The Mystified Magistrate

by Marquis de Sade

  3. Sade served for several years in the army, rising to the rank of colonel and distinguishing himself in battle.

  4. Sade, in a letter to his wife dated April 21, 1777 (that is, ten years before the composition of “The Mystified Magistrate”), makes the case that the prostitutes of Provence, or at least of Marseilles, “eat all sorts of unwholesome food every day of their lives,” ergo suffer commonly from colic, ergo were not made ill by his “candied lozenges” but by their own gluttony.

  5. A chief judge in France bears the title “President,” and his wife therefore has the right to be called “Présidente.” Sade’s referral to Madame de Montreuil by that title was generally ironic, or disdainful.

  6. On July 3, 1789, Sade, denied his daily walks on the Bastille ramparts because the reinforced garrison was becoming increasingly worried about the unrest in the streets below, retaliated by fashioning a makeshift megaphone, which he pushed through the bars of his cell, and shouting to the populace to come and save him and his fellow prisoners, whose throats “were being slit” (he was lying through his teeth).

  7. Although he does not name him, Heine doubtless was referring first and foremost to Sadé’s younger son, Donatien-Claude-Armand, who immediately after his father’s death in 1814 not only allowed but encouraged the authorities to burn his father’s works, including the enormous Days of Florbelle, which Sade wrote between 1803 and 1807, during his final stay in Charenton.

  8. It has been estimated that in the eighteenth century there were hundreds of brothels in France, catering to all tastes and classes. Police records also suggest that in Paris in the mid-1700s one out of seven women was a prostitute, and that statistic does not of course include the women of quality indulging in extramarital affairs, whose numbers, Sade maintains, were substantial.

  9. Sade’s nobility was of very old lineage, and through his mother, Marie-Eléonore de Maillé de Carman, he was directly allied to the Condé family, that is, to royal blood. His in-laws, the Montreuils, were of recent peerage—”new aristocrats”—and therefore especially sensitive to their position in the world.

  10. Approximately three-fourths of Sade’s writings were destroyed, some during his lifetime, many shortly after his death in 1814, some as recently as the 1940s, by the Nazi occupiers of France.

  THE MYSTIFIED MAGISTRATE

  1. Themis: In Greek mythology, the daughter of Uranus and Gaia, and the goddess of justice and law.

  2. Jacques Cujas (1520-1590). A legal expert of the sixteenth century who adapted Roman—or Justinian—law to the needs of the time and the society where it was in use.

  3. In the original Sade refers to d’Olincourt as “Count.” In principle, in France a father bore the title of count and his son was a marquis. Upon his father’s death in 1767, Sade in principle assumed the title “Count,” and indeed signed documents as such. However, by this time his title and surname were so linked that, until the Revolution, he generally referred to himself as “Marquis.” Here, for the sake of clarity and consistency, we shall refer to d’Olincourt as Marquis throughout.

  4. Cumaean Sybil. In ancient Greece, Cumae was the site of the many prophetesses from whom one solicited advice and counsel, and through whom one asked favors of the gods. The Cumaean Sybil was the most famous of these prophetesses; it was she Aeneas consulted before descending to Avernus.

  5. parbleau. An interjection, generally one of approval. The term is a corruption of par Dieu—by God.

  6. The term that Sade uses in the original is péchaire, an interjection of endearment used in the South of France, especially in the Languedoc region.

  7. Epidaurus. A town in Argolis, on the Aegean Sea, site of the Temple of Asclepius, to which thousands of Greeks of antiquity came to consult the oracle about how best to cure their ills.

  8. As noted earlier, Sade is referring to himself, and specifically to the Marseilles affair that was the source of so many of his later woes.

  9. A lawgiver of Sparta, probably ninth century B.c.

  10. On the southern tip of the Peloponnesian Peninsula.

  11. Averroës (1126-1198). An Arab philosopher and doctor, best known for his commentaries on Aristotle. What perhaps endeared him to Sade was that, like himself, this Arab doctor was a social outcast, his views on pantheism having been roundly condemned by the learned doctors of the Sorbonne. (See “The Teacher Philosopher.”)

  12. Again, Sade is portraying himself as the victim. During the month of August 1778, a band of law enforcement officers, in the service of and paid by Sade’s mother-in-law, invaded his castle at La Coste in southern France, and arrested the marquis, under much the same circumstances he describes here.

  13. Sade’s pun eludes translation. While the tribunal’s benches were adorned with the fleur-de-lis, the coat of arms of the French royal family, the author is doubtless referring to the barbaric practice of branding criminals with fleurs-de-lis.

  14. Again, Sade is referring to himself and the Marseilles episode.

  15. Sade’s memory fails him by a year. He is doubtless referring to what has become known as the Arceuil affair, which took place on April 3, 1768. Sade accosted a certain Rose Keller that morning on the Place de Victoires and took her to his rented cottage in the Paris suburb of Arceuil. There, he submitted her to “the English vice”; escaping from Sade’s cottage, she lodged a complaint against him, and a short time later Sade was arrested and incarcerated in the Pierre-Encize prison near Lyons.

  16. The Law of Talion, which dates back to early Hebrew and Greek history—and later to Roman—demands retribution in kind. More commonly, we know it as “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” See earlier reference to lex talionis on page 35.

  17. Paphos, on the island of Cyprus, was famous for its temple to Venus. In eighteenth-century parlance “temples of Venus” referred to brothels.

  18. A name meaning pure, chaste. Saint Agnes was a Christian martyr of the fourth century, a virgin who, having refused several suitors because of her “marriage” to Christ, was sent to a brothel as punishment. The first young man who touched her was struck blind, but after she prayed for him he regained his sight. She was executed shortly thereafter.

  19. This prescient sentence was written, as noted, just two years before the French Revolution.

  20. Mérindol is a town near Apt in the region of Provence where, in 1545, Protestants were massacred in great numbers.

  21. In the eighteenth century, the French king could issue, at his pleasure so to speak, a lettre de cachet—literally a document bearing the king’s seal—which had the virtue of overriding any court’s decision or sentence, that is, removing an accused from the normal judicial process. The other side of that royal coin was that, under a lettre de cachet, a person could be imprisoned, without appeal, for as long as the king liked. Sade spent more than twelve years in the royal dungeons under such a lettre de cachet.

  EMILIE DE TOURVILLE OR FRATERNAL CRUELTY

  1. Sade himself, as his father before him, bore the title of lieutenant-general, which was more hereditary and honorable than its bellicose name implies. It was largely an honorary title, but carried with it an income that could be substantial.

  2. A street that no longer exists, though it did in Sade’s time. In the mid-nineteenth century it was incorporated into the rue Saint-Martin in Paris’s third arrondissement. No doubt Sade would be tickled by the fact that today it is a playground for prostitutes.

  3. There are no hard figures relative to the number of prostitutes— not to mention hardworking women so poor they needed to supplement their income—plying their trade in eighteenth-century Paris. Here Sade, through the intermediary of Madame Berceil, is suggesting that many women of quality were also selling their favors. Be that as it may, there was at the time a substantial vice squad within the Paris police monitoring the brothels. In fact, Sade’s name figures prominently in its reports.

  4. Coucy-le-Château, a town bordering the Saint-Germain forest. Noyan is a town on the Comp
iègne-San-Quentin road.

  5. In his novels as in his letters, Sade often rails against those who take justice into their own hands and punish those they fear or dislike. In the eighteenth century, any well-placed or aristocratic family (they were not always one and the same) could petition the king to issue the aforementioned lettre de cachet. Armed with such a document, a family could have a person—usually another family member one wanted to get rid of—incarcerated in perpetuity. Here, through the character of the Count de Luxeuil, Sade is comparing the hatefui Tourville brothers to his mother-in-law, la présidente de Mon-treuil, who because of misdeeds, real and presumed, did indeed petition the king to have the marquis arrested and was instrumental in keeping him locked up until the Revolution, when the lettre de cachet was abolished and Sade released. (See note 20 for “The Mystified Magistrate.”)

  6. The song Sade cites is not from the region in which his tale is set but, understandably, from his native Provence.

  7. This is one of the rare times Sade speaks well of a member of the judiciary, whose corruption he views as one of the basic reasons he is behind bars. One will note that Judge Tourville has quit the bench because, being intelligent, gentle, and of excellent character, he could not stand the stench of the place.

  8. The private individual Sade clearly has in mind here is his hated mother-in-law, Madame de Montreuil, who, in Sade’s view, had him punished for his “crimes.”

  AUGUSTINE DE VILLEBRANCHE OR LOVE’S STRATEGY

  1. Sappho (circa 612 B.c.) is one of the most famous lyric poets of all time. Although she was married and had a daughter, and cast herself into the sea to commit suicide over the unrequited love of the uncommonly handsome young man Phoas, her name is generally associated with lesbianism, from the name of the island where she lived most of her life, Lesbos. Many of her poems are indeed addressed to women, and she was the leader of a group of girls devoted to music and poetry.

  2. Two famous jurists of the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, respectively: the Italian Bartolo (1313-1357) and the Frenchman Jacques Cujas (1520-1590; see note 2 for “The Mystified Magistrate”). Louis IX (1214-1270) was instrumental during his long reign in reforming the French legal system, creating a judiciary commission that laid the foundation for a future parliament.

  3. In Greek mythology, the Graces were three goddesses, the daughters of Zeus, who enhanced the pleasures of life: Aglaia (brilliance), Euphrosyne (joy), and Thalia (bloom).

  4. See note 16 for “The Mystified Magistrate. “

  5. Antinous was a young man of whom the Emperor Hadrian was uncommonly fond. Psyche, in Greek mythology, was a maiden of uncommon beauty with whom Cupid fell madly in love (not Adonis, as Sade states). She is a symbol of immortality.

  THE PROPERLY PUNISHED PIMP

  1. Upon the death of Louis XIV in 1715, his successor Louis XV was only five years old. Accordingly, Philippe d’Orléans was appointed regent until the young king was of age. If the golden age of the Sun King had been marked by an almost unprecedented state of immorality within the court and throughout the realm, the regent did nothing to improve matters. If anything, he made them worse (that remark is meant historically, not as a moral judgment), setting an example for Louis XV who, if anything, improved on Louis XIV’s practices.

  2. There is no rue des Déjeuners (literally, Breakfast Street) in Paris, nor to my knowledge has there ever been one. Sade probably means the rue des Jeûneurs, near the Paris Bourse, the stock exchange. In the author’s day it was on the outskirts of town, a place where Parisians gathered to play various outdoor games such as boules. Originally known as the rue des Jeux-neufs (literally, New Games Street) its name was subsequently corrupted to its present spelling. Today the street, which is in the second arrondissement, runs between the rue des Victoires and rue Poissonnière.

  3. In “The Mystified Magistrate,” La Brie is also the name given to Count d’Elbène when he is passing as a valet. In life, Sade enjoyed giving nicknames or false names to his own valets. Clearly this is a favorite name of Sade’s.

  4. Sade is in all probability referring to Philippe de Bourbon, who died in 1727 and held the distinguished title of Grand Prieur of France, though he might have been targeting his older brother, Louis-Joseph de Bourbon. Since, despite his impressive apostolic title, Philippe was a well-known libertine, chances are it was the younger Bourbon Sade was implicating here.

  THE TEACHER PHILOSOPHER

  1. A common exclamation, long outdated, a corruption of, or euphemism for, ventredieu, literally “God’s belly.”

  AN EYE FOR AN EYE

  1. Sade’s irony is showing. The reference is to the Count de Tressan, an older contemporary of Sade, who was largely responsible in the eighteenth century for the revival of interest in medieval literature, which Sade despised, as evidenced in his introduction to his own The Crimes of Love, published in 1800, in which he summarily dismisses medieval romances as “long and boring.”

  2. Again, the reference is ironic, for this town in northeastern France located on the Somme River is famous as the scene of a bloody battle that took place there in 1557, but, at least up until Sade’s day, and to the best of my knowledge since, has never given the world any writer of note.

  3. As a playwright, Sade was acutely aware of the trends in contemporary theater. The reference here is obscure, but what he seems to be suggesting is that, given the technical advances in graphics and the increased appetite of the public for prints and artistic reproductions in the late eighteenth century, producers would opt for a play whose subject could be easily depicted graphically in the press and elsewhere rather than on the merits of the play itself. Today, we would think of that as merchandising. Because Sade, however in advance of his time he was in many things, was a good (or actually, bad) old-fashioned playwright, he had to be irked by what he considered unfair criteria for getting a play put on in Paris. Once he was set free in 1790, he spent a great deal of time trying to have his own plays produced, to little avail.

  4. An unlikely number of years, since even considering the tendency of the time to marry young, that unparalleled period of fidelity had to put the good lady well over a hundred. Several times in his collection of stories, Sade’s numbers are inconsistent or contradictory, doubtless a result of not always having the opportunity to correct his initial drafts.

  5. The same Lucrèce who served as the subject for Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrèce. Having been brutally raped, the lady committed suicide, choosing death to dishonor and, in life as well as in Shakespeare, symbolizing the supreme act of purity and chastity.

  THE WINDBAGS OF PROVENCE

  1. In case everyone doesn’t know, there actually was during the long reign of Louis XIV an ambassador to France from Persia, a gentleman named Mahemet Riza Bey, who many members of the French court and intellectuals of the day, including Saint Simon, thought was a fraud. In fact, he was authentic.

  2. Throughout his literary work, and in his voluminous letters, Sade has a fixation on the question of magistrates taking the side of prostitutes whenever disputes between them and their clients are brought to court. Sade’s view—and indeed the prevailing opinion of the time—was that if a man paid for a lady’s favors, the bargain struck obviated any legal recourse on the part of the one who had accepted the money. Despite this, Sade was arrested, tried, and sent to prison on at least three occasions on the basis of complaints lodged against him by these “clients.”

  3. François I (1494-1547), king of France from 1515 to 1547, was an accomplished ruler in both foreign and domestic matters, and is credited with laying the first firm foundations of the absolute monarchy of the ancien régime. Despite all his accomplishments, he is also sadly remembered—and it is this that Sade refers to here—for his merciless persecution and massacre of the Protestants in southern France.

  4. From Areopagus, the Hill of Ares where in antiquity the Athens tribunal sat in judgment. As he often does, Sade uses classical references in his stories and novels, bot
h to display his erudition—which was considerable—and doubtless to impress any would-be censors.

  5. Two towns in the Vaucluse region of southern France not far from Sade’s château at La Coste. Again, Sade is reminding his readers of the bloody Protestant persecutions of the sixteenth century, at the instigation of François I. The tie-in here with the eighteenth-century judges of Aix is that the massacre of Protestants two centuries earlier occurred under the leadership of a High Court justice of Aix, one Meynier d’Oppède.

  ROOM FOR TWO

  1. Venus of Callipygus, from the two Greek words kallos—beauty— plus pygi—buttocks. A work in the Farnese collection in Naples, which Sade visited the year before his Vincennes imprisonment, this statue was one of the most beautiful portrayals of the goddess of beauty and love ever made. The statue is cited by Sade dozens of times in his works, since that part of the female—or indeed human—anatomy held a special interest for him.