There can be no doubt about submitting to the distinctive viewpoint that informs this anthology, a body of work whose multiple horizons are only now starting to be discovered. At the same time, there is surely nothing more serious than that same body of work, and this precisely to the extent that in a ‘civilized’ society the taboo of an almost total ban continues to weigh on it. It took the combined intuition of all the poets to save, from the final darkness to which hypocrisy had condemned it, the expression of a thought considered the most subversive of all, the thought of the Marquis de Sade – ‘the freest mind that ever was,’ according to Guillaume Apollinaire. It took nothing less than the will shown by true analysts, surmounting every prejudice, to extend the field of human knowledge by extracting the fundamental aspirations of that thought. To this task were devoted the successive efforts of Charles Henry, future director of the Laboratory of the Physiology of Sensations at the Sorbonne, in 1887, in an anonymous brochure entitled La Vérité sur le marquis de Sade; of Dr Eugène Deuhren (Le Marquis de Sade et son temps) at the beginning of this century; and, from 1912 to the present day, of Maurice Heine, whose systematic studies have resulted in an unbroken string of triumphs. Thanks to Maurice Heine, the immense significance of Sade’s writing is now beyond question: psychologically speaking, it can be considered the most authentic precursor of Freud’s work and of modern psychopathology in general; socially, it aims at nothing less than the establishment of a true science of mores, which has been deferred from revolution to revolution.
Even recalling that Sade wrote, on the sheet bearing the manuscript of his stories: ‘There is no story or novel in all the literatures of Europe in which the sombre mode is taken to a more terrifying and pathetic degree,’ we are not entirely surprised at the idea that he might periodically have made a concession to black humour. The very excesses of imagination to which his natural genius led him, and in which he was encouraged by his long years of captivity; the madly prideful bias that makes him keep his heroes from ever being sated, whether in pleasure or in crime; his evident concern with varying ad infinitum (if only by complicating them a little further each time) the circumstances that help maintain their aberrations, dot his narrative with a number of plainly outrageous passages, which relax the reader by tipping him off that the author is not taken in, either. For very brief moments the fantastic takes possession of Sade’s work; the real and the plausible are deliberately transgressed. One of the greatest poetic virtues of this work is to situate the portrait of social inequalities and human perversions in the light of childhood phantasmagoria and terrors, and this at the risk of making them overlap, as in the episode concerning the monster of the Apennines that we have chosen to reproduce here.
In more ways than one, Sade magisterially incarnates what we call black humour. It was he who, in life, seems to have inaugurated – at his own terrible expense, moreover – the kind of sinister joke bordering on ‘amusing murders,’ in the sense that Jacques Vaché would later mean it. The misdeeds which earned him his first years of imprisonment were, by a wide margin, much less horrible than was claimed.1 This relentless hater of the family, this monster of cruelty, was the same man who – in order, it is believed, to save his in-laws from the gallows, but no doubt especially out of a deep and disinterested conviction – stood up against the death penalty during the Terror and was thrown in jail by the same Revolution that he had enthusiastically served from the first. Freed after the 9th of Thermidor, he was arrested yet again in 1803, following the publication of a pamphlet against the First Consul and his entourage, and transferred as a madman from his prison to the Bicêtre hospital, then to the Charenton asylum, where he died.
It is permissible to see the manifestation of a supreme humour in the final paragraph of his will, in poignant contradiction with the fact that Sade, for his ideas, spent twenty-seven years, under three different regimes, in eleven prisons, and appealed, with more dramatic hope than anyone else has ever shown, to the judgment of posterity:
I forbid that my body be opened for any reason whatsoever. I ask with the greatest possible insistence that it be kept for forty-eight hours in the room in which I die, placed in a wooden coffin that will not be nailed shut before the end of the aforementioned forty-eight hours, at the expiration of which the aforesaid coffin will be nailed shut. During this interval, an urgent message will be sent to M. Lenormand, wood merchant, no. 101 Boulevard de l’Egalité in Versailles, asking him to come in person, with a cart, and to take possession of my body, which will be transported, under his escort, to the woods on my property in Malmaison, commune of Mancé, near Epernon. There I would like it to be placed, without any kind of ceremony, in the first copse of thickets on the right in said woods, as one enters from the direction of the old castle by the main path dividing it. My grave will be dug in this copse by the farmer at Malmaison, under the supervision of M. Lenormand, who will not leave my body until he has placed it in said grave; if he wishes, he may be accompanied in this ceremony by any of my family or friends who, without any sort of pomp, might wish to show me this last sign of affection. Once the grave has been filled in, acorns will be sown on top, so that afterward, the grounds of said grave being covered over again and the copse once again being filled with thickets as before, the traces of my tomb will disappear from the surface of the earth, as I like to think that all memory of me will be erased from the minds of men.
In Charenton-Saint-Maurice, of sound mind and body, on 30 January 1806.
Signed: D.A.F. Sade.
‘Sade,’ wrote Paul Eluard, ‘wanted to restore to civilized man the power of his primitive instincts; he wanted to deliver the amorous imagination from its own objects. He believed that out of this, and this alone, true equality would come. Since virtue is its own reward, he laboured, in the name of everything that suffers, to drag it down and humiliate it, to subject it to the supreme law of unhappiness, with no illusions and no lies, so that those it normally condemns might build here on earth a world on the immense scale of mankind.’2
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Justine ou les malheurs de la Vertu, 1791. Aline et Valcour, 1793. La Philosophie dans le Boudoir, 1795. Juliette, 1796. Les Crimes de l’Amour, 1800. Les 120 journées de Sodome, 1904. Contes et Fabliaux, 1926. L’Aigle, Mademoiselle, 1949, etc.
BIBLIOGRAPHY IN ENGLISH: Justine; or, the Misfortunes of Virtue. Aline and Valcour. Philosophy in the Bedroom. Juliette. The 120 Days of Sodom. The Gothic Tales. Selected Letters.
Leaving the volcanic plain of Pietra-Mala, we climbed for an hour back up a tall mountain situated to the right. From the crest of this mountain, we noticed chasms more than two thousand fathoms deep, toward which our path was leading us. The entire area was enveloped by woods that were so remarkably thick, so laden with foliage, that one could scarcely see the road ahead. After descending a rigid slope for nearly three hours, we arrived at the edge of a vast lake. On an island located in the middle of that body of water, one could see the keep of the palace that served as our guide’s retreat; because of the high walls surrounding it, we could see no more than its roof. We had been walking for six hours without noticing a single house; not a single individual had crossed our sight. A small black skiff like a Venetian gondola was waiting for us at the edge of the lake. It was from there that we could take in the horrible basin in which we found ourselves: it was surrounded on all sides by mountains as far as the eye could see, whose summits and arid flanks were covered with green pine, larch, and oak trees. It would have been impossible to see anything more rustic and sombre; it was as if we had reached the end of the universe. We climbed into the skiff, which the giant steered all by himself. It was still three furlongs from the dock to the castle. We then arrived at the foot of an iron door cut into the thick rampart surrounding the castle, after which a six-foot-wide moat lay before us; we crossed over it on a bridge that was raised the moment we had passed. When a second rampart stood before us, we passed through another iron door, and found ourselves in a clump of woods so dense that we thought it impossible to go any farther. And indeed we would not: this clump, formed by a living hedge, offered only spikes and no passage. In the heart of it stood the last rampart of the castle; it was ten feet thick. The giant lifted an enormous block of stone that only he could have moved, revealing a tortuous stairway. The stone closed over it again, and it was through the bowels of the earth that we arrived (still in blackness) in the midst of the building’s cellars, from which we climbed back up by means of an opening that was blocked by a stone similar to the one just mentioned. We finally found ourselves in a low-ceilinged room covered from end to end with skeletons. The seats in this place were formed only by dead men’s bones, and one had no choice but to sit on skulls. Horrible cries seemed to reach us from below the earth, and we soon learned that it was in the vaults of this room that were located the dungeons in which this monster’s victims were moaning.
‘I have you now,’ he told us once we were seated. ‘You are in my power; I can do with you as I please. Do not be alarmed, however: the actions I have seen you commit are too close to my own way of thinking for me not to feel you are worth knowing and worthy of sharing the pleasures of my retreat. Listen to me: I have time to tell you all before supper. They should be preparing it as I speak.
‘I am a Muscovite, born in a small village on the banks of the Volga. My name is Minsky. My father, when he died, left me enormous wealth, and nature endowed me with physical faculties and tastes in proportion to the favours with which fortune gratified me. Sensing that I was not cut out to vegetate in the depths of some obscure province such as the one in which I first saw the light of day, I travelled; the entire universe did not seem large enough to contain the breadth of my desires. It tried to impose limitations: I did not want any. Born a libertine, impious, debauched, bloodthirsty, and fierce, I travelled the world over in search only of vices, which I tried the better to refine them. I began with China, Mongolia, and Tartary; I visited all of Asia. Heading up toward Kamchatka, I entered America by the famous Bering Strait. I crossed through that vast portion of the world, living alternately with civilized populations and with savages, imitating the crimes of one group, the vices and atrocities of the other. I brought back to Europe penchants so dangerous that I was sentenced to be burned alive in Spain, broken on the wheel in France, hanged in England, and crushed under rocks in Italy: my wealth protected me from everything.
‘I headed on to Africa. It was there that I learned that what you have the madness to call depravity is nothing more than man’s natural state, and still more often the result of the very soil onto which nature has thrown him. Those good children of the sun laughed at me when I tried to scold them for their barbarity toward their women. “And what is a woman,” they answered, “except the domestic animal that nature has given us to satisfy both our needs and our desires? What right does she have to be worthy of us, any more than the cattle in our farmyards? The only difference we can see,” these sensible people told me, “is that our domestic animals might warrant some indulgence because of their gentle and submissive natures, whereas women deserve only harshness and barbarity, given their perpetual state of fraud, spitefulness, betrayal, and perfidy …”
‘… I’ve maintained these tastes. All the debris of corpses that you see here are the remains of creatures I’ve devoured. I live exclusively on human flesh. I hope you will enjoy the feast that I’ve had prepared for you …
‘… I have two harems. The first contains two hundred young girls, ranging in age from five to twenty; I eat them when the ways of lust have sufficiently mortified them. The second contains two hundred women aged twenty to thirty; you shall see how I treat them. Fifty valets of both sexes are employed in the service of this considerable number of objects of lubricity, and for recruitment I have a hundred agents deployed over every large city in the world. Would you believe that with the phenomenal movement that all of this requires, there is still but one way to enter my island: the road you have just taken? One would surely not suspect the number of creatures who pass by this mysterious path.
‘Never have the veils I’ve thrown over all this been pierced. It’s not that I have the slightest reason to fear: this belongs to the estates of the Grand Duke of Tuscany: they know the full extent of my irregular conduct, and the money I spread around keeps me safe from everything …
‘… The furniture you see here,’ our host told us, ‘is alive: each will walk at the slightest sign.’ Minsky made this sign and the table moved forward; it had been in a corner of the room, and now came toward the middle. Five armchairs went to group themselves around it; two chandeliers descended from the ceiling and floated over the centre of the table. ‘The mechanism is simple,’ said the giant, seeing us looking closely at the composition of these furnishings. ‘You can see that this table, these chandeliers, these armchairs are composed exclusively of groups of girls artistically arranged. My dishes shall be served piping hot on the backs of these creatures …’
‘Minsky,’ I observed to our Muscovite, ‘the role these girls have to play is exhausting, especially if you prolong your stay at table.’
‘In the worst case,’ said Minsky, ‘a few of them drop dead, and such losses are too easily repaired for me to worry about for even a second …
‘… My friends,’ our host said, ‘I have warned you that we eat only human flesh here. There is not a single dish before you that is not made from it.’
‘We shall try it,’ said Sbrigani. ‘Repugnance is an absurdity: it derives only from lack of habit. All meats are fit for nourishing man, all of them have been given us by nature, and there is nothing more extraordinary about eating a man than there is about eating a chicken.’ And so saying, my husband plunged his fork into a quarter of young boy that seemed particularly well prepared, and having put at least two pounds on his plate, he devoured it. I did likewise. Minsky urged us on; and as his appetite matched all his other passions, he had soon emptied a dozen dishes.
Minsky drank the way he ate: he was already on his thirtieth bottle of burgundy when they served the last course, which he washed down with champagne. Aleatico, falernian, and other precious Italian wines were drunk with dessert.
• • •
Sade’s posthumous good fortune, as if meant to compensate by some mysterious process for the insane harshness of the fate he suffered in life, has not only drawn long-distance the worthiest exegetes to his cause, but, on the uniquely lightning-struck terrain that is his opus – a terrain liable to bring forth a mutation of life – has brought to the task the prospectors most able to detect precious new veins. On the death of Maurice Heine in 1940 – coinciding with the bicentennial of Sade’s birth – the noble relay was picked up by Gilbert Lely, who, seconded in turn by the greatest luck in his love and his zeal, is preparing to unveil a number of works and documents that up until now have been concealed from us, certain of which throw new light on the Marquis’s extremely elusive profile. L’Aigle, Mademoiselle [The Eagle, Mademoiselle], which inaugurates this series of publications, takes us as if for the first time to the burning core of his passion, and in human terms allows us to penetrate all the way to their source. In the frenzy of that moment, of which the following letter reproduces the paroxysm, we will see that humour demands the role of the eagle and assumes it more than anywhere else in the secret structuring of its arithmetic operations, to which Sade attributed the meaning of signals – operations which, according to Gilbert Lely, ‘constitute a kind of reaction of his psyche, an unconscious struggle against the despair into which his sanity might have collapsed without the help of such a distraction.’
* * *
This morning I received a letter from you that went on forever. Do not write me such long letters, I beg of you: don’t you think I have better things to do than read your constant prattling? You must have an awful lot of time on your hands to write letters of that length, as must I to answer them, you will agree. And yet, as the subject of my letter is of great consequence, I would ask you to read it with a level head and a calm spirit.
I have just come upon three signals of the utmost beauty. I cannot keep them from you. They are so sublime that I am convinced that when you read them, in spite of yourself you’ll applaud the extent of my genius and the richness of my knowledge. One could say of your clique what Piron said of the Academy: you are forty who have wit enough for four. It’s the same with your little gang: you are six who have wit enough for two. Well, with all your genius, and although you have been working on the great work for only twelve years, I’ll bet you double against simple,3 if you like, that my three signals are worth more than everything you’ve ever done. Hold on, I’m mistaken, my goodness, there are four of them … Well, anyway, it’s three or four, and you know that three-four is very strong.
The first time you have to inform me of a cut or tear, you will cut off Cadet de la Basoche’s (Albaret’s) b—s and send them to me in a box. I shall open the box and cry out, ‘Oh, my God! what is this?’ And Jacques, the prompter, who will be looking over my shoulder, shall answer, ‘It’s nothing, Sir. Can’t you see that it’s a 19?’ ‘No, not really,’ I’ll say … All vanity aside, do you have anything to match that?
When you want to indicate the 2, the double, the duplicata, your second self, paying twice, etc., this is how you go about it: You must set a beautiful creature posing in my room (doesn’t matter which sex; I take after your family a bit there, I don’t look too closely; and besides, mad dog and all that), you must, I was saying, put in my room a beautiful creature in the pose of the Farnese Callipygian Venus, showing it off nicely. I have nothing against that part of the body; like the magistrate, I believe that it’s fleshier than the rest and that, consequently, for whoever likes flesh, that’s always better than things that are level … Coming in, I’ll say to the prompter, or to the prompted, ‘What is this infamous thing doing here?’ (just for form’s sake), and the prompter will answer, ‘Sir, that is a duplicata.’
When you want to make a large bridge, like this summer, with lightning and the rod (horrible effect that almost made me die in convulsions), you will have to set fire to the powder stores (it is turned vertically toward the study where I sleep): the effect will be sublime.
When you want to make a 16 into a 9 (pay attention now), you must take two death’s heads (two, do you hear; I could have said six, but, although I served in the Dragoons, I’m modest: so I’ll just say two) and, while I’m in the garden, you’ll have all that arranged in my room, so that I’ll find the decoration all ready when I come in. Or else you’ll tell me I’ve just received a package from Provence, one that has already been signed for: I’ll open it eagerly … and it will be that – and I’ll get quite a scare (I’m really quite timid by nature, as I’ve proved two or three times in my life).
Ah, good people, good people! believe me, do not invent anything, for it isn’t worth the effort to invent things that are so flat, so stupid, so easy to guess. There are so many better ways to spend your time than inventing, and when you don’t have a mind for invention, you’re better off making shoes or cannulas, than inventing heavily, clumsily, and stupidly.
The 19th, sent on the 22nd.
By the way, hurry up and send me my linens; and tell those who judge that I couldn’t care less, that they judge very badly, for M. de Rougemont, the director, who judges very well, has just judged that my stove was due for some serious repairs, and he’s having them done. And so, for once in your life, if it’s possible, pull the cart together; for however horrid you all may be, you should still try not to be so horrid that one of you is pulling to the right while the other is pulling to the left. Pull like M. de Rougemont, the director; there’s a man with good common sense, who always pulls straight – or who has himself pulled when he isn’t doing the pulling. My valet commends himself to you so that the magistrate’s wife won’t forget that if he indeed gave the signal, she had promised to have his son made a sergeant.
1. Cf. Maurice Heine on ‘the case of the Marquis de Sade’s “Spanish-fly” candies’ (Hippocrate, March 1933) and on ‘Rose Keller, or the Arcueil affair before the Parliament’ (Annales de Médecine légale, March 1933).
2. L’Evidence poétique.
3. Hey! double against simple: that’s a good one. Don’t you wish you’d thought of it? [Sade’s note]