Letters From Prison (19 page)

So, in two words, my daughter is ugly?
³
You tell me that in the gentlest way, but she’s ugly, that’s what you’re really saying. Well, ’tis her bad luck! Let her have some wit and virtue, ‘twill be better for her than if she had a pretty face! —How I’d like to have been part of the game of hide-and-seek!
⁴
’Tis a game I adore. —From what account shall we take the money, you ask, to pay young Seignon?
⁵
Ah, let me ponder that for a moment. . . Shall I take from this account?. . . or from that?. . . hmm. This one or that? Ah, Good Lord! you are all thoroughly confused! I have it: don’t pay him at all: then you’ll not have to worry about finding the sum! —The chocolate is good. —Oh! I’m aware that they don’t make wives like mine anymore, that is also why I beg of you to take good care of her for me. —My nonsense tales, you say, are only fit to amuse children? And what am I here, Saint Rousset, what am I if not a child? Your tales amuse me, interest me, and afford me the greatest pleasure: don’t ever deprive me of them. . . As for mine, if they bore you I’ll suppress them. But to talk naught but reason, that would be pretty dry . . . Adieu, I love you and embrace you as the second best and dearest friend I have in all the world.

1
. Robert François Damiens (1715[?]-1757). A French fanatic who stabbed Louis XV on January 5, 1757, as the king was entering his carriage at Versailles. Convicted of attempted regicide, Damiens was sentenced to an atrocious death on the Place de Grève. He was publicly tortured, then torn to pieces by horses. Sade considers his endless torture worse than that of Damiens.

2
. The fruits of war. Sade is implying he is a prisoner of war, a status that affects his manner of reasoning.

3
. In fact she apparently was quite ugly. Born on April 17, 1771, Madeleine-Laure was graced neither physically nor mentally. She retired early on to a nunnery, first to Saint-Aure, where her mother lodged. She never married, and spent her life in meditation and prayer.

4
. One presumes the Saint had been playing
cachette,
hide-and-seek, with Sade’s children.

5
. Unidentifiable. Presumably a teacher, or perhaps a tradesman. “Hmm . . . from what account?” muses the penurious marquis.

13. To Madame de Sade

[March 22, 1779]

I
wrote a long letter yesterday evening to Mademoiselle Rousset, the purpose of which, my dear friend, was to bid her farewell. . . for from what she says I gather she is leaving. That was the mysterious matter she did not want (or so you claim) to let you read in her letter. I leave it to you to judge whether ’tis an act of folly, and defer to your discretion and friendship both to her and to me to stop this ridiculous scheme. Moreover, it gives me a clear indication that my detention is slated to be much longer, for if ‘twere merely a question of a few months, she would keep her promise to wait for me. It strikes me that when it comes to signals, ’tis impossible to give one any more forthright than this one, and I assure you that if ’tis not a joke, as I trust and believe, and that she is indeed leaving, then I shall in any case be in a state of great despair, upset not only at losing her but also at knowing that there is no end in sight to my woes. Pray keep me informed about that, for I shall hold in abeyance both my attitude and my grief until I know the outcome. I expect to hear about it in your next letter, and meanwhile, reply line by line to the letter you have just written me, as is my wont.

I am pleased you are said to have gained a bit of weight and that the diet I recommended is working for you; it is unique, you may be sure, and I intend to adopt it for myself as soon as I am out.

Monsieur Le Noir did not increase the number of my walks. And it was pointless to strike out the line
“he appeared to me surprised that you were closely confined,”
because Monsieur Le Noir knows full well how confined I am, and because the commander here would not confine me in one way or another without orders from above; he does nothing on his own. Therefore, if Monsieur Le Noir appeared to you surprised, etc., he was putting on an act for you.
¹
Certainly, I am much more restricted than I was before; I have already gone into the details for you two or three times. The hope you held forth in June made me suspend judgment, but if it proves empty, as seems all too likely, and if Monsieur Le Noir promises you to look into my situation and see what he can do to improve it, you should simply tell me to write down, in the form of a memorandum, the various things I need for my comfort, and I shall do it; ask that they be implemented. Meanwhile, do keep on asking for that third walk, which I desire more than ever, since now’s the season to take advantage of it; but try to have it granted me in the afternoon, for ’tis only then that walks really do me any good. Certainly, if your hope of last June were to happen in everything except the extra walk I ask for, we could spare ourselves the trouble of asking for the rest. But if ’tis false, as seems very likely, then I most sincerely desire not to spend the summer as badly as I have the winter. Therefore I await your reply on the subject. You may dispense with any discussion of business matters, however brief, for most assuredly I shall not write one word in response. On that point, you must have received the notice wherein I give my word of honor, and I can tell you I shall not depart from it one iota.

Those verses are by Paulet, of that I am quite sure, and I persist in saying that the letter and the verses were sent from Paris, the lot through Saint Rousset or her intermediaries. You tell me that this Monsieur Ives (another made-up name, like Bontoux’s)
²
is a village wit who talks endlessly and who makes the two of you die laughing in the letters Gothon
³
has written. That’s precisely where I catch you out, for there is nothing less comical and nothing less endless than Paulet’s letter. The letter and the verses are very well written, in an easy and agreeable style, and are, in a word, the work of one of the Saint’s lovers. For she writes even better than that, and she did not want it to be her style; I would recognize it, of course. ’Tis therefore one more clear signal that I shall not waste my time either scrutinizing or interpreting. The only signals to which I pay any attention are the good old-fashioned ones, solid and substantial like the almanac she gave me at New Year’s, for example . . . Charming little New Year’s gift,
more charming with each passing year
And then the little looking glass shattered into a thousand pieces, which, without question, most clearly means that this is not going to be a lucky year for me, there being nothing more unlucky than broken mirrors. Those are what I call understandable signals. Oh! when they are like that I do understand them . . . But as for the others, in all candor I simply don’t put myself to any trouble over them. I do not know how
to read her,
Mademoiselle Rousset says to me in her letter . . . Ask her on my behalf what one should do to know how to read her: do you turn the page sideways, or upside down? Let her at least tell me how if she would have me
learn to read her!
Is she implying to me that I do not know how to figure out the special
punctuation, the dots, the commas, the dashes,
etc., which, following your example, she has got into the habit of cramming into her letters? If that is what she means, she is right to maintain that I do not know how to read her; and, if such is the case, she may rest assured that were she to write me letters in that kind for a hundred years I would be no further advanced, for I would have made no effort to decipher them. She is wrong, she adds, to have told me twice the truth when I asked for it only once . . . Please do me the favor of asking her for me in which of the two sentences I copied out for her yesterday is this glaring truth recorded, for as one of them says white and the other black, ‘twere well I be told which one contains the truth, so that, once I know which it is, I importune you no more upon this point. . .
The truth!
I’m most pleased that she dare assert that she told me
the truth.
Does she know it, the truth I ask for? It is short, it is brief; it is useless to drown it inside a jumble of nonsense about the hereafter. Simply write it down for me in a single line:
You will be released upon the---- day of the month of-in the year-at-o’clock in the morning or afternoon.
As you see, what I ask for is short and to the point; no need to make so much ado about it. It required neither thirty blank letters,
nor.
. . etc. All it required was a single little note, which you could just as easily have delivered to me as you did your infernal blank letters. But you cannot, you tell me?. . . A lie, an atrocious lie . . . Say rather that you do not want to, and at the same time know in your heart of hearts that I shall never forget how you behaved on this score.

So you have written to Gothon telling her
to write to me every month . .
. Something to look forward to, indeed . . .
every month
. . . So I have a hundred more of them to spend here! . . .
Every month,
how nice it sounds. You wrote to her because I told you to—all well and good, but from that phrase
every month
Gothon will understand—’tis as plain as the nose on her face—that I still have a very long time to spend here, and no longer will she have the illusion under which I told you ‘twas necessary we keep her, so that, thinking we were due to arrive from one day to the next, she would maintain the chateau at all times in a proper state and above all not raise any silkworms. Now find a way to make sure both those things come to pass.

A further bit of kindness.
You are not going to send the stomachers back to me because
you hope
I’ll have enough of them to last for the rest of my detention. Now, I very clearly informed you that I was supplied up until the end of May 1780. Thus you
hope
that at that point I shall need them no more. What a charming idea. Now, I do not wear them in summertime. Consequently, ’tis only twenty-one months from now that I might have a need for those in your possession. And you hope that by that time I’ll not need them anymore. Verily, I thank you, Madame! When I look back upon the period of my sufferings, I shall be able to think of how well you fulfilled your duties toward me and to say that you were a source of great comfort to me. I know full well that your answer to that will be that I lack common sense, that I get upset for no reason and that I always see everything in the worst light. For two years now, Madame, you have been writing me those fine phrases, and yet you must admit that when they began to reach me, ‘twas for good reason I got upset and I was not wrong in seeing things in the worst light. Inasmuch as I have been suffering ever since, who will assure me at present that more of the same is not in store for me? Am I in any way better off than I was at that time? Not by one iota; and ’tis a truly unusual and perhaps unparalleled thing, that with two years of suffering behind me, I have cause, both by the letters I receive and the treatment I endure, to consider myself worse off than I was in my first months here . . . And you believe I shall forgive those who have concocted this kind of torture to inflict upon me? I shall eat my own soul sooner than forsake vengeance . . . I shall prove to these unworthy monsters, to these execrable beasts vomited up out of hell to visit un-happiness upon others, that I am not their toy, and that if I had the misfortune to be it for a while, they may just as well become mine someday, no matter who they are.

Keep your bottle of Muscat wine. I asked whether Chauvin
⁴
had sent a lot of it, but since there is so little, I don’t want any; and above all do not buy me any, because I’ll drink nothing from any shopkeeper . . . it would be doctored stuff; I’ll not touch a drop . . . Besides, my fancy for it is gone . . . This situation I am in is both horrible and extraordinary; and I feel something very strange that I had never experienced in the outside world. I would like to have some experienced soul-healer explain it to me. Twenty times a day you have an overwhelming desire for all kinds of things, and then the next moment, without having procured them, you have an awful sense of revulsion for them. That was the way it was about every one of the things I asked you for, and as soon as they reached me I found them disgusting: explain that to me.

What is all this nonsense you keep feeding me over and over that
you do not understand how the doctor can be so philosophical as to laugh at a sentence which you did not write to him?
I said that
IF you had sent that sentence to the doctor, he would have been philosophical enough not to be angered by it.
That is clear, is it not? Personally, I see nothing strange about it; and there’s no point your telling me that I talk without knowing what I’m saying.

Nor did I say that the doctor’s daughter was a beauty, but I did say that she was not dark-haired, that she was fair. Does that mean I said she is a beauty? As far as the duchess is concerned, still nothing at the bottom of your portrait: she looks as much like La Martignan as I do Sixtus the Fifth. La Martignan is a tramp, in large part the cause of my affair,
⁵
and who acted out of revenge because I would have nothing to do with her in the days when I first went to Provence. She is affected, short in stature, and has a common look about her, whereas the duchess, along with a very amiable character, has very noble features and the look of
Minerva.
I persist in telling you that there is no lawyer in Paris named
Bontoux.
When I tried to convince Simeon that there was, he brought me a register, printed in Paris, listing the names and addresses of all the lawyers in Paris, amongst whom I espied no one by that name. So don’t talk to me any more about that brute. As for the unpleasant-looking countenance worn by the somber creature who was introduced to me by that name, let him go by whatever name he pleases,
Chivarucmarbarbarmarocsacrominecpanti,
if he likes, it’s all the same to me; but may the Good Lord take whatever steps He must to make sure he is never alone in the same room as me. I impatiently await the four volumes of
Les Hommes Illustres;
when you send me those first four, let me know how many more there are. And the little candles, for God’s sake, the little candles! Why do you persist in refusing to send them? I shall return Petrarch during the holidays, perhaps before. Does your father still go to the law courts? Bully for him! When one has a hundred thousand livres in annuities, one must be a fool to get up at five in the morning to go stick one’s nose in other people’s business! Is he by now presiding judge in his chamber? And your brother the knight, in what wretched regiment is he serving today? I find him mentioned nowhere in the almanac. Why do you never go to dine at your parents’, young lady?. . . For shame, you should be ashamed!
Honor your father and mother, says Moses, and eat often at home.
How is Madame de Plissay?
⁶
And give my regards to Madame de Chamousset.
⁷
I have always liked and respected her, and I would be willing to wager she does not dislike me either. It gives me pleasure to be told that I shall see Laure
⁸
when I am released . . . That, for example, is one desire that has yet to turn into revulsion. . . There are two or three others of the same sort, about which, Madame la Marquise, I shall inform you at the proper time and place. You did most positively tell me, my sweet, that
“your children left satisfied they were to see you in two years”
—that, word for word, is what you wrote. Which means, I believe, that I shall not see them for two years. You now change your tune, so much the better, for I confess it would have sorely grieved me to leave the country without seeing them. Thinking about them drives me crazy. If only you could see me talking to them all by myself. . . You’d think I’d lost my wits. Not a night goes by without my dreaming of them. I’ll write to them soon. I greatly appreciate all the charming things you tell me now and then about that duchess. I’d like to have sufficient wit to respond to them. Let it suffice that you know my heart is touched by them.