Justine or the Misfortunes of Virtue (Oxford) Read online

  Settling down once more in his chateau in Provence, Sade again began to recruit young girls. These included a pretty twenty-two-year-old named Catherine Treillet, whom Sade nicknamed Justine. Her father, a local weaver, gradually became concerned about the goings-on at La Coste and decided to take his daughter home by force. When the daughter refused to go with him, he marched up to the chateau and fired off a shot at the Marquis. This incident obviously had legal repercussions which contributed to a fateful decision. In his legal battle with Treillet, Sade determined to seek satisfaction in the Paris courts, and on 8 February 1777 he and Renée-Pélagie arrived in the capital, where he learned that his mother had died three weeks earlier. This was a perfect opportunity for Madame de Montreuil to get rid of her wayward son-in-law once and for all, and within a week of his arrival in Paris Sade was arrested and again imprisoned in the fortress of Vincennes.

  The following year the verdict imposed on Sade and his valet for the Marseilles ‘poisoning’ was in fact annulled by the court at Aix, but Madame de Montreuil was able to have a new lettre de cachet issued to keep her son-in-law detained. On the return journey from the Aix appeal to prison at Vincennes, however, the Marquis managed to give his guards the slip when they stopped at a coaching inn at Vincennes, and disappeared into the surrounding countryside, heading for La Coste, which he reached on foot at eight o’clock the next morning. His freedom was short-lived, however, for just six weeks later a detachment of ten armed men stormed the chateau and hauled him back to Vincennes.

  This fleeting taste of liberty was the only interruption in a thirteen-year period of detention, initially at Vincennes and then in the Bastille, to which Sade was transferred in February 1784. To fill the long days and evenings he read voraciously, gradually amassing a varied and extensive library which included the classics he had read as a child (for example, Homer, Virgil, Montaigne, La Fontaine, Boccaccio), works of Enlightenment philosophy by Buffon, La Mettrie, d’Holbach, Diderot, Rousseau, and Voltaire, and of course drama and fiction, by Beaumarchais, Marivaux, Voltaire, Defoe, Rousseau, Shakespeare, and many others. In the solitude of his prison-cell Sade began to write in earnest, producing a remarkable number of works in a relatively short time. Indeed, his literary output was so great that in 1788 he was able to compose a comprehensive catalogue of his works, listing no fewer than eight novels and volumes of short stories, sixteen historical novellas, two volumes of essays, an edition of diary notes, and some twenty plays. From this canon of writings only a small number survived the storming of the Bastille in 1789.

  All of the plays and two important works of prose—the lengthy epistolary novel Aline et Valcour, and the philosophical short story ‘Les Infortunes de la vertu’ (‘The Misfortunes of Virtue’), which would form the basis of the full-length libertine novel Justine that Sade would publish after the Revolution—conformed in every sense to accepted literary norms. On the other hand, of the libertine works composed during these prison years, the novel Les Cent vingt journées de Sodome (The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom), written between 1782 and 1785, and a philosophical essay with strong libertine overtones, Dialogue entre un prêtre et un moribond (Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man; 1782), show a total disregard for the conventions of form as well as of content. The obscene works that he began to produce in prison in the 1780s and completed for publication in the 1790s are of considerably more interest than anything else he wrote.

  In the months and weeks immediately preceding the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 angry crowds were in the habit of gathering beneath its walls. Sade quickly saw that the present unrest offered his best chance of freedom in thirteen years, and he shouted to the mob below that the guards were about to cut the prisoners’ throats. This provocative act immediately got Sade moved to the lunatic asylum at Charenton, a few miles south of Paris. Ten days later the citizens of Paris invaded the fortress, murdering the governor and plundering or destroying those manuscripts that Sade had not been able to smuggle out of the building. Among the lost works was the unfinished manuscript of The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, which would not resurface until the beginning of the twentieth century. Sade was eventually set free in April 1790 thanks to the abolition by the new National Assembly of lettres de cachet, the legal means by which so many had been held indefinitely without trial under the ancien régime.

  Sade was now a penniless and obese man of nearly fifty. Renée-Pélagie, who had remained utterly devoted to her husband throughout most of his time in prison, had by this time resolved to live alone in a Paris convent and refused to see him. It was not long, though, before the Marquis’ old magnetic charm was able to rescue him from dying of starvation in the streets. That summer Sade met the woman who would take his wife’s place as lover and loyal companion. Constance Quesnet, a thirty-three-year-old former actress, who was separated from her husband and had a six-year-old son, would remain at his side for the rest of his life. Nicknamed ‘Sensible’ or ‘Sensitive’ by Sade because of her highly strung temperament, Constance was a modestly educated but gentle, loving, and intelligent woman. The couple scraped a living on her small allowance, while Citizen Louis Sade, as he was now forced to call himself, tried to get his plays performed at the Comédie française and other leading Paris theatres. These efforts were largely unsuccessful, however, and Sade’s increasing poverty, brought about by years of mounting debts and the seizure of his lands under the Revolution, drove him to publish ‘well-spiced’ novels that he hoped would have a large sale: Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue in 1791, Philosophy in the Boudoir in 1795, The New Justine and Story of Juliette between 1797 and 1800. Only Aline and Valcour, published in 1795, and Crimes of Love, a collection of short stories which appeared in 1800, were sufficiently ‘respectable’ to be published under his own name. Citizen Sade was determined to make money, although in fact, for reasons which have more to do with the prevailing climate of taste in the 1790s than anything else, only the 1791 Justine achieved best-seller status.

  Although remaining an aristocrat and a monarchist at heart, Sade nevertheless managed to survive the Revolution and the Terror of the Robespierre regime by playing the revolutionary game. This he did admirably, throwing himself energetically into local activities and penning well-received patriotic speeches. Indeed, for a former aristocrat his rise to prominence as a revolutionary was remarkable. He became secretary, then president of his section of the city for a brief period, and was eventually appointed one of the section’s twenty judges, positions which he could easily have exploited to avenge himself on the Montreuils, whose death-warrants fate placed before him. A lifelong opponent of the death-penalty, however, Sade saved his in-laws and many others from the guillotine, a decision that eventually led to his arrest on 8 December 1793 on a trumped-up charge. In fact, the real reasons for his arrest were a now unfashionable atheism and ‘judicial moderation’, an ironic charge in the case of a man whose life and temperament could never have been described as moderate. Moved from one prison to another during the early months of 1794, Sade finally ended up at Picpus near Vincennes, a well-appointed former convent. It was here, from his cell window, that he watched as many of his fellow aristocrats mounted the steps of the guillotine, which had been moved there from the Place de la Révolution (the present-day Place de la Concorde) because of the stench of blood, their corpses being piled into a mass grave dug in the prison gardens. He would later write that the sight of the guillotine did him ‘a hundred times more harm’ than his imprisonment in the Bastille ever did. Sade himself escaped the guillotine thanks to a bureaucratic mix-up. In July 1794 his name appeared on a list of prisoners to be collected from Paris jails for judgement and execution that day, but as he failed to respond when his name was called he was marked down as absent. Within a short time the political climate had changed again, with Robespierre’s own fall from grace and execution, and Sade was freed on 15 October.

  For the next five years Sade and Constance got by as best they could. Sad
e would frequently write desperate letters to his lawyer Gaufridy, begging him to send money, though with little success. By 1799 the former aristocrat was even reduced to working as prompt in a Versailles theatre for forty sous a day.

  After more than a decade of freedom, under the strict new censorship laws of the Bonaparte regime, Sade was arrested at his publishers’ on 6 March 1801 for the authorship of Justine. For the first time in his life he was imprisoned because of his writings. Sade would remain in detention until his death in 1814. Less than two weeks after his arrest the Sade-Montreuil family arranged for the Marquis to be transferred to the Charenton asylum where he had briefly stayed in 1789, in surroundings far more salubrious than any of the Paris prisons. The authorities justified Sade’s continued detention and move to an insane asylum by inventing the medical diagnosis of ‘libertine dementia’, although in no sense could Sade be described as demented. The arrangement was one of pure convenience for the family. With their father out of the way, the Marquis’s two sons would have a better chance of finding suitable brides. In fact, Charenton offered Sade a number of distinct advantages. He had an expensively furnished two-room flat, with agreeable views, a library of several hundred volumes, and the freedom to walk in the gardens whenever he liked. Constance was allowed to move into the asylum with him, there were frequent dinner-parties, and Sade enjoyed a stimulating, if at times stormy, relationship with the asylum director, François de Coulmier. The latter was progressive enough to believe in the therapeutic value of drama. Consequently, for the first time in his life Sade was given free rein to indulge his greatest passion. A full-size theatre was built to house an audience of three hundred, and the Marquis given complete control of the rehearsal and performance of plays, which obviously included works written by himself. All of the plays performed at the asylum were wholly conventional in character (unlike the psychodrama experiments represented in Peter Weiss’s 1963 play Marat-Sade), and were acted by Sade, Constance, and other inmates with the support of professional actresses brought from the capital. The productions were highly successful and attracted large society audiences.

  Sade continued to write at Charenton, producing four novels, of which only three have survived, all conventional historical narratives, a detailed diary, and a significant body of correspondence.

  From the autumn of 1812 until his death two years later a sixteen-year-old girl named Madeleine Leclerc, whose mother worked in the asylum, visited Sade on a regular basis to perform paid sexual services, although diary entries suggest that the ageing prisoner doted on the girl and was jealous of her dalliances with young men.

  Sade died on 2 December 1814 at the age of seventy-four. His last will and testament had directed that his body be buried without ceremony or headstone on land he had purchased at Malmaison, near Épernon. Acorns were to be sown around the spot, so that ‘the traces of my grave will disappear from the surface of the earth as I trust my memory will disappear from the memory of men, except for those few who were kind enough to love me until the last, and fond memories of whom I take with me into my grave’. In complete disregard of these wishes, however, and as a final ironic twist to the colourful life of the eighteenth century’s most infamous iconoclast, Sade’s younger son, Armand, gave his father a full Christian burial in the Charenton cemetery. The would-be ‘martyr for atheism’ must have turned in his grave.

  The Birth of Justine

  There are three versions of Justine’s story, which evolved from a hundred-page novella to a two-hundred-page novel and finally to a marathon saga of more than a thousand pages. The original version, ‘The Misfortunes of Virtue’ (‘Les Infortunes de la vertu’) was one among the many works penned by Sade during his long years of imprisonment between 1778 and 1790. A novella or short story with satirical aims (critics describe it as a conte philosophique or ‘philosophical tale’), it was composed in fifteen days in 1787. It was largely conventional in style and lacked any characteristics that might now be termed obscene. Some have found this first draft of Sade’s tale of virtue despoiled to contain an intensity and clarity of vision absent from the two subsequent versions, but it was destined never to reach the reading public in the author’s lifetime.1

  The unpublished conte was to grow into the novel-length Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue (Justine, ou les Malheurs de la vertu), which appeared in 1791, a year after the author’s release from prison. This version, the text translated here, is a predominantly first-person narrative in which Justine herself recounts her adventures to fellow travellers. The New Justine, published in 1797, was a greatly extended version of the tale of over a thousand pages, and far more explicit, if not pornographic. This final version, which was accompanied by numerous explicit illustrations, has been described as the most extensive work of print pornography ever undertaken.

  Even the 1791 novel was considerably more violent and sexually explicit than the novella, and sold so well that five further editions had to be printed in the space of ten years. While the public’s appetite for Sade’s first published work was evidently insatiable, critical responses of the time were mixed. A contemporary review praises the author’s ‘rich and brilliant’ imagination, while exhorting young people to ‘avoid this dangerous book’ and advising even ‘more mature’ men to read it ‘in order to see to what insanities human imagination can lead’, but then to ‘throw it in the fire’.2

  Justine was, after all, a ‘libertine’ novel, and very few such novels were published under the author’s real name for fear of imprisonment or worse.3 Both those found guilty of writing libertine works and their publishers could be sentenced to the guillotine. There were indeed numerous attempts by the authorities during the 1790s to stop sales of the novel, one of many so-called ‘philosophical books’ sold clandestinely sous le manteau or ‘under the counter’.

  Justine’s story consists of a series of increasingly violent episodes of sexual abuse of the young orphan by libertine paedophiles, lascivious monks, murderous pederasts, and a ragbag of colourful characters: thieves, surgeons, counterfeiters, human vampires, and many other sexual predators. Scenes of sexual abuse alternate with long philosophical dialogues, during which the unshakeably devout young heroine attempts to convert all of her abusers to the Christian faith. These dialogues enable the author to lecture the reader on the futility of a belief in God or divine providence, the omnipotence of blind and amoral Nature, and thus to justify all acts of self-gratification at the expense of others.

  In this version the account of the sexual cruelty and perversions to which Justine is subjected is given in her own voice, the voice of a sexually inexperienced and pious girl, and so obscenity is largely avoided in the main narrative, at least at a linguistic level.

  Justine immediately appears to us as a passive creature, destined for martyrdom. A devout young child of twelve at the beginning of her remarkable odyssey, her religious faith remains implausibly unshaken by the unending catalogue of disasters that befall her throughout her relatively short and miserable existence. Suddenly left orphaned and destitute together with her fifteen-year-old sister, Juliette, she is first described to us in terms of what we would now consider to be a stereotype of feminine beauty (big blue eyes, teeth of ivory, lovely blonde hair). For the modern reader, the same physical features make up another stereotype—the dumb blonde—which is reinforced here by character traits connoting ‘girlishness’ and vulnerability (ingenuousness, sensitivity, naivety). Like her beauty, these traits can be also read on her physiognomy, at the very surface of her body: modesty, delicacy, shyness, and above all, the ‘look of a virgin’. Justine’s physical appearance immediately suggests that this is the part she will play: in Sade’s terms, she is primed to be a victim of her own virtue (which will prevent her from enjoying the sexual attentions forced upon her, but which, more importantly, will determine the very nature of her attraction for the men and women who abuse her). She will also be the victim of the religious and social prejudices of a society that places a high val
ue on the status of virginity, and in so doing creates a taboo that cries out to be transgressed.

  In all of these respects Juliette is an exact opposite: not blonde, but brunette, with eyes not credulously blue but dark and ‘prodigiously expressive’; not timid but spirited; not naive but incredulous; not innocent, but worldly wise thanks to the best possible education that a father’s untimely ruin will deny her younger sister.

  When both parents die and the two girls are left penniless orphans, Juliette’s only response is the pleasure of being free. Even if we had not already been told at the beginning of the narrative of the fortune her beauty will help her to amass, we would know from this display of lack of feeling that, far from being a victim, the insensitive and self-serving Juliette will be one of life’s winners. Not so the ‘sad and miserable Justine’.

  In the first two versions, when she finishes her sad tale Justine is recognized by her sister Juliette, whose rich and powerful lover succeeds in rescuing her from the gallows, and she goes to live with them in their chateau. Fate, however, cruelly cuts short Justine’s life and her new-found happiness. In a savage metaphor for the sheer perversity of providence, she is finally split asunder by a thunderbolt during a violent thunderstorm. The evolution of this scene and its repercussions in the narrative reflects both the increasingly transgressive sexualization of Justine from one version to the next and, perhaps also, the author’s changing attitude to his heroine. In the short story the bolt enters her right breast and comes out through her mouth, whereas in Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue the bolt exits through her abdomen and in The New Justine through her vagina. Furthermore, in the final version, in which there is no happy reunion, Justine’s horrific death is not so much an accident as an event engineered by Juliette and her libertine friends, who sadistically drive her outside as the storm reaches its peak.4