The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings

by Marquis de Sade

  The dose of cruelty with which Nature has more or less furnished each individual is no more than the other side of desire with which everyone identifies himself, as though he were its only agent, in the moment of initial awareness of the self. For at that point the impulse to cruelty endangers him with destruction just as he endangers others.

  The man who asks: what are all the earth’s creatures when measured against the least of my desires? is already the victim of the misunderstanding, the plaything of an impulse which raises questions about itself. He is individuated but he resents his individuation. The impulse of desire can lend its absolute character to the individual who, as his part of the bargain, lends his language to desire which has no language. Language borrows desire’s violence because violence is scarce in the individual who suffers as much from its lack as he would like to see the other suffer. The result is that he turns against the other the challenge which had been directed against him: Let us have the strength to renounce what we expect from others. The formula permits a rupture which compensates his rhetorical solipsism by bringing back into question his awareness of himself.

  With this as his point of departure, Sade attempts to find an outlet for the necessity to destroy by a negation of destruction; his concept of a Nature who destroys her own works now identifies destruction with the purity of desire. This is the proposal contained in his theory of apathy whose therapeutic value is in its capacity to provoke the renunciation of the other’s reality, but as a consequence, of his own reality too.

  The practice of apathy, as it is suggested by Sade’s characters, presupposed that what we call soul, conscience, sensitivity, heart, are only miscellaneous structures brought about by a concentration of the same driving forces. Under pressure from the world of others, these forces can transform the faculties into intimidating influences; but just as readily, when under pressure from our own inner drives, they can become subversive influences; in either instance, their reaction is immediate. What remains constant is the fact that our own inner forces intimidate us at the very moment that they make insurgents out of us.

  Blot out your soul . . . try to find pleasure in everything that alarms your heart; arrive quickly. . . at the perfection of this brand of stoicism; in apathy you will discover a whole host of new pleasures which are delectable in a way quite different from those you think are found in the source of your fatal sensitivity. On the basis of my errors, I have established principles; since that time, I have known felicity.

  How does this intimidating insurrection, or this insurrectional intimidation, work its way in us? By images which, seen before we act, incite us either to act or to suffer acts, and also by images of acts which, already committed, come back to us and rekindle the conscience; the conscience they rekindle is, of course, that faculty as it has been reconstructed by dormant drives:

  On one side there is the impossibility of reparations, and on the other the impossibility of figuring out which we should have the greater repentance for. Conscience grows dizzy and is so silent as to make us capable of extending crime beyond the limits of life. This condition indicates that conscience has a very special quality when compared with the other moods of the soul: it can annihilate itself because its operations have been amplified.

  Yet elsewhere Sade observes that the same is true of sensitivity: “Any extension of it leads to its annihilation.” That observation confirms him in his belief that the same drives are at work in both structures, working either to intimidate or to subvert. Thus our awareness of ourself and of others is the most fragile and the most transparent of functions. As soon as our impulses intimidate us by creating fear or remorse, either on the basis of images of actions performed or actions still to be undertaken, we must substitute acts of any kind each time the images seem on the verge of becoming substitutes for acts or a hindrance to our performing them. Thus Juliette is encouraged

  . . . to do in cold blood the same things which, done in frenzy, are capable of making us remorseful. By doing this we deal from strength each time virtue shows her head again, and this habit of molesting her in a positive way, at the moment when a certain calm in the senses seems to make her reappearance possible and desirable, is one of the surest ways of annihilating her forever. Use this secret, it is infallible; as soon as a moment of calm produces virtue in the guise of remorse—and that is always the guise she uses in order to recapture us—as soon as that happens, immediately do the thing you were thinking about with regret. . . .

  How can this practice of apathy become a viable method for the achievement of “voluptuous toughness”? Nothing would seem more contradictory in Sade than this break with others when the result of the abolition of our duties toward others and their consequent exclusion from our sensitivity is translated clearly and constantly by acts which, because of their violence, need the other—acts which by their very nature re-establish the reality of the other and of myself.

  If the other is no longer anything for me, and if I am nothing for the other, how can these acts be performed since, in effect, they would turn out to be the acts of a nothing on a nothing?

  In order that this nothing never again be filled by my reality and the reality of the other, through the presence either of enjoyment or of remorse, I must disappear in an endless reiteration of acts which I run the danger of regretting because, when they are suspended, the reality of the other imposes itself on me once again. I also run the risk of overestimating them because of the enjoyment they bring me. The risk is there once I take credit for that enjoyment or that regret, or once I give credit for it to the other who may be its source.

  Saint-Fond, the perfect type of the perverse libertine who has not got beyond the stage of negative feeling for his fellow men, fails in his fidelity to this necessity by allowing his victim as much reality as he allows himself. In effect, his conscience is intimidated by its own impulses; only this can explain his wish to pursue his victim—always the same victim—throughout eternity. His self-awareness functions in terms of the awareness he continues to have of his victim’s self-awareness in moments of suffering, a self-awareness which makes the victim an accomplice in the delights of the torturer.

  What is the purpose behind this reiteration of similar acts which is dictated by the moral attitude of apathy? Sade clearly understood the difficulty even in those moments when he was unable to resolve the dilemma: the enjoyment which negative contact with the other procures for me should be anticipated quite as much as remorse. Remorse here is only the other side of enjoyment, and the two are only different forms of behavior which have their sources in the same drives. Henceforth acts should not be informed by that enjoyment which is procured by the particular qualities of a single “victim,” but only by the negation of the object which provokes such acts. And in order that this reiteration may validate a negation of destruction itself—to a point where it is emptied of all content—the number of reiterated acts and the quantity of sacrificed objects become of capital importance. Quantity depreciates the value of objects; quantity undermines my reality and that of the other. Thus the moral principle of apathy, which provokes the greatest disturbance in the drives, tries to create a coincidence of the disturbance with an equally strong wariness designed to guarantee the purity of the disturbance. If the habit of apathy is to render the individual capable of doing in cold blood acts which would have brought remorse when done in a moment of frenzy, a similar process could be found for vice; with the result that virtue would never have a chance to make us remorseful. “In virtue’s name you will no longer conceive of repenting, because you will have grown accustomed to doing evil in answer to virtue’s reappearance, and in order to do evil no longer you would prevent her from ever appearing. . . .”

  Could this be the solution to the dialectical drama visible in the Sadean conscience? The answer depends on an answer to a more difficult question: Can the conscience of Sadean man accept any solution? To get beyond the notion of evil, which is always conditioned by the degree of rea
lity he accords to others, we have seen Sadean man carry the exaltation of the ego to its height; yet the height of this exaltation was supposed to be found in apathy where the ego abolished itself simultaneously with the other, where enjoyment disassociated itself from destruction, and where destruction identified itself with desire in its pure form. In this way, the Sadean conscience reproduces in its own operations the perpetual motion of nature which creates but which, in creating, sets up obstacles for herself. The only way she recovers her liberty, even momentarily, is by destroying her own works.

  —TRANSLATED BY JOSEPH H. MCMAHON

  PART TWO

  from Les Crimes De L'Amour

  Reflections on the Novel (1800)

  In the Year VIII of the Republic (1800), Sade published a four-volume work which he entitled Les Crimes de l’Amour and for which he wrote an introductory text, Idée sur les romans. This discursive essay contains much which, a hundred and fifty years later, may seem naive and, considering its author, a trifle conventional. It is none the less a remarkable essay, as Edmund Wilson has rightfully noted, “in which he [Sade] shows a comprehensive knowledge of the history of European fiction from the Greek romances through Boccaccio, Cervantes, Mme. de La Fayette, Marivaux, Richardson and Fielding, to Monk Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe (who figures as ‘Radgliffe’). He lays down some excellent principles, all of which he has more or less violated: that the novelist must not depart from what is probable; that he must not interrupt his story with incidents that are either too frequent or not properly related to the subject; that it should never be the author who moralizes but always one of the characters in his novel, and that he ought not even then to be made to except when he is forced to by circumstances.”1

  Sade came to writing relatively late in life. Although the recent discovery of his miscellaneous works(Œuvres diverses) reveals that his initial literary efforts date from a period much earlier than was originally thought, these are none the less the works of a dilettante, and it is not unreasonable to assume that Sade, had he remained a free man throughout his life, might never have become a writer. Prison fettered the libertine; it made the writer.

  Sade scholars Maurice Heine and Gilbert Lely both date the birth of Sade the writer as approximately 1780, two years after his incarceration in cell No. 6 of the Vincennes prison. “It was around 1780, in the course of his fortieth year, that the prisoner of the Royal dungeons began his gigantic labor as a writer. As Maurice Heine notes, Sade found salvation in his writing, which he came to look upon as the purpose of his life.”2

  Sade was not a man of half measures, and when he turned to writing he devoted himself to it with the same total dedication he had earlier shown in his pursuit of libertine pleasures. His letters from prison abound with requests for and judgments upon literary and philosophical works: “To refuse me Jean-Jacques’ Confessions, now there’s an excellent thing, above all after having sent me Lucretius and the dialogues of Voltaire; that demonstrates great judiciousness, profound discernment in your spiritual guides. Alas, they do me much honor in reckoning that the writings of a deist can be dangerous reading for me; would that I were still at that stage.” Thus Sade to his wife, in 1783.3 When the Bastille was stormed in 1789 and Sade’s former cell sacked—he had been removed ten days before to the Charenton Asylum at the request of the Bastille authorities, who accused him of inciting the populace to revolt4—the rioters discovered, and looted, Sade’s prison library of some six hundred volumes, “several of which were of great value.”5 Having dedicated himself to literature, Sade, in prison, became a voracious reader and student of literatures past and present. His “Reflections on the Novel” reveals the extent of his reading, and if his judgments are not invariably accurate, his literary perception is often acute, as is demonstrated by his preference for the English novelists Fielding and Richardson as opposed to the “fastidious portraits of love’s sighs” and the “tedious bedside conversations” of the French novelists of the period.

  Notable by its absence from Sade’s essay on fiction is any mention of Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons dangereuses. It cannot be supposed that Sade was unfamiliar with that novel, given the immense success it had enjoyed following its publication in 1782—a success none of Sade’s work would ever attain, at least during the author’s lifetime. Gilbert Lely has uncovered evidence to show that Sade and Laclos spent seven months together in the same prison—La maison de Santé at Picpus—from the end of March to the middle of October, 1794. From Sade’s subsequent silence concerning Laclos’ novel, Lely suggests that the two men may have quarreled during their term in Picpus together. The more likely hypothesis is that Sade was, purely and simply, jealous of Laclos—jealous perhaps of his popular success, but doubtless even more because he must have realized (his essay on the novel is too astute for him not to have known it) that Laclos had written a veritable masterpiece of cynicism and evil. Sade’s notebooks contain a Plan d’un roman en lettres (“Outline for an epistolary novel”) which is suspiciously reminiscent of Les Liaisons dangereuses and lends credence to the theory that Sade regarded Laclos as a rival who had, in Lely’s words, “encroached upon a domain he deemed to be exclusively his own.”

  “Reflections on the Novel” also provides evidence of another literary rivalry, that between Sade and Restif de la Bretonne, a writer Sade loathed. The sentiment was mutual. It was Restif who first referred to Sade as the “monster-author” and who, as an act of revenge against the popularity of Justine, wrote a novel entitled Anti-Justine. Unlike Sade’s book, noted Restif, his was one “which wives can read to their husbands,” a work which will make the reader “adore women, cherish them, and loathe all the more the vivisector who has just been released from the Bastille.” Sade in turn assailed Restif for being a lowly hack who wrote with such speed, in the base pursuit of money, that he had to keep a printing press at the head of his bed.

  On 30 Vendémiaire, Year IX (the 22nd of October, 1800), the critic Villeterque published a review of Les Crimes de l’Amour in which he violently attacked the stories themselves, the essay which served as an introduction, and the author, whom he implicitly accused of being the author of the anonymously published Justine. Sade was not one to allow such an indictment or such innuendos to go unanswered; his reply appeared in the form of a pamphlet issued by Sade’s publisher Massé in the Year XI (1803). Because of their historical and intrinsic interest, and because the Villeterque-Sade dialogue forms a logical appendix to the essay itself, we have included both in the present volume.

  “A note on the cover of the twentieth and final notebook of his autograph manuscript,” writes Maurice Heine, “informs us that Sade’s work in the form of the novella and short story consists of fifty tales. Sixteen of these, among the shorter or at least the more anecdotal, were intended to be classed as Historiettes and included as part of a two-or three-volume collection of essays entitled Le Portefeuille d’un homme de lettres. Thirty more, so arranged that the somber stories would alternate with the gay, were destined to comprise a four-volume work, with a preface by the author, entitled Contes et Fabliaux du XVIIIe siècle, par un troubadour provençal.”6 All this material was written in the Bastille during the years 1787 and 1788, and is thus subsequent to the composition of The 120 Days of Sodom.

  We find in the manuscript of the projected Contes et Fabliaux du XVIIIe siècle the following description of the work in Sade’s hand:

  This work comprises four volumes, with an engraving for each tale; these short tales are interspersed in such a manner that an adventure which is gay, and even naughty but well within the limits of modesty and decency, will follow immediately upon a serious or tragic adventure. . . .7

  Twelve years later, in the Year VIII, Sade published his collection as Les Crimes de l’Amour in which, abandoning his original plan to alternate the somber with the gay, he included only the “serious or tragic.” An article on the work which appeared in the Journal de Paris on 6 Brumaire, Year IX (the 28th of October, 1800)—thus barely a w
eek after Villeterque’s attack—speculated on the reason for the change in contents. Commenting first upon the “fecundity of the author’s imagination” and the “great variety of situations portrayed,” the author of the unsigned review went on to observe: “He [Sade] doubtless thought that his somber hue was better suited to us now and for some time to come, since in this realm [of tragedy] reality still continues to surpass fiction.”8