Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings

by Marquis de Sade

  Stung by this inculpation, I have just prepared two works in four volumes1 each where I have assailed, toppled, demolished the insidious sophistries in Justine, pulverized them from first to last. But since it is written on high, according to our friend Jacques the Fatalist,2 that men of letters are to be the perpetual victims of stupidity and of folly, my writings are being held, their publication is being delayed (and perhaps even prevented) while new editions of Justine pour from the press every other week. Bravo, my friends! there’d be no understanding your motions were you to cease your opposition to good and your encouragements to evil. In vain did we revolution ourselves to achieve the contrary, ’twas written on high that the most violent abuses are ever to hold sway in our France and that so long as any French soil is left on the globe, it will be recognizable by the corruption practiced upon it.

  Last Will and Testament (1806)

  OF DONATIEN-ALPHONSE-FRANÇOIS SADE

  Man of Letters

  For the execution of the clauses mentioned here below, I rely upon the filial piety of my children, desiring that their own may act with regard to them as they will have done with regard to me.

  First: Wishing to give evidence to demoiselle Marie-Constance Reinelle, wife of Monsieur Balthasar Quesnet, believed deceased, wishing, as I say, to give evidence to this lady, insofar as my poor powers permit, of my extreme gratitude for the care she has given me and the sincere friendship she has shown me from the twenty-fifth of August, seventeen hundred ninety, to the day of my death, sentiments proffered by her not only with the utmost tact and disinterest, but, what is even more, with the most courageous energy, since, during the Reign of Terror, she saved me from the revolutionary blade all too surely suspended over my head, as everyone knows ; and therefore, for the reasons outlined above, I hereby will and bequeath to the said lady Marie-Constance Reinelle, wife of Quesnet, the sum of eighty thousand livres in cash from the Tours mint, in whatsoever currency is then in usage in France at the time of my demise, wishing and understanding that this sum be deducted from the freest and most unattached portion of my legacy, charging my children to deposit it, within the space of a month from the day of my decease, with Monsieur Finot, notary at Charenton-Saint-Maurice, whom for this purpose I name the executor of my will and whom I charge to utilize the said sum in the manner the most secure and advantageous to Madame Quesnet, and in a manner susceptible to provide her with an income sufficient for her food and support, which income shall be promptly remitted to her on a quarterly basis, shall be transferable and not attachable by any person whatsoever, desiring, moreover, that the principal and the sale of the above-mentioned bequest be revertible to Charles Quesnet, son of the said dame Quesnet, who shall become the proprietor of the total, but only following the demise of his worthy mother.

  And this desire which I here express concerning the bequest I make to Madame Quesnet, I beseech my children, in the unlikely case that they should seek to evade or shirk their responsibility, I beseech them to remember that they had promised the said dame Quesnet a sum roughly similar in recognition of the care she took of their father, and as this present document merely concurs with and anticipates their initial intentions, any doubt as to their acquiescence to my final wishes is forever banished from my mind and will never for a moment trouble it further, especially when I reflect upon the filial virtues which have never ceased to characterize them and make them full worthy of my paternal sentiments.

  Second: I further leave and bequeath to the aforementioned Madame Quesnet all the furniture, effects, linen, clothing, books or papers which are in my chambers at the time of my decease, with the exception, however, of my father’s papers, which shall be indicated as such by labels placed upon the bundles, which papers shall be handed over to my children.

  Third: It is equally my intention and the expression of my last will that the present bequest in no wise deprive Madame Marie-Constance Reinelle, wife of Quesnet, of any rights, claims, or levies that she may care to make upon my estate, whatever the grounds may be.

  Fourth: I leave and bequeath to Monsieur Finot, the executor of my last will and testament, a ring valued at twelve hundred livres, in return for the trouble which the execution of the present act shall have occasioned him.

  Fifth: Finally, I absolutely forbid that my body be opened upon any pretext whatsoever. I urgently insist that it be kept a full forty-eight hours in the chamber where I shall have died, placed in a wooden coffin which shall not be nailed shut until the prescribed forty-eight hours have elapsed, at the end of which period the said coffin shall be nailed shut; during this interval a message shall be sent express to M. Le Normand, wood seller in Versailles, living at number 101, boulevard de l’Égalité, requesting him to come in his own person, with a cart, to fetch my body away and to convey it under his own escort and in the said cart to the wood upon my property at Malmaison near Épernon, in the commune of Émancé where I would have it laid to rest, without ceremony of any kind, in the first copse standing to the right as the said wood is entered from the side of the old château by way of the broad lane dividing it. The ditch opened in this copse shall be dug by the farmer tenant of Malmaison under M. Le Normand’s supervision, who shall not leave my body until after he has placed it in the said ditch; upon this occasion he may, if he so wishes, be accompanied by those among my kinsmen or friends who without display or pomp of any sort whatsoever shall have been kind enough to give me this last proof of their attachment. The ditch once covered over, above it acorns shall be strewn, in order that the spot become green again, and the copse grown back thick over it, the traces of my grave may disappear from the face of the earth as I trust the memory of me shall fade out of the minds of all men save nevertheless for those few who in their goodness have loved me until the last and of whom I carry away a sweet remembrance with me to the grave.

  Done at Charenton-Saint-Maurice in a state of reason and good health this thirtieth day of January in the year one thousand eight hundred six.

  D. A. F. SADE

  PART TWO

  Two Philosophical Dialogues

  Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man (1782)

  Until the recent discovery of Volume I of Sade’s miscellaneous works (œuvres diverses), which contains his early occasional prose and verse, as well as his one-act play, Le Philosophe soi-disant, and an epistolary work, Voyage de Hollande, the Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man was his earliest known work to be dated with certainty. Sade completed it, or completed the notebook which contains it, on July 12, 1782, during the fourth year of his second imprisonment in Vincennes. It is one of the most incisive works of Sade, who is not especially noted for his concision, and is contemporary to The 120 Days of Sodom, upon which it is known that he was hard at work that same year. Like The 120 Days, the Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man did not figure in Sade’s 1788 Catalogue raisonné, which was limited to works he wished publicly to acknowledge.

  The Dialogue did not appear until more than a century after Sade’s death. In the course of the nineteenth century, the notebook containing it was sold and resold on a number of occasions at various auctions of autograph manuscripts, and in 1920 Maurice Heine was fortunate enough to be able to purchase it at a sale held on November 6 at Paris’ Hôtel Drouot. Six years later he published it with an exhaustive introduction.1 Since it is included in a notebook containing primarily rough drafts, notes, and jottings, Lely raises the question as to whether this work was ever polished or reworked to the author’s satisfaction. Heine’s observation, however, that the manuscript was written in a “firm, legible hand, with few words crossed out” would indicate that Sade may well have been satisfied with its composition. In any event, the work needs no apology.

  What may most astonish the reader about the Dialogue is the author’s failure to acknowledge it. For, compared to much of his other writing, it seems tame indeed, despite the ferocity of its attack on the deity and the clerical establishment. As Heine points out, however, one may te
nd to give the Age of Reason, from the vantage point of the present century, more than its due. In fact, Sade’s position on the subject of religion was far more radical than that of most of his contemporaries, even the most enlightened. When, in the Encyclopedia of 1751, and under their own signatures, Diderot and d’Alembert can pronounce themselves in the following terms, it is easier to understand Sade’s reticence:

  Even the more tolerant of men will not deny that the judge has the right to repress those who profess atheism, and even to condemn them to death if there is no other way of freeing society from them. . . . If he can punish those who harm a single person, he doubtless has as much a right to punish those who wrong an entire society by denying that there is a God. . . . Such a man may be considered as an enemy of all men.2

  In the light of the above, one reads the Dialogue with a wider respect for the audacity and uncompromising nature of Sade’s mind.

  PRIEST—Come to this the fatal hour when at last from the eyes of deluded man the scales must fall away, and be shown the cruel picture of his errors and his vices—say, my son, do you not repent the host of sins unto which you were led by weakness and human frailty?

  DYING MAN—Yes, my friend, I do repent.

  PRIEST—Rejoice then in these pangs of remorse, during the brief space remaining to you profit therefrom to obtain Heaven’s general absolution for your sins, and be mindful of it, only through the mediation of the Most Holy Sacrament of penance will you be granted it by the Eternal.

  DYING MAN—I do not understand you, any more than you have understood me.

  PRIEST—Eh?

  DYING MAN—I told you that I repented.

  PRIEST—I heard you say it.

  DYING MAN—Yes, but without understanding it.

  PRIEST—My interpretation—

  DYING MAN—Hold. I shall give you mine. By Nature created, created with very keen tastes, with very strong passions; placed on this earth for the sole purpose of yielding to them and satisfying them, and these effects of my creation being naught but necessities directly relating to Nature’s fundamental designs or, if you prefer, naught but essential derivatives proceeding from her intentions in my regard, all in accordance with her laws, I repent not having acknowledged her omnipotence as fully as I might have done, I am only sorry for the modest use I made of the faculties (criminal in your view, perfectly ordinary in mine) she gave me to serve her; I did sometimes resist her, I repent it. Misled by your absurd doctrines, with them for arms I mindlessly challenged the desires instilled in me by a much diviner inspiration, and thereof do I repent: I only plucked an occasional flower when I might have gathered an ample harvest of fruit—such are the just grounds for the regrets I have, do me the honor of considering me incapable of harboring any others.

  PRIEST—Lo! where your fallacies take you, to what pass are you brought by your sophistries! To created being you ascribe all the Creator’s power, and those unlucky penchants which have led you astray, ah! do you not see they are merely the products of corrupted nature, to which you attribute omnipotence?

  DYING MAN—Friend—it looks to me as though your dialectic were as false as your thinking. Pray straighten your arguing or else leave me to die in peace. What do you mean by Creator, and what do you mean by corrupted nature?

  PRIEST—The Creator is the master of the universe, ’tis He who has wrought everything, everything created, and who maintains it all through the mere fact of His omnipotence.

  DYING MAN—An impressive figure indeed. Tell me now why this so very formidable fellow did nevertheless, as you would have it, create a corrupted nature?

  PRIEST—What glory would men ever have, had not God left them free will; and in the enjoyment thereof, what merit could come to them, were there not on earth the possibility of doing good and that of avoiding evil?

  DYING MAN—And so your god bungled his work deliberately, in order to tempt or test his creature—did he then not know, did he then not doubt what the result would be?

  PRIEST—He knew it undoubtedly but, once again, he wished to leave to man the merit of choice.

  DYING MAN—And to what purpose, since from the outset he knew the course affairs would take and since, all-mighty as you tell me he is, he had but to make his creature choose as suited him?

  PRIEST—Who is there can penetrate God’s vast and infinite designs regarding man, and who can grasp all that makes up the universal scheme?

  DYING MAN—Anyone who simplifies matters, my friend, anyone, above all, who refrains from multiplying causes in order to confuse effects all the more. What need have you of a second difficulty when you are unable to resolve the first, and once it is possible that Nature may all alone have done what you attribute to your god, why must you go looking for someone to be her overlord? The cause and explanation of what you do not understand may perhaps be the simplest thing in the world. Perfect your physics and you will understand Nature better, refine your reason, banish your prejudices and you’ll have no further need of your god.

  PRIEST—Wretched man! I took you for no worse than a Socinian—arms I had to combat you. But ’tis clear you are an atheist, and seeing that your heart is shut to the authentic and innumerable proofs we receive every day of our lives of the Creator’s existence—I have no more to say to you. There is no restoring the blind to the light.

  DYING MAN—Softly, my friend, own that between the two, he who blindfolds himself must surely see less of the light than he who snatches the blindfold away from his eyes. You compose, you construct, you dream, you magnify and complicate; I sift, I simplify. You accumulate errors, pile one atop the other; I combat them all. Which one of us is blind?

  PRIEST—Then you do not believe in God at all?

  DYING MAN—No. And for one very sound reason: it is perfectly impossible to believe in what one does not understand. Between understanding and faith immediate connections must subsist; understanding is the very lifeblood of faith; where understanding has ceased, faith is dead; and when they who are in such a case proclaim they have faith, they deceive. You yourself, preacher, I defy you to believe in the god you predicate to me—you must fail because you cannot demonstrate him to me, because it is not in you to define him to me, because consequently you do not understand him—because as of the moment you do not understand him, you can no longer furnish me any reasonable argument concerning him, and because, in sum, anything beyond the limits and grasp of the human mind is either illusion or futility; and because your god having to be one or the other of the two, in the first instance I should be mad to believe in him, in the second a fool. My friend, prove to me that matter is inert and I will grant you a creator, prove to me that Nature does not suffice to herself and I’ll let you imagine her ruled by a higher force; until then, expect nothing from me, I bow to evidence only, and evidence I perceive only through my senses: my belief goes no farther than they, beyond that point my faith collapses. I believe in the sun because I see it, I conceive it as the focal center of all the inflammable matter in Nature, its periodic movement pleases but does not amaze me. ’Tis a mechanical operation, perhaps as simple as the workings of electricity, but which we are unable to understand. Need I bother more about it? when you have roofed everything over with your god, will I be any the better off? and shall I still not have to make an effort at least as great to understand the artisan as to define his handiwork? By edifying your chimera it is thus no service you have rendered me, you have made me uneasy in my mind but you have not enlightened it, and instead of gratitude I owe you resentment. Your god is a machine you fabricated in your passions’ behalf, you manipulated it to their liking; but the day it interfered with mine, I kicked it out of my way, deem it fitting that I did so; and now, at this moment when I sink and my soul stands in need of calm and philosophy, belabor it not with your riddles and your cant, which alarm but will not convince it, which will irritate without improving it; good friends and on the best terms have we ever been, this soul and I, so Nature wished it to be; as it is, so she ex
pressly modeled it, for my soul is the result of the dispositions she formed in me pursuant to her own ends and needs; and as she has an equal need of vices and of virtues, whenever she was pleased to move me to evil, she did so, whenever she wanted a good deed from me, she roused in me the desire to perform one, and even so I did as I was bid. Look nowhere but to her workings for the unique cause of our fickle human behavior, and in her laws hope to find no other springs than her will and her requirements.

  PRIEST—And so whatever is in this world, is necessary.

  DYING MAN—Exactly.

  PRIEST—But if everything is necessary—then the whole is regulated.

  DYING MAN—I am not the one to deny it.

  PRIEST—And what can regulate the whole save it be an all-powerful and all-knowing hand?

  DYING MAN—Say, is it not necessary that gunpowder ignite when you set a spark to it?

  PRIEST—Yes.

  DYING MAN—And do you find any presence of wisdom in that?

  PRIEST—None.

  DYING MAN—It is then possible that things necessarily come about without being determined by a superior intelligence, and possible hence that everything derive logically from a primary cause, without there being either reason or wisdom in that primary cause.

  PRIEST—What are you aiming at?

  DYING MAN—At proving to you that the world and all therein may be what it is and as you see it to be, without any wise and reasoning cause directing it, and that natural effects must have natural causes: natural causes sufficing, there is no need to invent any such unnatural ones as your god who himself, as I have told you already, would require to be explained and who would at the same time be the explanation of nothing; and that once ’tis plain your god is superfluous, he is perfectly useless; that what is useless would greatly appear to be imaginary only, null and therefore nonexistent; thus, to conclude that your god is a fiction I need no other argument than that which furnishes me the certitude of his inutility.