LETTER XXIII TO MADAME DE SADE

The year 1784 introduced a new chapter in Sade's life, for without warning he was removed from Vincennes and transferred to the Bastille prison in the heart of Paris. The transfer took place on 29th February. The prisoner, who was not allowed to take anything with him, now found himself in a small octagonal room on the second floor of one of the towers. He had complained enough while in Vincennes but now, writing to his wife a week or so after the move, he complained about everything. He was ready to make his bed, as he had been told to do, but he was not good at sweeping the floor. Ironically, he hoped he might learn the skill by watching the man whose duty it might have been. To his chagrin, he was now much worse off than he had been in Vincennes. He wrote to Madame de Sade more in sorrow than in anger.

(Bastille, 8th March 1784)

Thirty-four months after an express refusal of a transfer to a fortress at the very door of my estates where every liberty was offered me, after a petition to end my days in peace where I was, wicked though I might be, all the time it pleased your mother to sacrifice me to her revenge, thirty-four months, I repeat, after this event, to see myself now forcibly removed unexpectedly and without warning, with all this mystery, all this comic incognito, all this enthusiasm, all this zeal scarcely pardonable in the excitement of the most important affair and after twelve years of misfortunes, as banal as it is ridiculous! And to see myself transferred to a prison in which I am worse off and a thousand times more constricted than in the wretched place where I was before! Such actions, Madame, with whatever odious lies you attempt to palliate their atrocious blackness, such actions, you must confess, deserve the culmination of all the hatred I have sworn against your infamous family. And I think that you would be the first to despise me if the acts of vengeance did not one day rival all the ferocious repetitions of theirs. But keep calm and rest assured that neither you nor the public will have anything to reproach me with on that score. But I shall have neither the virtue nor the perseverance to invent or search out in a cold rage whatever can render more bitter the venom which I ought to use. Everything will rise up from within me; I shall give my heart a chance, allow it free play in the sure knowledge that the serpents it will produce will be at least as poisonous as those which are hurled against me.

But let us pass on to the details. It is deeds not words that are required in this case, and while one's arms are tied, one must keep silent. These are the lessons in treachery that they have taught me; I shall profit by them, yes, profit, and one day I shall be as deceitful as you.

For twenty years, Madame, you have known that it is absolutely impossible for me to tolerate a room with a stove, and yet it is (thanks to the attentions of those who have concerned themselves with my transference) in a room of that kind that I am now shut up. I have been so incommoded these days that I have stopped lighting fires, and that whatever the weather, I shall continue not to light any. Luckily summer is here; but if I am to be here next winter, I implore you to see that I have a room with a fireplace.

You know that exercise is more important to me than food. And yet here I am in a room half the size of the one I had before. I haven't room to swing a cat and I can leave it only rarely to go into a narrow yard where you can breathe only guardroom and cookhouse air and into which I am marched at the point of the bayonet as if I had attempted to dethrone Louis XVI! Oh, how they make one despise great things when they endow little things with such importance!

The turns of dizziness to which I am subject, the frequent attacks of nose-bleedings which I suffer when I lie down without a very high support for my head, have forced me, as you know, to have a very large pillow. When I wanted to bring away the wretched pillow, you would think I was trying to steal the list of conspirators against the State; they snatched it out of my hands, protesting that acts of such consequence had never been tolerated. And in point of fact I saw that some secret decree of the government required a prisoner to sleep with his head low, for when, as a substitute for this pillow of which they deprived me I humbly requested four miserable planks of wood, they took me for a madman. A host of officials descended on me and having verified that I was very badly bedded, gave the judgement that it was not the custom for one to be otherwise. I protest to you in truth that these things must be seen to be believed, and that if they told us that they happened in China, our soft-hearted and sympathetic French would immediately cry out: 'Oh, the savages!'

Furthermore they claim that I must make my bed and sweep out my room; the first, I don't mind, because they did it very badly and it amuses me to do it. But as for that second, unfortunately I cannot manage it at all; my parents must be to blame for not having included that particular skill in my education. The fact is there were many things they did not foresee . . . many things. If they had, there would have been no tavern wench who could have rivalled me. Meanwhile I beg you to persuade the authorities to give me some lessons. Let the man who looks after me sweep it out but once a week for four or five years; I shall study him closely and you will see that afterwards I shall manage as well as he.

For seven years I have enjoyed the use of knives and scissors at Vincennes without causing any inconvenience. I haven't improved the last seven years, of that I am well aware, but neither have I deteriorated. Could you not make that point so as to persuade them to allow me the complete use of those two objects?

I am naked, thank God, and soon I shall be as I was when I emerged from my mother's womb: I was not allowed to bring anything with me; a shirt, a night-cap caused the guard to swear and Rougemont to shout himself hoarse. So I have abandoned everything, and I beg you to bring with you without fail on your first visit – two shirts, two handkerchiefs, six towels, three pairs of list-shoes, four pairs of cotton stockings, two cotton night-caps, two headbands, a black taffeta cap, two muslin cravats, a dressing-gown, four small pieces of cloth five square inches which I need for bathing my eyes, and some of the books that are on my previous list. All this on condition that I receive my boxes and other possessions from Vincennes inside a fortnight, for, if I had to go any longer without receiving them, all those items would have to be duplicated or triplicated, because of the time you anticipated that I should still be without my luggage.

Add to those things, I beg you, the following objects which bear no relation to the trunks, that is to say I am in constant need of them whether I receive my clothes soon or late. (Pressing items: my tail-cushion which I left at Vincennes, my fur-lined slippers, my two mattresses and my pillow.)

Half a dozen pots of preserves; half a dozen pounds of candles; some packets of small ones of fifteen to the packet; a pint of eau-de-Cologne of better quality than the last which was no use at all; a pint of rose-water for my eyes, into which you have first put one sixth part of brandy, that is to say five parts of rose-water to one of brandy to the pint; and the rest of the books which I long ago requested together with what was left of the new comedies to fill the catalogue I sent.

Let me have the objects requested in this letter if that is possible so that I may at least say that, for once, you have been useful for something during my detention, and above all the two mattresses for my bed and my large pillow. I leave the rest to our friend in charge.

If the oculists tell you that sea-water and the powder in question are still necessary for my eye, which is still in the same wretched state, get them to send me these objects left at Vincennes.

Expedite the dispatch of my luggage, I beg you.

Ah well! my very dear, very amiable and above all very ingenuous wife, were you carrying out a pretty deception on me when on each of your visits you promised that it would be you who would come to collect me, that I should come out a free man and see my children! Is it possible to be more basely deceitful and false? And now tell me if you believe that those who authorize you to deceive your husband so foully work for the happiness of your life? . . . My dear wife, if they tell you that, they are deceiving you: tell them that it is I who assure you of it.

Since my return to Vincennes after all the previous horrors which I at any rate have not forgotten, since this return there remained but two dagger thrusts that you and your people could inflict: change my prison and pack my son off to a corps in which I am absolutely opposed to his serving, and without my seeing him. Both these blows you have delivered. I shall not be ungrateful, this I swear on what I hold most sacred in the world.

I send my humble greetings, Madame, and implore you to pay some attention to my letter, my requests and commissions, all the more since part of my new plan of life here is to send you nothing but lists, by which token here is my first and last letter.

[In the right-hand margin]

(PS.) I think you would do well to reward the guard officer for services on which I can only congratulate myself and all the more because I am now so cruelly aware of the present difference. I commend him to you.

(Translated from the French by W.J. Strachan)

If the prisoner-author had completed the first thirty days of his projected one hundred and twenty, the sudden transfer to the Bastille in 1784 made him doubly aware that his writing had become his life. Without his manuscript, what was left to him? Since he had not been allowed to take his papers or any of his books with him, he saw that his career as a writer was as fragile as his hope of liberty. His manuscript could easily have been lost or confiscated by the authorities. He was lucky: it followed him, with his other possessions, to his cell in the Bastille, presumably because nobody had had time to read it. Sade now seems to have felt that it was more important to make a fair copy of what he had written so far than to continue. He spent just over a month on his self-imposed task, after which this partial manuscript embarked on an adventurous life of its own, described by Apollinaire early in the twentieth century and much quoted since. 'The manuscript is formed of sheets of paper 11 centimetres long stuck together and forming a roll 12 metres 10 in length. It is written on both sides in near-microscopic handwriting.' It was then hidden, and must have been well hidden, otherwise, as will become obvious later, it might have disappeared for ever. 'This manuscript', writes Apollinaire, 'is said to have been found in the room occupied by the Marquis de Sade in the Bastille by Arnoux Saint-Maximin, who gave it to the grandfather of the Marquis de Villeneuve-Trans, in whose family it remained for three generations.'

The last owner of the manuscript had apparently kept it in a phallic-shaped box. At the very end of the nineteenth century a new personage entered the story, Dr Iwan Bloch, a German doctor who wrote under the name of Eugen Diihren. 'Doctor Dühren', Apollinaire continues, 'arranged for it to be sold, through a Paris bookseller, to a German collector at a high price.' Presumably this allowed Bloch-Dühren to publish it, for the first time, in 1904.

As for the prisoner-author, back in 1785, after he had transcribed and concealed the twelve metres of sodomistic narrative, he now embarked on some of the busiest years of his writing life. During 1787 and 1788 he was preoccupied for the first time with conventional story-telling more or less in tune with the taste of the age. He had read most of the popular contemporary authors from Voltaire, Marmontel and Prévost to Crébillon, Restif de la Bretonne and lesser 'libertine' writers. He had a particular admiration for Madame de La Fayette and also for the English novelists Richardson and Fielding. In a letter written to his wife in 1783, after listing what he saw as his 'virtues' and his 'vices', he concludes by saying: ' . . . either kill me or take me as I am, for I shall not change'. In essence he never did, but most of the stories and the long novel he now wrote reveal aspects of this complex man which could hardly have been anticipated by a reading of Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome.

In fact nobody had read this piece of literary onanism and several more years would pass before anyone could read any of the Contes, Historiettes et Fabliaux d'un Troubadour Provençal, or the stories known as Les Crimes de l'Amour. The precise dates of their composition and their bibliographical history are not entirely clear, the literary merits of many are dubious, but in certain ways they have great value: they are accessible to the twentieth-century reader, they are never too long and they can hold the attention by a variety of means, varying from ironic humour or crude farce to psychological insight or Gothic horror. One of the best known, Le Magistrat Mystifié (The Mystified Magistrate), based partly on his own conviction at Aix, contains no references to the serious charges laid against him and express Sade's revenge through a harshly comic attack on an imaginary president. In another story, Faxelange, the author shows how an arranged marriage can lead ambitious parents and the bride herself into trouble, while in La Comtesse de Sancerre he may have planned a form of revenge against his mother-in-law, for the countess is in love with her daughter's intended husband and is prepared to commit any crime in order to keep him to herself.