Letters From Prison Read online

  However restricted the La Coste château, too many people were involved in Sade’s theatrical shenanigans—probably as many as twenty— for word not to leak out. Several of the underage servant girls somehow managed to contact their parents in Lyons, who immediately filed charges of kidnapping and seduction. With Gothon in tow, the ever-faithful Renée-Pélagie set off for Lyons to placate the parents, assuring them their girls (and boy) were fine and would soon be home. Meanwhile, three were sequestered in various nearby nunneries, one was kept under close watch at La Coste, while the last, judged the most dangerous by the looseness of her tongue and the seriousness of her wounds, was dispatched to Saumane, where the Abbe de Sade was asked to look out for her—and make sure she didn’t escape. Even the jaded abbe was shocked by what his new charge revealed to him, and went on record as not wanting ever to have any dealings with either the marquis or his wife again. Strong words, coming from an old debaucher such as he. Given the abbe’s position, it is almost shocking to find that about now, apprised of the gravity of the affair, the présidente waded in and again took charge, issuing orders, generally through Gaufridy, on how to deal with the girls until they were better, how and when to return them to their homes, what to do to obtain written releases, etc. Did this mean Madame de Montreuil had reversed herself, that she was forgiving her son-in-law of this latest aberration? Hardly. All she was doing was, once more, trying to keep a lid on the explosive situation, to save the already badly tarnished family escutcheon. On her basic position of having Sade arrested and put away she was as adamant as ever.

  But there were just too many pots boiling in the vallis clausa for the présidente to tend them all. During those lurid winter weeks, someone—La Jeunesse? one of the other revelers? Sade himself?— had managed to impregnate Nanon, who gave birth to a baby girl, Anne Elizabeth, on May 11, 1775, but “the paternity was attributed to Nanon’s husband, Barthélmy Fayère,” and scandal was thereby if not scotched at least muffled.

  Moreover, Nanon had too dubious a background herself to do the Sades much harm, or so they thought. But on June 10, 1775, Nanon and the marquise had a violent argument at the chateau, after which Nanon fled, screaming at the marquise and “showering her with a million imprecations.” What was the argument about? It may have had to do with the paternity of her month-old baby; it may have been about money (for Madame de Sade had none with which to pay her); it may have had to do with the young charges she had brought with her for whom she felt (a little late in the day) responsible. Whatever it was, Nanon took refuge in a nearby convent, where she confessed to the prior, Alexandre de Nerclos, all that had been going on at her former place of employ, and since she had often not only played an active role but been the plat de resistance at the chateau revels, she doubtless had a great deal to tell. After hearing her out, the prior wrote immediately to his colleague the Abbe de Sade that his nephew would doubtless “have to be shut up for the rest of his life,” adding that he was convinced “Madame de Sade was no better than her husband.” Was his opinion based on Nanon’s recounting of mad sexual exploits in the dark dungeons of La Coste? No, his complaint was based on the fact that “nobody in that house went to confession on Easter and Lady de Sade allows her young manservants to have dealings with a Lutheran woman”!12 Madame de Montreuil pulled some royal strings, managed to have a lettre de cachet issued against Nanon, and paid money to have her locked up. But what she was giving with the one hand she was taking away with the other. As noted, with Louis XV’s death in May 1774, the lettre de cachet concerning Sade’s arrest was no longer valid and, legally speaking, he was once again a free man. That also meant his civil rights had been restored, and, theoretically at least, he could regain control of his income and business affairs, now in the hands of the présidente. But Madame de Montreuil was just as aware of this potential development as Sade was and, as we have seen, lost no time in obtaining another royal warrant from the new regime through her friend in court, the duc de la Vrillière.

  Had Sade learned anything from the “Young Girls” scandal? Apparently not, for less than a year later he hired another group of young servants, this time from Montpellier and through the good offices of a monk, a Father Durand. The night of their arrival to take up their jobs, they were so upset by the marquis’s advances that three of the four left the very next morning. News of the incident reached the father of another girl from Montpellier who had been working as cook at the chateau since November, Catherine Treillet, affectionately known there as Justine. Fearful for her safety, Treillet, a weaver by trade, set out to fetch her. He arrived at the chateau and demanded to see his daughter, whom Sade promptly produced. After heated words on both sides, Sade escorted the man toward the main gate, at which point Treillet suddenly turned and fired a pistol point-blank at the marquis’s chest. Fortunately (for the marquis), only the primer went off, after which the man turned and fled. Later he returned and fired a second shot into the chateau courtyard, in the direction of where he thought he heard Sade’s voice. Next day the local La Coste judge began hearing witnesses regarding the incident, for the charges were bearing arms illegally and attempted murder. (Commoners in those days were not allowed to bear arms, much less fire them at aristocrats.) Meanwhile Treillet journeyed to Aix where he lodged a complaint against Sade, demanding his daughter back. She in turn signed a document (doubtless drawn up by Sade) saying she was perfectly happy in her work and had no cause for complaint. With all the mounting evidence of former servants telling juicy tales out of school, and the danger that Nanon— who was still in jail under royal warrant—would be released or escape, the only recourse was to send “Justine” back to her father. But when Sade informed Catherine that he was sending her back to Montpellier, Catherine, who like so many others before her seems to have been seduced by the charms of this Provençal Casanova, begged him to let her stay, and he (quickly) relented.

  As January faded into February, both the marquis and marquise decided it was time to leave La Coste behind and go to Paris—for two reasons. First, they had received alarming news from Madame de Montreuil that Sade’s mother, the dowager Countess de Sade, was failing (in fact, she had died on January 14 and been buried three days later, but word of this had not yet reached them); second, it was only in Paris that they could approach the courts directly and move heaven and earth to get Sade’s sentence quashed. All his friends advised him against going. Did he forget, after all, that he was still a fugitive, that a new royal warrant had been issued demanding his immediate imprisonment, that he still had a sentence of death hanging over his head from the Marseilles affair? Since the news about his mother had come from the présidente, did he not suspect a trap? His steward Reinaud, Gaufridy, even Gothon warned him against the trip. But he would hear none of it. Once Sade made up his mind to do something, nothing on the face of the earth could deter him.

  He set out accompanied by La Jeunesse, while Madame de Sade had with her Justine, who had asked to come along. After a long, arduous, and fatiguing journey—their coach broke down a number of times and the roads were frightful at that time of year—they arrived in Paris on February 8 and were received warmly by Sade’s former tutor, Abbe Amblet, on the rue des Fossés Monsieur-le-Prince. There they learned of the dowager countess’s death three weeks earlier, which seemed to affect Sade profoundly, despite the fact that his relations with his mother through the years had been virtually nonexistent.

  Madame de Sade went to spend the night at the dowager countess’s apartment, and the next day moved into the Hotel de Danemark on the rue Jacob. At nine o’clock in the evening, as Sade was visiting his wife at the Hotel de Danemark, Inspector Marais arrived armed with a lettre de cachet and placed Sade under arrest. An hour later he was a prisoner in the fortress of Vincennes. Two days later he was transferred to room 11.

  Madame de Sade was beside herself. She blamed the arrest on her mother’s machinations, but Madame de Montreuil hotly denied any involvement. “I know nothing about it,” she stoutly mainta
ined. Privately, however, she admitted, “Things could not be better or more secure: it was about time.”

  Thus Sade’s thirteen-year calvary as a prisoner began. However upset he was at losing his freedom, he clearly had no idea it would be for long. In fact, Inspector Marais told Sade as they made their way from the Hotel de Danemark to the Vincennes dungeon, the arrest was for his own good—it would speed up the appeals process. The présidente told Renée-Pélagie the same thing.

  But in truth the présidente’s firm intent was that her son-in-law be kept locked up for as long as possible—hopefully for the rest of his days. She knew how clever and resourceful he could be, how convincing and seductive, but she felt she could more than match him move for move. In the strange symbiosis that joined them, he was now but a pawn and she the queen.

  Ostensibly, Sade was incarcerated because his excesses had reached, if not exceeded, the point of madness. Various commentators have tried to argue the pros and cons of Sade’s sanity, as it is easiest to dispense with him if he is simply judged insane. But these prison letters seem anything but the product of a demented mind. As Antoine Adam wrote in his preface to the French edition of these letters:

  All these scandals do not prove that Sade’s intelligence has been profoundly affected and that he is [at age 37 when he entered prison] living in a state of continued dementia. Without question he is subject to transports of anger that verge on madness. . . . But these are only momentary crises, and once they are over it is probable that he reverts to the basically likable, basically refined person he really is. His intelligence remains generally sound, his behavior is for the most part reasonable. He is even aware of the morbid aspect of his aberrations, though he is not yet at the point of planning to construct a system of morality from them. In an astonishing letter to his wife, written in 1782 [thus five years after his arrest] . . . he says: “In 1777 I was still fairly young; my overwhelming misfortune could have laid the foundation [to reform me]; my soul had not yet become hardened . . .” He dreams of a cure, which, it seems to him, is still possible. . . .

  When he enters Vincennes, Sade is not the theorist of evil, the satanic genius that both his devotees and detractors would like us to believe. He is a man far too often invaded by his demons, who lead him into the most shameful follies, and he doubtless makes the most of them and through them satisfies both his sensuality and his pride; but he is also a man who, in his hours of sangfroid and lucidity, realizes the true character of his crises and, far from drawing any philosophy from them, would on the contrary prefer to conceal them.

  While prison for Sade, as for most people, is humiliating, infuriating, stifling, maddening—and the letters reflect all this—he has the advantage that, in preparing his revenge, he can channel his boundless energy, his insatiable appetite, his unique experience, and considerable erudition, into a vast, creative act.

  Sade is a man of many guises, and like a stag at bay, he will resort to any stratagem, any artifice, to attain his end, which is to regain his freedom. But below the surface of his immediate purpose the essence of the man does emerge in these letters. Both he and Renée-Pélagie know that their every missive will be read by not one but several watchdogs; therefore they constantly have to resort to subterfuge, to pseudonyms and code names, numbers and signals, many of which are often misread and misunderstood, especially by the prisoner. They also write each other at times in invisible ink, inserted either between the visible lines or on a partially blank page at the end of a letter, the purpose being, especially for Madame de Sade, to feed information that the prison censors would not have let pass. Later Sade would reproach his wife for failing to use this subterfuge judiciously, because, he said, her invisible ink jottings were most often nothing but idle banter, whereas if she had used the system properly it could have provided him much needed and much desired information, especially the date of his release, with which he was understandably obsessed.

  Doubtless because of that obsession, Sade developed another, which lasted throughout his years in Vincennes and the Bastille and disappeared as soon as he was free, namely a fixation on “signals” in the letters he received from his wife. He would count the number of lines on a page or in an entire letter, the number of times a word or phrase recurred, he would seize on a word that implied or suggested a number or figure, and from these “clues” try to deduce some meaning. In most of these signals he was searching for the date, the month, the year of his release, which he was sure the présidente, and therefore his wife, knew for certain and was refusing to tell him. But he was also searching in these signals for secret information the censors would not allow: when his walks, which were often restricted or eliminated, would be restored; when Renée-Pélagie would be allowed to come and see him; when certain errands and commissions he had requested would be fulfilled. The problem was, his wife maintained—and one has to believe her—that she never sent him any signals, that it was all in his own mind. Sade would for a time believe her and agree to cease combing her letters for these arcane signs, but then he would revert. “You promised not to search my letter for signals,” she wrote him two years after his incarceration in Vincennes, “and then you keep going back on your word. Be assured, my dear friend, that if I could tell you what you want to know [the date of his release] I would not use signs. I would state things very clearly.”

  Concerning these “numbers,” these “signals,” these “ciphers” Sade again and again refers to in his letters (and in his “Note Concerning My Detention”), Gilbert Lely writes (L’ Aigle, Mademoiselle, pages 153-54): “In almost all of Sade’s letters of this period one meets with allusions to more or less comprehensible numbers which he often calls signals. What does this curious arithmetic signify? Imprisoned in Vin-cennes by lettre de cachet, that is, utterly at the mercy of his persecutors’ discretion, Sade found himself in tragic ignorance of how long his detention was to last; wherewith he contrived a system of deduction based upon his calculations which, while they may appear ludicrous to us, were in his mind of a nature to reveal the wildly yearned for day of his liberation . . . Actually, the Marquis’s troubling arithmetical operations constitute a kind of defense mechanism, a partly unconscious struggle to ward off the despair which, he dreaded, were it to gain the upper hand, would lead to the overthrow of his reason. Absolutely in the dark as to his captors’ concrete intentions, Sade is led ‘to ferret out the most unexpected points of departure for his calculations,’ writes Maurice Heine. ‘To his eye everything has the look of a hint of his fate, or perhaps of a mysterious indication that has escaped the censor’s notice. His mind fastens desperately upon the number of lines in a letter, upon the number of times such and such a word is repeated, even upon a consonance which, spoken aloud, suggests a figure.’ But his efforts are not confined to trying to discover the date of his return to freedom; he also seeks for clues regarding his life while in prison: upon exactly what day will he again be allowed to take exercise? When will Madame de Sade visit him? His wife’s letters are the major source from which he mines the elements for his reckonings, and sometimes when the deductions he extracts from them have a baneful or contradictory look, he accuses Madame de Montreuil of having suggested to the Marquise such signals as might demoralize or throw him into perplexity.”

  An example: “This letter has 72 syllables which are the 72 weeks remaining. It has 7 lines plus 7 syllables which makes exactly the 7 months and 7 days from the 17th of April till the 22nd of January, 1780. It has 191 letters and 49 words. Now, 49 words plus 16 lines makes 59 [sic], and there are 59 weeks between now and May 30. . . .”

  Another: “On March 28 he sent to borrow 6 candles from me; and on April 6, 6 others whereof I lent only 4 . . . Thursday the 6th of January, 9 months after the borrowing of the candles, on exactly the same day 25 were returned to me instead of the 10 I had lent, which seems very plainly to designate another 9 months in prison, making 25 in all?”

  And finally: “I know of nothing that better proves the dearth a
nd sterility of your imagination than the unbearable monotony of your insipid signals. What! valets still sick of cleaning boots, workers reduced to idleness?. . . Recently, because you needed a 23, walks reduced by one and restricted to between 2 and 3: there’s your 23. Beautiful! Sublime! What a stroke of genius! What verve! . . . But if you must make these signals of yours, at least do so with honest intent, and not so they are forever a source of vexation!”