Is the Dialogue disgusting? Ludicrous? Or merely boring? Sade's next writing, after the Dialogue, has been dismissed as such, while it has also been seen as his master work. If his later long novels, La Nouvelle Justine and Juliette, could be regarded at one dismissive level as chapters in the history of obscene fiction, Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome (The Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom) is unique.
Sade began work on it while still in prison at the fortress of Vincennes, probably in about 1782 and soon afterwards. He was more than bitter about the injustice of his detention without trial. His health had suffered because he was allowed no exercise, he hated the food and complained about his eyes, which gave him so much pain that his one distraction, writing, was difficult. He had waited three years before being allowed a visit from his wife, but then the visits were stopped following his alleged bad behaviour. His books were taken away. Deprived of everything, he had to write constantly to his wife for sheets, linen, eye-ribbons, sweet biscuits, eau-de-Cologne, night-lights, notebooks.
If his physical life was empty, his head was full of ideas. He now began to write the blackest of his books; blackest because no ray of light, no memory of what might have been happy or 'good' ever gleams through it. Sade conceived and wrote it (part of it, at least) as though the 'normal' world did not exist, and he may well have thought that even if it did, he might never see it again.
The totality of evil portrayed in Les Cent Vingt Journées far outstripped the intensity of his own enraged conviction that he was being treated as a non-human creature. Repentance did not preoccupy him for a moment: he knew little beyond rage and a desire for revenge, he was desperate to show that even if his person were confined, in fact because he had no liberty, his imagination was totally free, freer than anyone might have thought possible. He took the conscious decision that he would evoke all the potential evil that lay not so much within his own mind as in the mind of man. If society had thought that beating a widow in Paris and feeding aphrodisiacs to girls in Marseille were wicked and punishable, he decided that he would make real all the wickedness that he might have committed but did not. Did his book make him a criminal? The society around him had shown him examples enough of cruelty and perversity, but that was not enough. He wanted, unconsciously, to look into the future, when scientists such as Krafft-Ebbing would attempt to classify sexual perversions. Sade, whose sexual life was now reduced to masturbation, attempted to satisfy himself by presenting all possible aspects of deviant behaviour: 'One cannot imagine to what degree men vary [the passions] when their imagination catches fire,' he wrote. If men were different 'in all their other manias and in all their other tastes', they were even more so where the passions were concerned. He was convinced he was undertaking a valuable task: '. . . he who could establish and detail these deviations would perhaps accomplish one of the finest pieces of work on human customs ever to be seen, and perhaps one of the most interesting'.
Interesting indeed it was, and is. As for the finest, the work earns admiration in the original sense of wonderment. Sade, who was in his early forties, sat alone in his prison cell and worked out the plan of his book with the precision of a mathematician and a careful regard for the characters and the setting. He presumably wished to entertain and instruct his potential readers. He warned them that this would be 'the most impure story ever told', but he maintained that the 'diversity' of the passions described was 'authentic'. Although convinced that he was breaking new ground, he was still ready to use the literary devices of the past, especially when he decided to adopt the story-within-a-story method, as Boccaccio and Marguerite of Navarre had done several centuries earlier, to amuse his 'libertines' during their four months of orgies.
Four friends with vast financial resources, all the time in the world and a total devotion to vice form a kind of sexual consortium. The wives of three of them are involved, plus the daughter of the fourth (who was a bishop), and everyone is interrelated. Four middle-aged women, experienced in prostitution, procuring, perversion and crime, are the latter-day Scheherezade figures and recount anecdotes and longer stories, as well as partaking in the orgies. Other dramatis personae are four elderly women described as duennas, all ugly, deformed or suffering from disgusting diseases. There are eight girls and boys aged between twelve and fifteen, and some lusty young men described as 'the eight fuckers'. Only one of their characteristics is important: the exact size of their penis. The company is dependent on a domestic staff of three cooks and three scullery-maids, for orgiasts need nourishment.
Sade set his book precisely in time – shortly before the death of Louis XIV (in 1715) and equally so in space, taking good care to situate it outside France, in the Château de Silling, deep in the Black Forest and cut off from the real world in all ways. The orgies and the story-telling last from November to February and the company is not to be disturbed: the bridge leading to the château is cut and the doors are sealed.
The sexual activity described in Les Cent Vingt Jourńees is far from sanitized. Rather, it is inextricably mingled with blasphemy (the privies are housed in the chapel), coprophilia and the delights offered by unwashed bodies. Few books written before the twentieth century (the work of Jean Genet comes to mind) have been more preoccupied with extremes of group sex or deviant behaviour, for Sade, bitterly aware of his isolation from society, tried to compensate through portraying an imagined alienation infinitely more extreme than his own.
He also tried to classify the 'passions' he intended to describe into four groups, covering four months of storytelling. These passions were to follow a progression: they would be simple, complex, criminal and finally murderous. If the word 'love' is mentioned occasionally, it is no more than lust, while the ideas that permeate all Sade's major work are never far in the background. Many of them are not original, even if they are intense. He had been deeply impressed by La Mettrie, especially by his book L'Homme Machine (1748) and also by Baron d'Holbach, author of Le Système de la Nature (1770). Both writers advocated atheistic materialism and Sade the extremist took their beliefs to the furthest lengths he could imagine.
On the Fourth Day of the projected one hundred and twenty Sade's story-teller la Duclos entertains the company with anecdotes about a voyeur and his counterpart, an exhibitionist. She has already described her own early experiences in the high-class house of assignation directed by Madame Guérin.
It should be pointed out that during Sade's lifetime incest and sodomy were punishable by death, but the sentence was rarely carried out. The deaths of children, however, incurred no legal penalty.
Each of the friends* was very keen to distinguish, at every moment of the day, those among the young people, girls and boys, who were destined to grant them their virginity. They decided therefore that in addition to their various forms of dress they must wear a ribbon in their hair indicating to whom they belonged. As a result the duke adopted pink and green, and everyone who wore a pink ribbon in front would belong to him by the cunt, while everyone who wore a green one at the back would belong to him by the arse. From that time Fanny, Zelmire, Sophie and Augustine placed a pink bow at one side of their coiffures and Rosette, Hébé, Michette, Giton and Zéphyr placed a green one at the back of their heads as proof of the rights the duke exercised over their bottoms.
Curval chose a black ribbon for the front and a yellow one for the back, so that in future Michette, Hébé, Colombe and Rosette always wore a black bow in front, while Sophie, Zelmire, Augustine, Zélamit and Adonis placed a yellow one in their chignons.
Durcet distinguished Hyacinthe alone with a lilac ribbon behind and the bishop, who was entitled to only five sodomite deflowerings, ordered Cupidon, Narcisse, Céladon, Colombe and Fanny to wear a violet one at the back.
Whatever clothes were worn these ribbons were never to be changed, and one glance at any of these young people wearing a certain colour in front and another at the back sufficed to show at once who possessed rights over their cunts and who possessed them over their bottoms.
Curval, who had spent the night with Constance, complained about her bitterly in the morning. The reason for these complaints was not clear; it needs so little to displease a libertine. In any case he was going to have her punished the following Saturday, when this beautiful creature announced that she was pregnant. Curval, the only man, apart from her husband, who could have been suspected as responsible, had known her carnally only since the beginning of the party, that is four days earlier. This news entertained our libertines greatly through the secret pleasures they could clearly see it would bring them. The duke could not get over it. However, the event earned Constance exemption from the penalty she would otherwise have had to undergo for having displeased Curval. They wanted to let the pear ripen, a pregnant woman entertained them and the plans they made for the later developments diverted their perfidious imagination in an even more lewd manner. Constance was excused from waiting at table, from punishments and from a few other minor duties that her state did not render more pleasurable to watch, but she was still obliged to lie on the sofa and to share until further orders the couch of whoever decided to choose her.
That morning it was Durcet who carried out the exercises in pollution and since his prick was remarkably small he caused more difficulties for the young students. However, they worked hard, but the little financier who had played the part of a woman all night could not carry through that of a man. He was impervious, intractable, and the art of those eight delightful students, directed by the most skilful mistress, could not even succeed in making him raise his nose. He emerged from the exercise in total triumph, and since impotence always produces to a small extent the kind of mood described in libertine language as 'teasing', his inspections were astonishingly severe. Rosette among the girls and Zélamir among the boys were the victims: one was not in the state that had been ordered – this enigma will be explained* – and the other had unfortunately disposed of what he had been told to keep.
In the public places there appeared only la Duclos, Marie, Aline and Fanny, two second-class fuckers and Giton. Curval, who was very randy that day, became inflamed by Duclos. Dinner, during which he made highly libertine remarks, did not calm him down in any way and the coffee, offered by Colombe, Sophie, Zéphyr and his dear friend Adonis, finally set fire to his brain. He seized hold of this boy, threw him down on a sofa and with a curse placed his huge member between his thighs at the back. Since this enormous tool extended more than six inches on the other side, he ordered the boy to masturbate vigorously the part which showed, and he himself began to masturbate the boy above the small piece of flesh by which he held him down. During this time he presented to the assembly a bottom as broad as it was dirty and its orifice tempted the duke. Seeing this arse available to him, he aimed his sinewy instrument while continuing to suck Zéphyr's mouth, an operation he had undertaken before he had had the idea of carrying out what he was now doing.
Curval, who had not been expecting such an onslaught, blasphemed with joy. He quivered in excitement, opened his legs wide and prepared himself. At that moment the youthful sperm of the charming boy he was masturbating dripped down on to the enormous tip of his frenzied instrument. This warm sperm which drenched him, the repeated shuddering of the duke who was beginning to discharge also, everything led him on, everything brought on his climax and floods of foaming sperm flooded Durcet's arse. This latter had posted himself there close by so, as he said, nothing was wasted. His plump white buttocks were softly immersed in an enchanting liquor which he would much have preferred in his entrails.
Meanwhile the bishop was not idle; he sucked alternately the divine arseholes of Colombe and Sophie. However, exhausted no doubt by various nocturnal exercises, he gave no sign of life and like all libertines rendered unjust by caprice and distaste he blamed harshly those two delightful children for the well-deserved weaknesses of his feeble nature.
Everyone dozed for a few minutes and since the hour for story-telling had come they now listened to the amiable Duclos who took up her story again in the following terms:
'There had been a few changes in Madame Guérin's house,' said our heroine.* 'Two very pretty girls had just found some dupes who were ready to keep them, and they deceived them as all women do. In order to make good this loss our dear mother had cast her eyes on the daughter of an innkeeper in the rue Saint Denis. She was thirteen years old and one of the prettiest creatures it was possible to see. But the young person, as well behaved as she was pious, resisted every seduction. Then la Guérin, having found a very skilful method to attract her to the house one day, immediately placed her in the hands of a strange person whose mania I shall describe to you. He was an ecclesiastic of fifty-five or fifty-six, but, fresh and vigorous, he could have been taken for less than forty. Nobody in the world had a more remarkable talent than this man for enticing young girls into vice, and since it was the most sublime of his arts, he made it also into his one and only pleasure. His entire delight consisted of rooting out the prejudices of childhood, causing virtue to be scorned and decking out vice in the most attractive colours. Nothing in this was neglected: seductive pictures, flattering promises, delightful examples, everything was brought into play, everything was skilfully handled, everything artistically geared to the age of the child and her type of intelligence, and he never failed. In a mere two hours of conversation he was certain to turn the best-behaved and the most reasonable little girl into a trollop. During the thirty years in which he had exercised this profession in Paris he had admitted to Madame Guérin, one of his best friends, that he had a catalogue of more than ten thousand young girls whom he had seduced and cast into the libertine life. He carried out the same services for more than fifteen procuresses, and when he was not employed he carried out research on his own account, corrupted everything he found and sent it to his suppliers. For what is most extraordinary, and the reason why I am describing to you the life story of this unusual personage, is that he never enjoyed the fruit of his labours. He would shut himself in with the child, but despite all the resilience supplied by his mind and his eloquence, he would emerge deeply aroused. People were totally convinced that the operation worked on his senses, but it was impossible to know either where or how he satisfied them. Even when he was closely examined, all that could be seen about him at the end of his talk was a remarkably fiery look and a few movements of his hand over the front of his breeches which indicated a distinct erection produced by the diabolical work he was carrying out, but never anything else.
'He arrived, he was shut in with the innkeeper's young daughter, I observed him. The tête-à-tête was lengthy, the seducer put into it an astonishing degree of pathos, the child cried, became animated, appeared to enter into a kind of enthusiasm. This was the moment when the man's eyes shone most brightly and when we noticed his gestures over the front of his breeches. Shortly afterwards he stood up, the child held out her arms as though to embrace him, he kissed her like a father and showed no kind of lewd attitude. He left, and three hours later the girl arrived at Madame Guérin's with her things.'
'And what about the man?' asked the duke.
'He had vanished immediately after his lesson,' replied Duclos.
'Without returning to see the result of his work?'
'No, monseigneur, he was sure of success. Not a single lesson had ever failed.'
'So there is a very extraordinary character,' said Curval. 'What do you think of him, monsieur le duc?'
'I think', replied the latter, 'that he was merely aroused by this seduction and that he discharged into his breeches.'
'No,' said the bishop, 'you haven't understood. This was only a preparation for his debaucheries and I wager that after this he was going on to commit some more serious ones.'
'More serious ones?' said Durcet. 'And what more delightful pleasure could he have derived than that of enjoying his own handiwork, since he was in control of it?'
'Well', said the duke, 'I wager I've found the answer. This as you say was merely a preparation, he aroused his feelings by corrupting young girls, and went on to sodomize boys . . . he was a bugger, I'll wager.'
They asked Duclos if she had any proof of this supposition, and if the man didn't also seduce young boys. Our storyteller replied that she had no proof of this, and despite the duke's very convincing assertion, everyone remained none the less in doubt about the nature of this strange preacher. It was generally agreed that his mania was truly delightful, but that he needed either to consummate the act or do something worse afterwards. Then Duclos took up the thread of her story again in the following manner:
'The day after our young novice, who was called Henriette, had come to the house, there arrived an eccentric lecher who brought the girl and myself together for the same task. This new libertine enjoyed no other pleasure beyond observing through a hole in the wall all the somewhat unusual delights which were being experienced in a nearby room. He liked to spy on them and found thus in the pleasures of others a divine form of encouragement to his own lewdness. He was placed in the room to which I have already referred and into which I went very often, as my colleagues did, to spy for my own pleasure on the passions of the libertines. I was chosen to amuse him while he carried out his examinations, and the young Henriette went into the other room with the arsehole-sucker of whom I spoke to you yesterday. The highly voluptuous passion of this lecher was the show that we wished to present to my observer, and in order to arouse him more deeply, rendering the scene more heated and more pleasant to watch, he was told in advance that the girl who had been allotted to him was a novice and that it was with him that she was fulfilling her first assignment. He was easily convinced of this through the modest and childlike manner of the little tavern-keeper's daughter. As a result he was as highly inflamed and lecherous as it was possible to be in his lewd performance, and he had no idea they were being observed. As for my man, who had his eye glued to the hole, with one hand on my bottom and the other on his prick which he was gradually stroking, he seemed to be matching his ecstasy to what he was observing. "Ah, what a sight!" he would say from time to time. "What a fine bottom that little girl has and how well that bugger is kissing it." In the end, after Henriette's lover had discharged, mine took me in his arms, and after having kissed me for a moment he turned me round, fondled, kissed and licked my bottom in obscene fashion and drenched my buttocks with the proofs of his virility.'
'While masturbating himself?' asked the duke.
'Yes, monseigneur,' replied la Duclos, 'while rubbing a prick, which I assure you, was so incredibly small that it is not worth a detailed description.'
'The personage who appeared afterwards', Duclos continued, 'might not have deserved to appear on my list if he had not seemed to me worthy of being pointed out through one attitude, rather strange as I see it, which formed part of his pleasures, fairly simple ones in fact. It will make you see to what extent libertinage degrades in a man all feelings of modesty, virtue and humility. This man did not wish to see, he wished to be seen. And knowing that there were men whose dream was to watch the pleasures of others, he begged la Guérin to hide a man with those tastes, who would provide him with the spectacle of his pleasures. La Guérin alerted the man whom I had entertained a few days earlier in front of the hole in the wall, without telling him that the man whom he was going to see knew very well that he would be seen – which would have disturbed his pleasure. She made him believe that in comfort he was going to watch the show about to be offered to him.
'The viewer was shut into the room with the hole in the wall, with my sister, and I went through with the other man. He was a young man of twenty-eight, handsome and fresh. After being told about the location of the hole he took up his position opposite to it in a casual manner and arranged for me to stand beside him. I masturbated him. As soon as he began to have an erection he stood up, displayed his prick to the observer, turned round, showed his arse, pulled up my skirts, showed mine, knelt down in front of it, rubbed my anus with the tip of his nose, exhibited everything with delight and precision and discharged while masturbating himself, at the same time holding me, with my skirts up, in front of the hole. In this way the man standing on the other side of it saw at this decisive moment both my bottom and my lover's raging prick. If this latter man experienced pleasure, God knows what the other man felt; my sister said he was transported with delight, he admitted that he had never felt so much happiness, and after that his buttocks were flooded just as much as mine had been.'
'If the young man had a fine prick and a fine bottom,' said Durcet, 'there must have been good reason for a splendid discharge.'
'It must have been delicious then,' said Duclos, 'for his prick was very long, fairly solid, and his bottom was as soft, as chubby, as prettily formed, as that of love itself.'
'Did you separate his buttocks?' asked the bishop. 'Did you display the hole to the observer?'
'Yes, monseigneur,' said Duclos, 'he showed mine, I offered his, he presented it in the most lewd manner in the world.'
'I've seen a dozen scenes like that in my life,' said Durcet, 'which have cost me a lot of sperm. There are few things more delightful to do. I speak of both aspects, for it's as enjoyable to watch as it is to want to be watched.'
'A person with more or less the same tastes', Duclos went on, 'took me to the Tuileries gardens a few months later. He wanted me to procure men for him and masturbate them right under his nose, in the middle of a pile of chairs in which he had concealed himself. And after I had aroused seven or eight for him in this way he sat down on a bench in one of the most frequented of the alleways, pulled my skirts up at the back, revealed my bottom to the passers-by, brought out his prick and ordered me to frig it in front of all of them, and although it was dark this caused such a scandal that when he shamelessly released his sperm there were more than ten people around us. We were obliged to run away in order to avoid being disgraced.
'When I told our story to la Guérin she laughed and told me that she had once known a man in Lyon (where boys act as panders) whose mania was at least just as strange. He disguised himself as a public go-between, took people himself to two girls whom he paid and kept for that reason, then hid in a corner to watch his plan in action. This latter, directed by the girl whom he had been bribing for this purpose, did not fail to show him the prick and bottom of the libertine she was clasping, the only pleasure to the taste of our false go-between, and the one capable of making him lose his sperm.'
Since Duclos had finished her story early that evening the friends spent the rest of the time, before supper was served, in a few choice lecheries. And since they had been aroused by shameless behaviour, they did not go into the private rooms and all entertained themselves in front of each other. The duke had la Duclos completely undressed, made her bend down, leaning against the back of a chair and ordered la Desgranges to masturbate him over her friend's buttocks, so that the tip of his prick brushed against Duclos's arsehole with every movement. A few other episodes followed which the order of this material does not yet allow us to reveal: however, the story-teller's arsehole was entirely drenched, the duke was very well served and taken care of. He discharged with cries, which proved to what point he was aroused. Curval had himself fucked, the bishop and Durcet did very strange things with both sexes, then supper was served.
After supper there was dancing, the sixteen young people, four fuckers and the four wives were able to perform three quadrilles, but all the participants in this ball were naked and our libertines, as they lay nonchalantly on the sofas, were delightfully entertained by all the different beauties offered to them in turn by the various attitudes that the dancing led the performers to assume. The libertines had near to them the story-tellers, who caressed them more or less quickly depending on the degree of enjoyment experienced by the men but, exhausted by the pleasures of the day, no one discharged, and each of them went to bed in order to find the necessary strength with which to abandon themselves the next day to new expressions of infamy.
Sade had planned many 'new expressions of infamy' which were to grow deeper and more horrifying as his story-tellers proceeded, but in the end he wrote out in detail only the first thirty days of the hundred and twenty. La Duclos completes her duties at the end of November. The author then acted as his own editor and made a list of his 'mistakes': he had said too much, he thought, about the activities in the chapel (i.e. the privies) and too much about sodomy, active and passive. The remaining months of orgies and stories are recounted only in note form. During December Madame Champville, who was faithfully devoted to Sappho, narrates the 'complex' passions. January sees Madame Martaine, who had spent her life in sodomite debauchery (a physical deformity prevented any other form of sex life), describing the 'criminal' passions, while Madame Des-granges, who personifies vice and lust, completes the winter with the 'murderous' passions. They are so murderous, and have such an effect on the listeners, that the former friends begin to kill each other by various nauseating methods. In the end only sixteen out of the original forty-six libertines and their staff survive and return to Paris. The four ringleaders avoid murder, but their wives are sacrificed. The story-tellers are allowed to go on living, and if the scullery-maids are dispatched, the three cooks, owing to their 'considerable talents', survive.
There were many possible reasons why Sade did not complete his vast book – eye-strain may have been one of them. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who learnt enough from Sade to write pornographic novels himself, gives one ironic, flippant explanation of why only a quarter or so of the projected work was finished: 'He must have been short of paper'.
*The Duc de Blangis, Curval, Durcet and an anonymous bishop.
*They had disobeyed orders and disposed of their excrement.
*She is referring to an earlier description of this establishment.