Letters From Prison

by Marquis de Sade

  In the course of the following week, Madame de Sade was able to inform her husband about the growing unrest in the streets, but inside the fortress he had already noted the heightened preparations: gunpowder had been placed on the tower platforms, the cannons had been loaded, and additional troops had hurriedly been brought in. In the late morning of July 2, as Sade was waiting for a guard to escort him from his cell to his daily exercise walk on the towers, a disabled war veteran named Lossinotte, who roughly a year before had been assigned to help Sade in his housekeeping, arrived to announce that his walk had been canceled. Furious, Sade ordered the man, whom he had described to Major de Losme-Salbray, the second in command at the Bastille, as the “stupidest and most insolent valet I have ever seen,” to go back to de Launay, the commandant, and ask him to reverse the decision. When Lossinotte reported back that his request had been denied, Sade seized what some have described a stovepipe and others as a funnel used for emptying the contents of chamber pots into the moat below, and thrust it through his window bars. With the help of this makeshift megaphone, he began to shout to the people in the street that the prisoners’ throats were being slit and urged them to come and save them. At which point guards rushed him, wrestled the “megaphone “from him, and subdued him. The Bastille prison logbook for July 2 duly noted the incident, and de Launay, made understandably nervous by the unrest in the neighborhood, sent a runner to Versailles, armed with a letter to Monsieur de Villedeuil,1 minister of state, requesting the immediate transfer of Sade. Relating the details of the incident, de Launay wrote:

  I have the honor of informing you that, having yesterday been obliged, because of the current circumstances, to revoke the walk that you were kind enough to permit Monsieur de Sade on the towers, at noon he went to his window and began to shout at the top of his lungs—which was heard by everybody who lives in the area as well as by passers by—that the Bastille prisoners’ throats were being slit, that they were being assassinated, and that the people should come to their aid. He kept repeating his shouts and loud complaints. This is a time when it seems extremely dangerous to keep this man here, where he will be disruptive to the maintenance of order. I therefore feel bound to recommend, My Lord, that this Prisoner be transferred to Charenton or some similar establishment where he cannot disrupt the order, as he constantly does here. This would be a propitious moment to relieve ourselves of this person, who cannot be controlled and over whom none of the officers has any influence or authority. It is impossible to allow him to exercise on the towers, since the cannons are loaded and to do so would be extremely dangerous. The entire officer corps would be infinitely obliged if you would be kind enough to have Monsieur de Sade promptly transferred.

  DE LAUNAY2

  For once, French bureaucracy was swift and sure.

  That same day, Monsieur de Villedeuil responded, not to de Launay but to Lieutenant Crosne of the Paris police:3

  Versailles, July 3, 1789

  Enclosed please find the orders of the king. Given the circumstances described in the enclosed letter from M. de Launay, I felt obliged to suggest to his majesty that the Count de Sade be transferred from the Bastille to Charenton. I ask that you be kind enough to expedite this move as quickly and secretly as possible, unless you find a more efficacious manner of remedying this problem, which you are authorized herewith to put into effect immediately.

  Please be kind enough to send M. de Launay ‘s letter back to me, indicating what action you have taken in this matter.

  DE VILLEDEUIL4

  At one in the morning of July 4, six men entered Sade’s cell, tore him from his bed “naked as a worm” as the prisoner himself described it, hustled him downstairs, and threw him into a waiting carriage. With Inspector Quidor of the Paris police holding a pistol to his throat, he was driven through the dark streets of Paris to Charenton, an insane asylum run by the order of friars known as the Petits Pères, or Brothers of Charity.5 The Charenton logbook for July 4 reads as follows:

  BROTHERS OF CHARITY CHARENTON ASYLUM—His lordship the Count de Sade (Louis, Aldonce, Donatien). Order of July 3, 1789. Period— without limit. Deprived of his liberty since 1777, at the request of his family, following a criminal trial on a charge of poisoning and sodomy, of which crimes he was subsequently found innocent, and further because of his extreme immorality, indulging in a great deal of debauchery coupled with periods of insanity, which make his family fearful that in one of his attacks he may disgrace them.

  Though originally an asylum for the mentally ill, Charenton had over the previous century allowed itself to become as well a veritable prison for perfectly sane people held under lettres de cachet. One of Sade’s contemporaries was quick to deplore that subtle but meaningful evolution, praising the order’s care but adding that he was most upset to see the Brothers of Charity’s hospitals turned into “little Bastilles.”

  Sade himself was more harsh. He described the place as “a dark building buried in the earth up to its roof, a horrid place so arranged that air can never reach the interior, and the sobs and screams of the prisoners cannot be heard by any except for seven or eight jailers.” And, he added, as for the Brothers of Charity, here were the grounds for becoming one: laziness, baseness, a taste for the dissolute, lust, gluttony, or the need to flee a world in which one had dishonored oneself.6

  But Sade had more immediate concerns than the dismal nature of his new surroundings. The day of his departure from the Bastille, his cell there had been sealed by order of Monsieur Chenon, commissaire of the Chatelet district. Sade desperately needed to regain his possessions, especially his precious manuscripts, “fifteen volumes in all ready for the printer,” the fruit of his past ten years’ efforts. He signed a power of attorney to his wife giving her the authority to break the seals, in the presence of Commissaire Chenon, and reclaim his manuscripts, books, furniture, and portraits. There is some question as to the date he signed that power of attorney: Lely has it July 9, but a document recently discovered by the historian Robert Darnton, which is Monsieur Le Noir’s account, places it at the 13th. The difference may seem slight but in fact is crucial, for Sade accused his wife of gross negligence in not acting more swiftly, which might be justifiable if she had received the document on the 9th. If it was the 13th, however, she actually would have acted quite expeditiously, for promptly on the morning of the 14th she went to see Commissaire Chenon, their plan being to proceed forthwith to the Bastille. But fortunately for both, an insurrection broke out in Chenon ‘s part of town and he was compelled to remain at his post throughout the day. Had they gone to the fortress earlier, they might have been caught there by the storming masses, who sacked and pillaged Sade’s cell.7

  Five days later, doubtless realizing that whatever extenuating circumstances there might be, she would be blamed for the irreparable loss by her irascible husband, the marquise wrote Chenon disclaiming any further responsibility in the matter and asking him to recoup and dispose of the cell’s contents however he saw fit, asking however that he do his best to make sure the papers and effects were not seen by all and sundry, since, she said, “I have personal reasons for wishing not to be burdened with them.”

  Foremost among the papers was the manuscript of The 120 Days of Sodom, which Sade had composed, on the basis of some earlier sketches, over a roughly five-week period commencing October 22, 1785. Fully aware of the dangerous and inflammatory nature of the work, Sade made care to work on it only in the evening, from 7 to 10 p.m., when there was the least chance of a guard’s interruption. For further security, he wrote the work on very thin pieces of paper, each less than five inches wide, in a minuscule hand. As soon as he had completed one sheet, he pasted it to another, until at the end of twenty days he had completed one side, which was over thirty-nine feet long. At that point he turned it over and wrote the balance on the other side, finishing the work on November 28. The virtue of the format was that it could be rolled into a tight scroll, which he could easily conceal between the stones of his ce
ll. And now it was gone. Lely rightly suggests that it was doubtless especially over this lost manuscript that Sade shed “tears of blood,” as he later described it.

  In a sense, Justine, Juliette, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and La Nouvelle Justine were Sade’s efforts during his early post-prison years to re-consitute The 120 Days of Sodom, which he assumed lost forever. But miraculously it was not. As we noted in our introduction to that work’s first English-language publication well over thirty years ago:

  Though Sade would never know it, the precious roll had not been destroyed. It was found, in the same cell of the Bastille where Sade had been kept prisoner, by one Arnoux de Saint-Maximin, and thence came into the possession of the Villeneuve-Trans family, in whose care it remained for three generations. At the turn of the present century, it was sold to a German collector, and in 1904 it was published by the German psychiatrist, Dr. I wan Bloch, under the pseudonym of Eugène Dühren. Block justified his publishing the work by its “scientific importance . . . to doctors, jurists, and anthropologists,” pointing out in his notes the “amazing analogies” between cases cited by Sade and those recorded a century later by Krafft-Ebing. Block’s text, however, as Lely notes, is replete with “thousands of errors” which hopelessly denature and distort it.

  After Block’s death, the manuscript remained in Germany until 1929, when Maurice Heine, at the behest of the Viscount Charles de***, went to Berlin to acquire it. From 1931 to 1935, Heine’s masterful and authoritative text of the work appeared in three quarto volumes, in what must be considered the original edition of the work.8

  In those early days at Charenton, Sade must have sorely regretted his impetuous act of July 2, for in all likelihood he would have been freed when the Bastille was stormed twelve days later Still, he could take some solace from the news that Bastille commandant de Launay, as well as Major de Losme-Salbray and the aide Miray—all of whom Sade loathed—had been hauled from the fortress to the Place de Grève and there slaughtered. That did not, however, make up for the loss of his papers. And meanwhile, there he was, still imprisoned under a lettre de cachet, for an indeterminate period.

  But the hated lettres de cachet were under fire, especially the so-called familial ones, whereby people could have family members incarcerated, often on personal grounds. Days before the revolution, on June 23, 1789, the king himself had come out against them—a trifle late, to be sure, but heads of state throughout history are often painfully slow to act or react to the urgent realities around them. It wasn‘t until March 16, 1790, that the National Assembly formally abolished the lettres de cachet, which the king ratified on March 26. Those imprisoned under such letters, the decree proclaimed, were free to go wherever they pleased.

  A week before, on March 18, Sade’s two sons, who had not seen their father for fifteen years, went to Charenton to inform him personally of the decree; exceptionally, the three were allowed to walk freely about the grounds and have dinner together unsupervised. When they informed their grandmother of the visit, she responded, perhaps sincerely, that she hoped he would be happy but doubted he had the capacity for happiness. To her confidant Gaufridy, however, to whom she passed on the news five days later that his favorite client might soon be free, she mused whether there might be a loophole in the decree, whether families might still take it unto themselves to keep their loved ones imprisoned by some sort of personal lettre de cachet. Opting for caution in those troubled times, however, Madame de Montreuil decided to remain neutral. That way, she figured, if events turned sour (read: if Sade decided to avenge himself), it would be difficult for anyone to blame her. “Whatever happens,” she wrote, “one would have nothing to explain.”

  Exactly ten days later, on April 2, a Good Friday, Sade left Charenton a free man, after thirteen long years of impossible incarceration. He left, as he describes it, “with only one louis in my pocket,” wearing a waistcoat and no breeches—breeches being the mark of aristocracy. He first went to Sainte-Aure and asked to see his wife, but was coldly rebuffed. As for former friends, most had fled Paris if not the country. He then decided to try Monsieur de Milly, a procurator at the Chatelet court, who was now retired but had formerly handled Sade’s affairs in Paris. Monsieur de Milly received him warmly, offered him temporary room and board, and lent him six louis, enough to keep him for a week or so. Four days later, Sade moved to the Hotel du Bouloir, a stone’s throw from de Milly’s house and hard by the Place des Victoires, the spot where all his trouble had begun, for it was there, exactly twenty-two years before, he had propositioned Rose Keller on April 3, Easter Sunday.

  But Rose Keller was the farthest thing from Sade’s mind at that point. Money was foremost in his thoughts, and for the moment the only place he could get it was, ironically, from la présidente. On April 12, Sade boldly approached her, and doubtless to his surprise she lent him a few louis, with the admonition however that he write Gaufridy immediately and obtain money to pay her back and have the wherewithal to fend for himself. It was made clear that he should not try her again. But Sade had already written Gaufridy the fourth day after his release, while he was still at Monsieur de Milly’s, asking for money and also informing the lawyer that he had petitioned the Paris court to restore him his civil rights. Since the petition was bound to be granted, Sade informed Gaufridy in that same letter that from now on, “I and I alone am now in charge of administering my affairs, I alone will decide how they are to be managed. Therefore, from now on you will deal only with me.”

  Having not heard back for a week, on April 12 he urgently wrote again:

  1. Whose name, perhaps prophetically, literally means “mourning city.”

  2. Gilbert Lely, Vie du Marquis de Sade, rev. ed. (Paris: Au Cercle du Livre Pré-cieux, 1966), Book V, p. 190.

  3. Roughly two weeks later, Crosne resigned his post and fled to England. He returned to Paris under the Terror and was arrested, incarcerated at Picpus, and executed on April 28, 1794.

  4. Lely, op. cit., p. 192.

  5. Founded under Louis XIV through the benevolence of one of the king’s advisers, Sébastien Leblanc, who bequeathed most of his fortune to the order in 1670 on the condition it be used to care for the indigent ill.

  6. From the Sade family archives. Cited in Maurice Lever, A Biography, p. 351.

  7. Actually, Chenon was assaulted the following day in the gardens of the Palais Royal by a roving group of men and women on the lookout for any prey. They tried to hang him from a nearby tree but finally let him go.

  8. Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings, compiled and translated by Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver (New York: Grove Press, 1966), p. 186.

  108. To Monsieur Gaufridy

  April 12, 1790

  I came out of Charenton (to which I had been transferred from the Bastille) on Good Friday. The better the day the better the deed! Yes, my good friend, ‘twas that day I regained my freedom; as a result, I have decided to celebrate it as a holiday for the rest of my life, and instead of those concerts, those frivolous walking parades that custom has irreligiously sanctified at that time of year when we ought to be moaning and weeping, instead, I say, of all those mundane vanities, whenever the forty-fifth day after Ash Wednesday brings us to another Good Friday, you shall see me get down on my knees, pray, resolve to mend my ways, and keep to those resolutions.

  Now to the facts, my dear lawyer, for I can see that you are about to echo what everybody is telling me: ’tis not talk we want, sir, but facts— to the facts then: the facts are that I landed in the middle of Paris with only one louis in my pocket, not knowing where to go, where to lodge, where to dine, where to find myself any money. Monsieur de Milly, procurator at the Châtelet, who has been looking after my interests in this part of the country for twenty-six years, was kind enough to offer me his bed, some board, and six louis. Not wanting to overstay my welcome or become a burden, I had set forth after four days at M. de Milly’s with only three louis left of the original six to fend for myself, to
find an inn in which to stay, a domestic, a tailor, my meals, etc., all that with three louis.

  Given my circumstances, I asked la présidente de Montreuil to ask her notary to advance me three louis, on condition that I write you immediately in order to reimburse the borrowed sum and second to remain alive—a request that the lady graciously accorded. Therefore, my good lawyer, I beseech you to dispatch to me without any delay whatsoever the preliminary sum of 1,000 crowns, the same sum I asked you for the other day, and whereof my need is no less extreme than the promptitude of your response is essential.

  Letter 109. To Monsieur Gaufridy

  [Early May, 1790]

  I have just this moment received your letter of the fourteenth: since it arrives too soon to be in answer to mine, I shall overcome my disappointment at not encountering here one of those charming notes which by far outvalue love letters, and with which one obtains money immediately.

  You must not doubt that if I did not write to you during my detention, ‘twas because I was deprived of the means to do so; I truly cannot forgive you for assuming my silence was due to anything else. I would not have bothered you about business details; in my position what would have been the point? But I would have inquired after your news, I would have given you my own; upon the chains that weighed so heavily upon me we might have dropped a flower or two. But my captors would not allow it; I did venture a letter to you in that vein, it was returned to me, thrown back at me, after that I wrote no more. Therefore, my dear lawyer, I repeat it, I cannot forgive you for having doubted my feelings in your regard. We have known one another since childhood, I need not remind you of it; a long-standing friendship made it natural that it be you in whom I placed my trust when long ago I asked you to take on the management of my affairs; what motive could I have had for changing my attitude?9 It is not your fault I was arrested at La Coste, but mine, I believed I was in safety there and I had no idea what an abominable family I had to contend with. I assume you will understand, that when I speak here of family I am referring only to the Montreuils; you cannot have the faintest idea of the infernal and anthropophagous manner in which these people have behaved with me. Had I been the last and lowliest of the living, nobody would have dared treat me with the barbarity I have suffered thanks to them; in a word, my eyesight is gone and my chest ruined; for lack of exercise I have become enormously fat, so much so I can scarcely move about; all of my feelings and sensations are extinguished; I have no more taste for anything, no taste for love; the society I so madly missed looks so boring to me today . . . so forlorn and . . . so sad! There are moments when I am moved by a wish to join the Trappists, and I cannot guarantee that I may not go off some fine day and vanish altogether, without anyone ever knowing what has become of me. Never have I been such a misanthrope as since I have returned into the midst of men, if in their eyes I have the look of a stranger, they may be quite sure that they have the same effect upon me.