Letters From Prison

by Marquis de Sade

  I have the honor of being, with my most distinguished sentiments, your humble and most obedient servant.

  de Sade

  1. It has been over four years since Sade was arrested at the Hotel de Dane-mark, and he still has not been allowed a visit from his wife, despite all his imprecations and unstinting efforts and her entreaties as well.

  2. Madame de Sade’s first visit to see her husband in Vincennes came on July 13, 1781. Despite his plea, their meeting took place in the Vincennes council hall, with a guard—Sade’s hated censor, Boucher—present the entire time.

  46. To Madame de Sade

  [Between July and October, 1781]

  I cannot tell you how grateful I am, my dear friend, that you were so good as to send me the letter I requested of you, word for word. Most certainly, the letter reassured me, but the hidden horrors, the convoluted infamies that I discovered in the abominable letters your most hateful mother forced you to write—which, fortunately for me, I had initially failed to perceive—filled me once again with a new dose of sorrow and anxiety that was far stronger than the reassuring contents of your letter were able to bring me. Still in all, despite my new state of agitation, and putting aside my distress and frightful bouts of anxiety, I shall await your visit1 in the hope that your words will have an even greater calming effect than did your letters, befouled as they were with all your mother’s bile, and that the response you will give to the questions I shall ask you, and you should know that I shall be observing with an eagle eye the way you look when you respond, I hope, I say, that that response will be more meaningful to me than anything you have written. And so I wait.

  ’Tis therefore decided once and for all that never will you reassure me on one matter without at the same time arousing in me a state of deep concern on the other. Why do you not reply regarding my most earnest request that Boucher not accompany you when you come to see me? Can it be that someone is forcing him to come with you? Still, I am not going to comment thereon, for it seems to me that ’tis implicit in your letter that you are making every effort to make sure he doesn’t come, and I shall let it go at that and not bring it up again, except to reiterate that if Boucher does accompany you, and if you are dressed in your whore’s outfit as you were the time before, I swear on my word of honor that I have no intention of coming down.2 That is the first question I shall ask when they come to fetch me: Is Boucher down there? Is she still outfitted as she was the last time?3 If the answers are yes, I shall not come down. If ’tis no, then perhaps they may simply be playing tricks on me; in which wise, I shall come down, but as soon as I set eyes either on Boucher or on your white dress and your hairdo, I shall straightway go back upstairs, and I swear in God’s name and my word of honor that may I be considered the most cowardly man if ever I go back on my word.

  de Sade

  What does this excuse mean: you ought to see the others? The “others’” husbands are not in prison, or if they are and these women behave in this manner, then they are all hussies who deserve naught but insults and contempt! Tell me, would you go to Easter Mass dressed up like some strolling actor or charlatan? Of course not, am I not right? Well then, the composure ought to be the same; pain and sorrow in this case ought to beget what piety and divine respect bring about in the other. No matter how outrageous the current fashion has become, you will never convince me that it applies to women of sixty. They should be your example, no matter how far removed you are from them in age. Bear in mind that my misfortune brings us closer to those who are older than we, and they—our elders—should serve as models both of behavior and dress for us. If you are decent and honorable, then you should look to please me and me alone, and the only way you may be sure of doing so is by being, in both looks and deeds, completely modest and utterly proper. In a word, I demand, if you love me (and that I shall of course be able to tell; what I ask of you cannot be refused me without unmasking you completely, by your signs and signals and by all your imbecilic and complicated turns of phrase), I therefore demand, as I said, that you come to see me wearing a dress that you women refer to as a dressing gown, and with a large, very large, bonnet as well, wherewith to cover your hair, which I would like simply to be combed out straight, with no fancy curls peeking out. Needless to say, no false curls either. A simple chignon, and no plaits. Nor should any part of your bosom be uncovered, not indecently exposed as it was the other day; as for the color of your dress, the darker the better. I swear to you on everything I hold most sacred in the world that I shall be in a state of uncontrollable rage, and there will be a most frightful scene, if you fail to follow to the letter everything I have just laid out for you. You should blush with shame for not having understood that those who decked you out the way you were the other day were making a fool of you and enjoying themselves to the hilt at your expense. Oh! just think how much fun they were having when they said to one another: the pretty little marionette! We can make her do whatever we want! For once in your life, be yourself. I sense that there are some things where circumstances oblige you to play their little game; but I am just as certain that there are some things asked of you that are indecent and ridiculous, perhaps even disgusting, and of those, I like to believe, you have refused to partake! As for the former, you should simply refuse, and as for the latter, you should threaten to take your own life sooner than even hear the slightest mention thereof.

  The fact is, I am all too acutely aware into whose abominable hands you have fallen! For, and mark this well, I am nobody’s fool, least of all yours, and I know that you are living at your mother’s; I have every reason to shudder whenever I dwell on the fact that you are there! Yes, I have no hesitation in saying that I would far prefer you were living at Madame Gourdan’s:4 at least there you would know who you are dealing with and be on your guard, whereas at your mother’s there’s no way of telling what deceitful traps she may be setting. Do you think that I can ever forget this remark as long as I live? I shall give fifty louis to anyone who manages to corrupt that young lady? —No, no, that I shall never forget, and if only you would call to mind the times, the places, the situations, all my so-called misdeeds will forthwith become understandable! —My dear friend, do bear this in mind: the despair of women who have scorned virtue is the respect that is paid to virtue by those who have constantly honored it; they are like those poor wretched creatures who publicly feign not to believe in god and who call upon others to blaspheme against him even as their hearts cry out to embrace him. In like manner, embrace virtue, hold it close! ’Tis virtue that causes me to blush with shame at my indiscretions, and ’tis virtue alone that will bring me to loathe them. Man’s natural inclination is to imitate; the character of a sensitive man is to try and model himself after what he loves. ’Tis the example of vices that has always been the source of my misfortunes; do not prolong them any further by providing me with proof of the most ghastly vices that could be proffered me. That would be the death of me; or, if my love of life should win out over the courage to kill myself (which I do not believe), ‘twould be only to plunge me headlong into the wildest sins of the flesh, which would serve the purpose of ending my days at the soonest opportunity, one way or another. Fickleness or infidelity, they say, can serve to reawaken desire in a lover or husband; yes, in a soul that is base and vile. But never for one moment think that mine is of that ilk. I shall never pardon an offense against propriety, nor should I ever agree to see again anyone who once was mine and then ceased to be. The very notion that another person might be involved with someone I am holding in my arms has always revolted me, and I have never in my life seen again any woman whom I even suspected of having been unfaithful to me. I believe that none of this applies to you, but the fact is you have made me suspicious, and the thought is now rooted deep in my soul.5 When they did that, what a wonderful piece of advice they gave you! I shall look into the matter most carefully, I shall verify the truth thereof: I shall find nothing (at least so I hope), but the suspicion has been planted, and in a character
such as mine ’tis a slow poison, the effects of which wreak their havoc on me day in and day out, and there is absolutely nothing on the face of the earth that is capable of halting its progress. I say it once more: when they did that what a wonderful piece of advice they gave you ! My greatest comfort was at least looking forward to the possibility of a happy old age in the bosom of a faithful friend who had never once failed me. It was, alas, my sole consolation, the only thing that dulled the pointed knives that are presently tearing me asunder. And you have had the effrontery to begrudge me that sweet hope of my declining years! I can’t go on: the suspicion has been planted; the sentences are too obvious for me to blind myself to their true meaning. Oh, my dear friend, is it true that I can no longer hold you in the highest esteem? Tell me: have you betrayed me so cruelly? If so, what a frightful future lies ahead! O great God! may my prison doors remain forever closed! I should rather die than emerge from here in order to behold my infamy, your infamy, and that of the monsters who offer you their advice! May I die rather than debase myself, rather than sink into the ultimate excesses of the most monstrous crimes, which I shall seek out with great delight in order to drown my sorrows in dissolution! I shall invent crimes so monstrous they defy imagination. —Farewell, see how calm I am and how much I need to see you alone. I beg of you, do whatever is required to see that it is arranged.

  1. This refers to an impending visit; after the initial July 13 visit, Renée-Pélagie was authorized to visit her husband with relative frequency, though the authorities were quick to cancel these visits at the slightest show of independence or arrogance from the prisoner.

  2. That is, coming down from his cell to the council room.

  3. Sade of all people was shocked and upset at the “revealing” dress his wife wore during her first visit, and by her (to him) frivolous hairdo.

  4. Probably Sade’s code name for Mme de Villette, Renée-Pélagie’s cousin by marriage, who had invited Mme de Sade to come live with her. Married to a notorious homosexual, whom the wags of Paris dubbed “voiture à la Villette,” which referred to a horse-drawn carriage one enters from the rear, Mme de Villette enjoyed a dubious reputation herself. Sade claimed she was “a bit Sappho,” but also told his wife that her heterosexual exploits were legion. Still, he preferred she live with the notorious Villettes than with her mother.

  5. Sade would seem to be the last person to play the jealous husband, yet we must take him at his word. It may be that seeing Renée-Pélagie after almost four and a half years rekindled his passion. As we have seen, she did arrive outfitted coquettishly, with a low cleavage and pretty curls. Who was the presumed lover? A man named Lefèvre, a Provençal peasant whom the Abbe de Sade had taught to read and write and who, later, Mme de Sade brought to Paris as a servant. In a letter to Milli de Rousset written two weeks after Renée-Pélagie’s first visit to Vincennes, she wrote: “He [Sade] is jealous. I can see you laughing from here. —And what is he jealous of you may ask? —Of Lefèvre (he does me great honor, don’t you agree?) because I told him Lefèvre had bought him some books . . . Tell me if you will: where does he come up with such things?”

  47. To Madame de Sade

  [Between August and October, 1781]

  Ah! how they have just proved to me that they are making sport of my life! How they have just managed to convince me that there is not one person in the world who cares one whit about me! Ah! great God, great God! the most atrocious misfortune that I have so long dreaded has now come to pass!

  You ask what is the basis for my suspicions: ’tis this.

  You are the instrument of my torture. That being so, how can they fancy having you play such a role without making you extremely unhappy? If you still had the slightest feelings of friendship for me, ‘twas essential they be forcibly extracted, for they were well aware that your friendship was my sole comfort, and they succeeded in that effort by giving you a lover.1 Here then is the odious policy of your mother’s most vile advisers: encourage crime, authorize it in order to punish evil. What a repulsive notion! What an infamous idea! and how is it possible, knowing you as I do, with all your virtue, all your decency, all your candor, that you did not sense the trap they had laid for you? How is it you were unable to avoid it? Alas! your execrable mother has now dealt me the final blow; she has stripped me of everything: possessions, honor, fortune, freedom . . . I would have endured everything, complained about nothing: but to steal your heart from me! . . . Oh! my dear and divine friend, oh! my former soulmate, this I shall not survive!

  I have figured it out, your hateful enigma. I shall be set free on February 7 in either ’82 or ’84 (’tis an enormous difference, and you can see that I can discern no more than that); the detestable and imbecilic play on words is the name of today’s saint, which happens to be Saint-Amand, and since one finds the word Fèvre in February,2 you have linked the name of this rapscallion to the numbers 5 and 7. And from there your wordplay, as banal as it is stupid, indicates that my release will be at the end of five years (or 57 months), on February 7. Saint-Amand’s day, Lefèvre, linked to the 7 and the 5, was your lover.3 But do you for one moment believe that such a platitude can in the long run rid me of my suspicions? Eh! no, no! do not fool yourself: the man has proved useful for your ideas and you have taken advantage of the man, and ’tis upon the truth, the whole truth, of that thing that you have built the enigma, and not the enigma upon a play of words. You fear to topple your deplorable enigma by reassuring me: you are dead wrong. On the contrary, there is a time period of which I am certain and which irrevocably focuses my ideas. By your failure to reassure me, at least I know for certain the date of my release; by destroying my suspicions, everything crumbles, both the enigma and the suspicions. At which point I come to the conclusion that I had it all wrong and my mind begins to waver. Put him therefore in this same situation, since ’tis the one you most like, and reassure me about your conduct. I am full willing to ignore the date of my release, or even assume it will never happen, but I do not want to lose your heart. In a word, I most earnestly pray to see you; my life is at stake. If you refuse me that, do not prove that my life means nothing to you and therefore that I have nothing further to hope for in this world, do not prove that you no longer even pity me. I deserve at least that, for I weep for my sins, I repent of them, and the only reason I desire to remain alive and be free is to make amends for all my wrongdoings and do my best once again (if I am granted that possibility, for there is none at all if you have changed) to do my best once again to make you happy. Oh! my dear friend, do not deny me that, I beg of you on bended knee! Why do you insist on driving me to despair and becoming the source of my undoing? I still hold one precious claim on you, a title that the entire universe is completely incapable of denying me: I am the father of your children. All right, let yourself be swayed in their name if not in mine! If you no longer like me, then I am fully prepared to die, I accept that, I shall rid you of my presence. But before I do, allow me to throw myself at your feet for a moment and weep, let me embrace your knees one last time, let me hear my judgment from your own lips, and I shall pass from this world content.

  My terrible misfortune is that you have linked your visits so closely and intimately to the composition of your signals that you cannot gratify me concerning one without fearing to enlighten me about the other. But today that fear must be regarded as fantasy pure and simple, since you see that I have confessed to you the secret I discovered, and I solemnly declare to you that nothing now will ever make me change my mind. Well, now! do you want to be even surer that ’tis not my release that concerns me but solely the need, the extreme need, to see you? Go beg the minister on my behalf to grant me that favor and in return he can tack two more years of prison onto the back end of the furthest removed of my two sentences: if that is what it takes, I subscribe to it unreservedly. Do they want half my fortune? I give it in exchange for an hour with you, and you can have whoever you name to be with you during our encounter. And why in God’s name did you an
nounce that visit as just around the corner, since in truth it has to be in the dim distant future, if my release is slated for some twenty-four months hence, that is, only in ’84?

  Oh! ye gods, how you make me suffer! and how studied and heinous your torments! Ah! ’tis thus one makes a soul bitter and filled with despair, but that is hardly the way to bring it back to the straight and narrow! In the name of God, come pay me an hour’s visit or I shall not answer for my life.

  1. Sade is assuming that if indeed Renée-Pélagie has a lover, it is all part of a master plot against him on the part of the présidente.

  2. French for February is février, which Sade links to the name of his wife’s presumed lover, the rapscallion Lefèvre.

  3. On August 5, Mme de Sade wrote her husband a letter, which so infuriated Sade he annotated it in obscene terms and spattered it with blood. From the date—5—and other numerical references, Sade in his fury deduces the two numbers refer to the size of Lefèvre’s penis: 7 inches (length) by 5 inches (circumference).

  48. To Madame de Sade

  [October 1781]

  You can well imagine, my dear friend, that after the moment of respite that you lodged in my soul concerning the frightful anxiety I felt about a detention as long as the one I mentioned to you recently, based on the figures you provided me, and especially after the Sainte-Aure,1 which means 58 and which falls at that period precisely in June 1783, you can well imagine, I say, that after that I was in a terrible frame of mind. One very special thing, which I most assuredly am compelled to regard as a frightful bit of subtle cruelty on this score: not a word of consolation, not a single person offering me even the slightest hope that I was mistaken and that I was going too far. After that, you can well understand that the only conclusion I could come to was that my incarceration would be at least that, not counting the two years of exile that were destined to bring this whole affair to a close and carry my suffering to the brink of old age. Thus will your mother have been the cause of making sure my days were spent in constant torment. I shall have spent my entire life the victim of her rage and her unremitting revenge. And this woman is a devout believer, and this woman goes and takes communion . . . All it would take to turn the most pious man in the universe into an atheist is an example such as that. Oh! how I loathe her! Good God, how I detest her! And what a blessed moment ‘twill be for me when I learn that this abominable creature has breathed her last! I most solemnly swear and vow by all that’s most genuine to give two hundred louis to the poor the day I learn of that most blessed event, and another fifty to the servant who brings me the news or to the clerks of whatever postal service announces the event by letter. I agree and consent to whatever tortures it may please God to rain down upon me if ever I fail to comply with the terms of that oath, a written copy of which I have been carrying upon my person for more than the past three years. I confess that I have never desired the death of anyone, with the exception of that woman! Ah! my dear friend, I beg your indulgence regarding a frivolous illusion; but as it assuages for a brief moment my sorrows, allow me to indulge for a while in such flights of fancy.