That man is able to derive the liveliest pleasure from cutting man (and woman) to pieces, and first—and perhaps especially—from the idea of cutting them to pieces, this is a fact, an obvious fact which we customarily hide from ourselves out of I don’t know what sort of cowardice. I do not know because, so far as I can see, there is nothing in all this that could for one minute conflict with Christian belief—nor moreover with Moslem or Taoist—which maintains that man once upon a time parted ways with God. And as for the unbeliever, by what right could he refuse to observe that man with unbiased eyes?
Yet refuse he does once he is in a hurry to build, to slap together, a natural philosophy—the nineteenth century’s term for it will be “a lay ethic”—untrammeled by laws and by authority, untrammeled by God. And as of now integrity is of slight importance to him. Well! how precious Sade thus becomes to us in his refusal of lies, in his refusal to seek short cuts, in his refusal to cheat! His refusal is a little too vehement? Ah, Sade is not a patient man. And do you suppose he is not exasperated by the others, with their ecstasies before Nature, their weepings over waterfalls, their quiverings upon the soft greensward? To so much sottishness an antidote was needed.
“A queer antidote,” Justine murmurs. “So pray tell me: what life shall be mine to lead?”
“An absurd life,” answers Sade. “But let’s have a look at it.”
The absurd world
The scene is usually laid in some awesome and almost inaccessible castle. Or in some monastery lost in the depths of a forest. Justine is there, a captive, and locked in the tower with her are three girls, the sober Omphale, the addle-brained Florette, Cornélie the inconsolable, all slaves of the perverse monks. Are they alone? No, everything would indicate that within the walls of the cloister there are other towers, other women. Sometimes this or that slave vanishes. What becomes of her? Everything leads to the suspicion that in leaving the monastery she takes leave of life. For what reason is she taken away? It is impossible to know. Her age has no bearing upon it: “I have seen a seventy-year-old woman here,” Omphale tells Justine, “and during the time they retained her in service I saw more than a dozen girls dismissed who were under sixteen.” Nor is her behavior a factor. “I have seen some who flew to do their every desire, and who were gone within six weeks; others, sullen and temperamental, whom they kept a good many years.” Well-clothed girls, well-fed. If they but knew where they stood, and what conduct . . . but no. “Here, ignorance of the law is no excuse. You are forewarned of nothing, and you are punished for everything. . . . Yesterday, though you made no mistakes, you were given the whip. You shall soon receive it again for having committed some. Above all, don’t ever get the idea that you are innocent.” (Thus are the themes of the castle and of the trial interwoven throughout Justine.) “The essential thing,” Omphale goes on to say, “is never to refuse anything . . . to be ready for everything, and even so, though this be the best course to follow, it does not much insure your safety. . . .”8
What remedies for so many ills? There is but one. The miserable can take consolation in the fact they are surrounded by others who are equally miserable, tormented by the same enigmas, victims of the same absurdity.
But it would be naive to suppose that in this adventure Sade’s sole concern is the fate of four little lambs.
VIII. SADE’S DISAPPOINTMENT
In 1791 Sade was to have his hour, and his months, of triumph.
For the Revolution, which recognized in him one of its Fathers, made him a free and honored man. At the Théâtre Molière his Le Comte Oxtiern is being played; in the streets the people hum a Cantata to the Divine Marat whose author is the Divine Marquis. The brilliance of his conversation, the breadth of his learning, the force of his hatred, everything about Sade spells a shining and safe career ahead. With his new friends he differs upon not more than one or two points: for example, like Marat, he favors a communist State,9 but he would also like to retain a Prince to oversee the application of the new laws. Graver however is this: these new laws are to be mild and moderate. Capital punishment is ruled out of them. Though the heat of his passions may sometimes justify an individual’s crime, nothing can excuse crime’s presence in the legal codes “which are by their very definition rational and of a dispassionate nature. But here we have one of those delicate distinctions which escape a great many people, who are manifestly unable either to think clearly or to count. You put a man to the gallows, my good friends, for having killed another man: and lo! that makes two men the less instead of one.”10
Thus, and not without insolence, speaks Citizen-Secretary Brutus Sade before a meeting of the Section of Piques. How does he sound? how does he look? He stands not so straight as he used to, after his years in the tyrant’s dungeons; and he has put on weight, too. But ever the grand style, and the gracious air, the same warmth of personality. A hint of obsequiousness. An engaging smile.
The President of Piques
He smiles, as all disappointed people do. He is disappointed. To be free, to be in the midst of life again, that’s not everything. Troubles, problems are beginning to beset him from all sides. There’s his notary, that insect Gaufridy, demanding money; his sons, behaving as though their father did not exist; his castles in Provence, threatened with demolition, and being pillaged in the meantime. Right here in the Section he sees himself closely watched by his fellow citizens. They expected something else from the ferocious Sade. Something else than this level-headedness, these cantatas, this politeness (at a time when the enemy besets us from without while from within the fifth column saps our finances and seeks to starve us into submission). Secretary—and even, a little later, President—of Piques: very nice, but one must still earn one’s living. He files a request for a head librarian’s post. No reply. The theaters turn down his new plays which, it would appear, are lacking in civism. “So they want civism, do they? I’ll give them all they can swallow,” Sade mutters, seated behind his President’s desk. It’s at that point that a little old gentleman sneaks into his office on tiptoe, somebody with an aristocratic past who’d like, thinks the Secretary, to become one of the boys; who sits down off in a corner. Who positively looks, thinks the Secretary, as if he were pissing in his pants. Who sits there fiddling stupidly with his cane; who plainly deserves nothing better than to be purged, with his face of a weasel. Why, good heavens, if it isn’t the President de Montreuil! The Enemy, the Persecutor to whom Sade is indebted for some thirteen years in jail.
Well, Sade simply goes over and shakes hands with him. And cheers him up a bit. No need to worry, they’ll admit him into the Section. And, you know, it’s not all fun and frolic at the Section. Poor Montreuil puts on a big grin all the same. Three days later an officer in the Army of the Somme, one Major Ramand, is brought before Sade. “You have aided émigrés to escape?” Sade demands. “I have.” “That means death, you realize.” “I realize it,” says the good Major. “Bah,” says Sade. “Here’s three hundred livres and some identity papers. Off with you.”11 Another three days later, Ramand is safe somewhere in the countryside and Sade is behind bars in Les Madelonnettes. If he misses being executed it’s by a hairsbreadth and because Robespierre is sent to the guillotine. Sade is released from prison; but he’ll be back there shortly. This time it is for having printed a pamphlet against Josephine. Why a pamphlet, why against Josephine? Probably for the same reason he treated Montreuil as a friend and released the Major.
Wherein Sade returns to prison
The simplest explanation is the first one that comes to mind. In prison Sade had become a writer. To be sure, he’d already scribbled a little, prior to then, here and there. Indeed, he’d shown himself able to wield a pretty pen, as they say; in the Troubadour manner (of course; for he is Provençal). But in prison writing had been accompanied by a sort of revelation.
It is impossible to measure, even to glimpse, the whole extent of an achievement of which a bare fourth has survived the effects of persecution; the rest having been bu
rned, pulped, lost. Rather, if you wish to obtain an idea of the fury—of the rage—with which Sade proceeds, consider how for Les Infortunes de la Vertu he works out a meticulous outline, then writes the novel a first time, then writes it again, then writes it yet again, each time expanding upon each detail, correcting the least phrase or, better still, reinventing it; and the second version is twice the length of the first; the third—fifteen hundred pages long—three times the length of the second. With Sade, writing is worse than a vice or a drug. It has simultaneously to do with passion and with duty. Now, directly he is set at large, everything conspires against continuing—politics, children, business. How is one to keep afloat while writing? Parasite, pimp, blackmailer—as we know only too well, for him who has the need to write, it’s write by hook or by crook. And the unlucky individual who has acquired—for the sake of his independence, says he—some “second trade” (but what then was his first?) has hardly—journalist, civil servant, insurance salesman—any other resource: he has himself put down as sick. For his part, Sade puts himself down as guilty. They’re jailing rebels this year? He’s a rebel. The indulgent are in trouble? “I am free to let off fools if I so please.” Plotters? Why not be a plotter? The impious and the libertine? There’s a category I fit into perfectly. When all else fails, there’s always madness. You could read, nothing stood in the way of your writing—and your fury at being held captive didn’t hurt—in the madhouses and prisons of the eighteenth century, fairly mild places, furthermore, for a nobleman up on nobody knew exactly what count. “What’s that one in here for?” Sade’s jailers used to wonder. “Seems like they got him for conspiracy against God.” “Ever heard the like of it?”
Yes, the argument is plausible. But shall we look a little farther? Sometimes a man will pursue fame, love, independence with such fervor that he overshoots the mark, with such passion that his passion will sometimes come to scorn what at first it sought, to deride the meager products of such efforts. The glory you strove so hard after, was it this tattle in the press, these silly interviews, this being elected to Academies, and this popular tune whose author nobody knows? Liberty, was it this (scanty) applause from the front rows; these defiant approbations; these votes which tomorrow will swing against you? No, in order to be satisfied with a pittance, pride is not enough, you need vanity of the most stupid sort. Vanity, and also a fondness for being shortchanged, a desire to be cuckolded. At this point the driving forces within a man undergo a mysterious change in direction; and the victor senses he has been vanquished by his victory; and the lover flees his mistress, and for the spirit that lusted after riches, poverty is now the mark of well-being. Our hero delights in and at the same time is exasperated by the silence his extravagant pretensions create around him; the lover of liberty turns around and goes back to prison. Totally disgusted.
Causes of a disappointment
Yes, the explanation is plausible. However, I cannot say that it greatly pleases me. Let us return to our ill-starred lambs.
IX. SADE HIMSELF, OR THE SOLUTION TO THE RIDDLE
Sadism did not used to be much talked about. Nowadays it is, in the newspapers and in serious books. The change is for the better. For this is an entirely natural and immediate trait in man, a trait he has possessed since the very beginning and which, when you come down to it, may be summed up in a few words: we demand to be happy; we also demand that others be rather less happy than we. That this trait may, under the pressure of circumstances, degenerate into frightful manias—this is a matter upon which psychiatrists are qualified to speak, not I. Whether Sade was a sadist or not I don’t know: the trial records shed little light upon the question. In the case we are best acquainted with—the Marseilles affair—Sade figures as a masochist, which is the very opposite. I see that at least once he flatly refused to be sadistic in spite of all sorts of encouragement: his past grievances, his feelings of the moment, and the chorus of the Section of Piques. But it could be argued that the true sadist is the one who declines to practice sadism on easy terms, who will not stand to be told when and where to give expression to his idiosyncrasy. Each of us is proud in his own way.
Over the last fifty years or so we have got into the habit of talking about masochism (which is what I have just done) as we do about sadism. With the same naturalness, in the same matter-of-fact way. As if it were a human characteristic no less simple, no less necessary than sadism; and no less susceptible of becoming a mania either. I have no objection to that. But if it is a natural characteristic, you’ll admit it is a very queer one; queer almost to the point of being incredible; and that to call it natural requires considerable forbearance on our part.
Masochism is incomprehensible
If I take the eye, for example, I note that it is subject to a wide range of anomalies. It can be farsighted, or myopic. It can present yet rarer and (like sadism) yet more distinguished defects: amaurosis or diplopia. It is sometimes able to put its faultiness to profit: it can be nyctalopic, and content to be so. (Just as a sadist turns his sadism to advantage; after all, a well-ordered society can hardly do without public executioners; at any rate, without judges and nurses and surgeons.) So far so good. But never, never has there been found an eye that was afflicted by buzzings, hyperacusia or colored audition. Well, that, all else being equal, is what some claim in behalf of masochism.
When pain experienced by others gives me pleasure, this pleasure I feel is obviously an unusual feeling; and doubtless a reprehensible one. In any case it is a clear and comprehensible feeling, and an article upon it can be included in the Encyclopedia. But that my own pain be pleasure to me, that my humiliation be to me a dignification—this is no longer reprehensible or unusual, it is simply obscure, and it is only too easy for me to reply that if it is pain, it isn’t pleasure, if it’s dignification, then it’s not humiliation. If it’s . . . And so on and so forth. Yet, however that may be, there does indeed exist, nobody will deny it, something which can be rightly termed masochism. To be more precise, there do indeed exist men, and women also, whom we must call masochists.
For there are some who seek nothing so eagerly as mockery and ridicule, and who thrive better on shame than on bread and wine: Philip of Neri, who used to caper in the streets and shave only one side of his face, preferred to pass for a madman than for a saint; the sheik Abu Yazid al Bisthami would give urchins a couple of walnuts in exchange for a slap. There is no lack of persons who to their friends—and to those foremost among all their friends, themselves—fondly wish “suffering, abandon, infirmity, ill-treatment and dishonor and profound self-contempt and the martyrdom of self-distrust.”12 And others too who say with the Portuguese nun: “Increase the number of my afflictions.” To anyone contending that behind whatever it may appear to be this amounts to a clever attempt to assure oneself of the weal which follows after woe, and the honor which follows dishonor, and the triumph of esteem which follows after the ordeal of disdain, in keeping with some natural law of compensation, the reply would have to be that he had not very well grasped the question. But let me continue.
Masochism is a universal trait
We see other persons who steer a steady course toward vexations and abuse, who, no matter where they happen to be, are extraordinarily alert and, through the workings of some unerring instinct, as if sensitized to the presence of a possible source of mistreatment and as if fascinated in advance, attracted, summoned by the cruel potentialities they have somehow detected in a man everybody else sees as a decent and unexceptional chap. (Thus Justine. . .) Or else, of their own accord, with peculiar willfulness march straight to where prison, trials, and death await them. (Thus Sade. . .)
Let there be no mistake: I do not pretend to be clearing up the mystery, I do not in the least claim to be explaining a difficult fact, a truly mysterious fact, which defies analysis now and has never yielded to it in the past. No. Instructed by experience, my inclination would instead be to acknowledge that in masochism we are dealing with something veritable but incompreh
ensible; with, to put it more vaguely, an occurrence—a frequent occurrence, perhaps, but at any rate an obscure one, and one which remains impenetrable to my intelligence. (After all, why these people are the way they are is more than I can fathom.) In short, I concede to mystery its share in all this—and, doing so, I am at once rewarded for my modesty. I venture no comments about proud spirits who seek silence or greedy spirits who seek poverty (for I must own that the explanation I offered a little while ago was, while banal, rather farfetched: that the proud spirit, the greedy or the libertarian spirit, having been acquainted beforehand with the signs of glory, wealth, liberty, were in a poor position to complain afterward).
The riddles find their solution
For if it happens that man sometimes experiences that which is not altogether human, and to which no familiar habits or everyday usages apply—but natural man is not other than civilized man, nor I other than other human beings, nor kindliness other than perfidy, nor pain other than pleasure—sadism, in the final analysis, is probably nothing else than the approach to and, as it were the (perhaps maladroit and certainly odious) testing of a truth so difficult and so mysterious that once it is acknowledged as such, the problems we have been helpless to resolve—and the very riddles Sade puts to Justine—become instantly and miraculously transparent. It is as though it were enough for me, in order to be able to see clearly (to see my way clearly through questions and a world both mightily confused and absurd), to have once and for all taken obscurity into account.
Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings Page 5