The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings Read online

  Anyone who is surprised at Sade’s discrediting himself by his humaneness instead of seeking a governor’s post in the provinces, a post that would have enabled him to torture and kill to his heart’s content, does not really understand Sade. Does anyone suppose that he “liked blood” the way one likes the mountains or the sea? “Shedding blood” was an act whose meaning could, under certain conditions, excite him, but what he demanded, essentially, of cruelty was that it reveal to him particular individuals and his own existence as, on the one hand, consciousness and freedom and, on the other, as flesh. He refused to judge or condemn, or to witness anonymous death from afar. He had hated nothing so much in the old society as the claim to judge and punish, to which he himself had fallen victim; he could not excuse the Terror. When murder becomes constitutional, it becomes merely the hateful expression of abstract principles, something without content, inhuman. And this is why Sade as Grand Juror almost always dismissed the charges against the accused. Holding their fate in his hands, he refused to harm the family of Madame de Montreuil in the name of the law. He was even led to resign from his office of President of the Piques Section. He wrote to Gaufridy: “I considered myself obliged to leave the chair to the vice-president; they wanted me to put a horrible, an inhuman act to a vote. I never would.” In December, 1793, he was imprisoned on charges of “moderatism.” Released 375 days later, he wrote with disgust: “My government imprisonment, with the guillotine before my eyes, did me a hundred times more harm than all the Bastilles imaginable.” It is by such wholesale slaughters that the body politic shows only too clearly that it considers men as a mere collection of objects, whereas Sade demanded a universe peopled with individual beings. The “evil” which he had made his refuge vanished when crime was justified by virtue. The Terror, which was being carried out with a clear conscience, constituted the most radical negation of Sade’s demoniacal world.

  “The excesses of the Terror,” wrote Saint-Just, “have dulled the taste for crime.” Sade’s sexuality was not stilled by age and fatigue alone; the guillotine killed the morbid poetry of eroticism. In order to derive pleasure from the humiliation and exaltation of the flesh, one must ascribe value to the flesh. It has no sense, no worth, once one casually begins to treat man as a thing. Sade was still able to revive his past experience and his old universe in his books, but he no longer believed in them with his blood and nerves. There is nothing physical in his attachment to the woman he calls “The Sensitive Lady.” He derived his only erotic pleasures from the contemplation of the obscene paintings, inspired by Justine, with which he decorated a secret chamber. He still had his memories, but he had lost his drive, and the simple business of living was too much for him. Liberated from the social and familial framework which he nevertheless needed, he dragged on through poverty and illness. He quickly ran through the money realized from the unprofitable sale of La Coste. He took refuge with a farmer, and then in a garret, with the son of “The Sensitive Lady,” while earning forty sous a day working in the theatricals at Versailles.

  The decree of the 28th of June, 1799, which forbade the striking of his name from the list of aristocratic émigrés on which it had been placed, made him cry out in despair: “Death and misery, this then is the recompense I receive for my everlasting devotion to the Republic.” He received, however, a certificate of residence and citizenship; and in December, 1799, he played the part of Fabrice in Oxtiern. But by the beginning of 1800, he was in the hospital of Versailles, “dying of cold and hunger,” and threatened with imprisonment for debt. He was so unhappy in the hostile world of so-called “free” men that one wonders whether he had not chosen to be led back to the solitude and security of prison. We may say, at least, that the imprudence of circulating Justine and the folly of publishing Zoloé, in which he attacks Josephine, Tallien, Madame Tallien, Barras, and Bonaparte, imply that he was not too repelled by the idea of another confinement.7 Conscious or not, his wish was granted; he was locked up in Sainte-Pélagie on the 5th of April, 1801, and it was there, and later at Charenton—where he was followed by Madame Quesnet, who, by pretending to be his daughter, obtained a room near his own—that he lived out the rest of his life.

  Of course, Sade protested and struggled as soon as he was shut up, and he continued to do so for years. But at least he was able again to devote himself in peace to the passion which had replaced sensual pleasure: his writing. He wrote on and on. Most of his papers had been lost when he had left the Bastille, and he thought that the manuscript of The 120 Days of Sodom—a fifteen-yard roll which he had carefully hidden and which was saved without his knowing it—had been destroyed. After Philosophy in the Bedroom, published in 1795, he composed a new opus, a modified and completely developed version of Justine, followed by Juliette. These two volumes, of which he disclaimed the authorship, appeared in a ten-volume edition in 1797. He had Les Crimes de l’Amour publicly printed. At Sainte-Pélagie, he became absorbed in an immense ten-volume work, Les Journées de Florbelle. The two volumes of La Marquise de Gange must also be attributed to him, though the work did not appear under his name.

  Probably because the meaning of his life lay henceforth in his work as a writer, Sade now hoped only for peace in his daily life. He took walks with “The Sensitive Lady” in the garden of the retreat, wrote comedies for the patients, and had them performed. He agreed to compose a divertissement on the occasion of a visit to Charenton in 1812 by the Archbishop of Paris. On Easter Sunday, 1805, he distributed the holy bread and took up the collection in the parish church. His will proves that he had renounced none of his beliefs, but he was tired of fighting. “He was polite to the point of obsequiousness,” says Nodier, “gracious to the point of unctuousness . . . and he spoke respectfully of everything the world respects.” According to Ange Pitou, the ideas of old age and of death horrified him. “This man turned pale at the idea of death, and would faint at the sight of his white hair.” He expired in peace, however, carried off by “a pulmonary congestion in the form of asthma” on the 2nd of December, 1814.

  The salient feature of his tormented life was that the painful experience of living never revealed to him any solidarity between other men and himself. The last scions of a decadent aristocracy had no common purpose to unite them. In the solitude to which his birth condemned him, Sade carried erotic play to such extremes that his peers turned against him. When a new world opened to him, it was too late; he was weighed down with too heavy a past. At odds with himself, suspect to others, this aristocrat, haunted by dreams of despotism, could not sincerely ally himself with the rising bourgeoisie. And though he was roused to indignation by its oppression of the people, the people were nevertheless foreign to him. He belonged to none of the classes whose mutual antagonisms were apparent to him. He had no fellow but himself. Perhaps, had his emotional make-up been different, he might have resisted this fate, but he seems always to have been violently egocentric. His indifference to external events, his obsessive concern with money, the finical care with which he worked out his debauches, as well as the delirious speculations at Vincennes and the schizophrenic character of his dreams, reveal a radically introverted character. Though this passionate self-absorption defined his limits, it also gave his life an exemplary character, so that we examine it today.

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  Sade made of his eroticism the meaning and expression of his whole existence. Thus, it is no idle curiosity that leads us to define its nature. To say with Maurice Heine that he tried everything and liked everything is to beg the question. The term “algolagnia” hardly helps us to understand Sade. He obviously had very marked sexual idiosyncrasies, but they are not easy to define. His accomplices and victims kept quiet. Two flagrant scandals merely pushed aside, for a moment, the curtain behind which debauch usually hides. His journals and memoirs have been lost, his letters were cautious, and in his books he invents more than he reveals about himself. “I have imagined everything conceivable in this sort of thing,” he writes, “but I have certainly not don
e, and certainly never will, all that I have imagined.” His work has not unreasonably been compared to the Psychopathia Sexualis of Krafft-Ebing, to whom no one would dream of attributing all the perversions he catalogued.

  Thus, Sade established systematically, according to the prescriptions of a kind of synthetic art, a repertory of man’s sexual possibilities. He certainly never experienced nor even dreamed them all up himself. Not only does he tell tall stories, but most of the time he tells them badly. His tales resemble the engravings that illustrate the 1797 edition of Justine and Juliette. The characters’ anatomy and positions are drawn with a minute realism, but the awkward and monotonous expressionlessness of their faces makes their horrible orgies seem utterly unreal. It is not easy to derive a genuine testimony from all the cold-blooded orgies that Sade concocted. Nevertheless, there are some situations in his novels which he treats with special indulgence. He shows special sympathy with some of his heroes, for example, Noirceuil, Blangis, and Gernande, and particularly Dolmancé, to whom he attributes many of his own tastes and ideas. Sometimes, too, in a letter, an incident, or a turn of dialogue, we are struck unexpectedly by a vivid phrase which we feel is not the mere echo of a foreign voice. It is precisely such scenes, heroes, and texts as these that we must examine closely.

  In the popular mind, sadism means cruelty. The first thing that strikes us in Sade’s work is actually that which tradition associates with his name: beatings, bloodshed, torture, and murder. The Rose Keller incident shows him beating his victim with a cat-o’-nine-tails and a knotted cord and, probably,8 slashing her with a knife and pouring wax on the wounds. In Marseilles, he took from his pockets a parchment “cat” covered with bent pins and asked for switches of heather. In all his behavior toward his wife, he displayed obvious mental cruelty. Moreover, he has repeatedly expressed himself on the pleasure to be derived from making people suffer. But he hardly enlightens us when he merely repeats the classical doctrine of animal spirits. “It is simply a matter of jangling all our nerves with the most violent possible shock. Now, since there can be no doubt that pain affects us more strongly than pleasure, when this sensation is produced in others, our very being will vibrate more vigorously with the resulting shocks.” Sade does not eliminate the mystery of the conscious pleasure which follows from this violent vibration. Fortunately, he suggests more honest explanations elsewhere.

  The fact is that the original intuition which lies at the basis of Sade’s entire sexuality, and hence his ethic, is the fundamental identity of coition and cruelty. “Would the paroxysm of pleasure be a kind of madness if the mother of the human race [Nature] had not intended that anger and the sexual act express themselves in the same way? What able-bodied man . . . does not wish . . . to bedevil his ecstasy?” Sade’s description of the Duc de Blangis in the throes of orgasm is certainly to be interpreted as a transposition in epic terms of Sade’s own practices: “. . . frightful cries, atrocious blasphemies sprang from the Duc’s swollen breast, flames seemed to dart from his eyes, he foamed at the mouth, he whinnied like a stallion . . .” and he even strangled his partner. According to Rose Keller’s testimony, Sade himself “began to shriek very loud and fearfully” before cutting the cords which immobilized his victim. The “Vanilla and Manilla” letter proves that he experienced orgasm as if it were an epileptic seizure, something aggressive and murderous, like a fit of rage.

  How are we to explain this peculiar violence? Some readers have wondered whether Sade was not, in fact, sexually deficient. Many of his heroes—among them his great favorite, Gernande—are inadequately equipped, and have great difficulty in erection and ejaculation. Sade must certainly have been aware of these problems but such semi-impotence seems rather to have been the result of excessive indulgence, as in the case of many of his debauchees, several of whom are very well endowed. Sade makes frequent allusions to his own vigorous temperament. It is, on the contrary, a combination of passionate sexual appetites with a basic emotional “apartness” which seems to me to be the key to his eroticism.

  From adolescence to prison, Sade had certainly known the insistent, if not obsessive, pangs of desire. There is, on the other hand, an experience which he seems never to have known: that of emotional intoxication. Never in his stories does sensual pleasure appear as self-forgetfulness, swooning, or abandon. Compare, for example, Rousseau’s outpourings with the frenzied blasphemies of a Noirceuil or a Dolmancé, or the flutters of the Mother Superior in Diderot’s La Religieuse with the brutal pleasures of Sade’s tribades. The male aggression of the Sadean hero is never softened by the usual transformation of the body into flesh. He never for an instant loses himself in his animal nature; he remains so lucid, so cerebral, that philosophic discourse, far from dampening his ardor, acts as an aphrodisiac. We see how desire and pleasure explode into furious crisis in this cold, tense body, impregnable to all enchantment. They do not constitute a living experience within the framework of the subject’s psycho-physiological unity. Instead, they blast him, like some kind of bodily accident.

  As a result of this immoderation, the sexual act creates the illusion of sovereign pleasure which gives it its incomparable value in Sade’s eyes, for all his sadism strove to compensate for the absence of one necessary element which he lacked. The state of emotional intoxication allows one to grasp existence in one’s self and in the other, as both subjectivity and passivity. The two partners merge in this ambiguous unity; each one is freed of his own presence and achieves immediate communication with the other. The curse which weighed upon Sade—and which only his childhood could explain—was this “autism” which prevented him from ever forgetting himself or being genuinely aware of the reality of the other person. Had he been cold by nature, no problem would ever have arisen; but his instincts drove him toward outside objects with which he was incapable of uniting, so that he was forced to invent singular methods for taking them by force. Later, when his desires were exhausted, he continued to live in that erotic universe of which, out of sensuality, boredom, defiance, and resentment, he had constructed the only world which counted for him; and the aim of his strategies was to induce erection and orgasm. But even when these were easy for him, Sade needed deviations to give to his sexuality a meaning which lurked in it without ever managing to achieve fulfillment, an escape from consciousness in his flesh, an understanding of the other person as consciousness through the flesh.

  Normally, it is as a result of the vertigo of the other made flesh that one is spellbound within one’s own flesh. If the subject remains confined within the solitude of his consciousness, he escapes this agitation and can rejoin the other only by conscious performance. A cold, cerebral lover watches eagerly the enjoyment of his mistress and needs to affirm his responsibility for it because he has no other way of attaining his own fleshly state. This behavior, which compensates for separateness by deliberate tyranny, may properly be called “sadistic.” Sade knew, as we have seen, that the infliction of pleasure may be an aggressive act, and his tyranny sometimes took on this character, but it did not satisfy him. To begin with, he shrinks from the kind of equality which is created by mutual pleasure. “If the objects who serve us feel ecstasy, they are then much more often concerned with themselves than with us, and our own enjoyment is consequently impaired. The idea of seeing another person experience the same pleasure reduces one to a kind of equality which spoils the unutterable charms that come from despotism.” And he declares, more categorically, “Any enjoyment is weakened when shared.”

  And besides, pleasant sensations are too mild; it is when the flesh is torn and bleeding that it is revealed most dramatically as flesh. “No kind of sensation is keener and more active than that of pain; its impressions are unmistakable.” But in order for me to become flesh and blood through the pains I have inflicted, I must recognize my own state in the passivity of the other. Therefore, the person must have freedom and consciousness. The libertine “would really deserve pity if he acted upon an inert, unfeeling object.” That is why
the contortions and moans of the victim are necessary to the torturer’s happiness, which explains why Verneuil made his wife wear a kind of headgear that amplified her screams. In his revolt, the tortured object asserts himself as my fellow creature, and through his intervention I achieve the synthesis of spirit and flesh which was first denied me.

  If the aim is both to escape from one’s self and to discover the reality of other existences, there is yet another way open: to have one’s flesh mortified by others. Sade is quite aware of this. When he used the cat-o’-nine-tails and the switch in Marseilles, it was not only to whip others with, but also to be whipped himself. This was probably one of his most common practices, and all his heroes happily submit to flagellation. “No one doubts nowadays that flagellation is extremely effective in restoring the vigor destroyed by the excesses of pleasure.” There was another way of giving concrete form to his passivity. In Marseilles, Sade was sodomized by his valet, Latour, who seems to have been accustomed to render him this sort of service. His heroes imitate him sedulously, and he declared aloud in no uncertain terms that the greatest pleasure is derived from a combination of active and passive sodomy. There is no perversion of which he speaks so often and with so much satisfaction, and even impassioned vehemence.

  Two questions immediately arise for those given to labeling individuals. Was Sade a sodomite? Was he basically a masochist? As to sodomy, his physical appearance, the role played by his valets, the presence at La Coste of the handsome, illiterate secretary, the enormous importance which Sade accords to this “fantasy” in his writings, and the passion with which he advocates it, all confirm the fact that it was one of the essential elements of his sexual character. Certainly, women played a great role in his life, as they do in his work. He knew many, had kept Mlle. Beauvoisin and other less important mistresses, had seduced his sister-in-law, had gathered young women and little girls together at the château of La Coste, had flirted with Mademoiselle Rousset, and ended his life at the side of Madame Quesnet, to say nothing of the bonds, imposed by society but reworked in his own fashion, which united him with Madame de Sade. But what were his relations with her? It is significant that in the only two testimonies on his sexual activity, there is no evidence that Sade “knew” his partners in a normal way. In Rose Keller’s case, he satisfied himself by whipping her without touching her. He asked the Marseilles prostitute to let herself be “known from behind” by his servant or, if she preferred, by himself. When she refused, he contented himself with fondling her while he was being “known” by Latour.