OTHER WORKS BY THE MARQUIS DE SADE TRANSLATED BY RICHARD SEAVER
Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, & Other Writings (with Austryn Wainhouse)
The 120 Days of Sodom & Other Writings (with Austryn Wainhouse)
Letters from Prison
Translation copyright © 2000, 2011 by Richard Seaver
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-61145-512-0
CONTENTS
Introduction
1. The Mystified Magistrate
2. Emilie de Tourville or Fraternal Cruelty
3. Augustine de Villebranche
or Loves Strategy
4. The Fortunate Ruse
5. The Properly Punished Pimp
6. The Teacher Philosopher
7. Your Wish Is My Command or As You Like It
8. An Eye for an Eye
9. The Windbags of Provence
10. Room for Two
11. The Husband Who Turned Priest:
A Tale of Provence
12. Thieves and Swindlers
13. The Gascon Wit
Notes
INTRODUCTION
Sade’s novella “The Mystified Magistrate” was written while the author was a prisoner in the Bastille and was completed, as he meticulously notes at the end of the manuscript, “at ten o’clock in the evening on July 16, 1787”—thus almost two years to the day before that bastion was stormed at the outbreak of the French Revolution.
The story is contemporary with Sade’s slightly longer novella, “Les Infortunes de la vertu” (The Misfortunes of Virtue), which he finished only a week earlier, on July 8, 1787, after two weeks of intensive writing. One hundred thirty-eight pages in its original form, “The Misfortunes of Virtue” was reworked and expanded by Sade during the following year and was eventually published in 1791—a year after his liberation from the Char-enton Insane Asylum—as the full-length novel Justine, considered by many to be his masterpiece. Six years later, having miraculously escaped the merciful blade of Dr. Guillotine, Sade further’ expanded the story into the monstrous La Nouvelle Justine, an even more daring and outrageous version of the virtuous heroine’s travails.
The composition of “The Mystified Magistrate,” therefore, and the rest of these tales, dates from one of Sade’s most fruitful and creative periods. The marquis was then in his forties, and in spite of growing obesity1 and problems with his eyesight (in the margin of the last manuscript page of “The Misfortunes of Virtue,” Sade wrote: “All the time I was writing this my eyes were bothering me”), his mind was vigorous and active and he was obsessively clear about what his life work was to be. Two years before penning “The Mystified Magistrate” and the other stories in this collection, Sade had written, also in the Bastille, his most seminal work, The 120 Days of Sodom, which the French critic Maurice Heine, who in the early decades of the twentieth century almost single-handedly resurrected Sade from near oblivion, has called “the first positive effort to classify sexual anomalies … a century before Krafft-Ebing and Freud.”
Although Sade has never been especially reputed as a humorist, there are throughout his work flashes of mordant wit, irony, and a keen sense of the grotesque: one need only recall Justine’s description of the avaricious couple, Monsieur and Madame Harpin, or any number of comically absurd situations in Philosophy in the Bedroom. “The Mystified Magistrate” and some of the stories here, however, are perhaps Sade’s only works in which humor is dominant and pervasive. In writing them, Sade took Boccaccio as his model, or rather, mentor.
The principal character of the novella, and object of Sade’s impassioned ridicule, Judge Fontanis, is patterned after one or more of the judges of the High Court of Aix. It was this same court that fifteen years earlier, on September 11, 1772, had sentenced the author and his footman Latour to death. The crime of which they stood accused—and it was a capital crime—was the poisoning of and perpetration of unnatural acts (read “sodomy”) upon a group of Marseilles prostitutes Sade had engaged during his visit to that city in the summer of that same year. The “poisoning” was the result of Sade’s having given two, and perhaps three, of the girls some aniseed candy, the sugar of which had been soaked with Spanish fly extract, or cantharides. It is clear that Sade’s intention during that partouze morning of June 27, 1772, was not to poison but to excite. But in all probability the candies in question were homemade, and either they contained more cantharides than was intended or Sade in his own excitement urged more upon the girls than their systems could endure.
As for the accusation of sodomy—also a capital offense—all four girls subsequently denied to the royal prosecutor that they had participated in any such act, citing God as their witness. The gentleman in question had indeed asked them to perform such an act, they admitted, but, decent girls that they were, they had steadfastly refused. Based on their collective withdrawal of that allegation, and the subsequent, more thorough analysis of the cantharides, which revealed no evidence of any poison “either bichloride of mercury or arsenic,” the case against Sade should have collapsed. But there was hanky-panky not only on the back benches but also— and especially—on the front,2 and as a result the royal prosecutor’s case was upheld and Sade, from that day forward, became not only a fugitive from justice but a marked man, a symbol of the hated aristocratic privilege, of the unjust society of haves and have-nots spawned by the egomaniacal excesses of Louis XIV, nurtured and brought to a new (degenerative) level by Louis XV, and carried to its bloody conclusion under Louis XVI.
After lengthy depositions, medical reports, and the aforementioned pharmaceutical analyses, the royal prosecutor found, and the High Court of Aix confirmed, that the crimes of the marquis and his domestic Latour were to be expiated at the cathedral door and that they were thereafter to be taken to the Place Saint-Louis, “for, on a gallows, the said Sade to be decapitated … and the said Latour to be hanged by the neck and strangled; then the body of the said Sade and that of the said Latour to be burned and their ashes strewn to the wind.” Since both Sade and his footman had fled to Italy roughly a week after the “Marseilles Affair,” the sentence was, fortunately for them and for history, carried out only in effigy. But this notorious scandal, which was seized upon and made into banner headlines by the popular press of the day, had serious repercussions throughout France and was a major factor in creating the legend that surrounded Sade both during his lifetime and ever since.
One of the judges of the Aix high court was a certain Monsieur de Fontiene, whose name bears a remarkable resemblance to that of the protagonist of “The Mystified Magistrate.” Whether it was actually he or another of the judges—or, more likely, a composite of the entire thirteen-member panel—whom Sade was holding up to ridicule remains a matter of conjecture. There is no question, however, that the unduly harsh sentence of 1772 prompted Sade to take his li
terary revenge: there are several references in “The Mystified Magistrate” and in the other stories here not only to the judges’ collusive protection of whores in Provence but also to the unjust, harsh, and stupid sentence the High Court of Aix had once imposed on a worthy young nobleman of the region. “It was I who last year talked my learned colleagues into exiling from the province for a period of ten years—and thereby ruining forever—a nobleman who had already served his king faithfully and well,”3 confesses Judge Fontanis one evening when he has imbibed a bit too much wine. “And all that over a party of females.”
Later in “The Mystified Magistrate,” the Marquis d’Olincourt—a spokesman for and alter ego of Sade— comments acidly on the colic from which Judge Fontanis is suffering. “You’ll have to excuse him if he took this attack a trifle seriously,” says d’Olincourt. “It is an illness of some consequence in Marseilles or Aix, this minor movement of the bowels. Ever since we have seen a troop of rogues—colleagues of our friend here present— judge that a few whores who were suffering from colic were ‘poisoned,’ it should come as no surprise to us that colic is a serious matter indeed as far as a judge from Provence is concerned.”4
Sade’s scathing condemnation of the judiciary is also evidenced in his hilarious put-down “The Windbags of Provence,” in which he combines judicial ignorance and arrogance into a visually devastating farce. But if he views the judiciary with utter disdain, he also, in “Emilie de Tourville,” castigates those who take justice into their own hands. Although he changes the setting, the sex, and the situation, Sade is clearly comparing this case of gross injustice on the part of Emilie’s jealous brothers to his own desperate situation. By the time he penned these lively tales, Sade had already spent more than ten years behind bars for his presumed crimes, and especially as a result of the Aix sentence in absentia. His mother-in-law, the Présidente de Montreuil,5 upset by her son-in-law’s infidelities and increasingly public and politicized acts of sexual rebellion, set about petitioning the king and paying off justices to get—and keep—her son-in-law incarcerated. As in the story “Emilie de Tourville,” Sade’s letters are filled with recriminations against those who, taking matters into their own hands, do far more damage than any judicial system, however stupid and corrupt.
Other stories in this collection deal with themes near and dear to Sade, all of which reflect the tenor of his time. Hypocrisy was rampant in the land: in the eighteenth century, that husbands betrayed wives was not news, but to have wives of the aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie consciously and brazenly betraying their husbands was (“The Properly Punished Pimp”; “An Eye for an Eye”; “Room for Two”). In “The Husband Who Turned Priest,” that same theme is echoed and overlaid with a topping of the debauchery and degradation of the Church. Other tales deal openly with homosexuality and lesbianism. In “Augustine de Villebranche” Sade-the-philosopher states, well ahead of his time, that if Nature indeed has inclined a person to favor those of his or her own sex, it would be wrong for society to condemn them for what were thought of as “unnatural crimes.”
Whatever their merit, Sade viewed these stories as a light counterpoint to his dark, consciously clandestine works—La Nouvelle Justine, Juliette, and The 120 Days of Sodom. Written over several years, first in the dreary prison of Vincennes on the eastern outskirts of Paris where he spent seven hellish years, then in the Bastille, these stories were originally planned as part of a volume to be called Tales and Little Fables of the XVIIIth Century by a Provençal Troubadour. In Sade’s own words: “These short stories and anecdotes are, in some instances, light-hearted, and even a trifle bawdy, but always well within the boundaries of modesty and decency, while others are serious and tragic.”
The volume from which they are drawn was first published in 1926 by Maurice Heine, who meticulously followed Sade’s text insofar as it was possible to do so, since large segments of the manuscript—which Sade had projected as a four-volume set, each with its own frontispiece—were lost when the Bastille was stormed and sacked on July 14, 1789. This occurred just ten days after Sade, whom the prison authorities rightly viewed as a troublemaker in that increasingly tense time,6 had been, in his own words, “torn from his bed naked as a worm” and in the wee hours of July 4 driven through the darkened streets of Paris to the Charenton. Insane Asylum, where he remained for another year. After his liberation from Charenton, on Good Friday, 1799 (“I have decided to celebrate it as a holiday for the rest of my life”), Sade almost immediately repaired to the site of his former prison and spent hours poking around in the ruins in search of his precious manuscripts, over whose loss, he wrote to his lawyer Gaufridy, “I am shedding tears of blood.” The image of the now corpulent, middle-aged marquis—he was then fifty—clothed not in his aristocratic finery but dressed down in drab Revolutionary-acceptable garb, poking in the charred ashes among the debris of the Bastille is as poignant as it is pathetic.
These stories, Maurice Heine observed, were “very much in keeping with the tenor of their time, a mixture of literature and philosophy, cast in the form of fiction. …” He notes further that the final corrected texts had been contained in Sade’s beau cahier (handsome notebook), which was stripped of its contents except for a few scattered pages; thus the text of his 1926 edition was necessarily based on the cahier jaune—the “Yellow Notebook.” Therefore, notes Heine, “this publication is based not on the definitive version but on an earlier draft, albeit one that was read and corrected by the author. This basic reservation is important to make, for it explains any oversights or even the extremely rare inaccuracies in the text to which purists might take exception. May they blame any such inconsistencies not on the Marquis de Sade himself—a writer far superior to most of his contemporaries and the first French novelist of the Revolutionary period—but rather on those who have persecuted him and on the irreparable consequences of their efforts to suppress or destroy his works.”7
To understand—both philosophically and as fiction—not only these stories but indeed all of Sade’s voluminous work, one must remember the society out of which they sprang. Born during the reign of Louis XV, Sade grew up in a country steeped in depravity, hypocrisy, and injustice, both during the Regency and the full reign of Louis XV—doubtless the most corrupt and decadent monarch ever to rule France. The four decades prior to July 1789 were marked by the mad, unfettered pursuit of sexual and sensual pleasure by the king and his entourage. The number of the king’s mistresses was astounding but, not content with plucking ladies of the court for this dalliances, he had a personal bordello constructed in Versailles in 1750, Le Parc-aux-Cerfs—the Deer Park—to which a nightly supply of young women were brought, at the insistance and under the supervision of his former mistress, Madame de Pompadour. The network of those charged with supplying the king’s apparently insatiable appetite spread from one end of the country to the other, directed by an official cabinet minister, La Ferte, whose august title was Intendant de Menus-Plaisirs—Minister of Dainty Pleasures. It has been estimated that, given all the payoffs due various members of this far-flung pleasure syndicate, each girl brought to the Deer Park cost the public treasury as much as a million livres. Over the more than two decades of the Deer Park’s existence— Louis XV died in 1774—the cost to France was staggering and explains in good part why his successor inherited a country close to financial ruin. The Goncourt brothers, looking for a simple word to best define the eighteenth century, settled on debauchery. “Debauchery is the air on which [this century] breathes and lives,” they wrote. In Justine, Sade himself terms his own era as “the age of total corruption.” And in Juliette, he bases his character Saint Fond, whose cynicism and egoism matches his corruption, on one of Louis XV’s ministers.
If Sade’s opus, then, is a ferocious and unrelenting attack on the existing social order, it is also in many ways a mirror of his time—a distorted mirror to be sure, but nonetheless cruelly accurate.
If the royal court and aristocracy were the main dissolute cul
prits (“When a royal prince walks the way of vice,” wrote Sade, “he is accompanied by the entire society”), the French clergy of the eighteenth century also share a fair measure of responsibility. The clergy was in large part made up of members of the aristocracy: oldest sons of the nobility joined the army, younger ones joined the priesthood. In this century of corruption in France, all levels of clergy—bishops, priests, abbés—thought little or nothing of having mistresses or visiting with almost unrestrained frequency the bordellos that crisscrossed the land.8 Louis XV had his vice squads, which spied and reported upon his subjects’ sexual practices in detail (more for their titillation factor, no doubt, than their curbing influence) and police records of the time are filled with accounts of men of the cloth spending virtually as much time in the arms of prostitutes as in the arms of the Church. Sade’s paternal uncle, the Abbé de Sade, with whom the future author spent five important and formative years, from the age of five to ten, at the abbé’s Château de Saumane in southern France, had numerous mistresses and was once arrested in a famous Paris bordello and spent several days in jail. Thus if in his fiction and philosophical works Sade mercilessly takes men of the cloth to task for their vices, duplicity, and shameless hypocrisy—as he does here in “The Teacher Philosopher” and “The Husband Who Turned Priest”—there is ample pragmatic reason to explain and justify his position.
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