Letters From Prison

by Marquis de Sade

  And because they had not added faith to the formidable mysteries of Christ’s religion, they dinned a homily into his head every day for six months; and thus you will see that that made him believe that God and bread are one and the same.

  ’Tis more or less in that same manner they converted the anti-papists in the Cevennes mountains. Since that took place not even eighty years ago, each of us remembers how well it worked.

  Oh, no, no! I swear upon all that’s most holy that I shall never believe the lessons of a god who believes that ’tis right and good to treat his creature in a most scurrilous manner in order to honor the creator. Construct your ungodly chapels, adore your idols, O detestable pagans! But so long as you transgress the sacred laws of Nature, mark you well that by so doing you oblige me to hate you and despise you.

  Be that as it may, do let me hear from you, I beg of you. If ’tis part of your practical joke not to write me, then send a brief word to the officers of the establishment; they will pass it on to me, and that semi-proof of your existence and your good health will give me some slight reassurance.

  You have an excuse for writing, I gave it to you on purpose two months ago. I have a large package all wrapped up and ready to be given to you; send someone to fetch it, and when you do include a word from you.

  This package contains six pieces of raw leather that require bleaching, all of which I shall need in the next two months. What am I going to do if you don’t have them done, as you always have every year in the past? ‘Twill put me in a pretty pickle. The pieces of leather are to wrap round my latest work, which I’m also most anxious to send you, so that La Jeunesse can make a fair copy of it1 and also so that I can turn my attention to something else, which I find impossible to do as long as the old work is here next to me. And I have a great desire to work; I have an overall plan that keeps running through my mind, which I very much want to bring to fruition. I absolutely must make up for lost time. They wake me up every day at five o’clock in the morning; I can use my eyes to good advantage only till four in the afternoon. So I must therefore profit from that time period. If you still are the least bit interested in what is happening to me, I would tell you that from four in the afternoon till midnight my poor wretched eyes continue to be horribly painful. But what does such a minor item mean to the daughter of a woman who has been so bold as to deprive me of the sense I hold most dear? But be patient: if men refuse me their justice, I shall still find means to take justice into my own hands. Justice too has eyes. And I shall also have some powder.2 All I need is some money to track down these no-good knaves; and that I shall find, and that I shall use.

  1. As noted, La Jeunesse through the years dutifully copied Sade’s prison manuscripts and drafts.

  2. Presumably gunpowder, to back up his threats.

  81. To Madame de Sade

  September 19 and 22, 1783

  This morning I received a fat letter from you that seemed endless. Please, I beg of you, don’t go on at such length: do you believe that I have nothing better to do than to read your endless repetitions? In truth, you must have an enormous amount of time on your hands to write letters of that length, and you must also assume I have all the time in the world to reply. Still in all, since the present letter is one of great consequence, I beseech you to read it with a clear mind and complete composure.

  I have just found three signals of most uncommon beauty. There’s no way in the world I can keep them from you. They are so sublime that I’m convinced that, in reading them, you will, despite all your efforts to the contrary, applaud the extent of my genius and the wealth of my knowledge. One might say of your clique what Piron said of the French Academy: you who number forty here have the mind of four.1 Your sequel is the same thing: your six there have the mind of two. Well, then, with all your collective genius, and although you have being working on your masterpiece for only twelve years, I am going to give you two-to-one odds,* if you like, that my three signals are worth more than everything you have done to date . . . Hold it, I’m mistaken, upon my word there are four. . . Well, then! ’tis three or four, and as you know three-quarters is a strong number.

  First signal I made up: Christopher2 de Sade

  From the first clipping you cut out or tore out to bring to my attention, you must cut off the b-s of Cadet de Basoche3 (Albaret) and send them to me in a box. I shall open the box, I shall cry out in admiration, and then I shall say: Oh, good God! what the blazes can that be? —Jacques the prompter, who will be there, somewhere behind me, will answer: ’Tis nothing, Sir; can ‘t you see that it’s the number 19? —No! I say, I can’t make that out. —With all due respect, do you have any as good as that?

  Second signal, same author:

  Whenever you want to indicate the number 2, the double, a duplicate copy, your own double, paying something twice, etc.,4 here’s how you should go about it: you must place in my room a handsome creature in some theatrical pose (the sex doesn’t matter to me; to some extent I take after your own family, I’m not overly choosy in that respect; and besides, since we’re dealing with a mad dog, etc.), as I was saying, you must have a handsome creature in a pose not unlike that of the Callipygian Venus5 there, in all its splendor. I have nothing against that part of the body; like your father the magistrate, I am of the opinion that ’tis plumper than the rest and as a result, for anyone who has a strong predilection for the flesh, ’tis always better than what is close-cropped . . . As I enter the room, I shall say (for the sake of appearances) to the prompter, or whoever is there: What in the name of all that’s holy is that disgraceful object? And the prompter will say: Monsieur, ’tis only a copy.

  Third signal, still from the same source:

  When you want to act as a major intermediary for someone, as you did this summer with the thunder and lightning rod (which I found so hilarious I almost died laughing), you should set fire to the powder keg (which is standing right next to the bed I sleep in): the effect will be sublime.6

  Oh! Here is the most beautiful, don’t you agree?

  Finally, the fourth:

  Whenever you have in mind to make a nine-sided 16 (listen to me carefully), you must take two skulls7 (two, do you hear? I could have said six, but even though I served in the king’s dragoons, I’m a modest enough fellow), and while I’m outside taking a walk in the garden you’ll put them in my room, so that I can find them already there when I return. Or else you can let me know that a package has been received for me from Provence; I shall hasten to open it . . . and there ‘twill be— and I shall be overcome with fear (for I’m extremely timid by nature, as I’ve proved once or twice in my life).

  Ah, good people, good and decent souls! Believe me when I say you should cease and desist from trying to invent things that are so ordinary, so insipid, and so easy to fathom, ’tis not worth the time and effort you put into them. There are plenty of other things you can do than devising and contriving, and when one is not predisposed to inventing one would be far better off making shoes or nozzles rather than inventing awkwardly, clumsily, and stupidly.

  The 19th, but mailed the 22nd

  By the way, send on my linen; and tell those who think that I should learn to take care of myself that they should think again, because Monsieur de Rougemont, who is a far better judge than they, has just determined that my stove is in dire need of serious repair, and he is having it taken care of. Thus for once in our lives why don’t we all try and pull together in the same direction, if that were possible, for even though you’re all a lowdown scurvy lot, we should nonetheless make an honest effort not to have some pulling to the left while the other is pulling to the right. Pull the way Monsieur de Rougemont does; ’tis a man of good common sense, who always pulls in the right direction . . . or lets himself by pulled when he doesn’t pull himself. —My valet sends his greetings to you and asks you to remind madame la présidente kindly not to forget that she had promised him, when the time came, to have his son promoted to the rank of sergeant.

  1.
The French Academy was made up of forty “immortals.”

  * What! two-to-one: not bad, that, eh? Don’t you wish you had thought of that? (Sade’s note)

  2. Probably Sade himself; he sees Christ’s tribulations as similar to his.

  3. One of Sade’s many nicknames for Albaret.

  4. Lely suggests that the “doubling” refers to heterosexual sodomy.

  5. The famous statue, renowned for its beauty and especially that of its shapely buttocks, is in the Farnese collection in Naples, which Sade visited the year before his Vincennes imprisonment.

  6. As mentioned, there were frequent thunderstorms in Paris that summer, which frightened Mme de Sade. She was also concerned that the newly installed lightning rods on the roof of Vincennes were attracting lightning. She could, Sade suggests, simulate the thunder by setting fire to one of the fortresses’ powder kegs—which was not by his bed—and blow up the place.

  7. He is probably alluding to the skull apparently used during the theatricals at La Coste during the winter of 1774-75.

  82. To Madame de Sade

  [November 4, 1783]

  Enclosed, my dear friend, a small sample of the work1 I mentioned to you earlier. I collected almost two hundred similar character traits, all of which I portrayed and arranged like the one I’m sending for you to judge. I made a point of keeping strictly to the facts; all I did was add a bit of local color in the details. I was afraid that the work you just sent me, French Anecdotes, might have caused the pen to drop from my hand, as they say. But that work is totally different from mine, ’tis a simple, boring chronology, which belongs on the desk of any working man. These little character traits of mine, arranged as you see, will, I dare hope, have both the ring of truth about them and yet retain all the flair of a novel. Besides, you will judge for yourself, and ’tis not a crime to talk for once about belles-lettres and literature, I should like your opinion about whether you think a fair copy of the work should be made. In the event you do, kindly send me—I haven’t the time to make an exact count—a notebook the size of a quire, that is twenty-five pages, of the same size as the ones I used for my comedies, with the margins already marked as they are on this sample enclosed. The Griffin stationers will mark the pages up for you. I shall be ready to begin on the 18th of this month. If by then I haven’t received the notebook, I’ll assume that you didn’t like the piece. And I shall not pursue it further. To finish the work I need a great deal of encouragement, for as this kind of compilation is not in the least up my alley, I would push ahead with it only out of boredom and for want of anything better to do. I have neither the slightest taste nor the least inclination for it. And if I do not receive the notebook I shall take comfort in the knowledge that I shall then be free to undertake something much more to my taste and considerably more enjoyable. You be the judge.

  I wish you a very happy and joyous birthday,2 and I am sending you this bauble as a bouquet, believing that both because you are personally familiar with the country and because I seem to recall that one of your forebears came from there, I thought it might interest you. If I am wrong, forgive me, but know that the gesture was well intentioned. Leave it at that, and know that in my heart of hearts all I want is to convince you most sincerely that I love you and that I shall always love you as long as I live, despite everything they might inveigle you into doing, and of which I am quite sure you are completely ignorant.

  I have received everything, but since I have my usual share of grumbling and harping, and perhaps even a number of crazy recriminations, I prefer not to defile a letter and a shipment whose sole purpose is to celebrate your birthday and to let you know how profoundly and sincerely I would have preferred to celebrate it in a completely different manner.

  In any event, stack this little notebook in with my comedies, for I have no other copy, and the draft I have kept is quite illegible.

  1. Probably not extant, this work conceived by Sade was different from anything else he wrote—apparently a kind of catalogue of people and their characteristics that he doubtless drew upon in writing his novels and plays.

  2. Renée-Pélagie’s birthday is actually in December, not November. Had Sade forgot? Unlikely. Perhaps he assumed the letter might take a month to pass the censor and reach its destination. Or, perhaps the true date of the letter, which was undated, was December 2, 1783.

  83. To Madame de Sade

  [Beginning of November, 1783]

  Good God! how right he is when M. Duclos tells us on page 101 of his Confessions1 that the witticisms of barristers always stink of the backstairs. Allow me to go him one better and say that they smell of the out-room, of the outhouse: the brainless platitudes your mother and her Keeper of the Tables invent are of an odor not to be suffered in any proper salon. And so you never weary of their drivel and their pranks! and so we are to have buffoonery and lawyers to the bitter end! Well, my chit, feed on that stuff to your heart’s content, gorge yourself on it, drink yourself high with it. I am wrong to try to teach you proper manners, quite as wrong as he who would attempt to prove to a pig that a vanilla cream pasty is better than a t-. But if you give me examples of obstinacy, at least refrain from criticizing me for mine. You cleave to your principles, eh? And so do I to mine. But the great difference between us two is that my systems are founded upon reason while yours are merely the fruit of imbecility.

  My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking to suit other people! My manner of thinking stems straight from my considered reflections; it holds with my existence, with the way I am made. It is not in my power to alter it; and if it were, I’d not do so. This manner of thinking you find fault with is my sole consolation in life; it alleviates all my sufferings in prison, it composes all my pleasures in the world outside, it is dearer to me than life itself. Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness. The reasoning man who scorns the prejudices of simpletons necessarily becomes the enemy of simpletons; he must expect as much, and laugh at the inevitable. A traveler journeys along a fine road. It has been strewn with traps. He falls into one. Do you say it is the traveler’s fault, or that of the scoundrel who lays the traps? If then, as you tell me, they are willing to restore my liberty if I am willing to pay for it by the sacrifice of my principles or my tastes, we may bid one another an eternal adieu, for rather than part with those, I would sacrifice a thousand lives and a thousand liberties, if I had them. These principles and these tastes, I am their fanatic adherent; and fanaticism in me is the product of the persecutions I have endured from my tyrants. The longer they continue their vexations, the deeper they root the principles in my heart, and I openly declare that no one need ever talk to me of liberty if it is offered to me only in return for their destruction. I say that to you. I shall say it to M. Le Noir. I shall say it to the entire earth. Were I brought to the foot of the scaffold, I’d not change my tune. If my principles and my tastes cannot consort with the laws of this land, I don’t for a moment insist upon remaining in France. In Europe there are wise governments that do not dishonor people because of their tastes and do not cast them into jail because of their opinions. I shall go elsewhere to live, and I shall live there happily.

  The opinions or the vices of private individuals do no harm to the State; only the morals of public figures exert any influence upon the general administration. Whether a private person believes or does not believe in God, whether he admires and venerates a harlot or treats her with kicks and curses, neither this form of behavior nor that will maintain or shake the constitution of a State. But let the magistrate whose duty it is to see a given town be provided with food double the price of commodities because the purveyors make it worth his while; let the treasurer entrusted with public funds leave hirelings unpaid because he prefers to turn those pennies to his own account; let the steward of a royal household in all its numbers leave luckless troops, whom the king has allowed
into his palace, go unfed because that officer would have a hearty meal at home the Thursday before Shrove Tuesday—and from one end of the country to the other the effects of this malversation will be felt; everything goes to pieces. And nonetheless the extortioner triumphs while the honest man rots in a dungeon. A State approaches its ruin, spake Chancellor Olivier2 at the Bed of Justice held in Henry II’s reign, when only the weak are punished, and the rich felon gets his impunity from his gold.

  Let the king first correct what is blatantly amiss in the government, let him do away with its abuses, let him send to the gallows those ministers who deceive or rob him, before he sets about repressing his subjects’ opinions or tastes! Once again: those tastes and opinions will not undermine his throne, but the unworthy behavior of those near the throne will topple it sooner or later.

  Your parents, you tell me, dear friend, your parents are taking measures to prevent me from ever being in a position to claim anything from them. This extraordinary sentence is all the more so for demonstrating that either they or I must be knaves. If they think me capable of asking them for anything beyond your dowry, I am the knave (but I am not; knavery has never made any inroads into my principles, it’s too base a vice); and if, on the contrary, they are taking measures to prevent my receiving that upon which my children must naturally count, then they are the knaves. Kindly decide which it is to be, the one or the other, for your sentence leaves no middle ground. You point your finger at them? I am not surprised. Neither am I surprised at the trouble they encountered marrying you off, or at the remark one of your suitors made: The daughter, I’m nothing loath; but spare me the parents! My surprise shall cease at the fact they have been paying me your dowry in vouchers that lose two-thirds on the market; no more shall I marvel that those who were concerned for my interests always used to warn me: Have a care there, you’ve no idea whom you are dealing with. One should not be the least bit surprised at people who take measures not to pay the dowry promised to their daughter; and I have long suspected that the honor of having sired three children upon you was going to be my ruin. ’Tis doubtless to secure it that your mother has so often had my house entered and my papers filched. It will cost her but a few louis to have some documents disappear now out of the notaries’ files, to have some notes to Albaret falsified: and when at last I emerge from here I shall still be quite able to beg in the streets. —Well, faced with that, what recourse do I have? To me three things will always remain as consolation for everything: the pleasure of informing the public, which is not fond of the foul tricks lawyers play upon noblemen; the hope of advising the king by going and casting myself at his feet if need be, to ask restitution for all your parents’ little escapades; and, should all that fail, the satisfaction, to me very sweet, of possessing you for your own sake, my dear friend, and of devoting the little that shall still be mine to your needs, to your desires, to the very special charm that will fill my heart seeing you are once more dependent on me.