Justine or the Misfortunes of Virtue (Oxford) Read online

  Justine’s Misfortunes

  The change of title from one version to another is not without significance. ‘Infortunes’ connotes the unfortunate fate suffered by virtue through no fault of its own, but the ambiguity of ‘Malheurs’—ill-luck, but also misery, the opposite of ‘bonheur’—seems to imply that virtue is itself a wretched state, and so anyone embracing it has only herself to blame. In the second version, then, the juxtaposition of the heroine’s name with her misery and its cause—Justine, ou les Malheurs de la vertu—personalizes the abstract title of the first version, focusing our attention on Justine as the source of her own misfortune.

  The Dedication to this edition is addressed to the woman who by this time had become Sade’s devoted companion, the aptly named Constance, and is designed to condition the responses, first of Constance, to whom the author speaks directly, and more generally of all those morally upright citizens that she, in her sensitivity, indirectly represents. Virtue, Sade implies, is best served when shown as the pitiful victim of vice, so that the reader will be unavoidably moved by her plight. Moreover, any attacks upon the work could only come from libertines, whose interest it is to show virtue triumphant; like Molière, his crusading predecessor, its author would then be an innocent victim of injustice and malevolence. Coming from the century’s best-known libertine, such sentiments seem motivated less by a genuine love of virtue than by fear of imprisonment for the publication of a libertine novel.

  At any rate, Sade was well aware of the novel’s potential to shock, as a letter written to his lawyer, Reinaud, clearly reveals: ‘A novel of mine is currently being printed, but one too immoral to be sent to a man as pious and as decent as you … It is called Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue. Burn it without reading it if by chance it falls into your hands. I disown it …’5 Read in the light of this letter, the Dedication comes across as a transparently hypocritical attempt to construct a moral lesson. It is hard not to read the novel’s ‘happy ending’ in the same way. Juliette and her lover are sufficiently moved by her sister’s sudden death to follow the path of virtue to true happiness. Juliette joins a Carmelite convent and becomes the very embodiment of piety, whilst her lover embarks on a successful and exemplary career in government. On the basis of events that directly contradict the lessons in self-interest of the entire preceding narrative, the reader is invited to draw the wholly implausible conclusion that ‘true happiness is found in the bosom of Virtue alone, and that if, for reasons which it is not ours to divine, God allows it to be persecuted on Earth, it is to make up for it in Heaven with the sweetest rewards’.

  In stark contrast, the ending of The New Justine shows that Sade has abandoned all former pretences at writing a morally uplifting tale. Neither Juliette nor any of her companions undergoes a Pauline conversion to virtue—quite the opposite in fact—and the reader of Juliette is left in no doubt as to the rewards of vice.

  Philosophical and Literary Influences

  Sade’s work is rooted in the literary, political, and above all, philosophical climate of eighteenth-century France, and can best be read as part of an existing tradition, dating back to the mid-seventeenth century, a tradition from which Sade borrows extensively. Many well-known writers before Sade, including the philosophers Diderot and Mirabeau, had composed and published libertine works. Indeed, there was a lively commerce in illicit books in Paris throughout the eighteenth century, particularly in the years leading up to the Revolution. During this period ‘philosophical’ books, as they were known in the trade, included any work considered subversive by the authorities, from religious satires to political pamphlets attacking the monarchy. Obscenity was often used in such works as a satirical weapon to castigate a repressive and corrupt clergy and a decadent aristocracy. The abuse of rank and an oppressive justice system were also popular targets in this underground literature. Driven partly by similarly satirical intentions, Sade’s obscene writings sit within this literary historical context, although his representation of libertinism is more extreme, more graphic, and more horrific than that of any of his predecessors or contemporaries. In our own predominantly secular age it is this depiction of a permissive, perverse, and violent sexuality that carries the most transgressive charge. In contrast, an eighteenth-century society steeped in Catholicism would have found the atheistic basis of Sade’s moral philosophy and his blasphemous rejection of all religious belief far less tolerable.

  Sade’s atheism was heavily influenced by the work of two materialist philosophers of the Enlightenment: La Mettrie’s Man Machine (1748) and Baron d’Holbach’s System of Nature (1770). Materialism rejected belief in a soul or afterlife, reducing everything in the universe to the physical organization of matter. According to La Mettrie, scientific observation and experiment are the only means by which human beings can be defined, and this method tells us that Man is quite simply a machine, subject to the laws of motion like any mechanism of eighteenth-century science. The sole purpose of existence in this scheme of things is pleasure—a doctrine espoused with relish by so many of Sade’s libertine characters. D’Holbach views the human being as a collection of atoms, so that even the conscience has a material origin, acquired from our education and experience. His system does not, therefore, allow for free will, since all our decisions are determined by our personal interest. For d’Holbach, all morality is a matter of social utility or pragmatism.

  Sade described System of Nature as the true basis of his philosophy, and indeed lifted whole passages from it practically verbatim to place in the mouths of the libertines as they rail against the various dogmas of religion, especially the illusory concept of virtue. As atheistic materialism’s most powerful and most controversial voice, Sade is the dark side of the Enlightenment because he says loud and clear what other Enlightenment philosophers hardly dare to whisper: the death of God and the renaissance of Man from the ashes of a God-centred universe. Sade’s originality lies in placing the body at the centre of his atheistic philosophy, in siting philosophy in the boudoir, in making sex the driving force of all human action, more than a century before Freud.

  Echoing Voltaire’s Candide, with which Sade was almost certainly familiar, Justine reads as a ferocious satire, attacking the corruption of practically all contemporary institutions, including the judiciary, banking, the bourgeois-dominated world of finances in general, and above all the Catholic Church, its doctrines and its abusive practices.

  Sade had good reason to hate all of these institutions. The spendthrift Marquis had frequently been obliged to seek loans at exorbitant rates of interest from greedy bankers. He had suffered years of imprisonment without proper trial at the hands of a corrupt judiciary. As for the Church, Sade’s profound hatred of religion had a personal as well as an intellectual origin, given his Spartan education by the Jesuits and, later, his imprisonment for so-called sacrilegious acts. ‘When atheism wants martyrs, let it choose them and my blood is ready,’ declares the Comte de Bressac, in melodramatic expression of what were essentially the author’s own sentiments.

  In all these respects Sade’s tale is decidedly Voltairean, but where Voltaire never quite found a satisfactory solution to the problem of physical and moral evil, other than to posit the concept of an indifferent God,6 Sade’s libertines dismiss belief in a deity altogether, and draw somewhat different conclusions from the observation, familiar to Candide, that the virtuous perish while the wicked survive. Candide and his fellow truth-seekers do eventually find a kind of contentment in the simple virtue of hard work. In contrast, Justine is repeatedly reminded of what the author-narrator had told the reader on the very first page: that ‘in a century that is thoroughly corrupt, the safest course is to do as others do’. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idealistic faith in Man’s natural goodness is directly challenged in a dissertation delivered to Justine by Roland the counterfeiter: the only truth is that the strong not only survive but flourish at the expense of the weak. The image of nature presented in the novel is far removed from Rousseau
’s idealized view of an earthly utopia, inhabited by noble savages and uncorrupted by the evils of civilization. In the original version even Justine herself comes to the conclusion, on encountering the monstrous Roland, that ‘Man is naturally wicked’. The note of optimism on which Candide ends is completely absent, then, from the far bleaker vision of life and death that closes Justine.

  The common theme of all three versions of Justine is that the heroine’s unreasonable attachment to virtue (and in particular to her virginity) attract nothing but misfortune, as she is exploited and abused physically and sexually by almost everyone she encounters, and is even framed for crimes of theft and murder.

  This emphasis on Man’s wickedness is to be found in two other great works of the period, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady (1747–8), in which virtue is also represented as an irresistible object of libertine abuse, and Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s masterly tale of Machiavellian manipulation, Les Liaisons dangereuses, published in 1782. Both must have had some influence on Sade. In his Note on the Novel (Idée sur les romans) of 1800, he lavishes fulsome praise on ‘l’immortel Richardson’, and although he never referred to Les Liaisons by name, we know that he kept a copy of it in his library at the Charenton asylum where he spent the last fifteen years of his life, and it is implausible to think that he had not read it when it was first published. There are, in fact, distinct echoes in the conception of Justine’s character of Cécile Volanges, the young, delectable, and sexually innocent girl whom Laclos’s libertines, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, take such pleasure in debauching. Other influences on the writing of Sade’s novel can be found among the popular genres of the century: fairy-tales, the Gothic novel (‘roman noir’), and in particular the conte moral or ‘moral tale’. Among fairy-tale elements of a general nature, which clearly detract from any realistic effect, there are giants (Gernande), and magical healing potions, while Justine’s unfortunate experiences in the forest at the hands of Saint-Florent, the Comte de Bressac, and others seems directly inspired by stories of the Little Red Riding Hood type, and the great many other fairy-tales known to Sade from his youth in which a credulous young girl, lost in the woods, too willingly places her trust in those she encounters. More specifically, the vampiric Gernande’s secret chamber filled with the bloody corpses of earlier spouses is strongly reminiscent of the tale of ‘Bluebeard’. Gernande’s isolated castle, Roland’s mountain fortress, and the labyrinthine monastery of Sainte-Marie-des-Bois, together with their sepulchral trappings of torture-chambers, skulls, and the like, seem to come straight out of the Gothic novel, although the atheistic Sadean version is, of course, completely devoid of the genre’s supernatural features.7

  Narrative and Style

  While Sade appears merely to borrow from the fairy-tale and the Gothic novel, it is the conte moral that undergoes parodic treatment in Justine. The ‘recognition scene’, a stock situation of the genre, in which characters long separated are tearfully reunited, is amusingly counterfeited in the reunion of the two sisters towards the end of the narrative. The style of the moral tale is parodied through excess—the ton larmoyant or ‘tearful tone’, and the heavy emphasis on sensibilité are clearly recognizable here, as in Justine’s frequent lachrymose pleadings for mercy. Most controversially of all, the genre’s moral aims are outrageously inverted: whereas the moral tale seeks to edify and improve its reader by extolling romantic love and showing how virtue alone leads to happiness, Sade’s narrative demonstrates that virtue leads repeatedly and inexorably to misery and that human relations are motivated mainly by lust or self-interest.

  The use of these models drawn from the popular literature of the time clearly has an impact on the verisimilitude of the narrative. Whatever her injuries, Justine always makes a perfect and speedy recovery, often thanks to quasi-magical healing potions, and even the mark of the thief branded on her shoulder by Rodin is completely removed by surgeons following her reunion with Juliette. Like the hero or heroine of some modern comic-book adventure story, she extricates herself with astounding ease from all of those mortal perils that beset her. The bloodthirsty Gernande, for example, forgets to lock the door of her prison, and with one bound, she is free! At the level of characterization, too, there is little concern with vraisemblance. In spite of the succession of depraved villains that confront Justine, her naive credulity followed by her amazement when her trust is betrayed remain implausibly unshaken. Equally implausible is the apparently untarnished innocence of a girl who has already been forced to participate in numerous orgies and should by now be well used to the naked bodies of both sexes: ‘Being little acquainted with this part of the body,’ she earnestly tells her listeners when the loveliness of a particular female posterior is in question, ‘you will permit me to remain uncommitted on this point’ (p. 233). Characterization is here wholly subservient to plot. At the level of discourse, finally, there is an equally apparent lack of regard for plausibility. That the common thieves, Dubois and Ironheart (‘Coeur de Fer’), should discourse like philosophers is unlikely, to say the least, while the necessarily more sophisticated vocabulary increasingly found in Justine’s narrative as the years go by does at times strain credulity, when we recall that her education was abruptly terminated at the age of twelve. We should, of course, not be surprised by this lack of attention to verisimilitude. Sade’s fiction is a long distance from the realism that will come to dominate and in many ways define the novel genre in the nineteenth century.

  Justine’s arguments are not only stylistically but also intellectually sophisticated enough to derive from her creator’s own self-questioning. That Justine is seen to match her opponents in the art of expression and debate is both essential to the creation of a balanced and therefore intellectually engaging debate, and necessary to ensure the ultimate strength and supremacy of the libertine view. Contrastingly, the crude terms in which the libertines describe their sexual lusts are equally an expression of the author’s own desires and fantasies, couched in a language that, in the dark confines of his cell in the Bastille, he must have found as titillating as did his libertine characters.

  Justine’s voice acts as an effective counterpoint to the vulgarity of her captors. As a religious prude she is obliged to avoid such vulgarity, while doing her best to recount her adventures as authentically as possible. This narrative structure imposes creatively productive limitations on a writer who is therefore obliged to come up with acceptable circumlocutions for sexual activities that his character might plausibly employ. Such a strategy produces a story of considerable inventiveness, in which different tones and linguistic registers provide interesting variety at the level of expression. In marked contrast to the verbosity of the libertines (which might be said to be the product of Sade’s own tendency to write prose that is excessively convoluted in nature), Justine’s voice frequently has a refreshing clarity and simplicity. Moreover, even when she is obliged to employ precious figures of speech to describe those perverse sexual activities she finds especially distasteful and abhorrent, the effect of such self-conscious circumlocution is to amuse rather than to arouse the reader.

  This sophistication of style is not present in The New Justine and The Story of Juliette, in which an exclusively third-person narrator is the dominant voice. In these later works circumlocution and euphemism give way to vulgarism and obscenity, as the abstractions of the libertine dissertation find concrete illustration in descriptions of the sexual acts that precede and follow it. In the many lengthy descriptions of these acts Sade’s language eschews the metaphorical, providing direct access to the body, its sexual parts and functions. The result is arguably far less successful, at least from a literary point of view.

  Sade and Justine

  Like its heroine herself, the Justine story emerges from circumstances of misfortune and poverty. Both author and character find themselves in dire straits, but both react differently to their situation. While Sade makes a virtue out of neces
sity, filling his long years of imprisonment with the writing of plays, novels, and essays, his fictional invention bows to her fate, reacting supinely to the sudden and devastating death of her parents and the ensuing loss of status and wealth.

  A minority of critics, however, have argued that Sade actually does identify with Justine as victim, and, given his deep sense of injustice at his treatment by the authorities for actions which he certainly did not consider criminal, this view is perhaps not without substance.

  The writing frenzy that produced this first novel-length version suggests an emotional investment in the narrative of the 1791 Justine that is absent from The Story of Juliette, which was probably written during Sade’s prolonged period of freedom in the 1790s. Jean Paulhan has argued that, if the sadistic libertines might be considered personae of the author, he also identifies masochistically with Justine.8 It is not hard to share this view of a man, writing in the relentless solitude of his prison-cell, tortured by sexual deprivation and by ignorance of the term of his detention, suffering increasingly from eye-trouble—a real problem for the writer Sade had by now become. There is some evidence, too, that the figure of his victim-heroine was drawn from life, which might support the hypothesis of a greater psychological and emotional attachment of the author to Justine than to Juliette. We know that the young female servant at the Sade family chateau of La Coste, whose real name was Catherine Trillet and who went by the nickname of Justine, participated voluntarily in sexual activities with the Marquis, refusing to leave the chateau with her father. She may even have fallen in love with her master, just as the fictional Justine does with the Comte de Bressac. Whatever the truth of their relationship, it does not seem implausible to assume that Sade used the serving-girl as a general model for his literary creation, in the same way that other figures and events from his past appear to have inspired particular scenes in the novel.