by Steven Moore
The philosophical and geographical range of Aline and Valcour is matched by its literary diversity. Sade’s “Essay on Novels” shows that he was thoroughly familiar with the long history of the novel (he goes back to the ancient Egyptians) and here in his first “public” novel Sade pays homage to its various permutations. The epistolary form and the Aline + Valcour story-line is indebted to Richardson’s Clarissa and Rousseau’s Julie, two novels he admired that likewise deviate from the romance norm by ending in tragedy. The group in the country allude to Arthurian romances and unknowingly reenact the 17th-century heroic romance when they encounter strangers and encourage them to recite their lengthy stories while the main narrative cools it heels. The Sainville + Léonore story arc is based on ancient Greek novels—in which romantic couples are separated and undergo a series of outrageous adventures before reuniting—but also on a century’s worth of French utopian/imaginary voyages. Sade adds the conte philosophique to the orgy of genres intertwined in Aline and Valcour, along with scenes that recall Gomberville’s Polexander, Prévost’s Cleveland and A Modern Greek Woman, and Rousseau’s Emile.234
Although Sade avoids the sexual explicitness that characterizes his other novels, he pushes it right to the edge. When the magistrate and banker arrive at the country retreat, Déterville warns his correspondent Valcour that he needs to depart from literary decorum, which doubles as Sade’s justification for his m.o.: “Unfortunately, I have two libertines to describe; you must therefore prepare yourself for some obscene details and forgive me for picturing them. I am unable to paint without colors; when vice is under my brush, I sketch the shades so much better if they produce outrage; to draw pretty pictures would be to make vice lovable, which is far from my intention.”235 Sade knew that some readers found certain fictional libertines “lovable” and used that as his excuse to paint it black. Sade’s wife Renée-Pélagie, who smuggled the manuscript out of prison and read it, wrote her husband a lengthy letter about it and challenged him on this point. Objecting to the detailed horrors his villains perform, she writes: “One must expose [such persons], so your argument goes, in order to hate them and defend oneself from them. There’s truth in that, but when this becomes the only goal of the work, there’s a point at which the process [of depicting evil] must stop. . . . Such details make [the book] unreadable to honest people, and that’s a pity.”236 She couldn’t have known that Aline and Valcour is Sade Lite; the true horrors were still to come.
Taking a break from Aline and Valcour in the summer of 1787, Sade dashed off a 150-page novel in two weeks entitled The Misfortunes of Virtue, which planted the bad seed that would grow over the next 10 years into the towering, 2,000-page suite of Justine and Juliette. A dour attempt at a Voltairean conte philosophique, the early Misfortunes of Virtue is a hard-hearted, R-rated story about two sisters abandoned at the ages of 15 (Juliette) and 12 (Justine); the elder embraces a life of vice and prospers, the younger clings to virtue and suffers endless torments until the final pages, when she is killed by a thunderbolt. Fancying himself the French Boccaccio, Sade originally intended the story for a large anthology to be called “Tales and Fabliaux of the 18th Century by a Provençal Troubadour,” which was never published, though some of the tales made it into his Crimes of Love collection (1800).237 Sensing the novel’s potential, Sade expanded it the following year to twice its original size with philosophical discourses and erotic episodes that would earn it an X-rating, and published it anonymously in 1791 as Justine, or Good Conduct Well Chastised (Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu), which has deservedly become Sade’s most famous novel.
By this point in European literary history, the theme of virtue—specifically the preservation of a girl’s virginity as the physical manifestation of virtue—had become so trite and predictable that Sade decided it needed to be upended and exposed as silly sentimentalism. “The scheme of this novel,” he boasts in the dedication, “. . . is doubtless new; the victory gained by Virtue over Vice, the rewarding of good, the punishment of evil, such is the usual scheme in every other work of this species: ah! the lesson cannot be too often dinned in our ears!”—as it had been in novels from d’Urfé’s Astrea up to Bernardin’s Paul and Virginia. Like any innovator, Sade wants to take a new approach, far beyond what the occasional defector from this sentimental trend (like Richardson in Clarissa and Diderot in The Nun) attempted:
But throughout to present Vice triumphant and Virtue a victim of its sacrifices, to exhibit a wretched creature wandering from one misery to the next; the toy of villainy; the target of every debauch; exposed to the most barbarous, the most monstrous caprices; driven witless by the most brazen, the most specious sophistries; prey to the most cunning seductions, the most irresistible subornations; for defense against so many disappointments, so much bane and pestilence, to repulse such a quantity of corruption having nothing but a sensitive soul, a mind naturally formed, and considerable courage: briefly, to employ the boldest scenes, the most extraordinary situations, the most dreadful maxims, the most energetic brush strokes, with the sole object of obtaining from all this one of the sublimest parables ever penned for human edification; now, such were, ’twill be allowed, to seek to reach one’s destination by a road not much traveled heretofore.238
Mark the word parable: Justine is not a realistic novel, despite its explicit language—none of Sade’s novels are—but rather a parable, an erotic fairy tale, a pornographic puppet show, which should take the edge off the horrors inflicted on Justine. Reading a Sade novel can be a masochistic experience—your safety word is novel: it’s just a novel—but it’s like eating human flesh: “One has merely to overcome an initial aversion; after that it is fair sailing” (Juliette, 582). At one point Justine beholds among a debauchee’s sex toys “the waxen dummy of a naked woman, so lifelike that I was for a long time deceived by it” (673); don’t be deceived by the dumb blonde Justine: she’s just a voodoo doll via which Sade can prick the French society that paid lip service to virtue but was steeped in vice, the same society that publicly abhorred him but privately lapped up Justine. (It went through several editions in the 1790s before it was declared illegal, but it continued to be available under the counter for the next century and a half.)
The structure of the novel closely resembles that of Prévost’s Manon Lescaut: Justine sister’s Juliette, now Madame de Lorsange, is sitting in an inn with her lover, Monsieur de Corville, when she spots a carriage transporting a criminal, whom she suspects is her long-lost kid sister, and they arrange to have a private interview with her so that she can tell her story. (There’s even a break in the narrative two-thirds through, the same point at which Prévost has an intermission.) Calling herself Thérèse, Justine unfolds a tale of woe in which her various acts of virtue over the last dozen years consistently backfired, always resulting in abduction and sexual torture, usually by successful, well-respected members of society. Juliette then reveals herself to Justine (parodying the recognition scene in earlier romances), her influential lover solves her legal problems, and our distressed heroine finds a moment’s peace at Juliette’s château until a thunderbolt kills her. In a transparently insincere sop thrown to conventional morality, Sade explains that Juliette interprets Justine’s electrocution as “a warning issued to me by the Eternal” (742), and instantly gives up her rewarding life of vice to become a Carmelite nun. You can practically hear Sade laughing up his sleeve.
By allowing Justine to tell her own story, Sade partly solved the structural problem he faced in The 120 Days of Sodom: the sexual assaults upon Justine mount from awful (rape) to horrific as the novel progresses without any awkward apologies for withholding details, aside from Justine’s occasional reluctance to repeat some of the worst things she heard and experienced, and which actually works in the novel’s favor: it leaves some things to the reader’s imagination (as Sodom did not) and, as John Phillips points out, it obliges the narrator “to employ euphemisms for a more interesting use of the language . . . and helps to creat
e nice touches of an ironic humour” (103). Justine speaks in the language of sentimental novels and popular piety, and the clash between her pretty diction and ugly reality exposes the vapidity of novelese. Like most novelists of his time, however, Sade abuses the first-person point of view by having Justine recite detailed conversations and long speeches; in reality, anyone recounting the story of her life to someone would summarize events, limiting herself to a few quotations at most. When Justine mentions a letter she once received, she conveniently has it on her, even though her narrative indicates she’s been stripped of her clothes and belongings repeatedly since then. Too, Sade often forgets he’s writing from Justine’s POV, lapsing into his own voice and narrating sex acts in terms that never would have occurred to straitlaced Justine (especially the hilariously blasphemous religious imagery). Are we to believe a virtuous girl like Justine would use language like this when recounting an attack of sodomy?:
Octavie weeps and weeps unheeded; fire gleams in the impudicious monk’s glance; master of the terrain, one might say he casts about a roving eye only to consider the avenues whereby he may launch the fiercest assault; no ruses, no preparations are employed; will he be able to gather these so charming roses? will he be able to battle past the thorns? Whatever the enormous disproportions between the conquest and the assailant, the latter is not the less in a sweat to give fight; a piercing cry announces victory, but nothing mollifies the enemy’s chilly heart; the more the captive implores mercy, the less quarter is granted her, the more vigorously she is pressed; the ill-starred one fences in vain: she is soon transpierced. (617).
There’s no motivation for Justine to dramatize the incident like this in such terms; she’s not one of those coquettes we’ve seen in earlier French novels who, consciously or not, titillate their auditors; this is just Sade writing in his default mode. Much later it occurs to him that he should justify such detailed accounts, so Justine interrupts her narration to ask her auditors:
But how can I abuse your patience by relating these new horrors? Have I not already more than soiled your imagination with infamous recitations? Dare I hazard additional ones?
“Yes, Thérèse,” Monsieur de Corville put in, “yes, we insist upon these details, you veil them with a decency that removes all their edge of horror; there remains only what is useful to whoever seeks to perfect his understanding of enigmatic man. You may not fully apprehend how these tableaux help toward the development of the human spirit; our backwardness in this branch of learning may very well be due to the stupid restraint of those who venture to write upon such matters. Inhibited by absurd fears, they only discuss the puerilities with which every fool is familiar, and dare not, by addressing themselves boldly to the investigation of the human heart, offer its gigantic idiosyncrasies to our view.” (670–71)
This justifies Sade’s explicitness, but not Justine’s; it is an important statement of Sade’s artistic credo, but for artistic reasons he should have placed it near the beginning.
The many speeches Justine unrealistically recites, unrealistically delivered by thieves and lechers who all sound like they studied at the Sorbonne, provide an anthology of Sade’s unorthodox opinions; via his villains, he airs his views in favor of infanticide, crime, sodomy, murder, perversion, and misogyny, and argues against virginity, religion, guilt, gratitude, and of course virtue. In the spirit of Voltaire’s philosophical novels, Sade emphasizes the role education plays in forming these opinions. When Justine’s first employer tries to talk her into committing theft, he does so “with an erudition of which” she had not dreamt him capable (477), and after a character named Bressac delivers a sarcastic but well-informed lecture on the origins of Christianity, she adds it is “supported by readings and studies I, happily, had never performed” (517). Despite her self-admitted ignorance, however, she remains devoted to the unexamined “principles” she imbibed as a child (her schooling apparently ended at age 12) and has the smug arrogance to hold herself morally superior to those who have spent years in “thoughtful and sober study” earning their opinions (519). Does she deserve whipping for that? Sade thought so.
Of course, most of Sade’s views are deliberately outrageous, pushing various Enlightenment ideas to extremes. One of his biographers writes, “Sade, as we know, loved to consider things like incest and murder in the abstract, and he delighted in finding arguments that justified them—in the abstract” (Schaeffer, 373). True, Sade orchestrated some violent orgies when younger, but when he was older and in a powerful position to behave like his fictional ogres (he was a magistrate briefly in 1793), he was criticized for his leniency and, in one case, refused “to act as chairman for a proposal he deem[ed] ‘horrible . . . utterly inhuman’ ” (Justine, 105). He opposed the death penalty, “a belief unusual in the eighteenth century,” Gray informs us, “even among progressive Enlightenment thinkers” (170). Atheism is the only unorthodox view he maintained outside the floating world of his fiction. But he took philosophy seriously—as thought experiments, not as applied ethics—and when he says in his dedication that Justine is “less a novel than one might suppose,” perhaps he meant it is more “The very masterpiece of philosophy” he hypothesizes in the novel’s opening line (457). Few people consider it that, but it firmly establishes Justine in the tradition of the conte philosophique as well as other genres (romance, picaresque, libertine). It also shows those gloomy English how a Gothic novel should be written: the lengthy scenes set in the Benedictine monastery and in the counterfeiter Roland’s mountain castle are more terrifying than anything they ever wrote. As R. F. Brissenden points out, Justine is a parody of these genres, “the purpose of which is to invert and attack the values which they embody and express” (273). Though published anonymously, Justine is the first novel by Sade readers of his time would have encountered, and that thunderbolt at the end announces a violent regime change in fiction.
In 1795, the year Aline and Valcour finally appeared, Sade also published anonymously a short novel in dramatic form entitled Philosophy in the Bedroom (La Philosophie dans le boudoir).239 Occurring over a single afternoon, it concerns the sex education of a rich 15-year-old named Eugénie de Mistival at the hands of three adults: her friend Madame de Saint-Ange (who at age 26 has “been fucked by upward of ten or twelve thousand individuals” [228]); Madame’s younger brother, the Chevalier de Mirvel; and a 36-year-old sodomite named Dolmancé, a typical Sadean spokesperson. (A well-endowed gardener named Augustin is also called in to lend a hand.) At the end of an afternoon seminar in libertinage, after Eugénie’s mother comes to rescue her only to be raped with a dildo by her disobedient daughter and tortured by her tutors, Eugénie boasts: “Here I am: at one stroke incestuous, adulteress, sodomite, and all that in a girl who only lost her maidenhead today!” (359). Up until the horrific ending, Philosophy in the Bedroom is a spunky sex fantasy—another example of Sade Lite, relatively speaking. It praises sexuality with guilt-free enthusiasm and makes an exuberant plea to virgins to make much of time:
Fuck, Eugénie, fuck, my angel; your body is your own, yours alone; in all the world there is but yourself who has the right to enjoy it as you see fit.
Profit from the fairest period in your life; these golden years of our pleasure are only too few and too brief. If we are so fortunte as to have enjoyed them, delicious memories console and amuse us in our old age. These years lost . . . and we are racked by bitterest regrets, gnawing remorse conjoins with the sufferings of age and the fatal onset of the grave is all tears and brambles. . . . But have you the madness to hope for immortality?
Why, then, ’tis by fucking, my dear, you will remain in human memory. (221)
Like d’Argens’ Thérèse the Philosopher, which Sade admired, it offers sensible advice on contraception and masturbation, and it is practically a public service announcement for anal sex.
But it’s the least of Sade’s major novels. The dialogic form is a throwback to quasi instructional erotica like Aretino’s and Chorier’s Dialogues, but whic
h Sade interrupts with the inclusion of a 40-page political pamphlet entitled “Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans” (296–339), which Dolmancé picked up that morning and reads to everyone in response to Eugénie’s planted question on the role of institutional morality in society.240 It’s an intriguing essay—by turns reasonable and ridiculous, erudite and sophistic—and a daring departure from form by an author who felt order “is required even in the depths of infamy and delirium” (240), but it disrupts the rhythm of the novel (talk followed by sex, theory followed by practice) and mostly repeats points Domancé has already made (not to mention points Sade already made in earlier novels). And Sade knew this; after Domancé finishes reading, he confesses it reprises his previous discourses (it’s implied he’s the author), so Sade has Eugénie politely say, “I didn’t notice; wise and good words cannot be too often uttered” (340), but that’s a feeble apology for devoting nearly a third of a short novel to a redundant essay. Gray calls it “the boldest and most modernist literary ploy of his career,” but also notes Sade thereby contradicts the ancien régime setting of the novel by addressing political issues of 1795 (358). I’m all for modernist ploys, but they need to work (like the essays in Bordelon’s Monsieur Oufle, and those in Sade’s next novel.) Equally clumsy is Sade’s last-minute attempt to inject some drama by having the Cavalier object to Domancé’s heartlessness; the young man gave no earlier signs of disagreement, and a few pages later he’s recommending that Eugénie’s mother be “Cut into eighty thousand pieces, after the manner of the Chinese” (362). Though flawed, the novel’s relatively light, upbeat tone sets Philosophy in the Bedroom apart from Sade’s other novels; even the gruesome scene at the end can be read as “black farce” (Phillips, 77), if you have a strong enough stomach. It’s the shortest and most accessible of Sade’s major novels, hence an ideal one for the virgin reader who wants to dally with the marquis before deciding whether to go all the way. For that, you’ll want to embrace Juliette.