Letters From Prison

OTHER WORKS BY THE MARQUIS DE SADE

TRANSLATED BY RICHARD SEAVER

Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, & Other Writings

(with Austryn Wainhouse)

The 120 Days of Sodom & Other Writings

(with Austryn Wainhouse)

The Mystified Magistrate and Other Tales

(forthcoming)

Copyright © 1999, 2011 by Richard Seaver

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Letters number 76, 77, 83, 108, and 109 from
Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings if the Marquis de Sade,
translated, compiled, and edited by Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver. Copyright © 1965 by Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse. Used by permission of
Grovel
Atlantic, Inc., and revised for this edition.

A fragment of the Introduction, entitled ‘’An Anniversary Unnoticed,” appeared in
Evergreen Review
in 1964, marking the 150th anniversary of Sade’s death.

Visit our website at
www.arcadepub.com
.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN: 978-1-611145-572-4

To the memory of

Gilbert Lely

through whose perseverance these letters were recovered

and to

Jean-Jacques Pauvert

whose courage under fire was exemplary

The translator would like to express his gratitude to Professor Robert Darnton for his gracious and generous help in verifying certain facts and characters of Sade’s universe.

“My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking to suit other people! My manner of thinking stems straight from my considered reflections; it holds with my existence, with the way I am made. It is not in my power to alter it; and if it were, I’d not do so.”

—Sade to his wife [November, 1783],

Letter Number 83

“ . . . it is impossible for me to turn my back on my muse; it sweeps me along, forces me to write despite myself and, no matter what people may do to try to stop me, there is no way they will ever succeed.”

—Sade to Abbé Amblet [April, 1784],

Letter Number 94

Introduction

Note on the Letters

Part One: Letters from Vincennes

Part Two: Letters from the Bastille

Epilogue

Frontispiece: Four of Sade’s prisons. Clockwise from top: Miolans, the Bastille, Pierre-Encize, and Vincennes. This nineteenth-century engraving served as the frontispiece of Maurice Heine’s 1883 anthology of Sade’s works.
Reprinted from Maurice Heine,
OEuvres Choisies et Pages Magistrales du Marquis de Sade,
volume 1 (Paris: Editions du Trianon, 1883)

In mid-November 1814, the newly appointed student doctor to the insane asylum of Charenton on the outskirts of Paris, L. J. Ramon, age nineteen, noticed as he made his rounds an aged, obese inmate, carelessly dressed, always alone, remote but courteous, gentlemanly of manner, who ambled slowly along the corridor outside his room. The man, he was told, was incurably insane and had been in the institution for more than eleven years. Ramon was struck by the man’s imposing air, despite his age and obesity. Roughly two weeks after that first encounter, the old man received a visit from his son, who, finding his father much weakened and no longer able to walk, asked Monsieur Ramon to spend the night with him. During the evening, Ramon helped the man take a few sips of herbal tea to help ease his pulmonary congestion. Shortly before ten, since he noted his patient had increasing difficulty breathing, Ramon got up to fetch him a drink. Surprised by the sudden silence from the bed behind him, Ramon turned back to find that the old man was dead. At the time, the fledgling doctor still had no idea that his charge was the infamous Marquis de Sade. More than fifty years later, writing about his early memories of the inmate, Ramon noted:

Never once did I catch him talking to anybody. As I passed I would bow and he would respond with that chill courtesy that excludes any thought of entering into conversation. . . . Nothing could have led me to suspect that this was the author of
Justine
and
Juliette;
the only impression he produced on me was that of a haughty, morose, elderly gentleman.

Eight years earlier, Sade had written his last will and testament, specifically setting forth the site and manner of his modest burial, asking that his body be borne to his property at Malmaison near Epernon, and there, “without display or pomp of any sort,” a ditch be dug in a copse that he specified, and his body laid therein.

The ditch once covered over, above it acorns shall be strewn, so that the spot may become green again, and the copse grown back thick over it, the traces of my grave may disappear from the earth as I trust the memory of me shall fade out of the minds of all men. . . .

Despite his express instructions, Sade’s wishes were ignored, and he was given what amounted to a pauper’s burial in the cemetery of Charenton. As for his desire—surely sincere—that he be forgotten, in that too he was contravened. His works were banned, burned, and destroyed; his descendants, starting with his son Donatien-Claude-Armand, all bearing the cross of his presumed shame, did their best to make sure his memory indeed faded from the minds of men. Yet his name, however maligned, lingered on throughout the nineteenth century, both in the public mind and, later, in the dictionaries and etymologies of the world. That name, in its pure and associated forms—sadism, sadist, sadomasochist—became synonymous with the gratuitous infliction of pain, the pursuit of wanton pleasure, delight in cruelty, especially excessive cruelty, specifically in the context of sexual release. His works—those that survived the censor’s sword or the family’s pyre—were spoken of (if at all) in hushed tones. Few were available to the public, though copies of some of the early editions of
Justine, The New Justine, Juliette,
and
The Crimes of Love
remained locked up on the top shelves of private libraries.

In the early part of the twentieth century, however, a number of enterprising and daring spirits, not content with the then current legend, began to examine Sade’s works more closely and came to the conclusion that there was much more to both the man and the myth than had hitherto been admitted. At the turn of the century, a German, Dr. Iwan Bloch, writing under the name of Eugène Dühren, published a study,
The Marquis de Sade, His Life and Work,
simultaneously in Berlin and Paris in 1901. A few years later, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire wrote his groundbreaking and daring
Work of the Marquis de Sade,
in a collection of classics aptly entitled “The Masters of Love.” With that one work Sade was if not resurrected at least a fit subject for drawing room—and sidewalk café—discussion. But it was not until after World War II that the Sadean rehabilitation began in full force, perhaps in part because the world had seen, through the ravages of that monstrous war, the full evil of which man was capable. In any event, the French surrealists, the pioneering biographers Maurice Heine and Gilbert Lely, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, the writers Simone de Beauvoir and Pierre Klossowski, and perhaps most daringly and courageously, considering the powerful forces of censorship then prevailing in France, the French publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert, who in the 1960s undertook the gargantuan task of issuing, at great personal risk, the complete works of Sade, all rank among the sturdy pioneers in this phoenixlike endeavor. So successful was the resurrection that in the second half of the twentieth century there were voices proclaiming Sade as one of the seminal thinkers not only of the eighteenth century but of all time, a precursor to Nietzsche, Stirner, Freud, Krafft-Ebing, and the surrealists. Simone de Beauvoir hailed him as a “great writer,” adding that he “must be given a place in the great family of those who wish to cut through the banality of everyday life.” If today evaluations are less dithyrambic, more measured, the fact remains that Sade still enjoys a measure of respect far greater than he ever could have imagined in his wildest dreams.