Neither the flighty Madeleine Leclerc nor Marie-Constance Quesnet was with Sade during the last few hours of his life. But the old man did not die alone. His son Donatien-Claude-Armand had been given permission to visit him on 2nd December 1814 and, obviously concerned about the state of his father's health, asked L.-J. Ramon, the junior house doctor, who was only nineteen and still a student, to spend the night with him. Although this was not one of his normal duties, he carried it out, arriving just as the Charenton priest was leaving. Ramon gave the patient a few mouthfuls of herbal tea from time to time and a dose of the medicine prescribed for his breathing difficulties. Soon afterwards, at about 10 p.m., the Marquis de Sade died in uncomplaining silence.
He had made his will in 1806. Three years later he told his son, whose views were puritanical, not to complain about his perpetual scribbling. 'Don't be sorry', he said, 'to see your name immortalized: my works will bring this about, and your virtues, although preferable to my works, would never have done so.'
The greater part of his will proved Sade's generous recognition of Marie-Constance Quesnet, for he left her virtually everything. His executor received a valuable ring and his family received only the papers Sade himself had inherited from his father in 1767. In the fifth and last part of his will, however, Sade seemed anxious to be forgotten by the whole world:
I forbid my body to be opened under any pretext whatsoever. I demand with the greatest insistence that it should be kept forty-eight hours in the room where I shall die, placed in a wooden coffin which will be nailed down only after the forty-eight hours referred to above, on the expiration of which the said coffin will be closed; during this time a dispatch shall be sent to the Sieur Lenormand, wood merchant, boulevard l'Egalité No. 101 at Versailles, asking him to come himself together with a wagon to take my body in order to transport it under his escort to the wood on my estate at Malmaison in the province of Mance near Epernon where I want it to be placed without any form of ceremony in the first overgrown thicket which is found on the right in the said wood as you come into it on the side of the old castle by the wide alley which divides the wood in two. My grave shall be dug in this thicket by the farmer of Malmaison under the inspection of Monsieur Lenormand, who shall not leave my body before it has been placed in the said grave. He can be accompanied during the ceremony, if he wishes, by those among my relatives or friends who without any show of mourning will want to give me this last sign of attachment. Once the grave has been filled in it shall be sown over with acorns so that afterwards the ground of the said grave having been replanted and the thicket being overgrown as it was before, the traces of my tomb will disappear from the surface of the earth, as I flatter myself that my memory will be effaced from the minds of men, except none the less from those of the small number of people who have been pleased to love me up to the last moment and of whom I carry into the grave a most tender recollection.
Made at Charenton-Saint-Maurice when of sound mind and in good health, January 30th, 1806.
signed D.A.F. Sade
If Sade's son had various virtues they are not easily seen, and a wish to preserve his father's literary work was not one of them. He asked the police authorities to destroy the manuscript of Les Journées de Florbelle, which had been left incomplete, and was even present to watch the pages crumple and vanish in the flames. Only outline notes remain of what was to have been a vast novel. Twenty years or so after his father's death he was still ready to repeat an earlier request to the editor of the Biographie Michaud: he asked for the name of his father, 'accused of being the author of the infamous Justine', not to be included. He made this request because of 'my name, my numerous family and my misfortunes'. The request was not granted.
Sade once remarked that 'the entr'actes in my life have been too long'. At the end of the twentieth century, as previously unknown works by this unique writer are discovered or reprinted, and as public taste and behaviour change, he is still speaking the epilogue.