Juliette

by Marquis de Sade

  “What! Clairwil, do you mean to say that you dislike men?”

  “I use them because my temperament would have it so, but I scorn and detest them nonetheless: I’d not be adverse to destroying every last one of those by the mere sight of whom I have always felt myself debased.”

  “What pride!”

  “It’s a characteristic of mine, Juliette; that pride is coupled with frankness. I am plain-spoken; it is a means to facilitate our early acquaintance.”

  “Cruelty is implied in what you say; if your desires were to be translated into actions—”

  “If? But they very often are. My heart is hard, and I am far from believing sensitiveness preferable to the apathy I luckily enjoy. Oh, Juliette,” she continued, donning her clothes, “you perhaps entertain illusions regarding this dangerous softheartedness, this compassion, this sensibility, the having whereof is thought creditable by so many churls.

  “Sensibility, my dear, is the source of all virtues and likewise of all vices. It was sensibility brought Cartouche to the scaffold, just as it caused the name of Titus to be writ gilt-lettered in the annals of benevolence. Owing to excessive sensibility, we behave virtuously; owing to excessive sensibility, we take joy in misbehaving; the individual lacking sensibility is an inert mass, equally incapable of good or evil, and human only insofar as he has the human shape. This purely physical sensibility depends upon the conformation of our organs, upon the delicacy of our senses, and, more than all the rest, upon the nature of our nervous humours within which I locate all the affections of man in general. Upbringing and, afterward, habit mold in this or that direction the portion of sensibility everyone receives from Nature; and selfishness, or the instinct of self-preservation, aids upbringing and habit to settle permanently upon this or that choice. But as the sort of education we are apt to receive unfailingly prepares us ill and indeed misleads us, the moment that education is over with, the inflammation produced in the electrical fluid by the impact of foreign objects, an operation we term the effect of the passions, begins to determine our habitual bent for good or for evil. If this inflammation is slight, whether because of the organs’ denseness, which softens the impact and lessens the pressure of the foreign object upon the neural fluid, or because of the brain’s sluggishness in communicating the effect of this pressure to the fluid, or again because of this fluid’s reluctance to be set in motion, its turgidity, then the effects of our sensibility dispose us to virtue. If, in that other case, foreign objects act in a forceful manner upon our organs, if they penetrate them violently, if they stir into brisk motion the neural fluid particles which circulate in the hollow of the nerves, then our sensibility is such as to dispose us to vice. If the foreign objects’ action is stronger yet, it leads us to crime, and finally to atrocities if the effect attains its ultimate intensity. But we notice that in every case the sensibility is simply a mechanism, that some degree or other of virtue or vice originates with it, that it is the sensibility which is responsible for whatever we do. When we detect an excess of sensibility in some young person, we may predict his future with confidence, and safely wager that some fine day this sensibility will see him a criminal; for it is not, as some may be prone to imagine, the species of sensibility, but the degree of sensibility that leads to crime; and the individual in whom its action is slow will be disposed to good, just as, very certainly, he in whom this action wreaks havoc will do evil, evil being more piquant, more attractive than good. Therefore ’tis toward evil that violent effects tend, following the general principle according to which all like effects, moral no less than physical, seek each other out and combine.

  “And so there appears to be no doubt that the necessary procedure with a young person one was endeavoring to train up for life would be to blunt that sensibility; blunting it, you will perhaps lose a few weak virtues, but you will eliminate a great many vices, and under a form of government which severely castigates all vices and which never rewards virtues, it is infinitely better to learn not to do evil than to strive to do good. There is nothing dangerous whatever in not doing good, whereas the doing of evil may be fraught with perils when one is still too young to appreciate the importance of concealing those acts of wickedness invincible Nature constrains us to commit. I may go farther: doing good is the most useless thing in the world and the most essential thing in the world is not doing evil, and this, not from the standpoint of one’s self, for the greatest of all joys is often born in excessive evil only, nor from the standpoint of religion, for nothing is so irrelevant to worldly well-being as what relates to this mummery about God, but solely from the standpoint of the law of the land, whereof the infraction, delightful as it may be, always, when discovered, precipitates the beginner into serious difficulties.

  “Hence there would be no danger developing in our hypothetical young individual a heart oriented in such wise that he would never perform a good deed, but at the same time would never feel the impulse to perform an evil one either—until, at least, he had attained the age when experience would make him realize the indispensability of hypocrisy. Now, in such a case, the appropriate steps to take would be radically to deaden the sensibility immediately when you noticed that, too lively, it was threatening to lead to vicious conduct. For here I suppose that from the very apathy to which you would reduce his spirit some dangers could issue; these dangers, however, will always be far smaller than those his excessive sensibility might breed. Granted a sufficient subduing of sensibility, a consequent lowering of sensitivity and temperature, what crimes are committed will always be committed dispassionately, and hence the hypothetical pupil will have time enough to cover up his traces and divert suspicion, whereas those committed in a state of effervescence will, before he has the opportunity to collect his wits, tumble him into the gravest trouble. The cold-blooded crimes will be perhaps less splendid than somber, but they will be less ready of detection, because the phlegm and premeditation wherewith they will be perpetrated will guarantee leisure to so arrange them as not to have to fear their consequences; the other category, those perpetrated barefacedly, brashly, thoughtlessly, impulsively, will speedily bring their author to the gibbet. And your chief concern shall not be whether your pupil, when a mature man, commits or doesn’t commit crimes, because in fact crime is a natural occurrence to which this or that human being is the accidental and often involuntary instrument, for whether he will or no, man is as a toy in Nature’s hands when his organs put him there; your chief concern, I say, must be to see to it that this pupil commits the least dangerous offense, having regard to the laws of the country wherein he resides, in such sort that if the pettiest is punished and the most frightful is not, then ’tis very assuredly the most frightful you must let him commit. For, once again, it is not from crime you must shelter him, but from the sword that smites the perpetrator of crime: crime entails no disadvantages, its punishment entails many. To a man’s welfare, it is all one whether he does or does not commit crimes; but it is most essential to this same welfare that he not be punished for those he commits, whatever their kind or degree of wickedness. A teacher’s foremost duty to the pupil in his care would then be to cultivate in him a disposition toward the less dangerous of the two evils, since, unfortunately, it is but too true that he must incline in the one direction or in the other; and experience will make it very clear to you, that the vices proceeding from hard-heartedness are much less dangerous than those caused by excess of sensibility, the excellent reason for this being that the lucidity and calm characteristic of the former ensure the means to avoid punishment, whereas there is nothing more obvious than that he will be punished who, lacking the time to make suitable provisions, to take the basic precautions, flies blindly into action in the heat of passion. Thus, in the first case, that is, where the young person is left to be impelled by his whole sensibility, he will perform a few good deeds which practice reveals utterly futile; in the second, he will perform no good deeds, which will mean not the slightest loss to him; and owing to the way y
ou have shaped him, he will commit none but those infractions which may be committed without risk. But your pupil will become cruel—and what shall the effects of this cruelty be? With one who has a little substance to him, they will consist in a stout refusal to act at the behest of a pity his mind and heart, molded by you, will not acknowledge or even register; I see no danger in that. ’Tis but a matter of one or two virtuous performances the fewer, and there is nothing more useless than virtue, since unto him who exercises it, it is a cross to bear, and since, in our climes, it is never rewarded. With a bold and rigorous spirit, this cruelty in action will consist in furtive crimes, whose sharp impact will, by its friction, heat the electrical particles in the fluid in his nerves, and will perhaps mean death for a number of persons of little account. Where’s the danger here? for, in full possession of his faculty of judgment and right reason, he will proceed coolly, carefully, with such secrecy, with such art that the torch of Justice will never be able to bring the thing to light; thus will he be happy, and at no risk; what else does he want? It isn’t evil, but the news thereof leaked out, that is perilous; and the most odious crime of all, if well concealed, causes infinitely less embarrassment than the slightest foible become public. Now consider the other case. The entirety of his sensitive faculties at his command and operative, this pupil espies an object and takes a liking to it; he would have it, his parents stand in his path: accustomed to giving the freest possible rein to his sensibility, he’ll poison, he’ll butcher everyone who, keeping him from that object, frustrates his purposes, and he’ll perish broken on the wheel. You observe that in treating of both cases I have supposed the worst coming to the worst; I have merely offered one example of the dangers inherent in either situation, and I leave you to imagine as many others as you like. If after you have done calculating you end by approving, as I am very sure you shall, the extinction of all sensibility in a pupil, then the first branch to lop off the tree is necessarily pity. And actually what is pity? A purely egotistical sentiment: seeing others beset by woe, we pity them because we fear lest that same woe befall us. Show me the man who, owing to his nature, is exempt from all the ills that afflict humankind, and not only will that man have no pity whatever, he won’t even know the meaning of the word. A yet greater proof that pity is no more than a purely passive commotion excited in persons of the skittish hysterical sort, owing to, or in proportion to, the misfortune of our fellows, is that, if we are immediate witnesses to it, we are always more sensitive to this misfortune, even though the sufferer be a total stranger, than we are to the calamity sustained a hundred leagues away by our very best friend. And how explain the difference in our reactions save by the fact that this feeling is nothing but the physical result of the accidental commotion inspired in our nervous system? Well, I ask whether such a feeling can be deserving of any respect and whether it can be viewed otherwise than as feebleness? More, it is an exceedingly painful feeling, since it occurs only through a comparison which harks us back to misfortune, and causes us to brood thereon. Contrariwise, its extinction procures us joy, since, as we extinguish it, in our sang-froid we glimpse a situation we are exempted from, and this permits us a favorable comparison—destroyed the moment we soften to the point of pitying the unlucky, which we do when tormented by the cruel thought that perhaps we ourselves may be in a similar plight tomorrow. Defy this annoying fear, learn to confront this danger undreadingly, and there’s an end to your pity for others.

  “A further proof that this feeling is nought but sheer weakness and pusillanimity is the particular frequency with which it is found in women and children, and its rarity in those individuals whose organs have acquired all suitable strength and vigor. For the same reason, the poor man is commonly he of the open heart; dwelling closer to misfortune than the rich man, more familiar with it, he is of readier sympathy. All of which thus demonstrates that pity, far from being a virtue, is but a weakness born of fear and of woe, a weakness which must be combated with especial severity when one sets about the task of blunting excessive nervous sensitivity, this sensibility that is so completely incompatible with every tenet of philosophy.

  “There, Juliette, there they are, the principles that have led me to this tranquillity, this equanimity, to this stoicism which now enables me to do anything and to endure anything without batting an eyelash. Make haste to initiate yourself into these mysteries,” continued that charming woman, as yet unaware of the point I had advanced to in these articles. “Make haste to annihilate this stupid commiseration which will upset you every time you catch sight of woe howsoever trivial. Arriving at that stage, my angel, by dint of continued tests which will soon have you convinced of the extreme difference between yourself and the alien object whose sad fate you lament, be persuaded the tears you shed over that individual cannot meliorate his circumstances one iota, and can only cause you affliction; be equally sure that the succor you were to give him would mean no more than an insipid sensual pleasure for you, whereas the refusal of aid may produce a very keen one. Be furthermore persuaded that you will be tampering with the natural scheme by rescuing from the indigent class those persons Nature deliberately placed there; that, wise and entirely logical in all her operations, her designs regarding human beings are neither for us to fathom nor to thwart; that her designs are substantiated by the unequal distribution of puissance among men, this necessarily implying unequal means, resources, conditions, and destinies. Avail yourself of examples out of history, Juliette, consult the authority of the ancients; you have been trained in the classics, recollect your reading. Remember the Emperor Licinius who, prescribing the harshest penalties, forbade all compassion toward the poor, and any sort of charity toward indigence. Remember that sect of Greek philosophers who maintained there was crime in seeking to meddle with the various shades in the Nature-ordained spectrum of social classes; and when you have developed your thought to the point I have, cease to deplore the loss of pity-prompted acts of virtue; for these virtuous acts, founded on egoism exclusively, are utterly unworthy of respect. Since it is by no means sure that there is good in extricating from misfortune the wretch Nature put there, it is far simpler to nip in the bud the sentiment whereby we are rendered sympathetic to his sufferings than to let it flower; and be all the while apprehensive lest our compassion, interfering with the order of things, be outrageous to Nature; the best course is to cultivate in ourselves such a frame of mind as will enable us to look upon those sufferings with indifference and unconcern. Ah, dear friend! were you, like me, strong enough to advance one step further, had you the courage to take pleasure contemplating the sufferings of others, merely from the agreeable thought of not experiencing them yourself, a thought which necessarily produces a very decided joy—were you able to go that far, no doubt but that it would represent a great achievement, since you’d have succeeded in turning some of life’s thorns into roses. Be equally certain, my heart, that men of the stamp of Denis, Nero, Louis XI, Tiberius, Wenceslas, Herod, Andronicus, Heliogabalus, Retz6 based their happiness upon similar principles, and that if they were able without shuddering, without qualms to do all they did in the line of atrocity, it is obviously because they had mastered the technique of exploiting crime for lustful purposes. ‘Those men were monsters,’ a fool will tell me. So indeed they were, according to our ways of thinking and behaving; but from the point of view of Nature and in terms of her dictates, they were simply the instruments of her intentions: endowing them with their ferocious and bloodthirsty characters, she appointed them to execute her laws. Thus, though they appear to have performed much evil, as that is defined by man-made law, they acted in admirable conformance to the law of Nature, whose aim is to destroy at least as much as she creates. No, no, those worthies wrought a substantial weal, since they put her desires into effect; whence it results that the individual who has a character like these so-called tyrants’, or he who manages to raise his character to this level, will not only not steer clear of evil, but may even discover in the fulfillment of his
designated or elected role a source of very potent joy which he will savor all the more fearlessly, the more certain he is that, by means either of his cruelties or his disorders, he is rendering Nature a service no less useful than that a saint performs through the exercise of his capacities for good-doing and virtue. Fortify all this with examples, feed it upon practice; gaze often and long upon spectacles of woe; accustom yourself to refusing aid to the downtrodden, to the unlucky, so that you become habituated to the idea and the sight of sufferers abandoned to their sufferings; be the direct cause of some, of a few which are somewhat crueler, more atrocious than the everyday; and it won’t be long before you recognize that between the sufferings you provoke, and which do not affect you in the least, and the voluptuous vibration of your nerves, thrilled by the impact of these sufferings, even if this be merely the thrill that comes of contrasting weal and woe and finding the comparison heavily in your favor—you have no cause for a moment’s hesitation. Little by little your sensibility will deaden; you’ll not have prevented great crimes, since, to the contrary, you’ll have caused some to be committed and will yourself have perpetrated not a few, but at least you’ll have done so phlegmatically, with this apathy which permits the veiling of the passions, and which, safeguarding lucidity, indispensable to the avoidance of disagreeable repercussions, is your guarantee against all dangers.”

  “Oh, Clairwil, I can’t imagine that with such attitudes you have impoverished yourself through good works.”

  “I am rich,” that extraordinary woman replied, “so rich that I am not even sure how much I have. Well, Juliette, I swear to you that I would prefer to throw all the money I own into the river than employ a penny of it in what fools call charities, prayers, or alms; I believe such things are most harmful to humanity, fatal to the poor whose energies are sapped by the practice of bestowing largesses, and more dangerous yet for the wealthy man who believes he has secured title to every virtue once he has given a crown or two to some priests or shiftless rascals, a certain means for masking his every vice the while encouraging the vices of others.”