Letters From Prison (66 page)

The list of errands, which if one wishes may be detached from the enclosed letter, that I kindly request my wife to send me without delay.

A basket of fruit containing the following:

half of which should be ripe and ready to eat, the other half less ripe, in a state to last three or four days;

Two jars of jam;

A dozen Palais-Royal biscuits, six of which souffléd with orange flowers, and two pounds of sugar;

Three packages of night candles.

Please do expedite these shipments; and so that my wife not fall back on the pretense that she has no money to pay for them, I enclose a money order herewith.

I ask the Presiding Judge de Montreuil to pay over to Madame de Sade, his daughter, the sum of two hundred livres, said sum to be deducted from the arrears of her dowry, which I shall settle at the time we make a complete and proper accounting as soon as I am in a position to do so. Done at Paris this fourth of September seventeen hundred and eighty-four.

DE SADE

97. To Madame de Sade

[Late 1784]

I
know full well that
vanille
causes overheating and that one should use
manille
¹
in moderation. But what do you expect? When that is all one has—when one is reduced to these two items for one’s source of pleasure! The only thing better I could do would be to deprive myself of everything out of the ordinary. One good hour in the morning for
five manilles,
artistically graduated from 6 to 9, a good half hour in the evening for three more, these last being smaller—no cause for alarm there, I should think; that seems more than reasonable; besides, when that is what you are used to, no one is any the worse the wear for it—and verily it gets the job done. I challenge someone to come up with anything better—and furthermore, I defy anyone to tell me that I haven’t learned something from being in Vincennes. What’s more, I must say to you that whatever you lose in one area you more than make up for in another, ’tis like the person who is burning down the right side of his house and building it up on the left. For on the side that is not burning—’tis a truly exemplary piece of wisdom, this— sometimes three months in truth, nor is it because the bow is not taut—oh, don’t worry, on that score it is everything you could hope for as far as rigidity goes—but the arrow refuses to leave the bow and that is the most exasperating part
²
—because one wants it to leave— lacking an object, one goes slightly crazy—and that doesn’t help matters in the least—and ’tis for this reason I tell you that prison is bad, because solitude gives added strength only to ideas, and the disturbance that results therefrom becomes all the greater and ever more urgent.

But I’ve already made up my mind about the stubborn refusal of this arrow to leave the bow, all the more so because when, ultimately, it does cleave the air—’tis veritably an attack of epilepsy—and no matter what precautions I may take I am quite certain that these convulsions and spasms, not to mention the physical pain, can be heard as far as the Faubourg St. Antoine—you had some inkling of this at La Coste—well, I can tell you ’tis now twice as bad, so you can judge for yourself. In consequence thereof, when you take everything into consideration, there is more ill than good, so I’ll stick with my
manille,
which is mild and has none of the above painful side effects. —I wanted to analyze the cause of this fainting spell, and believe that ’tis because of the
extreme thickness
—as if one tried to force cream out of the very narrow neck of a bottle or flask. That
thickness
inflates the vessels and tears them. That being so, the common wisdom is—the arrow ought to leave the bow more often—to which I agree most wholeheartedly—the only problem being, it simply doesn’t want to—and to try to hold it back when it doesn’t want to leave literally gives me such vapors that I think I’m dying. If I had the means—that is, means other than the
manille
(for the
manille
does not send the arrow flying, either), but if I had those other means which I utilize when I am free, the arrow being less recalcitrant and flying more frequently, the crisis of its departure would be neither as violent nor as dangerous—for its danger can be explained by the difficulty of departure. When one wants to enter some place, if the door opens easily you make little effort when you push it; but if the door sticks, the force you must use to open it becomes all the greater, because of the door’s resistance. Here, ’tis the same thing: if the arrow were to fly more frequently, ‘twould be
more fluid;
and consequently there would be fewer [violent] episodes; and in the reverse situation,
terrible episodes, violent efforts
if the arrow, filled to overflowing because of its excessive long lack of use, is obliged to tear open its quiver as it departs. —Imagine in your mind a rifle, and in its firing chamber is a bullet, the nature of which is that the longer it remains in the gun the larger it grows; if you fire the rifle within a couple of days, the explosion will be relatively light; but if you leave the bullet there for some time, then it will burst the barrel as it exits.

If you have a doctor you trust completely, explain to him everything I have just told you, for I am quite convinced that there is no one on the face of the earth who experiences a crisis such as I do in this situation; in consequence thereof, as soon as I am free I have every intention of consulting a doctor and explaining the whole problem to him—for ’tis quite certain that I am suffering from a physical or congenital defect that other men do not have, a defect that was less apparent when I was younger but which, as I grow older, is going to manifest itself more and more forcefully, and that idea drives me to despair. As soon as I am able to, I absolutely want to straighten this out, and as a result I shall rigorously follow whatever regime the doctor prescribes. Please don’t contradict me, saying that ’tis not only a physical problem but a moral one as well, for to that I reply that in here I have tried every possible test—forcing myself to be in total self control as long as I possibly can, and yet when the arrow leaves the bow, I not only lose my head completely but it remains in that state for an even greater length of time because the crisis itself is so long and drawn out, and my convulsions are of a violence that are simply beyond description. Not that I get myself all worked up about all this before it happens; on the contrary, the more my mind is in a state of frenzy the less likely it is that the arrow will leave—and that is something you’ve seen and witnessed yourself, and surely remember all too well. And the longer the arrow remains unsheathed, the more worked up one becomes—in consequence thereof all the problems of which you’re aware. If the arrow refuses to fly, and you try to force it,
horrible vapors;
if you succeed—
a frightful crisis
—and if you don’t succeed, one’s head is in
a hellish state.
You be the judge of whether I need to consult a doctor and whether or not I am in dire need of taking baths which, I am quite sure, would help alleviate, if not solve, the problem. —Please reply and let me know if you can tell me what you think about all that, and be assured that you have all my most tender feelings.

1
. As noted, Sade and his wife collaborated to thwart the censors with a private code in their letters. The terms
vanille, manilles
and
prestiges
have been defined earlier, and if this letter is to be believed, Sade often indulged in
manille
several times a day, with the help of the cases
(
é
tuis)
and flasks
(flacons)
that his faithful, ever-adoring wife provided him.

2
. More code words, though easily decipherable: the “arrow” is sperm, the “bow” his penis. Sade is suffering from a sexual dysfunction—and has for many years, according to this letter—where ejaculation is extremely difficult, often resulting in a kind of epileptic fit. It is entirely possible that his wild sexual fantasies are directly related to this dysfunction.

98. To the Author of the News
¹

July 31, 1785

S
ir

The public, overwhelmingly in favor of your latest column concerning an article from the Bastille relative to the adventures of the Count de S., would apparently like you to write more about this famous prisoner, and speaking for myself, since I once had the honor of making the gentleman’s acquaintance, I would be most appreciative if you could furnish me with further anecdotes regarding his detention. I am sending you by the very next post the details you inquired about, and meanwhile I have the honor of being, Sir, etc.

REPLY

In response to your request, Monsieur, I shall try to comply by relating to you a rather amusing anecdote that closely parallels the one I alluded to in my last column.

You have doubtless heard of what is referred to in the Inquisition of Madrid or in our own dungeons of Chatelet as the
prison stool pigeon.
He’s a kind of well-paid spy, who is locked up in a cell with some poor wretch the authorities are out to get, and from whom they want to elicit some kind of confession or other. This so-called companion of misfortune insinuates himself into his neighbor’s confidence; he sympathizes with him, fills him with some cock and bull story about his own background, offers him a ray of hope, gains his trust, and since the poor wretch wears his heart on his sleeve, the stool pigeon soon entices him to make the confession he was after. After which, the stool pigeon disappears and the poor wretch is hanged.

That Themis, the goddess of law and justice, is so stupid and barbaric as to stoop to such atrocious measures in order to multiply her victims or entice her lackeys into indulging in such dark and dubious pleasures, is a kind of horror that one can only add to all those others wherewith she constantly and continually befouls both herself and her miserable henchmen; but to add one more repulsive tactic to all the others is scarcely enough to raise an eyebrow: blood is drawn, Themis gulps it down, all methods are good and
valid
providing they do the trick.

But in a royal prison, under the safeguard and protection of the monarch, amongst people who have dedicated their lives to his service, that the snakes of that odious goddess succeed in sending forth their venom as freely as they are wont to do in the filthy nooks and crannies of their own abominable lairs, that is what doubtless strikes one as most surprising, and that indeed is precisely what happened yesterday to the prisoner who was the subject of my most recent article, which I gather you found interesting.

To come to the point, I must first admit that I have a
weakness
for our hero . . . Yes, Monsieur, a weakness! Who after all does not have a weakness? The world is molded out of
weaknesses,
and as our contemporary philosophers are wont to say, ’tis through the world’s
weaknesses
that the machine whose job it is to do away with virtue accomplishes its task. There can be no equilibrium without weakness, as we all know. Without Nicolas Cordier,
²
who had the
weakness
to go borrow fifteen thousand francs, his pistol at one’s throat; without Guillaume Partiet, who had the
weakness
to steal from the infirm and disabled; without Nicodem d’Evry, who
had the weakness
to have someone shit in his mouth; without Claude de Montreuil, who out of
weakness
slept with his sister and three daughters, the entire universe, which sustains itself only through
weaknesses,
suddenly dragged off into the vast deserts of space, would perhaps be hundreds of millions of miles farther from the sun than it is today.

Be that as it may, the
weakness
of our dear count is not nearly as great. It consists merely of his absolute loathing to have to account to anyone, and as you can well imagine his torturers have seized upon
that weakness
to further vex and mortify their unhappy patient. But guess to whom they made him accountable?. . .
The prison stool pigeon!
That’s right, good Sir,
the stoolie!
As a result, yesterday the count was questioned, sympathized with, comforted, filled with hope, but most of all questioned by his presumed companion-in-misfortune, but since it appears that you know the man, I shall cut my story short and leave it to your imagination to figure out how he behaved and how he responded to that provocation.

Are you not utterly amazed, Monsieur, as am I, that such tactics are used with a man of good common sense? Such shopworn tricks of the trade, such base and vile methods, completely despicable and so unworthy of decent people? But verily, Sir, ’tis not with decent or honorable people we are dealing here but with a troop of out-and-out scoundrels, who have the misfortune of thinking that the count is as stupid as they.

I have the honor of being, Sir, etc.

More to follow.

1
. Although ostensibly addressed to a newspaper columnist, one can presume it was sent to Mme de Sade.