Letters From Prison (4 page)

In these prison letters, it is interesting to see how Sade can convincingly assume one persona with one correspondent, then almost immediately adopt a second when addressing another. Sade’s letters to Madame de Montreuil, for example, are alternately contrite, entreating, endearing, flattering, seductive—he presses all the old buttons that once worked with her, for in the early days of his marriage she had been utterly won over by his undeniable charm, and he still hoped one might do the trick. Now none did: once she had decided Sade had, irrevocably in her opinion, demeaned her, betrayed her personal trust, and besmirched the family honor, no reconciliation was possible. All her many talents were focused on making sure her son-in-law—whom she was convinced was mad—remained behind bars so that he could do no further harm. It was not so much the judgment of society she was worried about, it was her family, the reputations of her children and grandchildren. Her once good name was by the time Sade entered Vincennes for the second time in 1777 compromised almost beyond redemption. From her viewpoint, Sade was, if not mad, certainly a man to try the most patient of souls.

After several months of relative quietude Sade’s debauching— and blasphemous—impulses took over. In mid-October 1763, just five months after his marriage, Sade left his wife behind in the country and came to Paris on the pretext of business. On the night of October 18 he took a prostitute, a woman named Jeanne Testard, to his rented room on the rue Mouffetard on Paris’s Left Bank. In the eighteenth century, it must be repeated, it was common practice—noblesse oblige— among men of the upper class to practice marital infidelity with a vengeance. Marriage was a business arrangement, and children were part of that pact. But a man’s real pleasure had to be sought outside the marriage bed. Women’s obligations at the time were to be dutiful spouses, as they had sworn to be before God at His altar, serving their husband faithfully and humbly, and sexually according to their husband’s whims or demands but without any thought of providing him pleasure, much less enjoying any on their own. Thus the mere fact of Sade—or anyone else—going with prostitutes bore no stigma and certainly was not considered a crime. But with Jeanne Testard, Sade, who throughout his life loved to provoke trouble if it arrived on its own volition, upped the ante: whether out of true conviction or as a sexual stimulant, Sade spent the night blaspheming God, Christ, and the Virgin Mary and forcing Jeanne to do the same, trampling on crucifixes and reviling the Church and all its works at the top of his lungs. In the morning, when her procuress came to fetch her, Jeanne related her ordeal and went straight to the police. One of those to whom she went was Inspector Louis Marais of the Paris vice squad, who as it happened had been assigned to watch Sade, among other young aristocrats, and who would be involved with Sade’s fate for many decades. (Several of the letters in this volume are to Monsieur Le Noir, lieutenant-general of the Paris police, and Marais’s superior.) Marais put together a dossier containing Jeanne Testard’s deposition and those of other prostitutes Sade had frequented and forwarded it to the king, who, having voraciously read and savored the report (Louis XV reportedly delighted in hearing in full detail the lubricious reports of his subjects’ wayward indulgences), ordered Sade’s arrest. On October 29, accompanied by Marais, Sade was incarcerated in the dungeon of Vincennes. His crime was not debauchery—half the court would have been imprisoned if that “crime” had been applied—but blasphemy and profanation, which was far more serious in the eyes of the law.

Was Sade an atheist? Some Sadean commentators have taken his private and public stance against God and the Church, and especially the violence thereof, as proof that he really deeply longed for belief, but this argument is extremely difficult to justify. For Sade, who thought in increasingly universal terms as he matured, God was a chimera, and his blasphemies were meant both to provoke and to prove His nonexistence. He viewed religion and all its trappings as a gigantic lie, a hoax used to oppress, tyrannize, and deprive the individual of his freedom and his true nature, which he believed was unique in each of us. That being so, Sade, to be true to himself, needed to desecrate and despoil, to publicly voice his conviction. If you believe something to be true, Sade would say, you must carry it to its extreme, no matter what the consequences.

In jail now for blasphemy, Sade was mainly concerned with keeping the scandal from his wife—who was three months pregnant—and his wife’s family. His father soon heard the bad news and hastened to Fontainebleau to beg the king’s indulgence, which was granted, and on November 13 Sade was released from Vincennes but confined to his parents-in-law’s property, the Chateau d’Echaffour, under the watchful eye of Inspector Marais. In understanding his letters from his later, thirteen-year incarceration in Vincennes, one can be edified by those he wrote in those early years. In a letter to Monsieur de Sartine, the lieutenant-general of police, Sade—imprisoned for desecrating the Almighty—invokes the name of the deity not once but thrice, and asks for a priest “by whose good guidance and my sincere repentance I may soon be in a position to come to those holy sacraments, the complete neglect of which had become the first cause of my fall.” In distress— and much of his life was spent in distress—Sade would stoop to anything, assume any guise, repudiate any stance, to gain his end. He could grovel in mortification if that’s what it took, he could cajole, beg, lie, castigate, cheat, charm, flatter. Only in his letters to his wife could he be himself; only to her could he bare his heart. Despite the enormous variations in the tone and tenor of the letters to his wife—in some he is the most loving, the tenderest of men, while others drip in sarcasm tainted with vitriol—one senses that in these alone is a direct line to his real self. Which brings us to the enigma of the true relationship between this “infernal couple.” Reading Sade’s letters to his wife over this span of thirteen years, one cannot help but be struck—even while deploring the loss of many of her corresponding letters to him, which would have been utterly revealing—by the sheer amount of undisguised affection and love they contain. True, Sade had married beneath himself, for the Montreuils were of new money, the paint of their aristocracy barely dry, whereas the Sades’ aristocratic roots ran deep. True, Renée-Pélagie was not the raving beauty he had dreamed of marrying; true, she was a simple woman, with scant taste for elegance in word or dress, so completely unlike the courtesans and coquettes with whom he was so often besotted. Even her own mother, though skirting the word
ugly,
stressed her qualities of “reason” and “gentleness” in describing her to the groom’s uncle. But Renée-Pélagie was nobody’s fool. She was a woman of great common sense, dedicated beyond belief, resolute, faithful to a fault, and possessed of a native intelligence that more than made up for her lack of formal education. Reading these letters, one senses a bond between them that was inviolable, forged by mutual trust and mutual pain.

As a young woman, the future Madame de Sade was what can fairly be described as a dutiful daughter. When her impending marriage to the young marquis was announced to her, she accepted it not only with good grace but with gratitude. She was made acutely aware of the fine catch the family had made. (Sade’s father had already turned on the charm with the présidente, who was so flattered by the match she could barely contain herself, even after she heard more than one disquieting story about her future son-in-law’s antics and tastes, even after she learned, weeks before the marriage, that he was suffering from the pox!) Cowed by her overbearing and overweening mother in her youth, Renée-Pélagie found during the fourteen years she had lived with Sade the courage to defy the présidente, to stand up for her husband against all charges and accusations—indeed against all proof that what he deserved in fact was her scorn. She revealed herself to be far more than a dutiful wife. Given as a pawn in a business transaction in which she had had no say, she ended up loving this miscreant, this utter scoundrel who betrayed her physically in more ways than anyone can count. Most Sade biographers and commentators see in Renée-Pélagie a passive, unimaginative creature completely in thrall of her forceful husband, a simple masochist to his . . . well. . . sadism. True, from prison he sometimes issues orders to her as if he were still a cavalry captain charging the enemy; he insults her when his errands and commissions have not been fulfilled in a timely manner, charging her with indolence and neglect. But beneath and beyond all that is a tenderness, a caring about her health, her well-being, her state of mind. And when in her infamy the présidente, alone or through intermediaries, tries to make Sade believe his wife has taken a lover, his jealously is unfeigned, his fury knows no bounds. This from a man who wrote endlessly of the need for woman’s emancipation from the servitude—sexual and otherwise—to which society condemned her. Even for a chameleonlike creature such as Sade, there is an underlying current of care and concern in his letters to his wife (which constitute well over half the letters in this volume) that cannot be denied.

There is no question in my mind that she loved him. Yet we cannot help but wonder why, given that Sade gave her dozens, nay hundreds, of reasons to loathe him. It was not only the nocturnal forays into all of the capital’s bordellos that would have him (Inspector Marais had forbidden some madams to allow Sade into their houses, so wild was his reputation), Sade also had had, early in his marriage, the effrontery to parade his mistresses publicly—to concerts, theaters, and receptions. Barely two years after his vows, he took one mistress, the actress and demimonde known as La Beauvoisin, down to La Coste, where he passed her off as Madame de Sade to the villagers. (Since they had never seen the real marquise, he had no trouble doing so; later he would deny on his most solemn word of honor that spiteful charge.) That gratuitous and heedless act was the beginning of the end for Sade, for it alienated Madame de Montreuil, who till then had, despite all his “lapses,” supported her son-in-law and continued to believe he would eventually “come around.” Now, she noted in a letter to Sade’s uncle the abbe in midsummer of 1765, she would no longer take part in the effort to change him. Severity, she says, seems to have had no more success with him than kindness. Still, in 1765 they were twelve years from the major incarceration, and despite her declaration to the abbe, many subsequent acts on her part demonstrate that she had not given up altogether on her charming scoundrel. By his libertinage, she reasoned, he was proving that he was at heart a conformist, for he was doing no more or less than so many of his contemporaries in this jaded world. And if he were at heart a conformist at age twenty-five, then at thirty and forty that same conformism would cause him to change accordingly, as happens in each generation. Just look at his father: he had been an outrageous libertine; he had been a freemason and atheist. Yet now he had turned to philosophy and writing, had re-found God and become a true believer. Who was to say the son would not evolve in the same manner?

What a misjudgment! While it was based as much on wishful thinking as anything else, Madame de Montreuil could not have imagined the lengths to which Sade’s predilections, impulses, and beliefs would take him. Even the Jeanne Testard affair was a pale precursor of outrages to come. The ubiquitous Inspector Marais—who seemed to have had not only a strange fascination for his job but for Sade in particular, as if he sensed that of all the rakes and reprobates under his scrutiny this one was special—kept close tabs on the marquis, and two years after the Testard scandal, he rightly predicted that the world would doubtless soon hear more of the horrors of “Monsieur le comte de Sade.”
⁵

Madame la présidente de Montreuil is the person to whom history attributes, or blames, the long and painful incarceration of the marquis. In addition to what had already transpired to try the good lady’s patience, there were four key events in Sade’s life that determined her not only to turn her back on him completely but also to bend her every effort to make sure he was put behind bars for, she hoped, the rest of his life. Had it not been for the Revolution, which brought a swift end to her influence and power, she doubtless would have attained her goal. There were other elements, of course, but these four led directly to his doom, not only because of their special nature but because they became, despite Madame de Montreuil’s efforts, fodder for the increasingly popular newspapers and broadsheets of the day. As today, scandal was the be-all and end-all of these papers’ existence. The first was known as “The Arcueil Affair,” the second “The Marseilles Affair,” the third (and most important from the viewpoint of Sade’s ultimate condemnation), “The Seduction of Lady Anne,” and the fourth, “The Young Girls’ Scandal.” The first occurred in 1768, the second and third hard upon each other four years later, and the fourth during the winter of 1774-1775.

For some time Sade had kept a cottage in the Paris suburb of Arcueil, to which he repaired frequently for his affairs—all of which were duly recorded by the ubiquitous Inspector Marais. On Easter Sunday 1768—and that fact is important—Sade had his valet bring two prostitutes to the house. Sade arrived somewhat before noon accompanied by a woman he had picked up at the Place des Victoires in Paris, promising her the job of housekeeper. The woman, Rose Keller, a widow, was a cotton spinner by trade who had been out of work for a month and reduced to begging in the streets. Inside, Sade ordered her to undress; she refused, but complied when Sade threatened her with a knife. Subsequently he whipped her, then, she claimed, cut her backside with a pen knife and poured sealing wax in the wounds. Later locked in an upstairs room, she managed to escape at about four in the afternoon and report the incident to the local authorities. This was precisely what the authorities had been waiting for: an innocent woman, not a whore, bound and tortured by the evil marquis. While the police and legal authorities of Arcueil proceeded with their investigation, the indomitable Madame de Montreuil sprang into action, motivated less by the desire to save her son-in-law than to preserve the family’s good name. She convoked the ever-faithful Abbe Amblet and the trusted attorney Maître Claude-Antoine Sohier and dispatched them to Arcueil to buy off Rose Keller. Simultaneously, she sent her husband to speak to his friends with influence at the court: the only way to nip the incipient scandal in the bud was to have the king issue a
lettre de cachet
⁶
sequestering Sade in a royal fortress before the case was brought to the public courts. The plan worked, or so the family thought: Sade, accompanied only by his ex-tutor Abbe Amblet, journeyed to the royal prison at the Chateau de Saumur, where he was duly incarcerated. From there he wrote a deeply apologetic letter to his uncle begging his forgiveness and adding: “If people get wind of this affair down there, tell them it’s all a terrible pack of lies and say that I am with my regiment. . . .” In other words, dear uncle, lie through your teeth. But what Sade was learning to his distress if not edification was that public opinion was having an even greater effect on a population that was increasingly fed up with the so-called misdemeanors of the aristocrats, whose sexual indulgences were rarely punished with any severity. Sade made a perfect scapegoat: not only did he not conceal his predilections and practices, he tended to boast of them. For a man who abhorred hypocrites, to do less would have been to become one himself. But his candor and honesty were only feeding the public’s fury. “At this time he is the victim of the public’s ferocity,” wrote Sade’s beloved Madame de Saint-Germain
⁷
to his uncle on April 18. Be that as it may, from now on Sade would be a marked man, as he began to realize. Did that sure knowledge impel him to reason? Hardly, as events will show.