected. I believe they have a shop for that in Paris, like the one selling Provençal goods where you go for oil.