The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings Read online

  The 120 Days of Sodom

  and other writings

  THE MARQUIS DE SADE

  COMPILED AND TRANSLATED BY

  AUSTRYN WAINHOUSE & RICHARD SEAVER

  WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY

  SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR & PIERRE KLOSSOWSKI

  Copyright © 1966 by Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver

  “Must We Burn Sade?” by Simone de Beauvoir copyright © 1955 by Éditions Gallimard, Paris, France; translation copyright © 1953 by Grove Press, New York. “Nature as Destructive Principle,” by Pierre Klossowski copyright © 1964 by Au Cercle du Livre Précieux, translation copyright © 1965 by Yale French Studies.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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  Acknowledgments

  The essay by Simone de Beauvoir “Must We Burn Sade?” was originally published in the December 1951 and January 1952 issues of Les Temps Modernes as “Faut-il brûler Sade?” and was subsequently reprinted in the collection of the author’s essays entitled Privilèges. The English translation first appeared in The Marquis de Sade, published by Grove Press in 1954, and is here reprinted in a slightly revised translation by permission of the publisher and the translator. “Nature as Destructive Principle,” by Pierre Klossowski, served as an introduction to the Au Cercle du Livre Précieux edition of Les 120 Journées de Sodome. This essay is a slightly revised and condensed version of the chapter entitled “Esquisse du Système” from the author’s book, Sade mon prochain, published by Éditions du Seuil, Paris, France, 1947. It is here reprinted by permission of the author and of the editor of Yale French Studies. The editors wish especially to thank Miss Marilynn Meeker for her meticulous job of editing, and for the number and diversity of her suggestions.

  To the memory of Maurice Heine, who freed Sade from the prison wherein he was held captive for over a century after his death, and to Gilbert Lely, who has unselfishly devoted himself to this same task of liberation and restitution.

  Contents

  Foreword

  Part One: Critical

  Must We Burn Sade? by Simone de Beauvoir

  Nature as Destructive Principle by Pierre Klossowski

  Part Two: from Les Crimes de l’ Amour

  Reflections on the Novel (1800)

  Villeterque’s Review of Les Crimes de l’Amour (1800)

  The Author of Les Crimes de l’Amour to Villeterque, Hack Writer (1803)

  Florville and Courval, or The Works of Fate (1788)

  Part Three: The 120 Days of Sodom (1785)

  Part Four: Theater

  Oxtiern, or The Misfortunes of Libertinage (1800)

  Ernestine, A Swedish Tale (1788)

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Foreword

  There is an opinion worth pondering, which may perhaps become the prevailing one among Sade’s more thoughtful readers: according to it, the immense fragment occupying the better part of the present volume deserves to be considered his crowning achievement, his masterpiece. Certainly, behind that estimate lie “special” criteria. Perverse criteria, one may feel, as one penetrates into a world where, as though in the Château of Silling itself, the appeal to ordinary standards evokes only sardonic silences. Nowhere, indeed, is Sade at such a remove from literature and its reassurances, nowhere does his assault upon ordinary standards reach such a pitch of unpitying absoluteness, nowhere is its violence so categorical or sustained for so long as in The 120 Days of Sodom. To this darkest of novels, to this book of purest destruction, to this unsurpassed novel of terror and signal act of terrorism, Sade attached a capital importance. Chronologically, it was his first major work: the year was 1785, he was forty-five and by then had made up his mind about what his writer’s task was to consist of. This psychopathia sexualis was to be its beginning and end. It was—it would have been—his definitive labor and “crime of love.”

  In themselves, the details of the manuscript’s disappearance and rediscovery make a remarkable story, whose essentials are given in the note preceding the work; here we need only say that the grand event inaugurating the Revolution Sade awaited so impatiently cost him the text in which he had consigned everything of the most intimate and extreme of his own revolt. Over the loss of his 120 Days, which was engulfed in the pillage that followed the Bastille’s capture, they were “tears of blood” he wept. “It was, and Sade knew it, his masterpiece that had gone astray,” insists Maurice Heine in his preface to the first edition. “The remainder of his literary life was to be dominated by the concern to remedy the consequences of that irreparable accident. With painful perseverance he strove to attain again the mastery that had been his at the supreme height of his solitude and his misanthropy.”

  The life of the Marquis de Sade was an incredible series of misfortunes, and what is perhaps most incredible of all was his capacity to withstand them. No doubt whatsoever, he invited trouble; it came his way unfailingly. Adversity or, more exactly, the cruel privations of confinement made Sade a writer in the first place—he said so, jubilantly, promising to take a prodigious revenge. Upon the prisoner’s fare of eternal anxiety his genius thrived, and the very frailty of words scratched on thin paper, the constant possibility that his persecutors intervene, that authority arbitrarily confiscate or tear to pieces all he had toiled to put together, lent a further dimension to his helpless vulnerability and his rage.

  It was thanks to the Revolution that Sade obtained his freedom. Overjoyed at his release, eager to participate in the movement of his times, he soon found himself in another nightmare. His disappointment was almost immediate and withering; but this too he overcame. In prison he had learned patience and cunning and duplicity and the techniques of unfeeling indifference, of what he called apathy; and these were the resources he drew upon to survive in the midst of the Nation and to outlast the Reign of Virtue. When his lawyer Gaufridy wondered about the Marquis’ political views, “Citizen Sade” assured him they were just what circumstances demanded, and nothing if not “mobile.” Today it requires, more than mere naïveté to tax Sade with insincerity. If anyone hated the ancien régime, it was he; but he realized at once something it has taken French historians until now to be clear on: that, precious misunderstandings and popular duperies aside, 1789 was a proprietors’ uprising calculated to secure and consolidate the position and interests of the bourgeoisie alone. How little he sympathized with the Incorruptible’s aim to bring forth a Republic cemented by blood Sade was able to illustrate when, as a judge, and to his mortal peril, he declined to sentence members of the opposition to death, explaining that while one might commit crimes for the sake of pleasure, it was not among his principles to murder in the name of justice.

  Elusive, paradoxical figure! On the one hand, Le Comte Oxtiern ou les Effets du Libertinage, presented to a public whose approval mattered so deeply to the playwright Sade; on the other hand, that “Theory of Libertinage”* Restif de la Bretonne had got wind of and shrilled against in advance of its eventual publica
tion by “the monster-author”—the contrast is extreme and it is strange. What conclusions must one arrive at regarding the man who, while citing Samuel Richardson and the creator of Joseph Andrews as the outstanding explorers of “the human heart, Nature’s veritable labyrinth,” was filling the more than one hundred notebooks of Les Journées de Florbelle, ou la Nature dévoilée, his effort to reconstitute The 120 Days?

  * This is the name Restif de la Bretonne invented to identify The 120 Days of Sodom, whose real title he did not know, but of whose composition he had learned.

  Again and again we are led back to a fundamental contradiction in Sade; and there, one senses, lies the entire problem of situating him. Introducing the volume that preceded this one, we alluded to the difficulty when we spoke of the two designs corresponding to two drives: to write in order to be read, and to write unreadably, in such a way as to preclude being read, and in answer to a very different but equally real purpose. To be known, and to be unknown; to divulge, and to conceal. To reintegrate society and broad daylight, and to hold to his cell, immuring himself in the night. Sade wanted both, and both at once.

  It was he who classified his works as L (lumière) or S (sombre), or else signed some and refrained from acknowledging others, and even disavowed Justine, his spiritual autobiography, so vigorously and so systematically protesting the allegations that the book was his as to establish the solidest grounds for suspicions to the contrary. Thus his “public” and his “clandestine” writings—if they represent antithetical attitudes and intentions—were in a dialectical sense complementary, and in a psychological sense inseparable. The drama of his life, precisely, was their reconciliation.

  A.W., R.S.

  PART ONE

  Critical

  Must We Burn Sade?

  by Simone de Beauvoir

  1

  “Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change.”

  They chose to kill him, first by slow degrees in the boredom of the dungeon and then by calumny and oblivion. This latter death he had himself desired. “The ditch once covered over, above it acorns shall be strewn in order that, the spot become green again and the copse grown back thick over it, the traces of my grave may disappear from the face of the earth as I trust the memory of me shall fade out of the minds of all men. . . .”1 This was the only one of his last wishes to be respected, though most carefully so. The memory of Sade has been disfigured by preposterous legends,2 his very name has buckled under the weight of such words as “sadism” and “sadistic.” His private journals have been lost, his manuscripts burned—the ten volumes of Les Journées de Florbelle at the instigation of his own son—his books banned. Though in the latter part of the nineteenth century Swinburne and a few other curious spirits became interested in his case, it was not until Apollinaire that he assumed his place in French literature. However, he is still a long way from having won it officially. One may glance through heavy, detailed works on “The Ideas of the Eighteenth Century,” or even on “The Sensibility of the Eighteenth Century,” without once coming upon his name. It is understandable that as a reaction against this scandalous silence Sade’s enthusiasts have hailed him as a prophetic genius; they claim that his work heralds Nietzsche, Stirner, Freud, and surrealism. But this cult, founded, like all cults, on a misconception, by deifying the “divine marquis” only betrays him. The critics who make of Sade neither villain nor idol, but a man and a writer, can be counted upon the fingers of one hand. Thanks to them, Sade has come back at last to earth, among us.

  Just what is his place, however? Why does he merit our interest? Even his admirers will readily admit that his work is, for the most part, unreadable; philosophically, it escapes banality only to founder in incoherence. As to his vices, they are not startlingly original; Sade invented nothing in this domain, and one finds in psychiatric treatises a profusion of cases at least as interesting as his. The fact is that it is neither as author nor as sexual pervert that Sade compels our attention; it is by virtue of the relationship which he created between these two aspects of himself. Sade’s aberrations begin to acquire value when, instead of enduring them as his fixed nature, he elaborates an immense system in order to justify them. Inversely, his books take hold of us as soon as we become aware that for all their repetitiousness, their platitudes and clumsiness, he is trying to communicate an experience whose distinguishing characteristic is, nevertheless, a tendency to be incommunicable. 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 to define the human drama in its general aspect.

  In order to understand Sade’s development, in order to grasp the share of his freedom in this story, in order to assess his success and his failure, it would be useful to have precise knowledge of the facts of his situation. Unfortunately, despite the zeal of his biographers, Sade’s life and personality remain obscure on many points. We have no authentic portrait of him, and the contemporary descriptions which have come down to us are quite poor. The testimony at the Marseilles trial shows him at thirty-two, “a handsome figure of a man, full faced,” of medium height, dressed in a gray dress coat and deep orange silk breeches, a feather in his hat, a sword at his side, a cane in his hand. Here he is at fifty-three, according to a residence certificate dated the 7th of March, 1793: “Height: five feet two inches; hair: almost white; round face; receding hairline; blue eyes; medium nose; round chin.” The description of the 22nd of March, 1794, is a bit different: “Height: five feet two inches, medium nose, small mouth, round chin, grayish blond hair, high receding hairline, light blue eyes.” He seems by then to have lost his “handsome figure,” since he writes a few years later, in the Bastille, “I’ve taken on, for lack of exercise, such an enormous amount of fat that I can hardly move about.” It is this corpulence which first struck Charles Nodier when he met Sade in 1807 at Sainte-Pélagie. “An immense obesity which hindered his movements so as to prevent the exercise of those remains of grace and elegance that still lingered in his general comportment. There remained, nevertheless, in his weary eyes an indefinable flash and brilliance which took fire from time to time, like a dying spark on a dead coal.” These testimonies, the only ones we possess, hardly enable us to visualize a particular face. It has been said3 that Nodier’s description recalls the aging Oscar Wilde; it suggests Robert de Montesquiou and Maurice Sachs as well, and it tempts us to imagine a bit of Charlus in Sade, but the data is very weak.

  Even more regrettable is the fact that we have so little information about his childhood. If we take the description of Valcour for an autobiographical sketch, Sade came to know resentment and violence at an early age. Brought up with Louis-Joseph de Bourbon, his contemporary, he seems to have defended himself against the selfish arrogance of the young prince with such displays of anger and brutality that he had to be taken away from court. Probably his stay in the gloomy château of Saumane and in the decaying abbey of Ebreuil left its mark upon his imagination, but we know nothing significant about his brief years of study, his entry into the army, or his life as an amiable man of fashion and debauchee. One might try to deduce his life from his work; this has
been done by Pierre Klossowski, who sees in Sade’s implacable hatred of his mother the key to his life and work. But he derives this hypothesis from the mother’s role in Sade’s writings. That is, he restricts himself to a description of Sade’s imaginary world from a certain angle. He does not reveal its roots in the real world. In fact, we suspect a priori, and in accordance with certain general notions, the importance of Sade’s relationship with his father and mother; the particular details are not available to us. When we meet Sade he is already mature, and we do not know how he has become what he is. Ignorance forbids us to account for his tendencies and spontaneous behavior. His emotional nature and the peculiar character of his sexuality are for us data which we can merely note. Because of this unfortunate gap, the truth about Sade will always remain closed to us; any explanation would leave a residue which only the childhood history of Sade might have clarified.

  Nevertheless, the limits imposed on our understanding ought not to discourage us, for Sade, as we have said, did not restrict himself to a passive submission to the consequences of his early choices. His chief interest for us lies not in his aberrations, but in the manner in which he assumed responsibility for them. He made of his sexuality an ethic; he expressed this ethic in works of literature. It is by this deliberate act that Sade attains a real originality. The reason for his tastes is obscure, but we can understand how he erected these tastes into principles, and why he carried them to the point of fanaticism.

  Superficially, Sade, at twenty-three, was like all other young aristocrats of his time; he was cultured, liked the theater and the arts, and was fond of reading. He was dissipated, kept a mistress—la Beauvoisin—and frequented the brothels. He married, without enthusiasm and in conformance to parental wishes, a young girl of the petty aristocracy, Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil, who was, however, rich. That was the beginning of the disaster that was to resound—and recur—throughout his life. Married in May, Sade was arrested in October for excesses committed in a brothel which he had been frequenting for over a month. The reasons for arrest were grave enough for Sade to send letters, which went astray, to the governor of the prison, begging him to keep them secret, lest he be hopelessly ruined. This episode suggests that Sade’s eroticism had already assumed a disquieting character. This hypothesis is confirmed by the fact that a year later Inspector Marais warned the procuresses to stop giving their girls to the Marquis. But the interest of all this lies not in its value as information, but in the revelation which it constituted for Sade himself. On the verge of his adult life he made the brutal discovery that there was no conciliation possible between his social existence and his private pleasures.