Letters From Prison (10 page)

1
. Sade is of course referring to his wife.

2
. All of Sade’s letters were read and if deemed necessary censored by the prison authorities.

3
. That is, Madame de Montreuil.

4
. Sade understands that the family’s easiest explanation for his unrepentant sexual excesses is simply that he is mad. If by keeping him confined in prison they manage to drive him mad, they will prove to the world they were right.

5
. Under the monarchy, while an elaborate judiciary system did exist, the king could take matters into his own hands and condemn—or pardon—as he saw fit.

3. To Madame de Montreuil

March 13, 1777

I
f in a soul capable of having betrayed in one fell stroke all the most sacred sentiments, those of humanity in having a son arrested beside the coffin of his mother, those of hospitality by betraying someone who had just given himself over to your care, those of Nature in not even respecting the refuge of your daughter’s embrace; if, I say, in such a person some slight spark of compassion might still exist, I should perhaps try to awaken it by the most accurate and at the same time most frightful description of my horrible plight. But independently of the fact that these complaints are completely useless, I still have enough pride, however brought low it may be, not to embellish your triumph with my tears, and even in the bosom of misfortune I shall still find the courage to refrain from complaining to my tyrant.

A few simple considerations will therefore be the sole point of this letter. You can value them as you like, and then I shall say no more . . . Yes, I shall seal my lips, so that my opinions shall no longer be dinned into your ears, leaving you for a while at least the chance to revel in the knowledge of my unhappiness.

I have long been your victim, Madame, but do not think to make me your dupe. It is sometimes interesting to be the one, always humiliating to be the other, and I credit myself with being blessed with as much insight as you can presume to have of deceit. For pity’s sake, Madame, let us never confuse my case and my imprisonment: you will seek to bring my case to a conclusion for the sake of my children; and my imprisonment, which you claim indispensable to that end, and which it is most certainly not, is not, and cannot be, anything but the effect of your own vengeance. The most terrifying of all the legal opinions heard so far is that of M. Simeon of Aix, who said in no uncertain terms that it was quite possible to obtain a judgment whereby
exile would serve as prison to the accused.
Those are Simeon’s very own words.
¹
Would not a
lettre de cachet,
in fact, which would have banished me from the kingdom, have served the same purpose?—of course it would— but it would not have served your fury nearly as well.

Was it you, then, who concocted and had carried out the plan to have me locked up between four walls? And by what misadventure have the wise magistrates who today govern the State allowed themselves be hoodwinked to the point of believing they were serving the interests of a family when it was clearly a question of slaking a woman’s thirst for revenge? Why am I once again behind bars? why is an imprudence being mistaken for a crime? why am I not being allowed to prove to my judges the difference between the two? and why are you the one who is keeping me from doing so? These are the questions to which Madame deigns not to reply, is that not true? Ten or a dozen bolts and locks serve as your answer instead, but this tyrannical argument, to which the laws are formally opposed, is not eternally triumphant. That is what consoles and comforts me.

Focusing upon my case alone, is it to clear my name that you are having me punished? and are you suffering under the illusion that this punishment shall be ignored? Do you for a moment believe that they who, sooner or later, shall hear of it shall surely assume that there has to have been a crime somewhere, since there has been a punishment? Be it meted out by the king, be it meted out by judges, ’tis still a punishment, and will the public—which is neither indulgent nor overly curious to find out the truth of the matter—make this frivolous distinction? And will it not always see crime wherever punishment has been exacted? And what a triumph then for my enemies! What fertile soil you prepare for them in the future! and how tempted they will be to have a further go at me, since the results correspond so nicely to their intentions! All your scandalous acts over the past five years have nicely prepared people’s minds and behavior in my regard, and you have been well aware of the cruel situation I have found myself in during this whole period, the constant target of fresh calumnies, which a sordid interest used to build upon the unhappiness of my situation. How do you think people can fail to judge a man guilty when the authorities have come knocking at his door three or four times, and when they then throw him in jail once they have their hands on him? Who do you hope to convince that I have not been in prison when they haven’t seen me or even heard from me all this time? After all the means taken to capture me, you can well imagine that the only conclusion people can come to, since I have dropped out of sight, is that I have been arrested. What advantage will derive from this? My reputation lost forever, and new troubles at every turn. That is what I shall owe to the wonderful manner in which you are handling my affairs.

But let us consider matters from another point of view. Is this a personal punishment I’m receiving? and is the thought this will turn me back onto the straight and narrow, as if I were a naughty little boy? A complete waste of time and effort, Madame. If the wretchedness and ignominy to which the Marseilles judges’ absurd proceedings have reduced me, by punishing the most commonplace of indiscretions as though it were a crime, have failed to make me mend my ways, your iron bars and your iron doors and your locks will be no more successful. You ought to know my heart well enough by now to be convinced that the mere suspicion of dishonor is capable of withering it completely, and you are smart enough to understand that a misdeed, whose origin lies in hot-bloodedness, is not corrected by making that selfsame blood more bitter, by firing the brain through deprivation and inflaming the imagination through solitude. What I am calling to mind here will be supported by every reasonable being who knows me passing well and who is not infatuated with the idiotic notion that, to correct or punish a man you must shut him up like a wild beast; and I challenge anyone to conclude other than that, from such methods, the only possible result in my case is the most certain perturbation of my organs.

If therefore neither my behavior nor my reputation stand to gain from this latest act of kindness on your part—if, on the contrary, there are nothing but negatives and, what is more, it disturbs my brain— what purpose will it have served, Madame, I ask you? Your vengeance, true? Ah, yes! I know all too well, ’tis always there one must return, and everything I have just written is quite beside the point. But what does all that mean, so long as I play the sacrificial lamb . . . and you are satisfied? On the contrary, you must surely say to yourself,
the greater the damage wrought, the more content I shall be.
But should you not already have been sufficiently contented, Madame, by the six months of prison I served in Savoy
for the same reason?
Am I to believe that five years of afflictions and stigmas were not enough? and was this appalling denouement absolutely necessary, especially after the frightful demonstration I gave you of what lengths this sort of mistreatment could drive me to, by risking my life to escape from it! You must admit that, after that experience, ’tis an act of barbarity on your part to have the same thing inflicted upon me again, and with episodes a thousand times crueler than before and which, having the effect they do on my brain, will at the first possible opportunity have me dashing my head against the bars that presently confine me. Do not reduce me to despair, Madame; I cannot endure this horrible solitude, I feel it. Remember that you will never derive any good from making my soul more savage and my heart immune to feeling, the only possible results of the frightful state in which you have had me put. Give me time to make amends for my errors, and do not make yourself responsible for those into which perhaps I shall again be swept by the dreadful disorder I feel aborning in my mind.

I am respectfully, Madame, your most humble and most obedient servant.

DE SADE

P.S.—If the person from Montpellier
²
returns there, I hope it will not be without the most urgent recommendation for her not to breathe a word about the scandalous scene to which you, with your usual wit, made her a witness, a blunder that, considering the circumstances of what her father has been up to,
³
is assuredly quite inexcusable.

1
. Joseph Jerome Simeon, a lawyer with the high court of Aix-en-Provence, who drafted a petition to be presented to the king and his council in an effort to overturn in absentia the sentence condemning Sade to death.

2
. Sade is doubtless referring to Catherine Treillet, known at La Coste as Justine, who had accompanied Madame de Sade to Paris in February but was now planning to go home. Before she left Paris in April, Madame de Montreuil had a “private talk” with her, admonishing not to reveal the specifics of that mad winter at La Coste—an admonishment surely accompanied by money.

3
. Catherine’s father had tried to kill Sade by firing a pistol at him point-blank at La Coste. After which, he hurried to Aix and lodged a complaint against the marquis with the procureur général—the attorney general—for kidnapping his daughter.

4. To Madame de Sade

April 18, 1777

’T
is most rightly said, my dear friend, that edifices constructed in a position such as mine are built only on sand, and that all the ideas one forms are naught but illusions, which crumble to dust as soon as they are conceived. Of the six combinations I figured out all by myself, and upon which I based a hope of some enlightenment in the near future, there remains, thanks be to God, not a single one, and your letter of April 14 caused them to disappear the way the sun’s rays dissipate the morning dew. ’Tis true that on the other hand I did find in that same letter the comforting sentence telling me that
I could be quite sure that I shall not stay here one minute longer than the time necessary.
I know nothing on earth so reassuring as this expression, so that if ’tis necessary for me to remain here six months, six months I shall remain. That is charming, and verily, those in charge of guiding your style must perforce congratulate themselves upon the progress you are making in their profound art of sprinkling salt on the wounds of the wretched. Indeed, they have succeeded masterfully. I warn you, however, that ’twill not be long before my head explodes because of the cruel life I am leading. I can see it coming, and I hereby predict that they shall have every reason to repent for having used an excessive dose of severity with me, which is so ill-suited to my character. ’Tis for my own welfare, they maintain. Divine phrase, wherein one recognizes all too clearly the ordinary language of
imbecility triumphant.
’Tis for a man’s own good that you expose him to maddening conditions, for his own good that you wreck his health, for his own good that you feed him on the tears of despair! So far, I must confess, I’ve not had the pleasure of understanding or experiencing that kind of well-being . . .

You are wrong, the fools gravely declare to you:
this gives you the chance to think things over.
’Tis true, it does make one think, but would you like to know the one thought this infamous brutality has engendered in me? The thought, deeply engraved in my soul, of fleeing as soon as I am able from a country where a citizen’s services count as nothing when it comes to compensating for a momentary lapse, where imprudence is punished as if it were a crime, where a woman, because she is cunning and filled with deceit, finds the secret of enslaving innocence to her caprices, or rather to her commanding and personal interest to bury the veritable crux of the matter; and, far from those whose goal is to harass and annoy, and all their accomplices, of setting off in search of a free country where I can faithfully serve the prince who will provide me with asylum there, and thus may merit from him what I could not obtain in my native land . . . justice and to be left in peace.

Those, my dear friend, are my sole and unique thoughts, and I aspire to naught but the happy moment when I can put them into effect. We have been misled, you say. Not so . . . I assure you that I was not fooled for one minute, and you ought to remember how, just before your room was filled with
a pack of rascals
¹
—who, without producing any order from the king, had come, or so they claimed, to arrest me on the king’s behalf—I told you that I did not trust your mother’s reassuring letter and that since it was full of tenderness, one could be sure that her soul was feeding on a diet of deceit. No, my dear friend, no, I may have been surprised, but as for mistakes I shall admit to none until the day I see that creature turn honest and truthful, which in all likelihood is not just around the corner. In coming here I acted like Caesar, who was wont to say that
‘twere better to expose oneself once in one’s life to the dangers one fears than to live in a constant concern to try to avoid them.
That reasoning led him to the Senate, where he knew full well the conspirators were awaiting him. I did the same, and like him I shall always be greater through my innocence and my frankness than my enemies through their baseness and the secret rancors that motivate them. You ask me how I am. But what’s the use of my telling you? If I do, my letter will not reach you. Still, on an off chance, I am going to satisfy you, for I cannot imagine they will be so unfair as to prevent me from replying to something they have allowed you to ask me. I am in a tower locked up behind nineteen iron doors, my only source of light being two little windows each outfitted with a score of bars. For about ten or twelve minutes a day I have the company of a man who brings me food. The rest of the time I spend alone and in weeping. . . There’s my life . . . That is how, in this country, they set a man straight: ’Tis by cutting off all his connections with society, to which on the contrary he needs to be brought closer so that he may be brought back to the path of goodness whence he had the misfortune to stray. Instead of good advice, wise counsel, I have my despair and my tears. Yes, my dear friend, such is my fate. How could anyone fail to cherish virtue when they offer it to you under such divine colors! As for the manner in which I am treated, ’tis in all fairness with civility in all things . . . but so much fussing over trifles, so much childishness that, when I arrived here, I thought I had been transported to the Lilliputians’ isle, where men being only eight inches tall, their behavior must be in keeping with their stature. At first, I found it funny, finding it difficult to get it into my head that people who otherwise appeared to be fairly sensible could adopt such foolish conduct. Later on I began to lose patience. Finally, I have taken to imagining that I am only twelve years old—’tis more honest than if I were to pretend the others were that age—and this idea of having reverted to childhood somewhat tempers the regret a reasonable person would otherwise feel at seeing himself treated in this manner. But one completely amusing detail I almost forgot is their promptness to spy on you, down to your least facial expression, and to report it on the spot to whomever is in charge. At first I was fooled by this, and my frame of mind, always affected by and attuned to your letters, indiscreetly revealed itself one day when I was especially enjoying a note from you. How quickly your following letters made me realize how foolish I was! From then on I resolved to be as hypocritical as the others, and these days I control myself, so that not even the shrewdest of them can figure out my feelings from my face. Well then, my pet, there’s one virtue I’ve nonetheless acquired! I dare you now to come here and tell me that one gains nothing in prison! As for the walks and the exercise you advised me to take, verily you speak as if I were in some country house where I might do as I please . . . When they let the dog out of his kennel he trots off to spend
one hour
in a kind of cemetery about forty feet square, surrounded by walls more than fifty feet high, and this charming favor is not yet granted him as often as he would like. You can well imagine—or at least you ought to—how many disadvantages would result from leaving a man the same freedom one allows animals; his health might pick up all of a sudden, and then where the devil would their projects be, they whose only goal is to see him dead? During the sixty-five days I have been here, I have consequently breathed fresh air for five hours all told, on five different occasions. Compare that with the exercise you know I am used to taking, which is absolutely essential for me, and then judge for yourself what state I am in! The result is terrible headaches, which refuse to go away and totally exhaust me, dreadful nervous pains, vapors, and a complete inability to sleep, all of which cannot fail to lead to serious illness sooner or later. But what does that matter so long as the présidente is pleased and so long as her dull-witted husband can say:
“That’s all to the good, all to the good, ‘twill make him mull things over.”
Farewell, my heart, be well and love me a little: that idea is the only one capable of easing my sufferings.