Letters From Prison (44 page)

True, this little joker will doubtless say: but you are the one who’s forever playing practical jokes on us; so you are the one who has to pay the piper. —To which I have two things to reply: first of all, that ’tis for the présidente to pay for these practical jokes, since she is the one behind them; and secondly, I strongly suggest that she pay as little as possible for them, for they are most poorly done. First, there is one turnkey who, when he wants to perform one of his little acts of buffoonery, begins by turning to one side, since he can’t bring himself to look me in the eye when he pours out his lies to me; and then there is another (this one is my favorite), who when he comes to administer the little injection his captain has ordered him to give that morning, always pokes his fellow turnkeys smartly in the ribs, to let them know he’s going to tell a huge lie, and that the order to do so comes from above and that they consequently should do the same . . . The imbeciles! lie to me will they! And the poor présidente, all wrapped up in her little cocoon, convinced that everything is going exactly as planned! —As for de Rougemont, that’s a whole other matter: he is considerably more subtle and a better actor. He’s the only one of the band whose every performance is worth at least twenty sous; some days you could even go so high as thirty, when he arrives, having just downed a hearty meal, his tongue still awash in globules of fatty matter that stick in his craw, expresses himself more or less like this, exaggerating his r’s beyond belief:

Ah, no, I say! you’re still not being fair to me. You are laboring under the mistaken belief that words are meant to foster understanding; dead wrong: you should not believe a single word I have the honor of saying to you, because words are absolutely meaningless

Ah no, I say . . . And with that he is overcome with a violent attack of hiccups and cannot go on. You must admit that I have the patience of Job and that I had the presence of mind to remember where I was, otherwise I would have run the knave out of room with a few well-placed kicks in the belly.

But he’ll get his just desserts in due course, of that I give you my word.

In any event, allow me to conclude with the following axiom that emanates from nothing more than good common sense, and that is; ’tis not by means of vice, and the unspeakable horror that vice begets, that vice can be either punished or reformed; only virtue can accomplish that, and virtue in its purest form. ’Tis not up to the présidente de Montreuil—cousin, niece, relative, godchild and gossip monger of all the little bankrupt clan from Cadiz and Paris, ’tis not for the présidente de Montreuil, niece of a crook who was thrown out of the Invalides by none other than Monsieur de Choiseul
⁵
himself for thievery and financial misconduct, ’tis not up to the présidente de Montreuil, whose family includes, on her husband’s side, a grandfather who was hanged to death in the Place de Grève,
⁶
’tis not for the présidente de Montreuil, who has given her husband no fewer than seven or eight bastards and has acted as pimp for all her daughters, ’tis not for her to try and mortify, punish, or repress defects of character for which one is not accountable in the first place and which, moreover, have never done the slightest harm to anyone. ’Tis not up to Dom S[arti]nos, who suddenly appeared out of nowhere one fine day in Paris, without anyone knowing whence he came, a bit like those poisonous mushrooms one discovers suddenly in full bloom at the edge of the woods, ’tis not up to Dom S[arti]nos who, when one checked more closely into his background, was found to have issued forth from the left side of Father Torquemada and from a Jewish woman whom the aforementioned Holy Father had seduced in the prisons of the Madrid Inquisition for which he was responsible, ’tis not up to Dom S[arti]nos, whose fortune in France was founded on his having sacrificed men as if they were cannibals, who, being in charge of the court of appeals, broke on the wheel the poor wretch to whom I have earlier referred, solely in order to enhance his own reputation and show that he was never wrong and quite incapable of misjudging anyone, ’tis not up to Dom S[arti]nos who, when he enjoyed a somewhat higher station, dreamed up all sorts of harassments and odious tyrannies relative to the public’s pleasures and distractions, in order to be able to provide
lascivious lists
wherewith to enliven the late-night revels of the Parc-aux-Cerfs, which, to pay court to each successive ruling party, had some two hundred innocent people put to death either by torturing them or by clapping them in prison, and I have that figure on very good authority, namely from the very people who were directly involved; in conclusion, ’tis not up to Dom S[arti]nos, politically the greatest scoundrel and generally the most notable crook who has ever walked the face of the earth, and perhaps the first who, since outrageous behavior has become an accepted way of life, has managed to come up with the most extraordinary misuse of power, namely that of letting a prostitute consort with the prisoners—no, ’tis not up to such a frightful defender of crime to try to either censure or repress or admonish those selfsame errors that were the source of his own greatest delights in that period when he was skimming off five hundred thousand francs per annum from the million allotted him by the king to provide the court with lubricious tidbits
⁷
and who, at the same time, not only stole with impunity but also took unspeakable advantage of his position in order to force certain poor wretches into various vices—those same vices that today he makes a point of admonishing! —And that bit of information I have directly from the women themselves.

In a word, ’tis not for the little bastard de Rougemont, the execration of vice personified, to this dissolute villain in doublet and breeches who, on the one hand, prostitutes his wife to augment the number of prisoners he has and, on the other hand, starves them to death in order to line his pockets with a few more crowns and pay the detestable henchmen of his debaucheries; in short, ’tis not for a knave and a rogue who, without the whims of fortune and the pleasure Lady Luck seems to take in bringing low those who are deserving of higher station and elevating those who are born only to crawl, and who, without this twist of fate, I say, would doubtless be only too happy to serve as my kitchen boy if we had both remained in the respective positions into which we were born; ’tis not for a tramp such as he to try to set himself up as censor of vices, and in fact for those same vices that he himself possesses to an even more odious degree, because, as we all know, one becomes all the more detestable and more ridiculous when one tries to cast out the mote in others’ eyes when the mote in one’s own eye is a thousand times greater, just as ’tis not for the lame to poke fun at those who limp any more than ’tis right that the blind lead those with only one eye.

That is all I have to say and I bid you farewell.

1
. Governor of the Duchy of Savoy who, as noted, acting upon the request of Madame de Montreuil to the king of Sardinia-Piedmont had Sade arrested and incarcerated in the Fortress of Miolans late in 1773.

2
. During his initial incarceration in Vincennes in October 1763 at the age of twenty-three because of the Jeanne Testard affair, Sade wrote the first of many letters to Sartine begging him to keep the “scandal” quiet. Sartine, whom Sade came to loathe, was indeed instrumental in both putting and keeping him in prison.

3
. From Sade to de Rougemont.

4
. Sade’s term is
avorton,
literally abortion.

5
. The Due de Choiseul, the former secretary of state for war.

6
. In Paris, the square where prisoners were executed, often in public.

7
. Sartine passed on his findings regarding the sexual misdeeds of the king’s loyal subjects to the minister, who in turn would pass them on to Louis XV and Mme de Pompadour, who apparently relished them.

45. To Monsieur Le Noir

May 22, 1781

M
onsieur,

You have done me the honor of coming to see me, of assuring me that
my errors were expiated,
of leading me to believe that my impending freedom would convince me thereof; you suggested that I pen a letter to obtain that freedom; I wrote it word for word in keeping with your good counsel; you told me that you were pleased with the contents of that letter, as indeed you were pleased with me.

Why therefore after all that, Monsieur, is that freedom to which you alluded, falsely it turns out, still but a promise? Are you trying to plant in my mind an opinion, so contrary to the decency and honesty I have always associated with you, that the only purpose of your visit was to deceive me and that you too, Monsieur, are but one more instrument of revenge of that odious creature, for human revenge is apparently the be all and end all of her existence, or who, by punishing me for her own sins, finds remorse for those with which she herself is rent? In short, could the sole reason for your visit be nothing more than to teach me a lesson, that lesson being that ’tis permitted to toy freely with those who are suffering and in pain, that these poor wretches are gullible fools when they promise to mend their ways or are tending in that direction; in short, could your visit have been naught but a lesson in vice, whereas I had every reason to expect from you a lesson in virtue? Those who compel you to take such steps debase you in the extreme by even daring to believe you capable of such acts. Therefore, kindly do me the honor of informing me, either by a letter or a personal visit, the specific reasons why a negotiation undertaken at your suggestion, and buttressed by the interest that you seemed to take in my case, has resulted in a turndown? At the same time, Monsieur, I beg you to let me know whether the moment when I shall be released is still far off.

Meanwhile, Monsieur, I most earnestly ask that I be allowed to see my wife,
¹
as you have led me to believe I might, and that she be permitted to see me alone, I beg of you, Monsieur. Since the sole subject of our discussions will be our personal affairs, and since neither the State nor the government has ever been a part of these matters, however slight, I do believe that one may well dispense with that ostentatious show of harshness that should be meted out only to fools and simpletons, and that to interpose a third party between me and my wife, especially one such as Monsieur de Rougemont, would be the most pointless and most odious thing in the world.
²
Moreover, to make this
respectable
commandant waste precious moments, when
his mind
and
lovely soul
manage to find day in and day out another use of time far more worthy of him, whether devoting himself in turn to culture, improving his knowledge of science or belles-lettres, or doing his best to comfort the poor wretch whose image lies before his very eyes.

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 visit
¹
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.