Letters From Prison (32 page)

Seeing myself reduced to spending a fair amount of time alone in a remote castle, almost always without you, and having the minor failing (it must be admitted) of being perhaps a tad too fond of women, I contacted a well-known p_____
⁵
in Lyons, and told her: I want to take three or four servants home with me, I want them young and pretty; find me some like that. This p_____, who was Nanon, for that Nanon was a well-known p------in Lyons—I shall prove it when the time comes—promises to find me these girls and does so. I take them home; I make use of them. Six months later parents come and ask to have these girls back, assuring me that they are their children. I turn them over to the parents; and all of a sudden I am charged with a suit for kidnapping and rape! But that is the greatest of all injustices. Here are the rules in this regard, and this I have from Monsieur de Sartine himself; he had the kindness to explain them to me himself one day, as he will be happy to recall: ’tis expressly forbidden any p______in France to traffic in virgin girls, and if the girl furnished is a virgin and lodges a complaint, ’tis not the man who is prosecuted, it is the p_____, who is subjected to rigorous and immediate punishment. Even if the man has asked for a virgin, ’tis not he who is punished: he is only doing what all men do. Once again, the p______, who gave him the girl and who knew full well ‘twas expressly forbidden, is punished. Therefore, that first deposition made against me in Lyons, for kidnapping and rape, contained not a shred of anything legitimate; I am in no wise guilty; ‘twas the p____to whom I applied who should have been punished and not me. But you can’t get blood from a stone, they know, and the parents hoped to squeeze some money out of me. Point made. Earlier on, I had had an amorous adventure in Arcueil, in which a woman,
⁶
also a liar and a double-dealing swindler, had, to get money (which was stupidly paid her) spread word to all Paris that I conducted all sorts of experiments and that the garden behind my house was a cemetery wherein I buried the bodies I had used in my tests. This tall tale was just too good to be true; ‘twas made to order for my enemies’ rage, and they never failed to bring it up and embellish it whenever anything happened to me. As a consequence, at the time of the Marseilles affair, ‘twas also some experiment I’d been trying, and here again the subject of my experiments would doubtless be the one girl who would never be seen again. But if all the girls did not turn up again at Lyons, they all did resurface sooner or later somewhere else. Let us examine the situation. Those girls from Lyons were five in number, that we know. One, terrified by the solitude in which she was being kept (not to perform experiments upon her but because decency compelled me to do so) escaped and took refuge at my uncle’s. And so we
have accounted for her.
One remained in my house, as a domestic, and there she died a natural death, in full view and with the full knowledge of the entire province; she was cared for by the public health director. There’s
another who’s accounted for.
Two were handed back over to their mother and father.
Two more who are accounted for.
As for the
fifth
and last, she was blatantly threatening to run away like her friend and to spread all kinds of gossip abroad if she were kept locked up any longer, and as she had no parents to come and claim her, I turned her over to a peasant in La Coste—whom I shall name in due course and whom you know very well—who in turn had her placed as a domestic in Marseilles in the house of one of that peasant’s relatives; and as I have to hand complete proof thereof, I confess I would be more than delighted to produce the evidence. And so she was taken care of, put into service and left there, regarding which a good and valid certificate was brought back to me, and which I have put in a safe place and will also produce when the need arises. I heard later on that that creature had left the house and taken to p_______.
⁷
And so that is what has become of the five girls from Lyons, the details of whose lives are clearly established in such wise that I can defy the cleverest, or rather the most double-dealing jurisconsult, to prove me anything to the contrary.

Sade’s certificate of baptism, dated June 3, 1740. One day after his birth at the hotel de Condé in Paris, he was baptized at Saint-Sulpice church. His parents had intended to name him Louis-Aldonse-Donatien, but then settled on Donatien-Aldonse-Frangois. The parish priest misunderstood the old provençal name Aldonse and instead substituted the more common “Alphonse” on the baptismal certificate. That clerical slip was later to plague Sade with the authorities, especially during and after the Revolution.

COURTESY MUSéE CALVET, AVIGNON

Portrait of the libertine as a young man, by Van Loo. A full-scale painting of Sade by the same artist was lost and probably destroyed during the Revolution.

A nineteenth-century romanticized portrait of Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil de Sade, the Marquise de Sade. Despite her ultra-strict Catholic upbringing, she was madly in love with her seductive husband, and despite his many outrageous acts and endless infidelities, loved him selflessly and unswervingly for twenty-seven years.

COURTESY BIBLIOTHéQUE NATIONALE

Sade’s father, the Count de Sade, was lord of the manors of La Coste
(ABOVE)
and Saumane
(OVERLEAF TOP),
and co-lord of Mazan
(OVERLEAF BOTTOM)—
all in the Vaucluse region of Provence. Upon his father‘s death in 1767, the marquis inherited the three properties, although he considered La Coste his home. Sade spent several of his formative years, from age five to ten, at Saumane, the domaine of his uncle the Abbe de Sade. In some of his flights abroad as a fugitive, Sade assumed the title Marquis de Mazan, taken from his third domaine.

PHOTOGRAPHS: LA COSTE BY ALAIN RESNAIS; SAUMANE AND MAZAN BY RICHARD SEAVER

Vincennes, the dungeon where Sade was imprisoned from 1777 to 1784, during which time most of the letters in this volume and many of his major literary works were written. In 1763, Sade spent a shorter (two-week) stint in this same prison as a result of a scandal known as the “Jeanne Testard affair.”
COLLECTION RICHARD SEAVER