Letters From Prison (43 page)

What I see all too clearly in all this is that you will not be coming with me. In which case, my angel, we shall do our best to replace you, which is all I can say.
⁵
As I shall have absolutely naught to do—since without you ’tis quite impossible to even try to sort out my affairs— since I shall have nothing to do except rest, I shall sow a few little flowers on this peaceful repose with the help of Mademoiselle de Rousset
on the one hand,
and the pleasant surroundings
on the other,
and you can come whenever you please: you will find us holding our breath and in excellent spirits!

Yes, I can well imagine that the rumors about my business manager
⁶
may well have changed: up till now, he was thought of as no more than a plain rogue; now he must of necessity be thought of as a double-dealing crook and a traitor. And if the path upon which he has now clearly embarked is any indication, he may well be a worthy candidate for the gallows. That is how I view the matter in any event, and I embrace you.

Please request, I beg of you, that the manuscript be given to you without delay, and above all read the Author’s Note before you begin the play. You can read it aloud with Mademoiselle Rousset, whom I ask to continue her efforts with the critics.
⁷

I embrace you.

But I most urgently ask that you not show the play to anyone else except Mademoiselle de Rousset or to Amblet. Within a month at the very most I shall need to see a dentist. Remember, you promised you would see to it.

1
. That is, the prison censor.

2
. The French term Sade uses is “lanterne.” Interestingly, a decade later that term took on a sinister meaning: to hang people from a lamppost.

3
. Sade is referring to his arrest on August 25 of that year, when he was bound and summarily hustled out of La Coste.

4
. Bougainville’s four-year trip was documented in his multi-volume work
Voyages autour du monde (Voyage around the World).

5
. Sade is trying to make his wife jealous by implying he was, or will be, having an affair with Milli Rousset.

6
. Again, Gaufridy. Sade has heard rumors that his once-trusted notary has been bought off by Madame de Montreuil.

7
. Among her other devoted services, Milli Rousset was trying to see if she could interest drama critics in Sade’s plays and get them performed.

44. To Madame de Sade

[May 21, 1781]

T
here is nothing so charming as your little plan, but you reveal therein an excess of malice: such in any case is how I view it. Without the malice, it would be utterly delightful. Let us examine it closely. You (or yours) are desirous of bettering my lot or of bringing my punishment to an end; the only thing is, you’re not quite sure how this plan will turn out in the end. It may turn out well, it may not: why then even talk to me about it? You should have left me as I was and gone about your business. —Was your plan carried out? You should have informed me of such at the same time you gave the news that it was a success. Did it fail? So I remained right where I was before. The point is, if everything you said you had done had been true—which common sense dictates in such cases—that is certainly what you should have done: let me know the outcome. To have done the contrary only reveals all too clearly the twisted double-dealing behind it and shows that all this was no more than an out-and-out jibe, which fortunately I figured out from the very start. As early as April 3 or 4, I asked you about it, and I repeated that same request many times thereafter, without significant variation. Yet Monsieur Le Noir’s visit was intended to produce that effect. A magistrate that you have every reason to believe is respectable, who comes to see you, saying:
Your punishment is over, you have paid the penalty for your misdeeds,
seems as if he ought to be taken at his word. He betrayed me. So where does that leave us? He demeaned himself far more than I, for between the dupe and the rogue the difference is indeed great, and it is surely not in favor of the rogue.

And yet in all this there is one thread that runs through this entire business. Magistrates, relatives, business associates, friends,
knaves or the commanding officer
(which comes to the same thing), all agree to speak as one; the instrument had but one string: it is plucked by one and all in the same manner. Some (I refer to those whom I have underlined above) like the bloated louts they are, the others slightly less bluntly, but they all speak as one, their agreement is total:
he must be lied to, and lied to villainously.
And here is the result: I keep coming back to the letter from the Count de La Tour
¹
which I came upon quite by chance in the Commandant de Miolans’s quarters:

The intent of la présidente de Montreuil, who has obtained from the minister the proper authorization whereby she shall be in charge of all matters concerning Monsieur de Sade, is that she mislead him at every turn, from dawn till dusk; in consequence whereof, you may keep telling him that his affair will soon be over.

It is therefore clear, given these fatal arrangements, that the plan for my punishment has been, or still is, to lie to me and mock me over a period of ten or twelve years, more or less. Well, to that I respond by asserting that there is and can only be one person responsible for that state of affairs, a hypocrite, a rogue, and an infamous scoundrel by the name of Monsieur S[artine]; only he could have counseled such a horror, only a rogue such as he could have been capable of sending more than two hundred innocent people to perish in chains or otherwise (and I shall prove it one day), only from him can such advice have emanated. The odious monster was not content to have undone me when I was in the full blush of youth;
²
no, he desires that the end of my life resemble its beginning, so that he can congratulate himself on having been, to the very end, my torturer; he who deserved to suffer the tortures of Damiens because he, through a well-known trait, thought he could topple the entire State, he who sentenced to perish on the wheel a poor wretch whom everyone knew was innocent, who could not possibly have been guilty of the crimes whereof he was charged, and whose last words before he expired were: “I
shall relate in full detail the infamy of him whose lies brought me to this pass, before the tribunal of God, who alone shall be my judge”
—remarkable words that, were I king, I would have engraved on a man’s carriage, if ever he took it into his head to acquire one, and thus distinguish himself from his ancestors, who were only too happy to earn a few meager pennies by caning the poor wretches incarcerated in the prisons of Madrid during the Inquisition. So there you have the unspeakable creature I have to deal with, the abominable character to whom we had recourse and to whom your odious mother was all the more delighted to appeal because she was well aware that he was my enemy, that he had shown himself to be many times over, and because she knew that he would give her only such advice that would indulge her revenge.

Any punishment that does not cure, that can only revolt him upon whom it is visited, is a gratuitous infamy that renders those who impose it guiltier in the eyes of humanity, of common sense, and of reason, a thousand times more than he upon whom it is inflicted. That truth is too obvious to be refuted. Well, then, what are you hoping for? And what do you dare hope to accomplish from everything you are doing, unless ’tis to make certain you rid me of every last vestige of character, render me ill-humored, turn me into a rogue, an ill-tempered wretch, and an out-and-out scoundrel like all the rest of you? For when all is said and done, whether the comparison is wholly accurate or not, you must admit ’tis essentially on the mark: but what you are doing to me is precisely what they do to dogs to make them more vicious. —
Oh! we shall always bring you to heel again, whenever we want to! all we have to do is mention setting you free, and that’s what we wanted to see when we sent Monsieur Le Noir. You’ve been as meek as a sheep, because he came to flatter you.
That’s your system, isn’t it? Well then, all I have to say is, I hope you’re proud of it!

In a word, there are numerous examples of my misdeeds, but there is none in the entire universe that even comes close to the vexatious means you have used against me. ’Tis iniquitous, illegal in every point, and there is no way either the king or the royal court could have ordered it, in consequence thereof I have every right to implore that I be avenged or, in case my request is turned down, to seek vengeance in my own way, following your good example.

I have no need whatsoever to ask to see Monsieur Le Noir. I still admire him enough not to want to burden his conscience with one more injustice concerning me. One day he’ll thank me for it. As for you, that is a whole other matter; I have the most urgent desire to see you. Considering the length of time you’ve been talking about it, you must have had a thousand chances for your request to be granted or turned down. I therefore warn you in no uncertain terms that if by the feast of Pentecost I have not seen you I shall be completely convinced that this whole thing is a farce, that I am on the verge of being released, and I shall make my arrangements accordingly. Thus, you can make of this what you will on this point. Either you must come or I shall conclude that I am going to be set free; ’tis quite clear. Monsieur Le Noir has not changed, nothing has changed, and for the past ten years everything has been foreordained, stipulated, the days marked, the lies decided upon, the farces learned by heart, and the only thing that has changed is that all this has taken on more and more weight as your stupid old mother grows longer in the tooth and, abandoned by the entire universe (which never thought much of her in the first place), she sees herself slipping into the grave. To all appearances, taking as her model a slithering snake, she is bound and determined to spew out her entire allotment of venom before she expires. Get on with it, then, let her lose as little time as possible lest we become befouled by all the remaining poison wherewith her ugly entrails are filled. Let her hurry and breathe her last without further delay and render her ugly soul into the muck.

My detention, you tell me, is the object of great scandal in Provence. Ah! of that I haven’t the slightest doubt; you have no need to tell me, unless ’tis to rub a bit of balm in my blood through this act of kindness. Well now, that being the case, how is it that your mother can derive such unmitigated pleasure from depriving her grandchildren of their father? And given that, why do you not want me to call her a monster unworthy of being alive? How do you fancy now that you can convince anyone in Provence that the exile from Marseilles was not tantamount to being banished from the entire province? —Oh! measures were taken, yes, measures, to keep their tongues from wagging! Oh! you would be most clever if you were ever able to figure out just what those measures were: as for myself, I swear I could not care a whit; my intentions are still the same as they always were. Once I am out, I shall soon be sheltered from my compatriots’ manner of thinking, for I shall soon be far away from them.

As for what I said to you about Milli Rousset, I have nothing further to add. As long as she has been patient enough to wait for me for three years, she could just as well wait for three more, if indeed that is my term, as Monsieur Le Noir’s visit would seem to indicate, for he apparently has the habit of delineating my halves. ’Tis an effort to make me believe that I shall be here for centuries, and that is unworthy of her; that is all I have to say on the matter. Nor should you come and tell me: but it’s your own fault if you’re not out, they offered you a transfer to Montélimar, all you had to do was agree to go there . . . Your Montélimar was a fairy tale, there was never any real basis for it; and to prove it to you, I declare here and now that I accept and am ready to leave, whether under guard or not, with no strings attached. Let us see what you have to say to that, and see whether or not it’s a fairy tale. And as for what I say to you, ’tis neither to feel you out nor to see what may happen next: when I again put in a request to be transferred to Montélimar I am stating an absolute truth, and I hereby declare that I prefer to go there, no matter the negative consequences, than to remain in this abominable house, where the infamies, the vileness, and the base indignities are carried to the extreme.

While on the subject, I am going to cite you three examples that are fresh in my mind. The other day I felt like eating a bit of lamb, and as you well know this is the time of year when lamb is plentiful on even the humblest of tables. I was made to pay for it out of my own pocket! What do you think of that? How mean can you get? Yesterday, hearing that green peas were on the menu and not having had the pleasure of laying eyes on any for a long while, I asked for some; what they sent me was a mishmash of dried peas from last year’s crop, which I devoured as if they were fresh, so great had been my desire to have some. And as a result, twice now in the last twenty-four hours I’ve been sick as a dog, whereas if they had given me some fresh little green peas I would have been fine. Do you want another example, even worse? For the past three years I’ve been made to drink stagnant water taken from a cistern that stinks to high heaven; whereas at Monsieur de Rougemont’s there is an abundance of excellent fresh spring water: but that water costs something, and were he to offer it to the prisoners ‘twould mean a few crowns less per annum out of the sums this scoundrel is already stealing from them. What’s more, would you believe that five or six letters,
³
and just as many conversations, have never succeeded in making that lowlife understand the following line of reason? Normal fare here consists of five courses a day, including soup, and I can tell you the devil himself would refuse to eat them, they are always detestable, the reason being that there is more for the turnkeys, who have worked out an arrangement with the cook. So I said, all right, don’t give me five, give me only two courses, but spend the same amount of money for these two courses you would have paid for all five. This strikes me as only fair. If my family pays six livres a day for my food, I have every right to ask that these six livres, having deducted the amount due for my laundry, should be spent on the two courses, since two courses is all I take. If you refuse that request, Commandant, then one of two things has to result: if in serving me the two courses I have requested they turn out to be as bad as the five, then you yourself are stealing from me the three courses I am not taking, or you are openly admitting that your cook is conniving with your turnkeys to steal them from me; there is no middle ground there. —Well now, that line of reasoning is one that Monsieur de Rougemont has never been able to get through his thick skull. The two courses are indeed as bad as the former five, witness the green peas that almost brought me to my grave. I beseech you to lodge a most strenuous complaint on my behalf about that to Monsieur Le Noir, or if you feel my complaint is not fully justified, then I shall write a letter to this wretched little scamp de Rougemont that will make him blush with shame, assuming he still has a modicum of modesty left within him. You need most insistently to point out to Monsieur Le Noir that since I do not drink any wine nor use any candles, that I have only half as much furniture as the others and no linen at all, etc., that I expect and have every right to demand that, with the sole exception of my laundry and without anything being skimmed off into the pockets of the turnkeys, the entire sums that are expended for my food be spent on those two courses I consume, which at least ought to make them edible. For, once again, this little squirt,
⁴
this bastard, this nasty half-breed, this one-fourth of an Englishman, in short, this squalid excuse for a human being must know that the whole of life does not consist of playing practical jokes or having others play them for him.