The Mystified Magistrate

by Marquis de Sade

  Among the many stigmata with which Sade has been branded is that of being not only anticlerical but an atheist, and indeed he was. But again one must relate his stance to the times in which he lived: in the eighteenth century it was, as Maurice Heine observes, “not terribly original to be an atheist. Since the beginning of the century, there were many of the more daring minds who considered religion as a pure figment of men’s imaginations, metaphysical truths as an illusion, and belief in God as ‘the strongest and most deeply-rooted of prejudices.’” Many intellectual groups of the day—philosophers, mathematicians, doctors—made it mandatory for new members to proclaim, their atheism before being admitted. In 1750—the same year Louis XV built his Deer Park—works by La Mettrie, Diderot, and Baron d’Holbach “dared bring [atheism] out from the clandestinity to which it had hitherto been relegated for so long,” Heine notes.

  Thus Sade, the ultimate rebel, was in a sense simply espousing a movement that, while still a countercurrent, was fast becoming mainstream. Sade’s problem was, as usual, his total lack of discretion. While others kept their atheism closeted, or resorted to publishing their works abroad, Sade made no bones about his position, as if provoking the authorities to react. One of his first brushes with the law, in fact, was the result of his having taken what with anyone else would have been an evening’s dalliance with a prostitute. Instead it became a national scandal. To be precise: on the night of October 18, 1763—Sade was then twenty-three—he took a woman named Jeanne Testard to his rented room on the rue Mouffetard near the Sorbonne and there, instead of simply enjoying himself, spent the night blaspheming God, Christ, and the Virgin Mary, obliging Jeanne to do the same. As might be expected, the next morning Jeanne— God-fearing girl that she was—complained of her ordeal to her procuress, who in turn complained to the police. In less than two weeks, Sade was arrested and imprisoned for the first time in that dismal dungeon Vincennes, where he later would spend so many agonizing years. The charge was blasphemy and profanation, far more serious crimes in the eyes of Louis XV’s laws than that of simple debauchery.

  Sade spent twenty-seven years—half his adult life— in eleven prisons under five different regimes, doubtless a record, most certainly for someone whose major crime was committing “the English vice” with paid prostitutes. Sade was not jailed for crimes against the state nor society. As a self-proclaimed, and certainly unrepentant, libertine, he was no more guilty of heinous crimes than were hundreds if not thousands of his contemporaries, none of whom suffered penalties remotely resembling those meted out to Sade. Rather, his “crime” was flaunting his “misdeeds,” as he refers to his sexual escapades, of openly proclaiming his preferences and predilections. In so doing he offended the king, whose pompous court he assiduously eschewed; the clergy, whose hypocrisy he abhorred; and his family-in-law, whose recent escutcheon9 he badly stained. But if the king was ultimately forgiving and the clergy generally indifferent, his mother-in-law, Madame la Présidente de Montreuil, was bound and determined to see her son-in-law removed from society. It is through her—doubtless with the tacit if not active approval of her husband, a well-meaning, weak-willed man—that Sade spent the thirteen years between 1777 and 1790 in dungeons. And it was she who, unknowingly but unequivocally, by removing her son-in-law from society, was responsible for turning him into a writer. The longer this “freest spirit that ever lived” (Apollinaire) remained locked up, the more wild the demons that filled his brain were set loose to people a fictional universe such as the world had never seen, to propound a philosophy that—until precisely two hundred years after his birth in 1740—few could comprehend or even imagine, a world in which cold, calculated evil triumphed at every turn.

  It is all too easy to condemn Sade, as many have done, as mad, and thus dismiss his works as aberrations, pure and simple, best left unread, perhaps even burned.10 That the “monster author” (Napoleon Bonaparte) was an inveterate libertine, that he was openly bisexual, as much enamored of feminine beauty as he was of the callipygian portion of the human body, is uncontested. That the years behind bars affected his health as well as whetted his imagination to unbelievable heights (and depths) none would dispute. But as we have seen, Sade was less an incomprehensible aberration than a product of his age, one who, admittedly, seized the various strands of the social fabric and rearranged them into a diabolic anarchical pattern, standing the world, as it were, upside down. Much of his philosophical work, and indeed his personal letters that have survived, reveal a man who was as intelligent as he was intolerant, as principled as he was violent, as sensitive as he was arrogant. But he was certainly not mad.

  Perhaps understandably the stories in this volume, which reveal the lighter, sometimes comic side of the Marquis de Sade, were among the first of many volumes discovered—or rediscovered—in the twentieth century that give us a fuller, more rounded picture of this amazing— and amazingly complicated—man. Unlike some of the other works, these tales should offend no one. Rather, it is hoped that they might, as the author noted, give the reader a modicum of pleasure, and perhaps an insight or two.

  In the stories, the footnotes at the bottoms of the pages are Sade’s own. The notes at the back of the book are the translator’s.

  A NOTE ABOUT MONEY

  In these stories, Sade mentions various monies current in the eighteenth century: ecus, louis, livres, francs, pistoles, and sous. The écu, a silver coin first struck under the reign of Louis IX, or Saint Louis (1214-1270), was worth three livres, the louts twenty-four livres. The value of the livre varied considerably, depending on the historical moment, and was replaced by the franc. The livre and franc seem to have been of relatively equal value; before 1789 the term franc was used loosely to mean livre. The pistole, an ancient gold coin also of varying value from country to country, was worth ten francs in France. The sou was worth five centimes, or l/20th of a franc.

  To give an idea of the cost of living in 1789, a semiskilled worker made 25 or 30 sous a day; a skilled laborer as much as 50 sous. A provincial bourgeois could live comfortably on 3,000 livres a year. In a letter to his wife Sade writes despairingly that it had cost the family a hundred thousand francs to have him incarcerated for ten years, or ten thousand francs per annum for room and board at Vincennes and the Bastille. For her own room and board at the convent of Saint-Aure, Madame de Sade paid half that amount for quarters she described as far from luxurious. Monsieur de Rougemont, warden of Vin-cennes prison, earned a salary of 18,000 francs a year (which he augmented, according to Sade and other prisoners, by an additional “illegal” 15,000 francs annually, overcharging his wards for food, wine, and other necessities).

  THE MYSTIFIED MAGISTRATE

  Ah! trust in me, I wish to sing their praises

  In such wise … that for twenty years

  they’ll dare not show their faces.

  It was the most profound regret that the Marquis d’Olincourt, a colonel of dragoons, a man of wit, grace, and vivacity, saw his sister-in-law, Mademoiselle de Téroze, promised in marriage to one of the most dreadful creatures who has ever existed upon the face of the earth. This charming girl, eighteen years of age, as fresh as the mythical Flora, fashioned like the Graces themselves, had for four years been the object of the affections of young Count d’Elbène—he being the lieutenant-colonel of d’Olincourt’s regiment. With great trepidation she saw that fatal moment arrive which, by joining her to the grumpy spouse to whom she had been betrothed, would separate her forever from the only man who was truly worthy of her. But how could she avoid it? Mademoiselle de Téroze’s father was a stubborn old fellow, a hypochondriac who was plagued with the gout, a man who sadly fancied that it was neither propriety nor a person’s virtues that ought to govern a girl’s feelings about a husband but only reason, maturity, and above all position. He further fancied that the position of a man of the long robe—a judge—was the most esteemed, the most majestic of all positions under the monarchy—the one, moreover, he loved most in all the world. It theref
ore followed, as night follows day, that only with a man of the judiciary could his daughter be happy.

  In spite of these sentiments, old Baron de Téroze had nevertheless given his elder daughter in marriage to a military man who, more’s the pity, was a colonel of dragoons. This daughter, extremely happy and born for happiness in many respects, had no reason to regret her father’s choice. But all this in no wise altered her father’s opinion; if this first marriage had been a success, it was merely the exception that proved the rule; the fact remained that only a man of the robe could make a girl completely happy. With this premise clearly established, it had then become a question of finding a judge. Now, of all the possible judges, the most amiable in the eyes of the old baron was a certain Monsieur de Fontanis, presiding judge of the High Court of Aix, an old Provençal acquaintance. Therefore, without further ado, it was Monsieur de Fontanis who was chosen to become Mademoiselle de Téroze’s husband.

  Few people have a clear picture of a presiding judge of the Court of Aix, for it is a species of animal of whom much has been said and little understood, a strict moralist by profession, meticulous, credulous, stubborn, vain, a timid soul, talkative and stupid by nature; his face stretched and taut like a gosling, rolling his r’s like Punch, and generally tall, thin, gaunt, and as smelly as an old corpse … It was as though all the spleen and inflexibility of the kingdom’s magistrature had taken refuge in the Provençal temple of Themis1 in order to sally forth from there each time a French court wanted to admonish someone or hang one of its citizens. But Monsieur de Fontanis surpassed by at least a full degree this rough sketch of his compatriots. Above his frail frame, which was slightly stooped, one could note that the back of his low-set head sloped upward toward the top; his brow was a sallow, almost sickly yellow and the pate itself was adorned magisterially by a multipurpose wig, the likes of which had yet to be seen in Paris. His two slightly bowed legs supported, with relative pomp and circumstance, this walking clock tower from whose upper respiratory tract there issued forth, not without more than a few drawbacks for anyone who happened to be in the vicinity, a shrill voice emphatically uttering idle banter, half in French and half in Provençal, banter he never failed to laugh at with his mouth open so wide that one could, at these moments, see a blackish abyss clear down to the uvula, a toothless pit excoriated in certain places and that bore an undeniable resemblance to another bodily seat which, considering the makeup of our frail humanity, as frequently becomes the throne of kings as it does of peasants. Quite apart from these physical attractions, Monsieur de Fontanis laid claim to a fine mind: after having dreamt one night that he had ascended to the third heaven with Saint Paul, he considered himself the greatest astronomer in all France. He took legal stands like Farinacci and Cujas,2 and he was often heard to say, in keeping with these great men, and with his colleagues who were not great men, that a citizen’s life, his fortune, honor, and family—in short, everything that society holds sacred—are as nothing when it comes to ferreting out crime, and that it was a hundred times better to risk the lives of a dozen innocent souls than to let a single guilty person go free by mistake, because there is justice in heaven above even though it be lacking in the courts here below, and because the punishment of an innocent soul has no other drawback than to send a soul on his way to paradise, whereas to let a guilty person go free threatens to multiply crime on earth. The only kind of people who had any influence on Monsieur de Fontanis’s hardened soul were whores—not that he generally used them to any great extent himself. Although of a very ardent temper, he was stubborn by nature and inclined to use his forces sparingly, so that his desires always far exceeded his ability to fulfill them. Monsieur de Fontanis aspired to the glory of transmitting his illustrious name to posterity, it was as simple as that, but what led this famous judge to be indulgent with the priestesses of Venus was his conviction that there were few citizens, at least on the distaff side, who were more useful to the State. Through their double-dealing, he claimed, their lies, and their loose tongues, a whole host of secret crimes managed to be uncovered. You had to give Monsieur de Fontanis due credit at least on one score, and that was that he was the sworn enemy of what philosophers are wont to call human frailties.

  This slightly grotesque combination of a physical Ostrogoth and Justinian morality left the town of Aix for the first time in his life in April, 1779, at the behest of the Baron de Téroze—whom he had known for a long time, for reasons of little or no interest to the reader—and came to take up lodgings at the Hotel de Danemark, not far from the Baron’s residence. Since it was then the time of year when the Saint-Germain fair was being held, everyone in the hotel thought that this extraordinary-looking creature had come to town as part of the show. One of those semi-official characters who are forever offering their services in public places such as these even went so far as to propose that he go inform the impresario Nicolet, who would be more than delighted to fit him into the program, unless of course he would prefer to make his debut with the rival impresario Audinot. To which the judge replied:*

  “My nurse was careful to warn me when I was a child that the Parisians are a caustic bunch much given to practical jokes, and would never properly appreciate my many virtues. But my wig-maker was quick to add, nonetheless, that my wig would make a deep impression on them. The common people are wont to joke when they are dying of hunger, to sing when they are overwhelmed with burdens! … Oh, I have always maintained that what these people need is an Inquisition like the one in Madrid, or a scaffold constantly ready and waiting, like the one in Aix.”

  And yet Monsieur de Fontanis, after freshening up a bit—which could only have had the effect of heightening the splendor of his sexagenarian charms—and after spraying himself with some rose-water and lavender which, as Horace says, were in no wise ambitious adornments, after all this, I say, and perhaps a few other precautions that have not been brought to our attention, the judge came to pay a call upon his old friend the baron. The double doors swing open, his name is announced, and the judge enters.

  Unfortunately for him, the two sisters and the Marquis d’Olincourt3 were playing like three children in one corner of the salon when this highly original figure of a man appeared, and no matter how hard they tried to control themselves they could not refrain from bursting out laughing, with the result that the Provençal judge’s solemn face was thoroughly discountenanced. He had been at great pains to study, in front of a mirror, the bow he planned to make upon his arrival, and he was performing it reasonably well when that accursed peal of laughter from the lips of our three young friends caused him to remain bent over, in the form of an arc, a great deal longer than he had planned to. He finally did straighten up, however; a stern glance from the baron brought his three children back within the bounds of respect, and the conversation began.

  The baron, whose mind was already made up and who did not want to waste any time beating around the bush, informed Mademoiselle de Téroze, before this initial meeting had come to an end, that the judge was the man he had in mind for her to marry and that before the week was out he expected her to give him her hand. Mademoiselle de Téroze said nothing, the judge withdrew, and the baron said once again that he expected to be obeyed.

  It was a cruel situation the lovely girl found herself in: not only did she adore Monsieur d’Elbène, not only did he idolize her, but, what is more, she was as weak as she was soft-hearted, and unfortunately had allowed her charming lover to pluck that flower which, so different from the rose to which it is nonetheless sometimes compared, does not have the rose’s ability to be reborn each spring. That being the case, what would Monsieur de Fontanis … a presiding judge of the court of Aix… have thought upon perceiving that his task had already been accomplished? A Provençal magistrate may have his share of ridiculous qualities—they are indeed inherent in this class—but the fact remains that he is well versed in the matter of first fruits, and can understandably be expected to find them at least once in his life, in his wife. T
his was what gave Mademoiselle de Téroze pause, for, however quick-witted and mischievous by nature, she was nonetheless of a sensitivity quite befitting a woman in such a situation and understood perfectly well that her husband would indeed have a very low opinion of her if she were to provide him with proof that she had been disrespectful to him even before she had had the honor of meeting him. For nothing is so just as our prejudices on this matter: not only must a poor wretch of a girl sacrifice all the affections of which her heart is capable to the husband her parents choose for her, but she is even guilty if, before meeting the tyrant who has been chosen to enslave her, she has had the misfortune to listen to the voice of Nature and yield, be it only for a moment, to its promptings.

  Mademoiselle de Téroze therefore confided her concerns to her sister, who, more playful than she was prudish, more pleasure-prone than religious, reacted to the secret by bursting out laughing like someone demented, and lost no time passing the information on to her solemn husband, who decided that, Hymen being in such a sad and sorry state, it could not under any circumstance be offered to the priests of Themis. These gentlemen, he pointed out, never joked about matters of such importance, and he was concerned lest his poor little sister-in-law find herself no sooner arrived in the town where “the scaffold was constantly ready and waiting” than she would perhaps be made to climb upon it and offered up as a victim to modesty and decency. The marquis cited chapter and verse—after dinner, especially, his erudition had a tendency to show itself—proving that the natives of Provence were indeed the descendants of an Egyptian colony; he noted that the Egyptians were very often given to sacrificing young girls, and that a presiding judge of the Aix court, who from an ancestral point of view was no more than an Egyptian colonist, could without any stretch of the imagination arrange to have the prettiest neck in the world, namely his dear sister’s, separated from the rest of her body … Head choppers, these colonial magistrates; they can slice a neck, d’Olincourt went on, quicker than a crow can say “caw,” whether for good reason or not concerns them not one whit. Like Themis, inflexibility wears a bandage over its eyes, placed there by stupidity; and in a town like Aix philosophy never sees fit to remove it…