Letters From Prison (2 page)

Yet, even in this presumably enlightened age, to pronounce the name Sade in polite company (or even impolite) generally draws a skeptical if not disapproving look, a knowing guffaw, a remark that, however seemingly innocuous, is fraught with negative implications: Why is someone like
you
involved with someone like
him?
(Such a question presumes judgments about both parties that are, in all probability, far from the mark.) The fact is, despite all redoubtable efforts to rehabilitate him by contemporary scholars and writers, Sade remains a marked man, as he was during most of his lifetime, and those in any way involved with him and his writings are generally assumed guilty by association. That is doubtless how Sade would have liked it, for however the world might judge him, he was without question one of the great rebels of history. Doubting everything, attacking everything, railing against society, religion, and authority in all its forms, excoriating laws and the courts, bewigged judges, corrupt prosecutors, venal police, decrying hypocritical clergy, he reached the only philosophical conclusion that such an attitude demanded if taken to its extreme: utter anarchy, in which no law or official constraint impeded the freedom of the individual—especially if that individual was the marquis himself.

Sade was different from most men, physically and psychically, as he was the first to recognize. On the one hand, he had insatiable and, putting it mildly, bizarre sexual appetites, and at the same time he suffered from a sexual dysfunction that made it increasingly difficult to satisfy those imperious appetites. In a moving letter to his wife written from the Bastille, probably in late 1784, he expounds candidly on the problem, which, he notes, is becoming increasingly acute, adding that he intends to seek immediate medical advice as soon as he is free. By the time he was in his mid-thirties, if not before, Sade fully recognized his difference—his “separateness,” as de Beauvoir terms it—and set about not only justifying it, which he does endlessly both in his work and his extraordinary letters, but analyzing it. What clearly emerges from these letters is the extent of Sade’s self-awareness. “Know thyself,” said the philosopher, and Sade spent endless hours, thanks in great measure to the thousands of hours of solitude imposed upon him by society, in the introspective search for who and what he was
au fond.
Society’s intent, he believed, indeed its mandate, was to skewer separateness by forcing the individual to integrate into the community: thus the uncontrolled rage in his writings against those who would try to inhibit him, control him, make him conform. Yet ironically Sade was in a very real sense a conformist; as a proud aristocrat, from one of the oldest and most distinguished families of Provence, he wanted, and strove to be, a member of the community. He wanted all the rights and privileges of the reigning establishment, but none of its restrictions. Obviously, he could not have both. As de Beauvoir noted in her pioneering essay, “Must We Burn Sade?” written some fifty years ago:

Sade tried to make of his psycho-physical destiny an ethical choice; and of this act, in which he assumed his separateness, he attempted to make an example and an appeal. It is thus that his adventure assumes a wide human significance. Can we, without renouncing our individuality, satisfy our aspirations to universality? Or is it only by the sacrifice of our individual differences that we can integrate ourselves into the community? This problem concerns us all. In Sade the differences are carried to the point of outrageousness, and the immensity of his literary effort shows how passionately he wished to be accepted by the human community. Thus we find in his work the most extreme form of the conflict from which no individual can escape without self-deception. It is the paradox and, in a sense, the triumph of Sade that his persistent singularity helps us define the human drama in its general aspect.

This volume collects most of the surviving letters that Sade wrote during his more than thirteen-year imprisonment in the dungeons of Vincennes and the Bastille, and the Charenton Asylum, from 1777 to 1790. He was thirty-seven when he went to prison this time (he had been in prison several times before, once in debtor’s prison and thrice for offense to the morals of the kingdom), and when he was freed, on Good Friday, 1790, he was fifty, vastly overweight from lack of fresh air and exercise (and also, despite all his grumbling about prison fare, from overeating), his health virtually ruined, his burning appetites banked to embers. Despite the fact that he had been released by the Revolution, he was an aristocrat and, more dangerously, allied to the royal family by birth and background. A free man at last, he was in this brave new society fully as vulnerable as he had been inside those dank, airless prison walls about which he complains so often and so eloquently in these letters. But what is perhaps most remarkable about this undoubtedly remarkable man is that, for all that he had gone through and suffered—and these letters do attest to the full extent of that suffering, a word that occurs probably more often than any other in his fulminations—his spirit was far from broken. He had read widely and eclectically in prison, had written feverishly in several genres— novels, short stories, philosophy, plays—and had formulated a literary master plan that was wildly ambitious, especially given his age and health. (In addition to his increasing corpulence, he suffered from migraines, serious eye problems, chest pains, and hemorrhoids.)

Whether his motive was revenge or enlightenment, during his prison years and the twenty years that followed, he produced a body of work that is unique. Whatever else he was, Sade was pure—admittedly a surprising term in his connection; he cut through, with a terrible swift sword, the hypocrisies of the day, the cant, the false, the sham, be it sacred or profane. A sybarite beyond compare, endowed with a sexual appetite that was prodigious, hot tempered, arrogant, prone to violence yet capable of great tenderness and acts of kindness, this most contradictory of men can only be understood—if indeed he can be understood at all—in the context of his time. Who, in fact, was this man who wrote four of the most outrageous novels ever penned:
Justine, Juliette, Philosophy in the Bedroom,
and
The Days of Florbelle?
¹

First, make no mistake: Sade was a libertine, as he was the first to admit. In his self-styled “Grand Letter” written to his wife from the dungeon of Vincennes to mark the anniversary of his fourth year incarcerated there, Sade says:

Yes, I am a libertine, that I admit. I have conceived everything that can be conceived in that area, but I have certainly not practiced everything I have conceived and never shall. I am a libertine, but I am neither a criminal nor a murderer, and since I am obliged to place my apology next to my justification, I shall therefore say that ’tis quite possible that they who condemn me so unfairly are in no position to offset their infamies by good deeds as patent as those I can raise to compare to my misdeeds. I am a libertine, but three families living in your section of the city lived for five years on my charity, and I rescued them from the depths of poverty. I am a libertine, but I saved a deserter from the military, a man abandoned by his entire regiment and his colonel, from certain death. I am a libertine, but at Evry, with your entire family looking on, I saved at the risk of my own life a child who was about to be crushed beneath the wheels of a cart drawn by runaway horses by throwing myself beneath the cart. I am a libertine, but I have never compromised the health of my wife. . . .

That admission, coupled with a cursory reminder of some of his offsetting good deeds, can be taken literally. The author of
The 120 Days of Sodom
was capable of acts of kindness and charity, of true friendship and deep devotion, as these letters will attest. They are in fact perhaps more revealing of the many sides of Sade than anything more formal he wrote or said. One can also take at face value what he says in that same letter about conceiving of a great deal more in the realm of libertinage than he ever practiced. Condemnation of the man for over a century was based in large part on the presumption that Sade had done everything he described in such excruciating detail, therefore was either a criminal or mad, probably both. As usual, the truth is much more complex and subtle. Sade, who as these letters reveal was much given to introspection and self-analysis, was born with huge appetites and a violent temper. Add to this that he was born into a society where aristocratic privilege in the areas of sex and sensuality were taken for granted, and only rarely admonished, and that he came from one of the oldest and noblest families of France, allied through his mother directly to royal blood, and one sees the possibility of unfettered behavior from the earliest age.

In a letter of April 25, 1759, written when he was not yet nineteen, Sade, who was already a captain in the cavalry, fighting the Prussians during the Seven Years War, wrote to his childhood tutor, Abbe Amblet:

I rose every morning to go in search of pleasure and the thought of it made me oblivious to all else. I believed myself fortunate the moment I found it, but what seemed happiness evaporated as quickly as my desires, leaving me with but regrets. By evening I was desperate and saw my mistake, but that was evening; with a new day there were my desires back again, and back I flew to pleasure.

Though he apparently gave an excellent account of himself as a cavalry officer, his regimental commander in the Burgundy Horse wrote in 1763, shortly before Sade was discharged from the army at the age of twenty-two, “terrible things” about the young man: “He was a gambler, a spendthrift, and a profligate. He spent all his leisure hours lurking backstage at local theaters, looking to pick up some pretty actress, and he frequented the houses of procuresses.” Reading the memoirs of the time, however, creates the impression that the gay blades of the latter half of the eighteenth century looked upon amorous conquests as a kind of competitive game. As actresses, demimondaines, and courtesans rose to prominence through either their beauty or their sexual prowess (or both), men vied against one another for them, and if a man could not steal that season’s pick from her prevailing lover, he would often content himself with the number two or three position in his mistress’s heart (and her pocketbook, for lover number one bore the brunt of her expenses, and those lower on the ladder paid incidentals and frivolities). To frequent whores, singly or in group, though not satisfying the same competitive instinct, was still common practice, with no stigma attached and certainly bearing little or no threat of official retaliation on the part of the police vice squad. That is why, in many of his prison letters, Sade rails against being singled out for what so many others, he rightly claimed, were doing with impunity.

How is it, then, that this proud aristocrat, who traced his ancestry back to the thirteenth century, specifically to Laura, the wife of Hugues de Sade, Laura the beloved of Petrarch and object of the poet’s love poems, ended up spending some thirty of his seventy-four years behind bars? How could this man, whom the poet Guillaume Apollinaire termed “the freest soul that ever lived,” endure roughly half his adult life in jail? Was Sade, as the world would have us believe, a danger to society, a man who, had he been free, might well have acted out the fantasies of his fictions and lived a life of crime, raping and maiming and killing along his fateful path? As suggested, the letters in this volume tend to belie that; the more likely scenario being that it was prison, with all its physical and mental restrictions, that gave rise to his literary scatology and cruelty, his obsessive and gleeful descriptions of sexual encounters and combinations such as the world had never seen. Deprived of freedom, this born rebel, this ardent anarchist, this “freest of men,” took revenge against his enemies, both real and imagined, in the only way he knew how: by fantasizing to the extreme. Prison gave him the time to write, which would have largely eluded him had he been living outside, engrossed first in the pursuit of pleasure, then in defending his outrageous acts against the powers that would consort to do him in—be they the police, the judiciary, or his own family—all of whom provided him the grist for his wild, and incredibly fertile, imagination. Throughout the letters, he writes with vitriolic pen of those who he believes are responsible for his being behind bars, who are out to get him. Enemy Number One is his mother-in-law, the présidente de Montreuil,
²
who (to Sade) not only sought but reveled in her endless revenge against him. Revenge for what, one might ask?

The litany of allegations, or what Sade would minimize as “misdeeds” or “errors of youth,” is long and complex. One should bear in mind, however, that his misconduct, if that is strong enough a term, took place not only in the context of an extraordinarily permissive society but in a family for whom pleasure, especially sexual pleasure, was a dictate and goal. To know the son, then, one must know the father.

Jean-Baptiste Joseph François de Sade, born in 1702, bore the title Count de Sade
³
and was the first member of the family to turn his back on his native Provence and try his luck in the Paris of Louis XV. Armed with letters of introduction from his father, who vainly tried to dissuade him from leaving the gentle southland for the spite and malice of the court, the handsome, intelligent young Provengal quickly made a place for himself in the courtly whirl. He had a ready wit and “an astonishing talent for composing short pieces in prose or verse” that won him the admiration of the fashionable women of the time and impressed the men. Not surprisingly, the count set out to conquer not just the minds of the women but their hearts as well, and succeeded to an astonishing degree. The number and quality of his mistresses is legendary, even by the libertine standards of the day, and included several of the fairest and most highly placed ladies of the court of Louis XV (not to mention both sisters of his friend and protector, the Prince de Condé). Thus we can say without exaggeration that the young marquis’s propensity for libertinage came naturally to him,
de père en fils.
Today the term “role model” would spring to mind.