Letters From Prison (3 page)

Politically, the count’s ambitions equaled his amatory skills, and early in his Paris stay he managed to ally himself with the Prince de Condé, scion of the illustrious Bourbon family. Through the Condé connection, Sade
père
made himself both a military and diplomatic career of considerable distinction. He was a colonel in the pope’s light cavalry and lieutenant-general for the provinces of Bresse, Bugey, Valromey, and Gex (a title purchased, not earned, but nonetheless one that had to be approved by the king, who awarded them stingily). He was briefly ambassador to the court of Russia, minister plenipotentiary to the Elector of Cologne, and the principal negotiator in concluding the alliance between France and Spain in 1741. During the decades of the 1730s and 1740s the count’s reputation as a skilled negotiator grew impressively: indeed, as he approached the age of forty he had to feel that he had, despite his father’s warnings, unquestionably made the right decision in forsaking Provence for the glittering capital.

The count had not hastened to marry: there were too many hearts to conquer, if only for a week or a month (or even a day) to think of marriage. But in 1733, the count, at age thirty-one, did marry the lady-in-waiting to the young Princess de Condé. The bride was Marie-Eléonore de Mailé de Carman, a Bourbon by blood but relatively impecunious. It was not a love marriage—in those days few were among aristocrats—but in the context of our Sadean epic the count’s methods and motives are especially meaningful. Thirteen years after the death of his first wife, the Prince de Condé had remarried: his choice was a German princess, who was by all accounts utterly ravishing, and who, at fifteen, was almost twenty-five years younger than her new husband. Seeing her, the count made up his mind he must have her. But how, since the prince, insanely (and rightfully) jealous, kept her under close and constant guard? Through her lady-in-waiting, of course. Thus Sade the Father’s marriage to Mile Maillé de Carman was an act of total duplicity, a clever but completely cynical means of hopefully bedding the Princess of Condé, wife of his patron and protector. Morality aside, as libertine behavior, it ranked among the best (or worst).

In his later years, the count constantly accused his son of wanton profligacy and libertinage, venting his disapproval and fears, especially in letters to his younger brother the Abbe de Sade, that Donatien would be the ruin of him. A classic case of memory lapse, because by the time the count had penned these dire concerns about his son, he had already done a rather masterful job of running through the family fortune himself. His tastes were sumptuous, his ambitions large, his financial restraints virtually nil. If one were to compare father and son as profligates, the count would win hands down.

One of the grave charges against the marquis, for which he served long years in prison and for which he was sentenced to death in absentia, was that of sodomy.
Quelle horreur!
But here again, look to the father: police reports of the time show that, however many fair mistresses he seduced, Jean-Baptiste was known to frequent the Tuileries Gardens, to solicit the favors of young men. At one point, in fact, he was arrested for soliciting a male prostitute, who turned out to be a police decoy, but the count’s name and exalted position kept him (barely) out of jail.
Tel p
è
re tel fils.

And then there was the count’s brother, the Abbe de Sade, a cleric of some distinction—vicar general of Toulouse, later vicar general of Narbonne. This high-ranking man of the cloth was entrusted with the education of his nephew when Sade was only five, largely because Sade’s father, finding it hard to deal with the boy’s ardor and violent temper, essentially abdicated his paternal responsibilities and turned them over to his brother. From 1745 to 1750 the future marquis’s education was entrusted to his uncle, largely at the Chateau de Saumane in the Vaucluse region of southern France, a castle that still exists today in much the same state it was in when Sade was growing up: Its dark, forbidding air, its remote, austere setting on a craggy promontory overlooking the tiny village of Saumane and, beyond, the lush valley of the Vaucluse, and especially its underground network of dungeons and cells had to have made a deep impression on the boy, impressions that would later find voice in many of his major fictions. So too must his uncle’s scarcely concealed amorous exploits have affected young Sade. At one point the abbe kept at the chateau a mother and daughter, of whom he apparently made frequent and indiscriminate use. He also was the known protector of an infamous local prostitute. In fact, throughout his life the abbe was an active and shameless libertine, and at one point, despite his name and title, was imprisoned for several days on the charge of debauchery, arrested in Paris “in the house of the woman named Peron, given to debauchery, together with the prostitute Leonore.” Further, during his years in Paris, the abbe always had as his mistress a certain Madame de la Polelinère, who also happened to be the mistress of the Maréchal de Saxe. Writing later of those years at Saumane, Sade describes his uncle’s abode as a veritable seraglio, then corrects himself: “No, it was a bordello.” If a man of God could permit himself such license, what restraints could either church or state impose on one as hot-blooded and independent as he? Early on, then, Sade witnessed—and loathed—the hypocrisy of convention, the arbitrary and restrictive laws and customs whose purpose, he became convinced, was to rob the individual of his own special character with which nature had endowed him at birth.

In his novel
Justine,
Sade rightly qualified the eighteenth century as “an age of total corruption.” And in
Juliette
he has Saint Fond, clearly modeled after one of Louis XV’s ministers, say: “What a fool a statesman would be not to let his country pay for his pleasures. What does the people’s misery matter to us if only our passions are satisfied.” Leading the dissolute way was Louis XV himself, whose Parc-aux-Cerfs at Versailles, constructed in 1750, was well known by the populace to be a veritable seraglio, which the king’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour, constantly restocked with a bevy of young beauties to satisfy the king’s desires. The clergy, which might have acted as a brake on the excesses and narrowed the widening gap between people and state, was often as bad as the court itself. Sade’s uncle, the Abbe de Sade, was as we have seen no better than his dissolute brother. And the abbe was far from alone: police reports and records of the time, including those of Sade’s nemesis Inspector Marais, are filled with reports of the clergy’s unfettered debauchery, from one end of France to the other.

Thus as the eighteenth century advanced steadily toward its explosive conclusion, young aristocrats like Sade thought themselves beholden to no one, accountable to nothing save their own pleasures and desires. As Sade would later write in his novel
Aline and Valcour,
in a passage that is surely autobiographical:

Born in Paris in the lap of luxury, as soon as I could think for myself I came to the conclusion that Nature and fortune had combined to heap their bounties upon me. I thought this because people were stupid enough to tell me so, and that idiotic presumption made me haughty, domineering, and ill-tempered. I thought the world was at my feet, and the entire universe would serve my slightest desire. If I wanted something, all I had to do was take it.

Until he was ten, Sade did not attend any schools. His uncle engaged for his instruction at Saumane a tonsured young priest, Abbe Amblet, with whom Sade would remain friends for most of his life. In the fall of 1750, Sade was sent off to Paris to continue his education at the Louis-le-Grand College on the rue St-Jacques, a Jesuit institution that catered to the children of high aristocrats and was reputedly the most expensive school in Paris. Abbe Amblet came along to provide additional tutoring. “I returned to Paris,” wrote Sade, writing of Amblet, “to continue my studies under the guidance of a man who was both strict and intelligent, and who would probably have been a good influence on my youth, but unfortunately I did not keep him long enough.” Young Sade and Abbe Amblet took up quarters on the rue Fosses Monsieur-le-Prince, around the corner from the school and a stone’s throw away from where his mother was living at the Hotel de Condé. We know little of Sade’s years at Louis-le-Grand, but one aspect—unique at the time—of the school’s curriculum had to interest him especially: the good fathers stressed the literary, especially drama, and were famous for their theatrical productions. Surely Sade’s lifelong interest in the theater stems from that period.

For some inexplicable reason, Sade’s father aborted his son’s education when the lad was only fourteen, and at the end of the school year in 1754 sent him off to join the army. For the next five years Sade served his king not only honorably but with distinction, acquitting himself well in a number of battles during the Seven Years War. By the time he was nineteen he was captain in the king’s cavalry, and he remained in the army till February 1763, when the Treaty of Paris ended the war. But if he was a good soldier he had also devoted much of his time and energy during these nine long years to the dual indulgences of garrison life: gambling and wenching. So ardent were his efforts in both fields that his father, again conveniently forgetting his own youth, lamented to his brother and a number of other friends that his son was—ye gods!—a libertine and, worse yet, a profligate! It was time, the father decided, to find Donatien a wife. Preferably—no, necessarily—a wealthy one. For in his heart of hearts Sade’s father knew that he alone, by his overreaching political ambition and lavish spending during his more than forty years in Paris, had managed to accomplish what none of his forebears had: squander the family fortune. Only he knew the extent of the financial debacle, only he knew that his son the marquis, he of the violent temper and scathing tongue, would shower his father with blame when he learned of it. How unduly alarmed he was about the possibility that his son, by 1758 a captain in the cavalry, would make further inroads into his declining if not wholly depleted estate is shown in a letter to his brother the abbe in which he deplored the fact that young Donatien had promised not to gamble more than a louis a day, hardly a princely sum. “As if that scoundrel had a louis a day to lose!” he wrote. “He promised me not to risk more than an ecu.”

The way out of his financial morass, the count decided, was to marry off the marquis into a family of high position, he hoped, but in any case, one of impeccable means. After several unsuccessful attempts—Sade’s reputation as a rake had preceded him—he settled on a family of lesser nobility, the Cordier de Montreuils. They were only recently ennobled—in the previous century—but they had excellent connections at court and, more important, were solidly wealthy. Through them, the Count de Sade must have figured his own fault of financial recklessness might be redeemed and the family fortune recouped. Sade’s early biographer, Gilbert Lely, believes the count was acting out of baser motives: referring several times in letters to his “no-good son,” who in his opinion was “a bad buy” for whatever family he married into, the count very simply wanted his son out of his life. Forever. One has to wonder why, for until then the sins of the Sade family had been largely the father’s, not the son’s. Still, as the count wrote his brother, if he could pull off this marriage, he’d “be rid of the boy.” Sade had to have felt his father’s dislike, and if filial obedience had had any restraining effect upon him till now, it was certainly now cast aside.

Sade had openly and often declared that he would marry only for love, and putting his words into practice at the same time his father was in deep and delicate marriage negotiations with the Montreuils, Donatien managed to fall madly in love with a young beauty he had met in Paris whose lineage was as long and glorious as his: Laure-Victoire Adeline de Lauris. What was more, she was a Provençal lady of the manor in Vacqueras, a town not far from La Coste, so there was an added geographic affinity. Soon after they met, she yielded to his ardent advances, but unlike his other mistresses, this one Sade truly wanted for his wife. A letter discovered in 1948 in the Bibliothèque Nationale by Sade biographer Gilbert Lely revealed not only the existence but the depth of the affair. Laure’s father, the Marquis de Lauris, agreed to the young man’s proposal of marriage, but suddenly she herself resisted. The more she did, the more inflamed Sade became. It would be difficult to understand her change of heart—it was clear she and Donatien were passionately in love—without the knowledge that at some point in the spring of 1763 Sade contracted a venereal disease, which he doubtless passed on to his mistress. More to the point, Sade’s father learned of his son’s illness just as he had finally concluded negotiations with the Montreuils.
⁴
If ever they were to learn of Donatien’s condition, the marriage would be off. Sade, in Provence now, was still courting Laure-Victoire and refusing his father’s urgent pleas to come back to Paris. Finally, only two days before the scheduled date for their marriage, Sade showed up, displaying little inclination for this creature he was to marry, this Renée-Pélagie who, he had been told, was neither attractive nor very feminine. But the die was cast: thanks to the count’s influence and importuning, the king had agreed personally to sign the marriage contract, an act that so flattered the Montreuil clan, especially Sade’s future mother-in-law, Madame la présidente de Montreuil, that all else was forgiven. On May 1 the two families journeyed to Versailles to be officially introduced at the court. The only person lacking was the bridegroom, who had still not renounced his hopeless suit to sway his beloved Laure. In fact, despite his father’s and his uncle’s cajoling and threats, Sade did not arrive in Paris till the afternoon of May 15, less than 48 hours before the wedding was scheduled to be celebrated.

So, despite all his brave declarations, Sade married not for love but for money. As he had been forewarned, his bride Renée-Pélagie was no beauty. She had been a bit of a tomboy, cared little about fashion or dress, but she was plucky, unpretentious, had a good head on her shoulders, and in her letters, despite the almost childish hand, she shows intelligence and, for the most part, sound judgment. She would need all that and much more to cope with the hand she had been dealt, for though she went into the marriage open-eyed—her mother had warned her about some of the characteristics and shared with her some of the escapades of her husband-to-be—she had no inkling of what she was really getting into. Who could have? Yet she felt grateful to her parents—especially her mother, who ruled the roost with an iron hand—for having secured her not only a handsome husband but one who allied her to royal blood. And, after all the prenuptial Sturm und Drang, the newlyweds seemed to settle into a routine of Paris high society life. Several letters and reports of the time refer to the young marquis as pleasant and seductive, attentive and loving to his wife; the most oft-repeated word is “charming.” Even his mother-in-law, who had had grave misgivings earlier, was completely taken by her son-in-law. “Your nephew could not be more charming or more desirable as a son-in-law,” she wrote the Abbe de Sade the day before the marriage, “with that genial intelligence of his and that tone of good education that your care seems to have instilled in him.” Later, she wrote Sade’s father that he was sorely mistaken in judging his son so harshly. Her feelings about him are understandable: in many ways the présidente and Donatien were kindred souls: egotistical, authoritarian, ambitious (albeit in different ways), energetic, brutal, unscrupulous. That is doubtless why she was so drawn to him at first; that is also why she turned on him with such vengeance when, as time went on, he betrayed—in her eyes—the trust she had placed in him.