Letters From Prison

by Marquis de Sade

  In the event I were to suffer a second loss such as this, I commend you to act in the same manner as you have here with regard to my remaining aunt, so that the final surviving aunt will be the recipient of her sisters’ annuities. As soon as this has been done, please be good enough to inform Madame de Sade of it, so that she may then pass the information on to me. At the same time, please tell my aunts that I would have taken care of this matter much sooner if only I had been informed of it sooner.

  I have the honor of being, Monsieur, your most humble and obedient servant.

  COUNT DE SADE

  1. Sade’s paternal grandfather, Gaspard François de Sade, had five daughters, only one of whom married. The other four all became nuns, two at the convent of Saint-Laurent in Avignon, two at different convents in Avignon. The cloistered sisters saw little of their errant nephew, but rumors of his deeds and misdeeds reached them nonetheless, doubtless from their brother the Abbé de Sade. Despite the disturbing echoes, all four seemed never to give up on the marquis. Hence his gratitude, which one has to believe was sincere.

  2. Marguerite-Félicité de Sade, also known as Madame La Coste, was an ordinary nun in the convent of Saint-Bernard in Cavaillon. Since it was she who died, Sade is confused when he asks that her share be divided between the two surviving sisters at Saint-Bernard and Saint-Benoit. His other surviving aunt, Anne-Marie Lucrèce, was in Avignon.

  92. To Madame de Sade

  [End of February, 1784]

  However great my desire to see you, my dear friend, I ask you most sincerely and most urgently not to run the risk of coming to visit me in such frightful weather. There are a thousand dangers you risk if you do try to come, all of which worry me to death when I think of you thus exposed. This weather cannot long endure. Thus the few days I shall be kept waiting will cause me less suffering than the mortal anguish wherewith I shall be overcome the minute you leave me in such weather as this; because, after you leave, I shall have no way of knowing what has become of you, and that drives me to distraction. Your mother must be either dead drunk or completely mad in thus risking her daughter’s life, in order to form a 19 and a 4, or a 16 and 9, and not be weary of this little numbers game she has been playing for twelve years now. Oh! what an indigestion that horrible woman had suffered from all the numbers she has ingested! I am convinced that if she had died before the eruption, and if they opened her up, a million numbers would have come tumbling from her entrails. You have no idea how much I loathe all these numbers and convoluted intricacies. I am told that using numbers is the language of negotiators. Well, then! I shall never negotiate for the rest of my life, for considering all the insuperable horror you have given me over all that gibberish, I believe that if the king were to give me the top-ranking ambassadorship in his kingdom, I would refuse it.1

  But I am wrong in saying I believe. Nothing is more certain. Believe me, do not head off in the wrong direction. I can see what’s going through your mind, but I declare and solemnly swear to you on all that I hold most sacred in the world, that were the king to offer me [the ambassadorship] to a monarchy, I would not take it. You have instilled in me too great a loathing for chains: I would turn my back on them even were they covered with flowers.

  To go live in whatever part of the world I choose and there, together with my wife and children, to devote myself wholly to science and the arts, that in a nutshell is what I most desire. And I most solemnly declare and swear to you that anything that might in any way divert or distract me from that goal, or restrict me to any degree, I shall firmly and resolutely refuse. Therefore, mark my words, do not undertake any such efforts on my behalf, nor should you pursue the matter of Soubise’s infantry regiment on behalf of your son. For I say to you once again, it simply will not work. I have told you this many times over. And despite everything I say, you plow right ahead; in all fairness, you’re the one who will bear the consequences. You know that when you go to the ministers and request a favor for someone who actually does not want that favor, they look upon it askance; therefore, there’s no point taking that risk.

  Do not, I repeat, take such a risk, for I swear to God and upon my own life that I want nothing and will accept nothing. Nor should you allow your son to join the Soubise infantry, and if you do so against my express wishes, as soon as I am free my first act will be to remove him from same.

  ’Tis because of all these lovely projects no doubt that you tease me in a thousand different ways about my literary works. Another sure way to bind me to such endeavors and throw myself headlong into them to the point of madness. If I had written a decent play, no matter what the genre, I would have stopped at that, and I solemnly declare to you that I would never have gone any further. But since I am not fortunate enough to have succeeded, I want to devote myself to writing day and night, to the absolute exclusion of everything else. That is my character, as you well know, and yet you never want to admit it. ’Tis you who will have to bear the consequences for not taking me at my word.

  Believe me that what I am about to tell you is deeply and indelibly engraved in my mind and heart. You know my faults, as you know how much they are near and dear to me. Now then, I swear upon my word of honor that if someone—someone whose word I trusted—were to come to me and say: What you are doing poses no problem whatsoever, Sir; you may rest assured that you are quite free to go on as you have, no one will any longer stand in your way. Yes, I declare that if I were told that by someone in authority I would immediately take such a violent dislike to my shortcomings that I would never again indulge in them as long as I lived. But ‘twas for them I was clapped in prison, and for that reason alone I shall treasure them all my life. I have kept no secrets from you and those around you; I have revealed my character, made no bones about what makes me tick, for some twenty years now, and you have chosen not to take advantage of it; rather you have preferred to take me the wrong way. That being so, when I leave this place behind, there’s no point in having my possessions removed, for ‘twill not be long before I am carted back to this same room.

  I await your thoughts about the scene I described to you during your last visit, and the answer—yes or no—about the project in question. If you tease and procrastinate, I shall forthwith start working on my tragedy about François I, the full outline of which I have already prepared; and which, if I dare say so myself, will be sublime.

  I embrace you with all my heart, and I beseech you not to expose yourself to this foul weather. At least let that naughty white bosom of yours be well protected or I shall fly into a terrible rage against you. And in God’s name, bring me some stockings!

  For I am sorely lacking IN STOCKINGS, SADE.2

  And do follow up to make sure they are sent, etc.

  1. Somehow Sade had got it into his head—probably misreading a sentence or thought expressed in one of his wife’s letters—that the king was about to offer him an ambassadorship, at the request or urging of la présidente, if only to get him out of France. Nothing could have been further from the truth: Madame de Montreuil, and doubtless the king’s ministers, wanted him right where he was.

  2. Sade is making a pun impossible to translate. Having asked several times for cotton stockings (bas), he notes that he is “bien mal en bas,” which means “sorely lacking in stockings,” but also, by signing his name thereafter, could mean “a very poor ambassador” (bien mal ambassade).

  In the first weeks of 1784 a decision was made to shut down the Vincennes dungeon, partly the result of pressure from the increasingly restive populace, partly because Sade was one of only three prisoners remaining in Vincennes. On February 29, with no warning, Sade and the two other prisoners, both aristocrats, were unceremoniously taken from their cells and brought to the even more forbidding Bastille.

  The Bastille, in the heart of what is today Paris’s fourth arrondissement (or district), at the Porte Saint-Antoine, was built from 1370 to 1382. Originally constructed to house the military, it was soon turned into a state prison. It contained
eight towers, each of which was given a name. Upon his arrival there on February 19, 1784, Sade was lodged in Liberty Three on the third floor of Liberty Tower, one of two towers—the other was called Bertaudièere— that comprised the Saint-Antoine cell block. There was only one cell per floor, an octagonal room about fifteen feet in diameter. The cells all had high ceilings—some as much as twenty feet; the walls were whitewashed and the floors were of brick. There was one window in each cell secured by three sets of bars, which filtered out most of the light. Still, Sade’s window was higher than the prison walls, and he could at least catch a glimpse of the city beyond.

  When he was spirited away from Vincennes without warning, most of his belongings—his books, his manuscripts, his wall hangings, his paintings and family portrait, his clothing, his bed linen, his “rump cushion,” without which he could not work—were left behind. It was not until two months later, on April 29, that he was delivered all his Vincennes possessions.

  If at Vincennes he disdained and reviled the warden, de Rougemont, at the Bastille he encountered an even more formidable foe, Monsieur de Launay, the commandant, who took an immediate dislike to his new ward who, he complained to his superior, the lieutenant general of police, was “violent and extremely difficult.”

  For the next five years, there would be a running battle between de Launay and Sade, one all-powerful and vindictive, the other powerless except to provoke, by voice and pen, and to remonstrate against the constant injustices to which he was subjected.

  Sade was far from the only famous prisoner sequestered in the Bastille. Some of the most celebrated names of French history and literature had earlier been lodged within its storied walls: Jacques d’Armagnac, Bernard Palissy, Fouquet, and Voltaire, to name but a few.

  93. To Madame de Sade

  March 8, 1784

  Thirty-four months after having formally refused a transfer to a dungeon at the doorstep of my own lands,1 where I was promised I would have complete freedom, and then having asked the favor of allowing me to remain in peace where I was, no matter how poorly off I was, for whatever length of time it pleased your mother to sacrifice me to her vengeance, thirty-four months, I say, after that event, to find myself whisked away by force, completely unexpectedly, without the slightest warning, the whole thing wrapped in mystery and surrounded by all sorts of burlesque secrecy, the entire event steeped in an enthusiasm and fervor that would scarcely have been excusable in the initial turmoil of an affair of the first magnitude, and now, after a dozen years of misfortunes, as dull as it is ridiculous! And to have me taken where? To a prison where I am a thousand times worse off and a thousand times more oppressed than the wretched place whence I came. Such methods, Madame, no matter how much one tries to disguise or gloss over this atrocious deed with hateful lies, such methods, you must confess, has to be the last straw as regards all the hate that I have sworn against your family most foul. And I truly believe that you would be the first to underestimate me sorely if the episodes of my revenge did not one day equal in all their ferocity those they have heaped on me. Do not worry, and you may rest assured that neither you nor the world at large will have the slightest reproach to make me on that score. But I shall have neither the merit of dreaming up, or in coldfury of seeking to invent, whatever may cause the venom I intend to use all the more poisonous. The deep well within me will furnish whatever I need, I shall harden my heart, let all the mechanisms of revenge do their worst, and you may be sure the venom I shall spew forth will be fully worthy of that unleashed against me.

  But let us get down to the details. In such cases, actions speak louder than words, and so long as one’s arms are tied, silence is golden. These are the lessons in lying I have been forced to learn: I shall learn from them, yes, I shall indeed learn from them, and one day, Madame, I shall be as double-dealing as you.

  For twenty years now, Madame, you have known that ’tis absolutely impossible for me to live in a room heated by a stove, and yet (thanks to the loving care of those who were involved in this transfer) here I am locked up in just such a room. These past few days I was so indisposed that I stopped lighting a fire; and no matter what the weather may become, I still shall not light one. Fortunately, summer is nigh; but if I am still here next winter, I beg you to take whatever steps are necessary to see that I have a room with a fireplace.

  You know, too, that exercise is even more necessary to me than food itself. And yet I am in a room that is scarcely half the size of the one that I had, in which ’tis impossible to take as much as even a few steps, and when I am allowed out, which is rare, ’tis only for a few minutes, into a little courtyard, where all one breathes is the stench of the warders and the kitchen. Worse, one is taken there by guards who prod me with a ramrod affixed to the end of their guns, as if I had tried to dethrone Louis XVI himself! Oh! how one learns to loathe major things when one attaches such importance to minor ones!

  You are also well aware that my dizzy spells and my frequent nosebleeds, both of which I have when I’m not lying down with my head perched extremely high, had obliged me to have an oversized pillow. When I tried to take this wretched pillow with me, you would have thought I was trying to steal the list of those who had conspired against the State; barbarically, they tore it from my hands and declared that matters of such magnitude had never been tolerated. And indeed I realized that some secret rule or regulation of government doubtless stipulated that a prisoner’s head should be kept lowered, for when to remedy that situation owing to the fact that my oversized pillow had been denied me I humbly requested four planks of wood, they took me for a madman. A swarm of commissioners descended upon me, who, having verified that I was indeed most uncomfortable in bed, in their infinite wisdom concluded that the rules were the rules and ‘twas impossible to change them. Verily I say unto you that you have to see it to believe it, and were we to learn that such things were taking place in China, our tender and compassionate Frenchmen would waste not a moment shouting to the high heavens: Oh! those barbarians!

  What is more, I am told that I must make my bed and sweep up my room. As for the former, so much the better, for they made it up most poorly and I enjoy making my own bed. But as for the second, ’tis unfortunately a hopeless case; my parents are at fault in this, because they never included sweeping up in their articles of education. There was no way they could ever foresee . . . many things. If ever they had, there’d not be a servant in any public house in the country who could hold a candle to me in the sweeping department. Meanwhile, I beg of you to have someone give me a few lessons. I suggest that the man who serves me here sweep my room only once a week for the next four or five years: I shall watch his every move, and you shall see, after that learning period I shall do just as fine a job of sweeping as he.

  For seven long years at Vincennes I was allowed the use of knives and scissors, without there ever being the slightest problem. I haven’t improved any over the course of those seven years, that I admit, but I haven’t grown any worse, either. Would you be so good as to point that out to them, and accordingly have them restore my right to use these two objects?

  I am stripped naked, thank God, and before long I shall be as naked as the day I was born. I was not allowed to take anything along with me, no matter what: a shirt, a nightcap made the lackey burst into invective, de Rougemont to shout himself hoarse, in consequence thereof I left everything behind, and I most insistently urge you to bring me during your very first visit two shirts, two handkerchiefs, six napkins, three pairs of slippers, four pairs of cotton stockings, two cotton caps, two hairnets, a cap of black taffeta, two muslin cravats, a dressing gown, four small pieces of linen five inches square that I need to bathe my eyes, and several of the books that are on my previous list. And that list assumes that within a fortnight I shall be receiving my cases and equipment from Vincennes, for if there is any delay in their arrival, then I kindly ask that you double or triple the quantities requested, depending on how long you deem it will be before my baggage a
rrives.

  I would also be greatly indebted if you would make sure I receive the following items, which have nothing to do with my cases; that is, I still need them whether or not my belongings arrive sooner or later. (The most pressing objects: the cushion for my rear, left behind at Vincennes, and my fur-lined slippers, both my mattresses, and my pillow.)

  Half a dozen jars of jam, half a dozen pounds of candles, several packages of small candles, the kind that contain fifteen to a package; a pint of Cologne water of better quality than the last you sent, which was worthless, a pint of rosewater for my eyes, to which kindly add a sixth portion of eau-de-vie; that is, the pint of rosewater should contain five parts rosewater and one part eau-de-vie; and the sequels to those books that I have been asking for such a long time now, as well as the remaining comedies above and beyond those already received from the catalogue I sent you.

  May there be a swift reply to the objects requested in this letter, if ’tis not too far beyond your earthly powers, so that at least for once I can say that you served some useful purpose to me during my detention, and above all the two mattresses from my bed and the oversized pillow. I leave the rest to your good judgment.

  If the oculists tell you that seawater and the powder in question [are] still necessary for my eye, which is still in as bad shape as ever, have those items, left behind at Vincennes, forwarded to me as soon as possible.