Justine or the Misfortunes of Virtue (Oxford) Read online

  Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

  United Kingdom

  Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

  Translation, Introduction, Select Bibliography, and Explanatory Notes © John Phillips 2012

  Note on Money © David Coward 1992

  Chronology © David Coward 2005

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

  First published as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2012

  Impression: 1

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above

  You must not circulate this work in any other form

  and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Data available

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Data available

  ISBN 978–0–19–957284–7

  Printed in Great Britain by

  Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics have brought readers closer to the world’s great literature. Now with over 700 titles—from the 4,000-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth century’s greatest novels—the series makes available lesser-known as well as celebrated writing.

  The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading. Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry, religion, philosophy, and politics. Each edition includes perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the changing needs of readers.

  Refer to the Table of Contents to navigate through the material in this Oxford World’s Classics ebook. Use the asterisks (*) throughout the text to access the hyperlinked Explanatory Notes.

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  THE MARQUIS DE SADE

  Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue

  Translated with an Introduction and Notes by

  JOHN PHILLIPS

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  JUSTINE,

  OR THE MISFORTUNES OF VIRTUE

  DONATIEN-ALPHONSE-FRANÇOIS, MARQUIS DE SADE, was born in Paris in 1741 into an old patrician family. He was educated at the Jesuit college of Louis-le-Grand and at military school at Versailles. The end of the Seven Years War in 1763 dashed his hopes of a military career, and that same year he reluctantly made the good match his impoverished father forced on him by marrying Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil, daughter of a recently ennobled but wealthy lawyer. Serious sexual misdemeanours brought him to the attention of the police and he was jailed twice for his excesses. In 1772, for attempted murder and sodomy, he was sentenced to death and his effigy was burned in his absence. In 1777, after years spent in not uncomfortable hiding, mainly at his chateau at La Coste near Avignon, he was jailed and not released until 1790. During his prison years study was his therapy and writing his salvation. It was now that he developed a coherent system of atheistical materialism and wrote plays, novels, and the stories of Les Crimes de l’amour (The Crimes of Love), which he published in 1800. In the 1790s, having no love for the ancien régime which had deprived him of his freedom, he played a minor role in the revolution. Jailed as a political moderate, he escaped the guillotine in July 1794 by an administrative accident. Describing himself as ‘a man of letters’, he tried to make a living from the novels (Justine, 1791; Aline et Valcour, 1795; La Nouvelle Justine and L’Histoire de Juliette, both 1797) which justified their obscenities by reference to a comprehensive system of sexual realpolitik. In 1801 he was jailed as the author of Justine, and in 1803 was transferred to the lunatic asylum at Charenton, diagnosed as suffering from ‘libertine dementia’. He continued to write and even helped to stage plays for the inmates. His applications for release were consistently rejected, and he remained a captive until his death in December 1814. Against his wishes, he was given a Christian funeral, but was buried in an unmarked grave.

  JOHN PHILLIPS is Lecturer in French at Wadham College, University of Oxford, and Emeritus Professor of French, London Metropolitan University. He has written widely on Sade and his books include Sade: The Libertine Novels (2001), The Marquis de Sade: A Very Short Introduction (2005), and How to Read Sade (2005).

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Note on the Text

  Select Bibliography

  A Chronology of the Marquis de Sade

  A Note on Money

  JUSTINE, OR THE MISFORTUNES OF VIRTUE

  Explanatory Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  INSANE pornographer obsessed with cruel, violent and perverse forms of sex, woman-beater, child rapist, and even murderer—these are just some of the more lurid labels that have been attached to the infamous Marquis de Sade over the last two centuries. Conversely, the French surrealists of the early twentieth century sanctified the ‘divine marquis’ as arch-transgressor and apostle of freedom. The real Sade, however, is a figure of far greater complexity than allowed by any such simplistic labels, all of which derive from myth rather than fact. He is a figure of uncertainty and contradiction, and at the same time an author of considerable erudition and intellect. His work ranges across a wide variety of genres, from novels, short stories, and plays to political, philosophical, and literary essays. His rhetorical talents and mastery of expression have been widely acknowledged in all of these genres, but it is for his contes or novellas, such as the first version of Justine, that he has received the most critical praise. It is, however, in the 1791 publication, Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue, the second, novel-length version of the Justine saga, that the author is able to develop and explore at greater leisure the embryonic themes of the original conte: the overwhelming force of the sex drive, the corruption of contemporary institutions, especially the aristocracy and the Church, the bankruptcy of certain current philosophical ideas and the astuteness of others, and above all, the absurdity of any notion of divine providence. This doctrine, fundamental to both Christianity and to philosophical optimism, according to which virtue would ultimately be rewarded and vice punished, is dramatically and outrageously reversed in Justine’s sorry tale. The effects of such a reversal in the light of the author’s declared intention to make the reader prouder of virtue have long been a matter of controversy. We shall return to this question presently. First, given the close relationship between Sade’s character and the fictions he created, a brief survey of his life will provide an indispensable context.

  The Marquis de Sade, 1740–1814

  Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade was born in 1740, son of Jean-Baptiste-Joseph-François, Comte de Sade, Lord of Saumane and Mazan, cavalry-officer and diplomat, and of Mlle Maillé de Carman, a lady-in-waiting and poor distant cousin of the Princesse de Condé. The main influences on Sade’s young life were his father and his paternal uncle, the Abbé Jacques-François de Sade, who were bot
h active debauchees. At the same time, both were highly cultured men. Sade’s father was a close friend of Voltaire and himself wrote verses, while Donatien’s uncle in particular had a fine and extensive library which, alongside the classic authors, included all the major works of contemporary Enlightenment philosophy as well as a fair sample of erotic writings. As Donatien spent much of his early childhood at the family chateau of Saumane in Provence in the care of his uncle, he had plenty of time to become well acquainted with this library of free-thinking authors.

  The future writer and roué grew up, then, in a world of progressive ideas and libertine tastes. It was also a predominantly masculine world. When he was not in the company of his father and uncle, Donatien’s early education was divided between the Jesuit college of Louis-le-Grand in Paris, which he attended alongside other boys of the French aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie between the ages of ten and fourteen, and a young preceptor by the name of Abbé Amblet, who taught him reading, arithmetic, geography, and history. Amblet was a gentle and highly intelligent man, and the only male member of the child’s entourage who was not a libertine. From the Jesuits, Sade acquired a taste for rigorous intellectual inquiry, the debating skills of classical rhetoric, and above all, a lifelong passion for the theatre. The Jesuits’ enthusiasm at this time for both sodomy and corporal punishment may also have helped shape the young Marquis’s nascent sexuality. As for his mother, she appeared to take very little interest in her only child. Her relative absence from his childhood is often seen by critics as the possible source of the mother-hatred that permeates Sade’s adult writings.

  At the age of fourteen Sade was sent to a prestigious military academy to train to serve in the light cavalry regiment of the King’s guard. In 1763, following some years of action in the Seven Years War as a junior officer, the now twenty-two-year-old Marquis left one dissolute life as a soldier for another as a Paris socialite, much to the exasperation of his now destitute father, who determined to find him a wife and a dowry without delay. The Comte quickly came up with the daughter of a senior Paris judge. About the same age as Donatien, Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil came from the recently ennobled bourgeoisie rather than from the traditional aristocracy to which the Sade family proudly belonged, but the Montreuils were well connected and wealthy, and offered a substantial dowry for their eldest daughter. Renée-Pélagie was a plain girl and no great intellect, yet her strength of character and devotion would prove a great support to her husband throughout their long marriage. Her mother, the Présidente de Montreuil, was a formidable woman who would also play a significant role in the Marquis de Sade’s destiny.

  Following their wedding, on 17 May 1763, the young couple were initially housed by the Montreuils, either in their Paris house or their chateau in Normandy. It was at this time that Sade began to put on plays, allocating parts to his wife and even his mother-in-law, indulging an abiding interest in the theatre.

  This domestic harmony was short-lived, however. Only five months after the wedding the Marquis was arrested for the crime of debauchery and imprisoned at Vincennes. Having paid a twenty-year-old Parisian prostitute named Jeanne Testard to spend the night with him, Sade had shocked her religious sensibilities by talk of masturbating into a chalice, and proposing to thrust communion hosts into her vagina. He had then frightened her with whips and other weapons into committing a number of similar sacrilegious acts. On 13 November 1763 the King ordered his release after only three weeks, on condition that he reside at the Montreuils’ Norman chateau and stay out of trouble.

  In 1764 the Marquis was given permission to move back to Paris. During the next few years Sade fell in and out of love with three women, all actresses that he met while frequenting the theatrical milieu. One might conjecture that this succession of painful amorous experiences eventually had a desensitizing effect on his emotional character. The last of these affairs was with a Mlle Beauvoisin, whom he even passed off as his wife on a visit to La Coste, where the Sade family owned a castle and land.

  In January 1767 Sade’s father died, at the age of sixty-five. This was a traumatic event for Donatien, who had been very close to the Comte in spite of their many quarrels. Later that year he returned to Paris for the birth of Louis-Marie, the first of Renée-Pélagie’s children who would survive into adulthood.

  While still in Paris over a year later, on Easter Sunday 1768, Sade picked up a thirty-six-year-old beggar named Rose Keller and, on the pretext of needing a cleaner, took her to a little country house he had rented at Arcueil. Once there, he locked the woman up, ordered her to strip, and whipped her, pouring what felt to her like molten wax into her wounds. Keller later managed to escape from the house and report her experience to the police. Sade was duly arrested and taken to the royal prison at Saumur, where he was held for a fortnight before being transferred to Pierre-Encize, another royal prison near Lyons. After a hearing at which Sade categorically denied any intention of causing Keller serious harm (the medical evidence in fact supported his defence) and claimed that the woman was a prostitute who had accepted money for sexual purposes, he was fined and released after a few months’ imprisonment, on condition that he return to Provence and remain there until further notice.

  Around this time the huge debts that Sade incurred to pay for his sexual pleasures and also for the theatrical activities at La Coste were beginning to change his mother-in-law’s view of him, a process that would culminate eventually in her outright hostility. But the single event that probably did most damage to his relationship with La Présidente was the love-affair with his wife’s youngest sister, Anne-Prospère de Launay, who was as beautiful as Renée-Pélagie was plain. Fresh from her convent schooling, and still dressed as a nun, this pretty and, by all accounts, flirtatious twenty-year-old must have represented to Sade all the taboos that his fictional characters would take such pleasure in breaking: virginity, incest, and religion. Another major scandal would soon send them off together into Italy’s most romantic city.

  On 22 June 1772 Sade and his valet, Latour, set off for Marseilles, ostensibly to secure a loan to pay the Marquis’s debts. It was not long, however, before they were looking to spend the money Sade had just borrowed in France’s southern city of sin. In humorous self-disguise, the two men swapped names, Sade calling his servant Monsieur le Marquis, while Latour addressed his master as Lafleur (which would later be the name of a valet in Philosophy in the Boudoir), and organized a session of debauchery with four young prostitutes, ranging in age from eighteen to twenty-three. The session included acts of flagellation and sodomy. The girls were also asked to swallow pastilles containing cantharides (or ‘Spanish fly’), a well-known aphrodisiac, although the intention on this occasion was to cause flatulence, the effects of which Sade found particularly arousing. One of the girls became ill, and complained to the authorities that Sade had tried to poison her. Less than a week later a warrant was issued for the two men’s arrest, and on 9 July the police arrived at La Coste to take them into custody, but an actor in Sade’s theatre company having warned of the allegations made in Marseilles, Sade and Latour had already fled, accompanied this time by the ravishing Anne-Prospère. In spite of Renée-Pélagie’s attempts to bribe the girls into withdrawing their accusations, the two men were found guilty of all charges and condemned to death in absentia (sodomy alone carried the death-sentence at this time), and on 12 September their bodies were symbolically burned in effigy. By now the three fugitives had reached Venice, Sade travelling under the pseudonym of the Comte de Mazan.

  This was the first of three Italian trips that Sade undertook between 1772 and 1776 in his attempts to escape French justice. These journeys prompted him to write his first major literary work, Travels in Italy (Voyages d’Italie), a sort of travelogue with philosophical and historical commentaries, which would not be published until 1795 but which represented an important stage in his formation as a writer and thinker. On the one hand the travel perspective enabled Sade to develop a theme to which he would repeatedl
y return in his libertine fiction, and which would come to form the basis of his opposition to the absolutism of religious morality: the cultural and historical relativity of human mores. On the other hand, in their increasing improbability, events in the Marquis de Sade’s life were beginning to resemble the picaresque adventures of the typical eighteenth-century hero of fiction, and so would also provide ample inspiration, as well as geographical and cultural material, for the novels he would write in the 1790s. During this period Sade managed to elude capture by the French authorities, until he was eventually arrested in Chambéry in December 1772 by order of the King of Sardinia and detained at the sixteenth-century fortress of Miolans. Renée-Pélagie did all she could to obtain his release, but the Montreuils exercised their influence to keep him locked up. At the instigation of Madame de Montreuil, warrants for Sade’s arrest were issued and reissued over the next few years. Before the first extended period of Sade’s imprisonment, which began in 1777 and was to last until the Revolution, there was one more scandal which greatly assisted La Présidente in her vigorous campaign to get her embarrassing son-in-law permanently incarcerated.

  During a period of prolonged residence in hiding at La Coste between 1774 and 1775, the Marquis had hired five girls and a young male secretary for the winter. It was Anne Sablonnière, a young woman of twenty-four, otherwise known as ‘Nanon’, who helped find the girls and was as a consequence alleged later to have acted as procuress. There was probably some truth in this, in that the intention had almost certainly been to organize a little harem. In addition to the six youngsters and Nanon, there was also Renée-Pélagie’s maid, Gothon, a young girl from a Swiss Protestant family. In January 1775 Sade was accused of having abducted the five young girls. This situation was exacerbated in the spring of that year by Nanon’s giving birth to an illegitimate child and claiming that Sade was the father. This affair was hushed up by the Sade and Montreuil families, who conspired to get Nanon arrested for an alleged theft of three silver plates and locked away in a house of detention at Arles, where she would remain for three years. Her baby died of neglect at La Coste at the age of ten weeks. As for the five girls, four were sent off to various nunneries to keep them quiet, while one chose to stay with Renée-Pélagie as scullery-maid. Nevertheless, the whole business had done Sade’s reputation considerable damage, and fearing another police raid on La Coste, he set off again for Italy. It was a year before he felt safe enough to return to France.