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.
True, this little joker will doubtless say: but you are the one who’s forever playing practical jokes on us; so you are the one who has to pay the piper. —To which I have two things to reply: first of all, that ’tis for the présidente to pay for these practical jokes, since she is the one behind them; and secondly, I strongly suggest that she pay as little as possible for them, for they are most poorly done. First, there is one turnkey who, when he wants to perform one of his little acts of buffoonery, begins by turning to one side, since he can’t bring himself to look me in the eye when he pours out his lies to me; and
then there is another (this one is my favorite), who when he comes to administer the little injection his captain has ordered him to give that morning, always pokes his fellow turnkeys smartly in the ribs, to let them know he’s going to tell a huge lie, and that the order to do so comes from above and that they consequently should do the same . . . The imbeciles! lie to me will they! And the poor présidente, all wrapped up in her little cocoon, convinced that everything is going exactly as planned! —As for de Rougemont, that’s a whole other matter: he is considerably more subtle and a better actor. He’s the only one of the band whose every performance is worth at least twenty sous; some days you could even go so high as thirty, when he arrives, having just downed a hearty meal, his tongue still awash in globules of fatty matter that stick in his craw, expresses himself more or less like this, exaggerating his r’s beyond belief:
Ah, no, I say! you’re still not being fair to me. You are laboring under the mistaken belief that words are meant to foster understanding; dead wrong: you should not believe a single word I have the honor of saying to you, because words are absolutely meaningless
Ah no, I say . . . And with that he is overcome with a violent attack of hiccups and cannot go on. You must admit that I have the patience of Job and that I had the presence of mind to remember where I was, otherwise I would have run the knave out of room with a few well-placed kicks in the belly.
But he’ll get his just desserts in due course, of that I give you my word.
In any event, allow me to conclude with the following axiom that emanates from nothing more than good common sense, and that is; ’tis not by means of vice, and the unspeakable horror that vice begets, that vice can be either punished or reformed; only virtue can accomplish that, and virtue in its purest form. ’Tis not up to the présidente de Montreuil—cousin, niece, relative, godchild and gossip monger of all the little bankrupt clan from Cadiz and Paris, ’tis not for the présidente de Montreuil, niece of a crook who was thrown out of the Invalides by none other than Monsieur de Choiseul5 himself for thievery and financial misconduct, ’tis not up to the présidente de Montreuil, whose family includes, on her husband’s side, a grandfather who was hanged to death in the Place de Grève,6 ’tis not for the présidente de Montreuil, who has given her husband no fewer than seven or eight bastards and has acted as pimp for all her daughters, ’tis not for her to try and mortify, punish, or repress defects of character for which one is not accountable in the first place and which, moreover, have never done the slightest harm to anyone. ’Tis not up to Dom S[arti]nos, who suddenly appeared out of nowhere one fine day in Paris, without anyone knowing whence he came, a bit like those poisonous mushrooms one discovers suddenly in full bloom at the edge of the woods, ’tis not up to Dom S[arti]nos who, when one checked more closely into his background, was found to have issued forth from the left side of Father Torquemada and from a Jewish woman whom the aforementioned Holy Father had seduced in the prisons of the Madrid Inquisition for which he was responsible, ’tis not up to Dom S[arti]nos, whose fortune in France was founded on his having sacrificed men as if they were cannibals, who, being in charge of the court of appeals, broke on the wheel the poor wretch to whom I have earlier referred, solely in order to enhance his own reputation and show that he was never wrong and quite incapable of misjudging anyone, ’tis not up to Dom S[arti]nos who, when he enjoyed a somewhat higher station, dreamed up all sorts of harassments and odious tyrannies relative to the public’s pleasures and distractions, in order to be able to provide lascivious lists wherewith to enliven the late-night revels of the Parc-aux-Cerfs, which, to pay court to each successive ruling party, had some two hundred innocent people put to death either by torturing them or by clapping them in prison, and I have that figure on very good authority, namely from the very people who were directly involved; in conclusion, ’tis not up to Dom S[arti]nos, politically the greatest scoundrel and generally the most notable crook who has ever walked the face of the earth, and perhaps the first who, since outrageous behavior has become an accepted way of life, has managed to come up with the most extraordinary misuse of power, namely that of letting a prostitute consort with the prisoners—no, ’tis not up to such a frightful defender of crime to try to either censure or repress or admonish those selfsame errors that were the source of his own greatest delights in that period when he was skimming off five hundred thousand francs per annum from the million allotted him by the king to provide the court with lubricious tidbits7 and who, at the same time, not only stole with impunity but also took unspeakable advantage of his position in order to force certain poor wretches into various vices—those same vices that today he makes a point of admonishing! —And that bit of information I have directly from the women themselves.
In a word, ’tis not for the little bastard de Rougemont, the execration of vice personified, to this dissolute villain in doublet and breeches who, on the one hand, prostitutes his wife to augment the number of prisoners he has and, on the other hand, starves them to death in order to line his pockets with a few more crowns and pay the detestable henchmen of his debaucheries; in short, ’tis not for a knave and a rogue who, without the whims of fortune and the pleasure Lady Luck seems to take in bringing low those who are deserving of higher station and elevating those who are born only to crawl, and who, without this twist of fate, I say, would doubtless be only too happy to serve as my kitchen boy if we had both remained in the respective positions into which we were born; ’tis not for a tramp such as he to try to set himself up as censor of vices, and in fact for those same vices that he himself possesses to an even more odious degree, because, as we all know, one becomes all the more detestable and more ridiculous when one tries to cast out the mote in others’ eyes when the mote in one’s own eye is a thousand times greater, just as ’tis not for the lame to poke fun at those who limp any more than ’tis right that the blind lead those with only one eye.
That is all I have to say and I bid you farewell.
1. Governor of the Duchy of Savoy who, as noted, acting upon the request of Madame de Montreuil to the king of Sardinia-Piedmont had Sade arrested and incarcerated in the Fortress of Miolans late in 1773.
2. During his initial incarceration in Vincennes in October 1763 at the age of twenty-three because of the Jeanne Testard affair, Sade wrote the first of many letters to Sartine begging him to keep the “scandal” quiet. Sartine, whom Sade came to loathe, was indeed instrumental in both putting and keeping him in prison.
3. From Sade to de Rougemont.
4. Sade’s term is avorton, literally abortion.
5. The Due de Choiseul, the former secretary of state for war.
6. In Paris, the square where prisoners were executed, often in public.
7. Sartine passed on his findings regarding the sexual misdeeds of the king’s loyal subjects to the minister, who in turn would pass them on to Louis XV and Mme de Pompadour, who apparently relished them.
45. To Monsieur Le Noir
May 22, 1781
Monsieur,
You have done me the honor of coming to see me, of assuring me that my errors were expiated, of leading me to believe that my impending freedom would convince me thereof; you suggested that I pen a letter to obtain that freedom; I wrote it word for word in keeping with your good counsel; you told me that you were pleased with the contents of that letter, as indeed you were pleased with me.
Why therefore after all that, Monsieur, is that freedom to which you alluded, falsely it turns out, still but a promise? Are you trying to plant in my mind an opinion, so contrary to the decency and honesty I have always associated with you, that the only purpose of your visit was to deceive me and that you too, Monsieur, are but one more instrument of revenge of that odious creature, for human revenge is apparently the be all and end all of her existence, or who, by punishing me for her own sins, finds remorse for those with which she herself is rent? In short, could the sole reason for your visit be nothing more than to teach me a lesson, that lesson being that ’
tis permitted to toy freely with those who are suffering and in pain, that these poor wretches are gullible fools when they promise to mend their ways or are tending in that direction; in short, could your visit have been naught but a lesson in vice, whereas I had every reason to expect from you a lesson in virtue? Those who compel you to take such steps debase you in the extreme by even daring to believe you capable of such acts. Therefore, kindly do me the honor of informing me, either by a letter or a personal visit, the specific reasons why a negotiation undertaken at your suggestion, and buttressed by the interest that you seemed to take in my case, has resulted in a turndown? At the same time, Monsieur, I beg you to let me know whether the moment when I shall be released is still far off.
Meanwhile, Monsieur, I most earnestly ask that I be allowed to see my wife,1 as you have led me to believe I might, and that she be permitted to see me alone, I beg of you, Monsieur. Since the sole subject of our discussions will be our personal affairs, and since neither the State nor the government has ever been a part of these matters, however slight, I do believe that one may well dispense with that ostentatious show of harshness that should be meted out only to fools and simpletons, and that to interpose a third party between me and my wife, especially one such as Monsieur de Rougemont, would be the most pointless and most odious thing in the world.2 Moreover, to make this respectable commandant waste precious moments, when his mind and lovely soul manage to find day in and day out another use of time far more worthy of him, whether devoting himself in turn to culture, improving his knowledge of science or belles-lettres, or doing his best to comfort the poor wretch whose image lies before his very eyes.
Letters From Prison Page 32
