Letters From Prison
Though enchained I may be, my heart is yet free.
(Les Arsacides)
and always will be. Even if these accursed chains, yes, even if they bring me to my grave, you will always see me the same. I have the sad misfortune of having received at birth a staunch soul, that has never bent nor ever will. I have no fear of offending or embittering anyone, no matter whom. You have given me too many proofs that my term is set for me to have any doubts on that score: consequently, no one is in a position to either lengthen it or shorten it. Moreover, were it not set, I would not be dependent on these people, but on the king, and he is the one person in the country I respect—he, and the princes of royal blood. Beneath them, I see naught but a blur so indistinct that in this circumstance it were better for me to refrain from looking too closely, for it would reveal a superiority so much in my favor that it would only serve to further confirm my already profound contempt.
You have to feel that ’tis unimaginable to want to treat me as they do and then expect me not to complain; for let’s add two and two for a moment: when a detention has to be as prolonged as mine is, is it not a veritable abomination to try to make it even more horrible by everything your mother has chosen to dream up in order to torment me here? What! ’tis not enough to be deprived of everything that makes life pleasant and worth living, ’tis not enough to be kept from even breathing clean fresh air, to see all one’s desires forever being shattered against four walls, and to spend one’s days so alike one to the other that they resemble those we can expect in the grave? This dreadful torture is not enough, according to that horrid creature: it must be made even worse by everything she can think of to redouble all the horror. But you will agree that only a monster is capable of carrying vengeance that far . . . But ’tis all in your imagination, you are going to say; people aren't doing any such thing; all these are figments of your imagination that people in your situation often have. Figments of my imagination? Really! I shall go to the top of my notebook of observations, which contains no fewer than 56 proofs of the kind I am about to cite to you, from which I shall take only one, and you shall see whether ’tis not venomous rage of an odious shrew that lies behind all these maneuvers that I impute to her, and whether one can properly call them figments of one’s imagination.
You should not for one moment doubt that a prisoner, although he may have good reason to believe his release is still distant, will leap like a starveling at anything even faintly suggesting his term might be less long: ’tis human nature, that, there’s nothing wrong about it: thus ’tis not something someone should be punished for, but rather pitied. Therefore, ’tis an act of manifest cruelty to foment, foster, give rise to initiatives that tend to mislead him. One ought to be exceedingly careful to do the opposite, and basic humanity (were there any here) should at all times act as a constant reminder not to [toy with] the most sensitive of a poor wretch’s feelings; for ’tis clear that the cause of all suicides is hope betrayed. Therefore, one must not foster that hope when it will not happen; and whoever does so is visibly a monster. Hope is the most sensitive part of the soul of him who suffers and is in pain; he who holds out this hope to him, then destroys it, is acting like those demons in Hell who, they say, are forever reopening the same wound, and who take pains to focus on an already open wound rather than on others. That is precisely what your mother has been doing to me for four years: a multitude of fresh hopes month after month. To judge from what these people say, from examining your parcels, your letters, etc., my release is always just around the corner; then, when we come to that corner, all of a sudden, a well-aimed dagger-thrust: and we are off for another long round of jokes and gibes. It seems as though this wicked woman enjoys nothing more than having me build houses of cards, to have the pleasure of knocking them down the moment they are done. Forgetting for a moment all the negative influence this has upon hope, not to mention the great possibility ‘twill have of denaturing it, not to mention the certainty that one will write off hope for the rest of one’s life, there is, you will agree, the far more serious danger of the final excess of despair; and at present I do not for one moment doubt that this is her sole and unique objective, and that, having failed to have me killed, and having left me in the dreadful situation I was in for the five years before I was in prison, she has decided to work on doing me in for perhaps another five years, under more propitious conditions. From the multitude of proofs I have just told you that I have of this barbaric little game she has been playing with me, which consists of lifting me up and then knocking me down, I shall cite you one of the more recent, in order to convince you of what I say.
About six months ago you sent me a curtain for my room; I kept asking the people here to put it up; they never wanted to. What must I conclude from this? That there is no need to, which gives rise to hope; they will leave it at that until they figure I have had the time to build my house of cards, and when that day comes, they hang the curtain— and my castle is dashed to pieces. Such are the little games Madame la présidente de Montreuil plays, games she has been enjoying for four years along with the lackeys she is paying to aid and abet her in these kindnesses, people who laugh at her behind her back (at least that is what Marais told me in no uncertain terms, he doubtless being jealous at not being a member of the inner circle) as soon as they receive their presents or money. There are 56 maneuvers of this kind, not counting those yet to come; not that I have entertained 56 different opinions about my release, God forbid! I would have spent my entire life counting and calculating, which I have carefully refrained from doing (you have the proof of my more serious occupations),2 but I have kept a close eye on matters and I have duly noted that in all likelihood, instead of sand castle number four, the one I am presently on and which, far off though it be, will doubtless crumble like the other three; instead of four, I say, she has been involved in trying to get me to build a good 56. I can’t help wondering whether this is how a sensible woman behaves, an intelligent woman and a woman who, if for no other reason than the ties that bind us, ought to lessen my sufferings instead of augmenting them? But she is offended, you tell me. First of all, I deny that; she has been done no injury except insofar as she wanted to be injured, and if she has a quarrel on that score, ’tis solely to her own genius she must look for whatever she may take as a personal affront. But let us suppose that she actually has been offended: does that mean she must seek revenge? A woman so pious, who outwardly seems to fulfill all the ceremonial part of her religion, should she turn her back on the foremost and most basic of all its dogmas? But let us allow her vengeance, I shall concede that; but, a prison sentence of this length, a sentence so harsh, is that not revenge enough for her? Does she need more? Oh ! you are missing the point, you will cut in; all this has been necessary; that’s what it takes for us to win! To win! Gome, in all fairness now: even supposing I were to get out tomorrow, would you dare say I had won, without fearing that I accuse you of a most furious insolence? Win!—to put somebody in prison for four or five years over a mere party involving some girls, exactly like any one of the eighty others that take place every day in Paris! And then to come and tell him how lucky he is to get off with only five years in prison, and that if he has been driven crazy the way he has, ‘twas in order to win! No, I banish the very idea, for I am too disgusted by it and I am quite sure you shall never be so brazen as to bring it up again.
Let us go back to something I spoke of a short while ago, a mere party involving some girls which, I can see from here, affrights those who despair at being unable to convince me that all the calumnies they accept against me are the gospel truth. My adventures can be reduced to three. I shall pass over the first: that one was wholly Madame la présidente de Montreuil’s doing, and if anybody should have been punished for it, ‘twas she;3 but in France one does not punish those who have a hundred thousand livres a year income, and below them are the little victims whom they can hand over to the voracity of those monsters whose profession is to earn their living from th
e blood of the misfortunate. They are asked for their little victims, they hand them over, and the debt is discharged. That is why I am in prison. The second adventure was the Marseilles incident: I believe there is no point in discussing it, either. I think it has been sufficiently established that nothing but libertinage was involved there, and that whatever of a criminal nature they saw fit to insert into the affair, in order to slate the vengeful thirst of my Provençal enemies, and the rapacity of the chancellor who wanted my title for his son, was nothing but pure invention. And so, as for that one, I think it entirely taken care of by the Vincennes detention4 and the banishment from Marseilles.
Let us then move on to the third. Before starting, I ask your forgiveness for the terms I am going to be obliged to use; I shall do my best to moderate them by using abbreviations. Moreover, between husband and wife one may, when the case requires it, express oneself somewhat more freely than with strangers or ordinary friends. I also ask you to excuse my confessions, but I prefer you think me a libertine rather than a criminal, laid bare, with no effort on my part to disguise it one iota.
Seeing myself reduced to spending a fair amount of time alone in a remote castle, almost always without you, and having the minor failing (it must be admitted) of being perhaps a tad too fond of women, I contacted a well-known p_____5 in Lyons, and told her: I want to take three or four servants home with me, I want them young and pretty; find me some like that. This p_____, who was Nanon, for that Nanon was a well-known p------in Lyons—I shall prove it when the time comes—promises to find me these girls and does so. I take them home; I make use of them. Six months later parents come and ask to have these girls back, assuring me that they are their children. I turn them over to the parents; and all of a sudden I am charged with a suit for kidnapping and rape! But that is the greatest of all injustices. Here are the rules in this regard, and this I have from Monsieur de Sartine himself; he had the kindness to explain them to me himself one day, as he will be happy to recall: ’tis expressly forbidden any p______in France to traffic in virgin girls, and if the girl furnished is a virgin and lodges a complaint, ’tis not the man who is prosecuted, it is the p_____, who is subjected to rigorous and immediate punishment. Even if the man has asked for a virgin, ’tis not he who is punished: he is only doing what all men do. Once again, the p______, who gave him the girl and who knew full well ‘twas expressly forbidden, is punished. Therefore, that first deposition made against me in Lyons, for kidnapping and rape, contained not a shred of anything legitimate; I am in no wise guilty; ‘twas the p____to whom I applied who should have been punished and not me. But you can’t get blood from a stone, they know, and the parents hoped to squeeze some money out of me. Point made. Earlier on, I had had an amorous adventure in Arcueil, in which a woman,6 also a liar and a double-dealing swindler, had, to get money (which was stupidly paid her) spread word to all Paris that I conducted all sorts of experiments and that the garden behind my house was a cemetery wherein I buried the bodies I had used in my tests. This tall tale was just too good to be true; ‘twas made to order for my enemies’ rage, and they never failed to bring it up and embellish it whenever anything happened to me. As a consequence, at the time of the Marseilles affair, ‘twas also some experiment I’d been trying, and here again the subject of my experiments would doubtless be the one girl who would never be seen again. But if all the girls did not turn up again at Lyons, they all did resurface sooner or later somewhere else. Let us examine the situation. Those girls from Lyons were five in number, that we know. One, terrified by the solitude in which she was being kept (not to perform experiments upon her but because decency compelled me to do so) escaped and took refuge at my uncle’s. And so we have accounted for her. One remained in my house, as a domestic, and there she died a natural death, in full view and with the full knowledge of the entire province; she was cared for by the public health director. There’s another who’s accounted for. Two were handed back over to their mother and father. Two more who are accounted for. As for the fifth and last, she was blatantly threatening to run away like her friend and to spread all kinds of gossip abroad if she were kept locked up any longer, and as she had no parents to come and claim her, I turned her over to a peasant in La Coste—whom I shall name in due course and whom you know very well—who in turn had her placed as a domestic in Marseilles in the house of one of that peasant’s relatives; and as I have to hand complete proof thereof, I confess I would be more than delighted to produce the evidence. And so she was taken care of, put into service and left there, regarding which a good and valid certificate was brought back to me, and which I have put in a safe place and will also produce when the need arises. I heard later on that that creature had left the house and taken to p_______.7 And so that is what has become of the five girls from Lyons, the details of whose lives are clearly established in such wise that I can defy the cleverest, or rather the most double-dealing jurisconsult, to prove me anything to the contrary.
Sade’s certificate of baptism, dated June 3, 1740. One day after his birth at the hotel de Condé in Paris, he was baptized at Saint-Sulpice church. His parents had intended to name him Louis-Aldonse-Donatien, but then settled on Donatien-Aldonse-Frangois. The parish priest misunderstood the old provençal name Aldonse and instead substituted the more common “Alphonse” on the baptismal certificate. That clerical slip was later to plague Sade with the authorities, especially during and after the Revolution.
COURTESY MUSéE CALVET, AVIGNON
Portrait of the libertine as a young man, by Van Loo. A full-scale painting of Sade by the same artist was lost and probably destroyed during the Revolution.
A nineteenth-century romanticized portrait of Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil de Sade, the Marquise de Sade. Despite her ultra-strict Catholic upbringing, she was madly in love with her seductive husband, and despite his many outrageous acts and endless infidelities, loved him selflessly and unswervingly for twenty-seven years.
COURTESY BIBLIOTHéQUE NATIONALE
Sade’s father, the Count de Sade, was lord of the manors of La Coste (ABOVE) and Saumane (OVERLEAF TOP), and co-lord of Mazan (OVERLEAF BOTTOM)—all in the Vaucluse region of Provence. Upon his father‘s death in 1767, the marquis inherited the three properties, although he considered La Coste his home. Sade spent several of his formative years, from age five to ten, at Saumane, the domaine of his uncle the Abbe de Sade. In some of his flights abroad as a fugitive, Sade assumed the title Marquis de Mazan, taken from his third domaine.
PHOTOGRAPHS: LA COSTE BY ALAIN RESNAIS; SAUMANE AND MAZAN BY RICHARD SEAVER
Vincennes, the dungeon where Sade was imprisoned from 1777 to 1784, during which time most of the letters in this volume and many of his major literary works were written. In 1763, Sade spent a shorter (two-week) stint in this same prison as a result of a scandal known as the “Jeanne Testard affair.” COLLECTION RICHARD SEAVER
above and facing page: The original of a letter from Sade to his wife dated June 25, 1780, in which he responds to a letter from her in which she dangles before him all the things he will do “when I get out.” The only problem, Sade notes, is that she fails to mention just when that magic date might be. Sade expresses his fear that when that day finally does come he may be “shipped off to some distant place” in exile, for he has an obsessive fear of ships and sailing.
See letter 28, p. 157.
COLLECTION RICHARD SEAVER
ABOVE AND FACING PAGE: The original of a letter dated October 11, 1782, from Madame de Sade to Mlle de Rousset, who was back at La Coste trying to keep the long-neglected chateau from falling into a state of complete disrepair The letter begins: “Since there is some hanky-panky going on relative to the [marquis’ s] study, about which I am quite convinced because of another matter altogether, which is no concern of yours, it is imperative we find another place, and inform me what it is, where we can store the most important things. I have therefore written to Gaufridy, instructing him to put all my letters in a locked drawer, withou
t showing them to anyone.” One can only guess what information, or indiscretion, those letters might have contained.
COLLECTION RICHARD SEAVER
Jean-Charles Pierre Le Noir, lieutenant-general of the French police, held Sade’s fate in his hands. He succeeded Antoine de Sartine, a much harsher official whom Sade despised and writes about in several letters in the most scathing terms.
REPRINTED FROM PAUL GINI STY, LA MARQUISE DE SADE (PARIS: BIBLIOTHéQUE CHARPENTIER, 1901
A bird’s-eye view of the Bastille. Note the extensive gardens where guards and family could walk. Prisoners’ walks were confined to the narrow space within the high prison walls.
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DRAWING BY PALLOY, COLLECTION RICHARD SEAVER
The Porte de Saint-Antoine, hard by the Bastille towers. On July 2, 1789, using a makeshift megaphone, Sade shouted from the window of his prison cell to the inhabitants and passersby below that the prisoners were being massacred and that the people should come and save them.
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGRAVING, COLLECTION RICHARD SEAVER
Twelve days after Sade’s rebellious act, the Bastille was stormed, and Warden de Launay and several of his aides were brutally murdered by the rampaging mob. By then, however, Sade had been removed to the insane asylum at Charenton.