Letters From Prison

by Marquis de Sade

  To date, no one has been able to figure out the exact meaning of Sade’s deductions, which, by the way, he never again alluded to once he was free.

  These letters, covering thirteen key years—he went into Vincennes a still dashing, still seductive man of thirty-seven and emerged an obese, elderly gentlemen of fifty—in a sense reveal more about this most enigmatic of men than any of his other work. Here he is not putting on a face for the world, he is not posturing or proselytizing, he is not indulging in his outrageous philosophical fantasies of evil, which, as an act of vengeance against “the stupid scoundrels who torture me” (see letter 67), including and indeed starting with the présidente, were his therapy and psychic salvation. In short, in these letters from prison, we are as close to the real Marquis de Sade as we will get. In the letters to his wife, his chief correspondent and confidante, he often expresses his irritation, his frustration, even his hate for her entire clan, but more often it is affection, gratitude, and love that informs them. Renée-Pélagie was the enduring love of his life:13 his passions were many and varied, but she alone remained true to him, and he both recognized and appreciated that. The terms of endearment he used to her are touching and sincere: my pet, my turtle dove, miracle of Nature, delight of my eyes, flame of my life. His frequent concerns about her health and her well-being are heartfelt. One summer when the weather, which had been scorching, turns cold, he hastens to write and order her to take out her warm garments again lest she fall ill. When he learns that on more than one occasion her mother had not provided a carriage when she came to see him, he flies into a rage against the stingy présidente who dared expose his darling wife to the dangers of crossing Paris on foot and unattended.

  In his few letters to the présidente, he can be imperious and groveling at the same time, but he understands she wields the power and controls his fate, and he writes accordingly. In his letters to one of the few women he loved but never physically conquered, Marie-Dorothée de Rousset, also known as Milli, Milli Springtime, Fanny, or the Saint, there is a closeness, a bantering but respectful tone, an intimacy not found elsewhere. And when, after spending several months in Paris seconding Madame de Sade’s efforts to plead the marquis’s cause both with the présidente and the king’s ministers, Milli Springtime writes him that she is returning to Provence, he writes her a letter of disappointment and disdain that reveals the depths of his feeling for her. His letters to his attorney, business manager, and boyhood friend Gaufridy are those of irritated master to recalcitrant employee. While Sade sorely needs him, increasingly he cannot suffer him, and in his paranoia—here doubtless justified—taxes him for yielding to the hateful stratagems of la présidente and essentially accuses him of working for her. His letters to Monsieur Le Noir, the lieutenant-general of police, are generally respectful, both because in the main he had dealt fairly with the prisoner and had—unlike the Vincennes warden de Rougemont—treated him as the gentleman he was. As for the latter, both in the letters to de Rougemont and his references to the man in his letters to others, Sade’s vitriolic pen knows no bounds. As for the letters to his valet Carteron, a.k.a. La Jeunesse, a.k.a. Martin Quiros (pseudonyms the marquis made up for his favorite valet), Sade reserves a whole other tone, one of teasing and twitting, a complicity that can only come from those who have been through a lot together (which they surely had) and whose relationship, even though of master to servant, was one of friendship and intimacy. In his Carteron letters, Sade displays a rollicking sense of humor completely lacking anywhere else, with the possible exception of some of his buoyant tales and novellas, such as the delicious “Mystified Magistrate.”

  Several years after Sade’s death, the need to excavate the Charenton Cemetery caused Sade’s grave to be dug up. Dr. L. J. Ramon, now fully aware of his early patient’s fame, attended the exhumation, where he asked for and received Sade’s skull. Phrenology14 was all the rage then, and Ramon made a careful examination of the skull. According to that study, the prominent features of Sade’s character were theosophy and benevolence (top of the cranium), lack of combativeness (no exaggerated development behind the ears), no excess in physical love (no exaggerated distance between nostrils). In fact, Sade’s skull, Dr. Ramon concluded, “was in all respects similar to that of a Father of the Church.”

  Later, Ramon yielded to the entreaties of a German phrenologist of some renown, Dr. Spurzheim, and loaned him the skull in connection with a number of lectures Spurzheim was scheduled to give in England and America. Spurzheim died some years later, and no trace of the famous skull was ever found.

  Sade would doubtless have highly approved of both Dr. Ramon’s extraordinary conclusions about his character and Dr. Spurzheim’s supreme carelessness in losing his demon-filled head.

  1. Only the first three survive. Conversations from the Chateau de Florbelle, or The Days of Florbelle as it came to be known, was seized by the police in 1807. After Sade’s death, Sade’s son Donatien-Claude-Armand not only gave the order that it be destroyed but personally witnessed the manuscript’s burning.

  2. Sade’s father-in-law, Claude-René Montreuil, was president of the Court of Taxation. As such, his wife had the right to be called “presidente,” and whenever that title is used here, it refers to Madame de Montreuil.

  3. The titles “count” and “marquis” were used alternately from generation to generation. When Sade’s father died early in 1767, he therefore assumed the title “count,” though history has linked him forever under his original title.

  4. Learning of his son’s “illness,” the Count de Sade immediately assumed it was the lovely Laure who had given his son “the pox.” Hardly likely.

  5. In referring to the count, Marais of course meant our marquis.

  6. A royal warrant bearing the king’s seal that took precedence over other legal documents and offered no appeal. It had the added virtue for wayward nobles of taking their case outside the workings of the normal judicial system.

  7. One of Sade’s two surrogate mothers (and probably a former mistress of Sade’s father). When Sade was a student at Louis-le-Grand, he spent part of at least one summer, and perhaps two, at Madame de Saint-Germain’s country home. She loved the boy and lavished all sorts of kindnesses upon him. Sade, whose relations with his mother were virtually nil, remained devoted to Madame de Saint-Germain throughout his life.

  8. Later, investigators would find notches carved in the mantelpiece, the anal marquis’s recording of the number of beatings he endured.

  9. In truth, Sade was guilty of neither in the strict sense of the term. When asked if the marquis had sodomized them, all the girls said they would never commit such a horrible act; for them to have said the contrary would have put them in jeopardy, because sodomy, though practiced frequently enough in the whorehouses of the time, was by law punishable by “death by fire” and the victims’ ashes scattered to the wind. If sodomy there was, it was between the two men, which was not in question by the prosecution. As for poisoning, two master pharmacists of Marseilles, who examined the unused pills and regurgitations of the two girls, found no traces of arsenic or any other corrosive matter. That he used Spanish fly is unquestioned, but so did hundreds if not thousands of other bordello clients. In fact, pills containing the substance were known in France as Richelieu’s pills, for he himself was a known exponent. Used in moderation, Spanish fly had been known since Roman days as an effective aphrodisiac. Sade’s crime, obviously, was having given both girls what amounted, in today’s parlance, to an overdose.

  Years later, in his letters from Vincennes, Sade is still arguing not his innocence but his “right” to use such an aphrodisiac, which, he maintains in one of his letters to his wife, whores are well aware of: “There are, I think, very few who do not know what it is,” he writes.

  10. Sade took the name from one of the ancestral properties he owned in Provence, the Chateau de Mazan.

  11. Though under the law newspapers could say nothing disparaging about aristocrats, the foreign p
ress and broadsheets—a kind of underground press— were under no such restriction and thrived on scandal, especially royal scandal.

  12. Italics mine.

  13. In all fairness, after her refusal to see him following his release, Sade took up with a young ex-actress, Marie-Constance Quesnet, whom he also loved.

  14. In the nineteenth century, a branch of medicine that maintained that a person’s character and mental faculties could be ascertained by measuring the skull.

  Note on the Letters

  It is to Sade’s early biographer, Gilbert Lely, that we owe the discovery of the vast majority of Sade’s letters from prison, which were “lost” for 150 years. In researching his biography in the late 1940s, Lely came upon the bundle of letters at the Chateau of Condé-en-Brie, the residence of Sade’s direct descendant Xavier de Sade, in January 1948. Lely’s invaluable find consisted of one hundred seventy-nine letters in all, plus a number of notes, memoranda, and receipts. Lely used them to good effect in his biography—published in two volumes, the first in 1952, the second in 1957—to trace the evolution of Sade’s thought and work during that crucial thirteen-year period of his life. During the 1950s Lely also transcribed and published three volumes, consisting of ninety-one of the letters. The three volumes were respectively entitled: The Eagle, Mademoiselle; The Carillon of Vincennes; and Monsieur Six (the last-named edited with the assistance of Georges Daumas). In 1966 the French publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert published a thirty-volume edition of Sade’s works, the last two volumes of which contained his prison letters. The Pauvert edition added twenty or so letters that had subsequently come to light following Lely’s three volumes (the letters in his Condé-en-Brie discovery ended in 1786), and deleted a few of lesser importance from the Lely volumes. To these we have added four important letters written in 1790, immediately following Sade’s release, on Good Friday of that year, from the Charenton Asylum to which he had been sent from the Bastille just a few days before that dungeon was stormed on July 14, 1789.

  Roughly two-thirds of these prison letters are to his wife, the only person to whom he was allowed to write on a regular basis and also the only person to whom he felt he could open his heart freely. Although they vary greatly in tone and content, and often express exasperation and sometimes drip with disdain, they are, collectively, a tribute to the solidity of the relationship between these two, who have more than once been referred to an “an infernal couple.” Lely writes:

  One should never be misled by Sade’s biting sarcasms, nor his terrible bouts of anger, whenever his least wishes are thwarted— which are quite understandable in the light of the frightful conditions under which he was being held—about what Madame de Sade’s real role was in all this or what her husband’s true feelings about her were. Despite all his reproaches and his ever alert suspicions—some of which were perhaps an attempt on his part to spur her on to greater efforts, which he judged too slow or ineffective, given the agony of his state of limbo, he could not be unaware that his wife’s entire existence was focused on his liberation, and to achieve that cherished end she would shrink from nothing. For years she bombarded the ministries with her touching pleas. Thus to the extent that he hoped that his letters would escape either the censor’s vigil or the indiscretion of Madame de Montreuil, he never hesitated to open his heart to Madame de Sade, and even at times reveal to her his most secret desires, knowing that this woman, who had already offered him so many proofs of her love, would never do anything to harm or hurt him.1

  Precisely because of this candor, this confidence in his correspondent, we have through these letters insights into the mind and heart of this most scandalous of writers as accurate and truthful as we will doubtless ever have. Lely compares them to “Shakespearan monologues,” and Maurice Lever calls them “an epistolary soliloquy unique in world literature,” which may be stretching things a bit, but they are indeed of a rare eloquence and honesty, especially those to Renée-Pélagie, and cast a whole new light on the Divine Marquis.

  In addition to those correspondents already mentioned, this volume contains letters to the following: Abbe Amblet, his boyhood tutor and longtime friend; his elder son Louis-Marie; the noted Paris oculist Grandjean and his son, both of whom treated Sade for his serious eye problems in prison; Commander de Sade, his elderly uncle, who under the influence of la présidente tried to convince the marquis to give him a power of attorney so that he could manage his nephew’s affairs (he failed); Chevalier du Puget, the king’s lieutenant-general at the Bastille, who befriended Sade; Monsieur de Montreuil, the president, from whom Sade requests a sum of money; Madame Le Faure, a longtime servant of the Sades; Sade’s beloved aunt, Gabriella-Elénore de Sade; and Monsiur Reinaud, one of Sade’s stewards. There are in addition a few open letters: an Evening Prayer; a letter to the entire officer corps of the Bastille; a presumed exchange with a Paris columnist relative to a famous prisoner of the Bastille (himself); an affidavit relative to an altercation between him and one of the prison guards; and the aforementioned letter addressed simply “To the Stupid Scoundrels Who Are Tormenting Me.”

  Most of Sade’s letters, as one can see by the samples of the originals in this volume, were written in an excellent and elegant calligraphy, with very few erasures or changes. The longest is sixteen pages, but most cover one or both sides of a single sheet or, in some instances, two sheets. Lely rightly notes that most if not all were written at a single sitting, with no preliminary draft, which makes their power and cogency all the more remarkable.

  A few remarks on the translation:

  —The ellipses in the letters are Sade’s, who tended to use them rather freely and indiscriminately, and unless otherwise noted do not indicate an omission.

  —In those few instances where there is a seeming or obvious omission, we have so indicated by the bracketed [words missing]. In a few instances—letters 31, 52, 56, 61—parts of the letters are indeed missing, and that too we have noted.

  —Sade was enamored of the semicolon, and we have upon occasion, where sense dictates, used full stops to divide some of his longer sentences into logical parts. Otherwise we have kept faithfully to the original punctuation.

  —There are times when Sade does not follow a question with a question mark but rather a full stop or exclamation point. In most instances we have followed standard stylistic usage and inserted question marks, unless it seemed logical that an exclamation point should prevail.

  —All italics in the text, unless otherwise noted, indicate Sade’s own underlining of words and passages.

  —For the most part, we have followed Sade’s paragraphing, but in a very few instances, where there was an obvious shift in mood or subject, we have begun a new paragraph where Sade does not.

  As for the dates, most of the letters are undated, or bear only the day but not the month or year. Lely and others since have, by various references in the letters themselves or by cross references, managed to date them fairly precisely. But to differentiate those with specified dates from those without, the latter have been bracketed.

  In his letters, Sade refers to various monies current at the time: ecus, louis, livres, francs, pistoles, sous, and liards. The ecu, a silver coin first struck under the reign of Louis IX, or Saint Louis (1214-1270), was worth three livres, the louis 24 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, and the Hard, a copper coin, was worth a fourth of a sou.

  To give an idea of the cost of living then, in 1789 a semi-skilled 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. Sade in a letter to his wife writes despairingly that it had cost the family a hund
red 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 Vincennes prison, earned a salary of 18,000 francs a year (which he augmented, according to Sade and other prisoners there, by an additional “illegal” 15,000 francs annually by overcharging his wards for food, wine, and other necessities). After the Revolution, Sade complains to his lawyer Gaufridy about the diminishing value of the paper money issued by the new government. He is referring to the assignat, whose value declined between 1792 and 1795 to virtually nothing. Thus Sade’s complaint of often going to bed hungry during those years was doubtless not exaggerated.

  R. S.

  1. Gilbert Lely, Vie du Marquis de Sade, rev. ed. (Paris: Au Cercle du Livre Prprésidente-cieux, 1966), Book V, p. 236. References to and quotes from Lely refer to this edition.

  The Chateau de Vincennes, a vast structure in the Val de Marne to the east of Paris, was built over a period of more than three decades, from 1337 to 1370. (It was, coincidentally, completed the year construction began on Sade’s other prison nemesis, the Bastille.) It long served as a residence for the kings of France, and in the sixteenth century an imposing sainte-chapelle was added to the several imposing buildings within its walls. The dungeon, which stood on a slight promontory, was flanked by four forbidding towers. The cells, which Gilbert Lely, Sade’s pioneering biographer, describes as “heartbreakingly grim,” were disproportionately high and bathed “in eternal twilight,” since their narrow windows with their double bars filtered out most of the daylight. In a letter written roughly two months after his incarceration, Sade describes his situation: “I am in a tower locked up behind nineteen iron doors, my only source of light being two little windows each outfitted with a score of bars. . . .” In his sixty-five days there, he notes, he has been allowed only five hours of fresh air: “When they let the dog [Sade himself] out of his kennel, he trots off to spend one hour in a kind of cemetery about forty feet square, surrounded by walls more than fifty feet high.”