Letters From Prison (59 page)

Oh! Here is the most beautiful, don’t you agree?

Finally, the fourth:

Whenever you have in mind to make a nine-sided 16 (listen to me carefully), you must take two skulls
⁷
(two, do you hear? I could have said six, but even though I served in the king’s dragoons, I’m a modest enough fellow), and while I’m outside taking a walk in the garden you’ll put them in my room, so that I can find them already there when I return. Or else you can let me know that a package has been received for me from Provence; I shall hasten to open it . . . and there ‘twill be— and I shall be overcome with fear (for I’m extremely timid by nature, as I’ve proved once or twice in my life).

Ah, good people, good and decent souls! Believe me when I say you should cease and desist from trying to invent things that are so ordinary, so insipid, and so easy to fathom,
’tis not worth the time
and effort you put into them. There are plenty of other things you can do than devising and contriving, and when one is not predisposed to inventing one would be far better off making shoes or nozzles rather than inventing
awkwardly, clumsily,
and
stupidly.

The 19th, but mailed the 22nd

By the way, send on my linen; and tell those who
think
that I should learn to take care of myself that they should
think
again, because Monsieur de Rougemont, who is a far better
judge
than they, has just determined that my stove is in dire need of serious repair, and he is having it taken care of. Thus for once in our lives why don’t we all try and pull together in the same direction, if that were possible, for even though you’re all a lowdown scurvy lot, we should nonetheless make an honest effort not to have some pulling to the left while the other is pulling to the right. Pull the way Monsieur de Rougemont does; ’tis a man of good common sense, who always pulls in the right direction . . . or lets himself by pulled when he doesn’t pull himself. —My valet sends his greetings to you and asks you to remind madame la présidente kindly not to forget that she had promised him, when the time came, to have his son promoted to the rank of sergeant.

1
. The French Academy was made up of forty “immortals.”

*
What! two-to-one: not bad, that, eh? Don’t you wish you had thought of that? (
Sade’s note
)

2
. Probably Sade himself; he sees Christ’s tribulations as similar to his.

3
. One of Sade’s many nicknames for Albaret.

4
. Lely suggests that the “doubling” refers to heterosexual sodomy.

5
. The famous statue, renowned for its beauty and especially that of its shapely buttocks, is in the Farnese collection in Naples, which Sade visited the year before his Vincennes imprisonment.

6
. As mentioned, there were frequent thunderstorms in Paris that summer, which frightened Mme de Sade. She was also concerned that the newly installed lightning rods on the roof of Vincennes were attracting lightning. She could, Sade suggests, simulate the thunder by setting fire to one of the fortresses’ powder kegs—which was not by his bed—and blow up the place.

7
. He is probably alluding to the skull apparently used during the theatricals at La Coste during the winter of 1774-75.

82. To Madame de Sade

[November 4, 1783]

E
nclosed, my dear friend, a small sample of the work
¹
I mentioned to you earlier. I collected almost two hundred similar character traits, all of which I portrayed and arranged like the one I’m sending for you to judge. I made a point of keeping strictly to the facts; all I did was add a bit of local color in the details. I was afraid that the work you just sent me,
French Anecdotes,
might have caused the pen to drop from my hand, as they say. But that work is totally different from mine, ’tis a simple, boring chronology, which belongs on the desk of any working man. These little character traits of mine, arranged as you see, will, I dare hope, have both the ring of truth about them and yet retain all the flair of a novel. Besides, you will judge for yourself, and ’tis not a crime to talk for once about belles-lettres and literature, I should like your opinion about whether you think a fair copy of the work should be made. In the event you do, kindly send me—I haven’t the time to make an exact count—a notebook the size of a quire, that is twenty-five pages, of the same size as the ones I used for my comedies, with the margins already marked as they are on this sample enclosed. The Griffin stationers will mark the pages up for you. I shall be ready to begin on the 18th of this month. If by then I haven’t received the notebook, I’ll assume that you didn’t like the piece. And I shall not pursue it further. To finish the work I need a great deal of encouragement, for as this kind of compilation is not in the least up my alley, I would push ahead with it only out of boredom and for want of anything better to do. I have neither the slightest taste nor the least inclination for it. And if I do not receive the notebook I shall take comfort in the knowledge that I shall then be free to undertake something much more to my taste and considerably more enjoyable. You be the judge.

I wish you a very happy and joyous birthday,
²
and I am sending you this bauble as a bouquet, believing that both because you are personally familiar with the country and because I seem to recall that one of your forebears came from there, I thought it might interest you. If I am wrong, forgive me, but know that the gesture was well intentioned. Leave it at that, and know that in my heart of hearts all I want is to convince you most sincerely that I love you and that I shall always love you as long as I live, despite everything they might inveigle you into doing, and of which I am quite sure you are completely ignorant.

I have received everything, but since I have my usual share of grumbling and harping, and perhaps even a number of crazy recriminations, I prefer not to defile a letter and a shipment whose sole purpose is to celebrate your birthday and to let you know how profoundly and sincerely I would have preferred to celebrate it in a completely different manner.

In any event, stack this little notebook in with my comedies, for I have no other copy, and the draft I have kept is quite illegible.

1
. Probably not extant, this work conceived by Sade was different from anything else he wrote—apparently a kind of catalogue of people and their characteristics that he doubtless drew upon in writing his novels and plays.

2
. Renée-Pélagie’s birthday is actually in December, not November. Had Sade forgot? Unlikely. Perhaps he assumed the letter might take a month to pass the censor and reach its destination. Or, perhaps the true date of the letter, which was undated, was December 2, 1783.

83. To Madame de Sade

[Beginning of November, 1783]

G
ood God! how right he is when M. Duclos tells us on page 101 of his
Confessions
¹
that
the witticisms of barristers always stink of the backstairs.
Allow me to go him one better and say that
they smell of the out-room, of the outhouse:
the brainless platitudes your mother and her
Keeper of the Tables
invent are of an odor not to be suffered in any proper salon. And so you never weary of their drivel and their pranks! and so we are to have buffoonery and lawyers to the bitter end! Well, my chit, feed on that stuff to your heart’s content, gorge yourself on it, drink yourself high with it. I am wrong to try to teach you proper manners, quite as wrong as he who would attempt to prove to a pig
that a vanilla cream pasty is better than a t
-. But if you give me examples of obstinacy, at least refrain from criticizing me for mine. You cleave to your principles, eh? And so do I to mine. But the great difference between us two is that my systems are founded upon reason while yours are merely the fruit of imbecility.

My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking to suit other people! My manner of thinking stems straight from my considered reflections; it holds with my existence, with the way I am made. It is not in my power to alter it; and if it were, I’d not do so. This manner of thinking you find fault with is my sole consolation in life; it alleviates all my sufferings in prison, it composes all my pleasures in the world outside, it is dearer to me than life itself. Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness. The reasoning man who scorns the prejudices of simpletons necessarily becomes the enemy of simpletons; he must expect as much, and laugh at the inevitable. A traveler journeys along a fine road. It has been strewn with traps. He falls into one. Do you say it is the traveler’s fault, or that of the scoundrel who lays the traps? If then, as you tell me, they are willing to restore my liberty if I am willing to pay for it by the sacrifice of my principles or my tastes, we may bid one another an eternal adieu, for rather than part with those, I would sacrifice a thousand lives and a thousand liberties, if I had them. These principles and these tastes, I am their fanatic adherent; and fanaticism in me is the product of the persecutions I have endured from my tyrants. The longer they continue their vexations, the deeper they root the principles in my heart, and I openly declare that no one need ever talk to me of liberty if it is offered to me only in return for their destruction. I say that to you. I shall say it to M. Le Noir. I shall say it to the entire earth. Were I brought to the foot of the scaffold, I’d not change my tune. If my principles and my tastes cannot consort with the laws of this land, I don’t for a moment insist upon remaining in France. In Europe there are wise governments that do not dishonor people because of their tastes and do not cast them into jail because of their opinions. I shall go elsewhere to live, and I shall live there happily.

The opinions or the vices of private individuals do no harm to the State; only the morals of public figures exert any influence upon the general administration. Whether a private person believes or does not believe in God, whether he admires and venerates a harlot or treats her with kicks and curses, neither this form of behavior nor that will maintain or shake the constitution of a State. But let the magistrate whose duty it is to see a given town be provided with food double the price of commodities because the purveyors make it worth his while; let the treasurer entrusted with public funds leave hirelings unpaid because he prefers to turn those pennies to his own account; let the steward of a royal household in all its numbers leave luckless troops, whom the king has allowed into his palace, go unfed because that officer would have a hearty meal at home the Thursday before
Shrove Tuesday
—and from one end of the country to the other the effects of this malversation will be felt; everything goes to pieces. And nonetheless the extortioner triumphs while the honest man rots in a dungeon.
A State approaches its ruin,
spake Chancellor Olivier
²
at the Bed of Justice held in Henry II’s reign,
when only the weak are punished, and the rich felon gets his impunity from his gold.

Let the king first correct what is blatantly amiss in the government, let him do away with its abuses, let him send to the gallows those ministers who deceive or rob him, before he sets about repressing his subjects’ opinions or tastes! Once again: those tastes and opinions will not undermine his throne, but the unworthy behavior of those near the throne will topple it sooner or later.

Your parents, you tell me, dear friend, your parents are taking measures to prevent me from ever being in a position to claim anything from them.
This extraordinary sentence is all the more so for demonstrating that either they or I must be knaves. If they think me capable of asking them for anything beyond your dowry, I am the knave (but I am not; knavery has never made any inroads into my principles, it’s too base a vice); and if, on the contrary, they are taking measures to prevent my receiving that upon which my children must naturally count, then they are the knaves. Kindly decide which it is to be, the one or the other, for your sentence leaves no middle ground. You point your finger at them? I am not surprised. Neither am I surprised at the trouble they encountered marrying you off, or at the remark one of your suitors made:
The daughter, I’m nothing loath; but spare me the parents!
My surprise shall cease at the fact they have been paying me your dowry in vouchers that lose two-thirds on the market; no more shall I marvel that those who were concerned for my interests always used to warn me:
Have a care there, you’ve no idea whom you are dealing with.
One should not be the least bit surprised at people who take measures not to pay the dowry promised to their daughter; and I have long suspected that the honor of having sired three children upon you was going to be my ruin. ’Tis doubtless to secure it that your mother has so often had my house entered and my
papers
filched. It will cost her but a few louis to have some documents disappear now out of the notaries’ files, to have some notes to Albaret falsified: and when at last I emerge from here I shall still be quite able to beg in the streets. —Well, faced with that, what recourse do I have? To me three things will always remain as consolation for everything: the pleasure of informing the public, which is not fond of the foul tricks lawyers play upon noblemen; the hope of advising the king by going and casting myself at his feet if need be, to ask restitution for all your parents’ little escapades; and, should all that fail, the satisfaction, to me very sweet, of possessing you
for your own sake,
my dear friend, and of devoting the little that shall still be mine to your needs, to your desires, to the very special charm that will fill my heart seeing you are once more dependent on me.