Letters From Prison (69 page)

In a sense,
Justine, Juliette, Philosophy in the Bedroom,
and
La Nouvelle Justine
were Sade’s efforts during his early post-prison years to re-consitute
The 120 Days of Sodom,
which he assumed lost forever. But miraculously it was not. As we noted in our introduction to that work’s first English-language publication well over thirty years ago:

Though Sade would never know it, the precious roll had not been destroyed. It was found, in the same cell of the Bastille where Sade had been kept prisoner, by one Arnoux de Saint-Maximin, and thence came into the possession of the Villeneuve-Trans family, in whose care it remained for three generations. At the turn of the present century, it was sold to a German collector, and in 1904 it was published by the German psychiatrist, Dr. I wan Bloch, under the pseudonym of Eug
è
ne D
ü
hren. Block justified his publishing the work by its “scientific importance . . . to doctors, jurists, and anthropologists,” pointing out in his notes the “amazing analogies” between cases cited by Sade and those recorded a century later by Krafft-Ebing. Block’s text, however, as Lely notes, is replete with “thousands of errors” which hopelessly denature and distort it.

After Block’s death, the manuscript remained in Germany until 1929, when Maurice Heine, at the behest of the Viscount Charles de***, went to Berlin to acquire it. From 1931 to 1935, Heine’s masterful and authoritative text of the work appeared in three quarto volumes, in what must be considered the original edition of the work.
⁸

In those early days at Charenton, Sade must have sorely regretted his impetuous act of July 2, for in all likelihood he would have been freed when the Bastille was stormed twelve days later Still, he could take some solace from the news that Bastille commandant de Launay, as well as Major de Losme-Salbray and the aide Miray—all of whom Sade loathed—had been hauled from the fortress to the Place de Grève and there slaughtered. That did not, however, make up for the loss of his papers. And meanwhile, there he was, still imprisoned under a
lettre de cachet,
for an indeterminate period.

But the hated
lettres de cachet
were under fire, especially the so-called familial ones, whereby people could have family members incarcerated, often on personal grounds. Days before the revolution, on June 23, 1789, the king himself had come out against them—a trifle late, to be sure, but heads of state throughout history are often painfully slow to act or react to the urgent realities around them. It wasn‘t until March 16, 1790, that the National Assembly formally abolished the
lettres de cachet,
which the king ratified on March 26. Those imprisoned under such letters, the decree proclaimed, were free to go wherever they pleased.

A week before, on March 18, Sade’s two sons, who had not seen their father for fifteen years, went to Charenton to inform him personally of the decree; exceptionally, the three were allowed to walk freely about the grounds and have dinner together unsupervised. When they informed their grandmother of the visit, she responded, perhaps sincerely, that she hoped he would be happy but doubted he had the capacity for happiness. To her confidant Gaufridy, however, to whom she passed on the news five days later that his favorite client might soon be free, she mused whether there might be a loophole in the decree, whether families might still take it unto themselves to keep their loved ones imprisoned by some sort of personal
lettre de cachet.
Opting for caution in those troubled times, however, Madame de Montreuil decided to remain neutral. That way, she figured, if events turned sour (read: if Sade decided to avenge himself), it would be difficult for anyone to blame her. “Whatever happens,” she wrote, “one would have nothing to explain.”

Exactly ten days later, on April 2, a Good Friday, Sade left Charenton a free man, after thirteen long years of impossible incarceration. He left, as he describes it, “with only one louis in my pocket,” wearing a waistcoat and no breeches—breeches being the mark of aristocracy. He first went to Sainte-Aure and asked to see his wife, but was coldly rebuffed. As for former friends, most had fled Paris if not the country. He then decided to try Monsieur de Milly, a
procurator
at the Chatelet court, who was now retired but had formerly handled Sade’s affairs in Paris. Monsieur de Milly received him warmly, offered him temporary room and board, and lent him six louis, enough to keep him for a week or so. Four days later, Sade moved to the Hotel du Bouloir, a stone’s throw from de Milly’s house and hard by the Place des Victoires, the spot where all his trouble had begun, for it was there, exactly twenty-two years before, he had propositioned Rose Keller on April 3, Easter Sunday.

But Rose Keller was the farthest thing from Sade’s mind at that point. Money was foremost in his thoughts, and for the moment the only place he could get it was, ironically, from la présidente. On April 12, Sade boldly approached her, and doubtless to his surprise she lent him a few louis, with the admonition however that he write Gaufridy immediately and obtain money to pay her back and have the wherewithal to fend for himself. It was made clear that he should not try her again. But Sade had already written Gaufridy the fourth day after his release, while he was still at Monsieur de Milly’s, asking for money and also informing the lawyer that he had petitioned the Paris court to restore him his civil rights. Since the petition was bound to be granted, Sade informed Gaufridy in that same letter that from now on, “I and I alone am now in charge of administering my affairs, I alone will decide how they are to be managed. Therefore, from now on you will deal only with me.”

Having not heard back for a week, on April 12 he urgently wrote again:

1
. Whose name, perhaps prophetically, literally means “mourning city.”

2
. Gilbert Lely,
Vie du Marquis de Sade,
rev. ed. (Paris: Au Cercle du Livre Pré-cieux, 1966), Book V, p. 190.

3
. Roughly two weeks later, Crosne resigned his post and fled to England. He returned to Paris under the Terror and was arrested, incarcerated at Picpus, and executed on April 28, 1794.

4
. Lely,
op. cit.,
p. 192.

5
. Founded under Louis XIV through the benevolence of one of the king’s advisers, Sébastien Leblanc, who bequeathed most of his fortune to the order in 1670 on the condition it be used to care for the indigent ill.

6
. From the Sade family archives. Cited in Maurice Lever,
A Biography,
p. 351.

7
. Actually, Chenon was assaulted the following day in the gardens of the Palais Royal by a roving group of men and women on the lookout for any prey. They tried to hang him from a nearby tree but finally let him go.

8
. Marquis de Sade,
The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings,
compiled and translated by Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver (New York: Grove Press, 1966), p. 186.

108. To Monsieur Gaufridy

April 12, 1790

I
came out of Charenton (to which I had been transferred from the Bastille) on Good Friday. The better the day the better the deed! Yes, my good friend, ‘twas that day I regained my freedom; as a result, I have decided to celebrate it as a holiday for the rest of my life, and instead of those concerts, those frivolous walking parades that custom has irreligiously sanctified at that time of year when we ought to be moaning and weeping, instead, I say, of all those mundane vanities, whenever the forty-fifth day after Ash Wednesday brings us to another Good Friday, you shall see me get down on my knees, pray, resolve to mend my ways, and keep to those resolutions.

Now to the facts, my dear lawyer, for I can see that you are about to echo what everybody is telling me:
’tis not talk we want, sir, but facts—
to the facts then: the facts are that I landed in the middle of Paris with only one louis in my pocket, not knowing where to go, where to lodge, where to dine, where to find myself any money. Monsieur de Milly, procurator at the Châtelet, who has been looking after my interests in this part of the country for twenty-six years, was kind enough to offer me his bed, some board, and six louis. Not wanting to overstay my welcome or become a burden, I had set forth after four days at M. de Milly’s with only three louis left of the original six to fend for myself, to find an inn in which to stay, a domestic, a tailor, my meals, etc., all that with three louis.

Given my circumstances, I asked la présidente de Montreuil to ask her notary to advance me three louis, on condition that I write you immediately in order to reimburse the borrowed sum and second to remain alive—a request that the lady graciously accorded. Therefore, my good lawyer, I beseech you to dispatch to me without any delay whatsoever the preliminary sum of 1,000 crowns, the same sum I asked you for the other day, and whereof my need is no less extreme than the promptitude of your response is essential.

Letter 109. To Monsieur
Gaufridy

[Early May, 1790]

I
have just this moment received your letter of the fourteenth: since it arrives too soon to be in answer to mine, I shall overcome my disappointment at not encountering here one of those charming notes which by far outvalue love letters, and with which one obtains money immediately.

You must not doubt that if I did not write to you during my detention, ‘twas because I was deprived of the means to do so; I truly cannot forgive you for assuming my silence was due to anything else. I would not have bothered you about business details; in my position what would have been the point? But I would have inquired after your news, I would have given you my own; upon the chains that weighed so heavily upon me we might have dropped a flower or two. But my captors would not allow it; I did venture a letter to you in that vein, it was returned to me,
thrown
back at me, after that I wrote no more. Therefore, my dear lawyer, I repeat it, I cannot forgive you for having doubted my feelings in your regard. We have known one another since childhood, I need not remind you of it; a long-standing friendship made it natural that it be you in whom I placed my trust when long ago I asked you to take on the management of my affairs; what motive could I have had for changing my attitude?
⁹
It is not your fault I was arrested at La Coste, but mine, I believed I was in safety there and I had no idea what an abominable family I had to contend with. I assume you will understand, that when I speak here of family I am referring only to the Montreuils; you cannot have the faintest idea of the
infernal
and
anthropophagous
manner in which these people have behaved with me. Had I been the last and lowliest of the living, nobody would have dared treat me with the barbarity I have suffered thanks to them; in a word, my eyesight is gone and my chest ruined; for lack of exercise I have become enormously fat, so much so I can scarcely move about; all of my feelings and sensations are extinguished; I have no more taste for anything, no taste for love; the society I so madly missed looks so boring to me today . . . so forlorn and . . . so sad! There are moments when I am moved by a wish to join the Trappists, and I cannot guarantee that I may not go off some fine day and vanish altogether, without anyone ever knowing what has become of me. Never have I been such a misanthrope as since I have returned into the midst of men, if in their eyes I have the look of a stranger, they may be quite sure that they have the same effect upon me.

I have kept myself busy during my detention; consider, my dear lawyer, I had fifteen volumes ready for the printer,
¹⁰
now that I am at large, hardly a quarter of those manuscripts remains to me. Through unpardonable thoughtlessness, Madame de Sade allowed some of them to be lost, let others be seized, and lo and behold thirteen years of toil gone for naught! Three-quarters of these writings had remained behind in my room at the Bastille; on the fourth of July, I was removed from there to Charenton; on the fourteenth the Bastille was stormed, overrun, and my manuscripts, six hundred books I owned, two thousand livres’ worth of furniture, precious portraits, the lot is lacerated, burned, carried off, pillaged, without my being able to recover so much as a straw; and all that owing to the sheer negligence of Madame de Sade. She had had ten whole days
¹¹
to retrieve my possessions; she had to know that the Bastille, which over that entire ten-day period they had been cramming with guns, powder, soldiers, was being prepared either for an
attack
or for a
defense.
Why then did she not move quickly to get my possessions out of harm’s way? my manuscripts?. . . my manuscripts?. . . my manuscripts over whose loss I am shedding tears of blood! . . . Other beds, tables, chests of drawers can be found, but not ideas . . . . No, my friend, no, I shall never be able to describe to you my despair at their loss, for me it is irreparable. Since then, the sensitive and delicate Madame de Sade refuses to see me. Anyone else would have said: “He is unhappy, we must dry his tears away”; this logic of feelings has not been hers. I have not lost enough, she wishes to ruin me, she is asking for a separation. Through this inconceivable proceeding she is going to justify all the calumnies that have been spewed out against me; she is going to leave her children and me destitute and despised, and all that in order to live, or rather to
vegetate deliriously,
as she puts it, in a convent
¹²
where some
confessor
is doubtless consoling her, making her see where the path of crime, with all its attendant horror and indignity, is going to take us all. When ’tis my most mortal enemy who has her ear,
¹³
the advice my wife is receiving could not possibly be worse, nor more disastrous.