Letters From Prison

  OTHER WORKS BY THE MARQUIS DE SADE

  TRANSLATED BY RICHARD SEAVER

  Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, & Other Writings

  (with Austryn Wainhouse)

  The 120 Days of Sodom & Other Writings

  (with Austryn Wainhouse)

  The Mystified Magistrate and Other Tales

  (forthcoming)

  Copyright © 1999, 2011 by Richard Seaver

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Letters number 76, 77, 83, 108, and 109 from Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings if the Marquis de Sade, translated, compiled, and edited by Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver. Copyright © 1965 by Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse. Used by permission of Grovel Atlantic, Inc., and revised for this edition.

  A fragment of the Introduction, entitled ‘’An Anniversary Unnoticed,” appeared in Evergreen Review in 1964, marking the 150th anniversary of Sade’s death.

  Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-611145-572-4

  To the memory of

  Gilbert Lely

  through whose perseverance these letters were recovered

  and to

  Jean-Jacques Pauvert

  whose courage under fire was exemplary

  The translator would like to express his gratitude to Professor Robert Darnton for his gracious and generous help in verifying certain facts and characters of Sade’s universe.

  “My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking to suit other people! My manner of thinking stems straight from my considered reflections; it holds with my existence, with the way I am made. It is not in my power to alter it; and if it were, I’d not do so.”

  —Sade to his wife [November, 1783],

  Letter Number 83

  “ . . . it is impossible for me to turn my back on my muse; it sweeps me along, forces me to write despite myself and, no matter what people may do to try to stop me, there is no way they will ever succeed.”

  —Sade to Abbé Amblet [April, 1784],

  Letter Number 94

  Introduction

  Note on the Letters

  Part One: Letters from Vincennes

  Part Two: Letters from the Bastille

  Epilogue

  Frontispiece: Four of Sade’s prisons. Clockwise from top: Miolans, the Bastille, Pierre-Encize, and Vincennes. This nineteenth-century engraving served as the frontispiece of Maurice Heine’s 1883 anthology of Sade’s works. Reprinted from Maurice Heine, OEuvres Choisies et Pages Magistrales du Marquis de Sade, volume 1 (Paris: Editions du Trianon, 1883)

  In mid-November 1814, the newly appointed student doctor to the insane asylum of Charenton on the outskirts of Paris, L. J. Ramon, age nineteen, noticed as he made his rounds an aged, obese inmate, carelessly dressed, always alone, remote but courteous, gentlemanly of manner, who ambled slowly along the corridor outside his room. The man, he was told, was incurably insane and had been in the institution for more than eleven years. Ramon was struck by the man’s imposing air, despite his age and obesity. Roughly two weeks after that first encounter, the old man received a visit from his son, who, finding his father much weakened and no longer able to walk, asked Monsieur Ramon to spend the night with him. During the evening, Ramon helped the man take a few sips of herbal tea to help ease his pulmonary congestion. Shortly before ten, since he noted his patient had increasing difficulty breathing, Ramon got up to fetch him a drink. Surprised by the sudden silence from the bed behind him, Ramon turned back to find that the old man was dead. At the time, the fledgling doctor still had no idea that his charge was the infamous Marquis de Sade. More than fifty years later, writing about his early memories of the inmate, Ramon noted:

  Never once did I catch him talking to anybody. As I passed I would bow and he would respond with that chill courtesy that excludes any thought of entering into conversation. . . . Nothing could have led me to suspect that this was the author of Justine and Juliette; the only impression he produced on me was that of a haughty, morose, elderly gentleman.

  Eight years earlier, Sade had written his last will and testament, specifically setting forth the site and manner of his modest burial, asking that his body be borne to his property at Malmaison near Epernon, and there, “without display or pomp of any sort,” a ditch be dug in a copse that he specified, and his body laid therein.

  The ditch once covered over, above it acorns shall be strewn, so that the spot may become green again, and the copse grown back thick over it, the traces of my grave may disappear from the earth as I trust the memory of me shall fade out of the minds of all men. . . .

  Despite his express instructions, Sade’s wishes were ignored, and he was given what amounted to a pauper’s burial in the cemetery of Charenton. As for his desire—surely sincere—that he be forgotten, in that too he was contravened. His works were banned, burned, and destroyed; his descendants, starting with his son Donatien-Claude-Armand, all bearing the cross of his presumed shame, did their best to make sure his memory indeed faded from the minds of men. Yet his name, however maligned, lingered on throughout the nineteenth century, both in the public mind and, later, in the dictionaries and etymologies of the world. That name, in its pure and associated forms—sadism, sadist, sadomasochist—became synonymous with the gratuitous infliction of pain, the pursuit of wanton pleasure, delight in cruelty, especially excessive cruelty, specifically in the context of sexual release. His works—those that survived the censor’s sword or the family’s pyre—were spoken of (if at all) in hushed tones. Few were available to the public, though copies of some of the early editions of Justine, The New Justine, Juliette, and The Crimes of Love remained locked up on the top shelves of private libraries.

  In the early part of the twentieth century, however, a number of enterprising and daring spirits, not content with the then current legend, began to examine Sade’s works more closely and came to the conclusion that there was much more to both the man and the myth than had hitherto been admitted. At the turn of the century, a German, Dr. Iwan Bloch, writing under the name of Eugène Dühren, published a study, The Marquis de Sade, His Life and Work, simultaneously in Berlin and Paris in 1901. A few years later, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire wrote his groundbreaking and daring Work of the Marquis de Sade, in a collection of classics aptly entitled “The Masters of Love.” With that one work Sade was if not resurrected at least a fit subject for drawing room—and sidewalk café—discussion. But it was not until after World War II that the Sadean rehabilitation began in full force, perhaps in part because the world had seen, through the ravages of that monstrous war, the full evil of which man was capable. In any event, the French surrealists, the pioneering biographers Maurice Heine and Gilbert Lely, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, the writers Simone de Beauvoir and Pierre Klossowski, and perhaps most daringly and courageously, considering the powerful
forces of censorship then prevailing in France, the French publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert, who in the 1960s undertook the gargantuan task of issuing, at great personal risk, the complete works of Sade, all rank among the sturdy pioneers in this phoenixlike endeavor. So successful was the resurrection that in the second half of the twentieth century there were voices proclaiming Sade as one of the seminal thinkers not only of the eighteenth century but of all time, a precursor to Nietzsche, Stirner, Freud, Krafft-Ebing, and the surrealists. Simone de Beauvoir hailed him as a “great writer,” adding that he “must be given a place in the great family of those who wish to cut through the banality of everyday life.” If today evaluations are less dithyrambic, more measured, the fact remains that Sade still enjoys a measure of respect far greater than he ever could have imagined in his wildest dreams.

  Yet, even in this presumably enlightened age, to pronounce the name Sade in polite company (or even impolite) generally draws a skeptical if not disapproving look, a knowing guffaw, a remark that, however seemingly innocuous, is fraught with negative implications: Why is someone like you involved with someone like him? (Such a question presumes judgments about both parties that are, in all probability, far from the mark.) The fact is, despite all redoubtable efforts to rehabilitate him by contemporary scholars and writers, Sade remains a marked man, as he was during most of his lifetime, and those in any way involved with him and his writings are generally assumed guilty by association. That is doubtless how Sade would have liked it, for however the world might judge him, he was without question one of the great rebels of history. Doubting everything, attacking everything, railing against society, religion, and authority in all its forms, excoriating laws and the courts, bewigged judges, corrupt prosecutors, venal police, decrying hypocritical clergy, he reached the only philosophical conclusion that such an attitude demanded if taken to its extreme: utter anarchy, in which no law or official constraint impeded the freedom of the individual—especially if that individual was the marquis himself.

  Sade was different from most men, physically and psychically, as he was the first to recognize. On the one hand, he had insatiable and, putting it mildly, bizarre sexual appetites, and at the same time he suffered from a sexual dysfunction that made it increasingly difficult to satisfy those imperious appetites. In a moving letter to his wife written from the Bastille, probably in late 1784, he expounds candidly on the problem, which, he notes, is becoming increasingly acute, adding that he intends to seek immediate medical advice as soon as he is free. By the time he was in his mid-thirties, if not before, Sade fully recognized his difference—his “separateness,” as de Beauvoir terms it—and set about not only justifying it, which he does endlessly both in his work and his extraordinary letters, but analyzing it. What clearly emerges from these letters is the extent of Sade’s self-awareness. “Know thyself,” said the philosopher, and Sade spent endless hours, thanks in great measure to the thousands of hours of solitude imposed upon him by society, in the introspective search for who and what he was au fond. Society’s intent, he believed, indeed its mandate, was to skewer separateness by forcing the individual to integrate into the community: thus the uncontrolled rage in his writings against those who would try to inhibit him, control him, make him conform. Yet ironically Sade was in a very real sense a conformist; as a proud aristocrat, from one of the oldest and most distinguished families of Provence, he wanted, and strove to be, a member of the community. He wanted all the rights and privileges of the reigning establishment, but none of its restrictions. Obviously, he could not have both. As de Beauvoir noted in her pioneering essay, “Must We Burn Sade?” written some fifty years ago:

  Sade tried to make of his psycho-physical destiny an ethical choice; and of this act, in which he assumed his separateness, he attempted to make an example and an appeal. It is thus that his adventure assumes a wide human significance. Can we, without renouncing our individuality, satisfy our aspirations to universality? Or is it only by the sacrifice of our individual differences that we can integrate ourselves into the community? This problem concerns us all. In Sade the differences are carried to the point of outrageousness, and the immensity of his literary effort shows how passionately he wished to be accepted by the human community. Thus we find in his work the most extreme form of the conflict from which no individual can escape without self-deception. It is the paradox and, in a sense, the triumph of Sade that his persistent singularity helps us define the human drama in its general aspect.

  This volume collects most of the surviving letters that Sade wrote during his more than thirteen-year imprisonment in the dungeons of Vincennes and the Bastille, and the Charenton Asylum, from 1777 to 1790. He was thirty-seven when he went to prison this time (he had been in prison several times before, once in debtor’s prison and thrice for offense to the morals of the kingdom), and when he was freed, on Good Friday, 1790, he was fifty, vastly overweight from lack of fresh air and exercise (and also, despite all his grumbling about prison fare, from overeating), his health virtually ruined, his burning appetites banked to embers. Despite the fact that he had been released by the Revolution, he was an aristocrat and, more dangerously, allied to the royal family by birth and background. A free man at last, he was in this brave new society fully as vulnerable as he had been inside those dank, airless prison walls about which he complains so often and so eloquently in these letters. But what is perhaps most remarkable about this undoubtedly remarkable man is that, for all that he had gone through and suffered—and these letters do attest to the full extent of that suffering, a word that occurs probably more often than any other in his fulminations—his spirit was far from broken. He had read widely and eclectically in prison, had written feverishly in several genres— novels, short stories, philosophy, plays—and had formulated a literary master plan that was wildly ambitious, especially given his age and health. (In addition to his increasing corpulence, he suffered from migraines, serious eye problems, chest pains, and hemorrhoids.)

  Whether his motive was revenge or enlightenment, during his prison years and the twenty years that followed, he produced a body of work that is unique. Whatever else he was, Sade was pure—admittedly a surprising term in his connection; he cut through, with a terrible swift sword, the hypocrisies of the day, the cant, the false, the sham, be it sacred or profane. A sybarite beyond compare, endowed with a sexual appetite that was prodigious, hot tempered, arrogant, prone to violence yet capable of great tenderness and acts of kindness, this most contradictory of men can only be understood—if indeed he can be understood at all—in the context of his time. Who, in fact, was this man who wrote four of the most outrageous novels ever penned: Justine, Juliette, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and The Days of Florbelle?1

  First, make no mistake: Sade was a libertine, as he was the first to admit. In his self-styled “Grand Letter” written to his wife from the dungeon of Vincennes to mark the anniversary of his fourth year incarcerated there, Sade says:

  Yes, I am a libertine, that I admit. I have conceived everything that can be conceived in that area, but I have certainly not practiced everything I have conceived and never shall. I am a libertine, but I am neither a criminal nor a murderer, and since I am obliged to place my apology next to my justification, I shall therefore say that ’tis quite possible that they who condemn me so unfairly are in no position to offset their infamies by good deeds as patent as those I can raise to compare to my misdeeds. I am a libertine, but three families living in your section of the city lived for five years on my charity, and I rescued them from the depths of poverty. I am a libertine, but I saved a deserter from the military, a man abandoned by his entire regiment and his colonel, from certain death. I am a libertine, but at Evry, with your entire family looking on, I saved at the risk of my own life a child who was about to be crushed beneath the wheels of a cart drawn by runaway horses by throwing myself beneath the cart. I am a libertine, but I have never compromised the health of my wife. . . .

  That admission, coupled wi
th a cursory reminder of some of his offsetting good deeds, can be taken literally. The author of The 120 Days of Sodom was capable of acts of kindness and charity, of true friendship and deep devotion, as these letters will attest. They are in fact perhaps more revealing of the many sides of Sade than anything more formal he wrote or said. One can also take at face value what he says in that same letter about conceiving of a great deal more in the realm of libertinage than he ever practiced. Condemnation of the man for over a century was based in large part on the presumption that Sade had done everything he described in such excruciating detail, therefore was either a criminal or mad, probably both. As usual, the truth is much more complex and subtle. Sade, who as these letters reveal was much given to introspection and self-analysis, was born with huge appetites and a violent temper. Add to this that he was born into a society where aristocratic privilege in the areas of sex and sensuality were taken for granted, and only rarely admonished, and that he came from one of the oldest and noblest families of France, allied through his mother directly to royal blood, and one sees the possibility of unfettered behavior from the earliest age.

  In a letter of April 25, 1759, written when he was not yet nineteen, Sade, who was already a captain in the cavalry, fighting the Prussians during the Seven Years War, wrote to his childhood tutor, Abbe Amblet:

  I rose every morning to go in search of pleasure and the thought of it made me oblivious to all else. I believed myself fortunate the moment I found it, but what seemed happiness evaporated as quickly as my desires, leaving me with but regrets. By evening I was desperate and saw my mistake, but that was evening; with a new day there were my desires back again, and back I flew to pleasure.