Letters From Prison (5 page)

Paying off Rose Keller was the easy part. Her demands were exorbitant—the price of silence in matters of scandal always comes high—and in this instance it was 2,400 livres, plus seven gold louis for medicines. Once again, Madame de Montreuil had triumphed, or so she thought. But in fact even the king’s
letter de cachet
could not save Sade this time. The criminal chamber of Parlement—or high court— in Paris, seized the information gathered by the Arcueil villagers, convened an investigation, and issued a warrant for the arrest of the marquis, who was already in jail under the king’s warrant. If Parlement was aware of this situation, it chose to ignore it, perhaps subtly hoping to thwart the Montreuils’ preemptive strike and play on public opinion. Part of the problem, for Sade, was that the head of Parlement was one Charles de Maupeou, long an archenemy of Monsieur de Montreuil, who saw a rare opportunity to discredit the family. In addition, in those days, only two decades before the Revolution, efforts were being made by various members of the judiciary to undercut the king’s authority. In all likelihood, first in issuing its warrant, then, when Sade failed to respond (which he could hardly do since he was already in prison), sending the official crier to trumpet in Paris, including under the Montreuils’ windows, that “the gentleman Sade” must appear in person for trial, the high court was trying to establish its legal authority over that of the king. Meanwhile, the prisoner, after being transferred from Saumur to the less lax prison of Pierre-Encize—ostensibly an act of sovereign kindness to keep him out of the clutches of the Paris criminal court—was granted a letter of annulment by the king on June 3. In the tug of war between the court and the judiciary, such a royal pardon was final, and essentially expunged the case from the books, much to the chagrin of President de Maupeou. The high court, with de Maupeou presiding, met and approved the king’s decision. In all this, once again the long arm of Madame de Montreuil could be seen. Now, purely for form, the prisoner was brought to the Conciergerie in Paris for trial on June 10, where he was nominally fined “alms of one hundred livres to be used for bread for the prisoners of the Conciergerie.” After that he was returned to Pierre-Encize to await the king’s pleasure for release. On November 16, 1768, the king ordered Sade to be released and sent to his estate at La Coste. Thus Sade’s first long-term acquaintance with prison life—by now he had been in jail seven months—was over. The question was, had it proved a sobering experience? The answer came in the form of a resounding no less than four years later.

The second event that sealed his fate with the long-suffering Madame de Montreuil began to unfold in the afternoon of June 23, 1772, when Sade and his valet Latour set off from La Coste for Marseilles, ostensibly to attend to some business there. In fact, he and La-tour spent the next five days visiting the city’s bordellos. On the fifth day Sade ordered his valet to round up several girls—all prostitutes— and a “meeting” was scheduled for ten o’clock in the morning at the house of one of them, Marie Borelly, on the rue d’Aubagne, for Sade rightly judged that to indulge the fantasies he had in mind he needed privacy. There Sade and Latour proceeded to hold a matinal debauch involving five prostitutes, all of whom whipped the gentlemen and were whipped by them in turn, with Sade dictating the action and sometimes reversing roles, calling his valet “Marquis” and referring to himself as Lafleur, and, in one further strange twist, keeping a concrete count of the beatings he had received.
⁸
But the heated action, which went on for at least two hours, was not the cause of Sade’s impending downfall: from a little gold-rimmed box he had in his coat, he took out some aniseed candies, whose sugar coating was soaked with the extract of what is commonly known as Spanish fly, and tried to force them on the girls. Only one, Marianne Laverne, ate any, though another pretended to but spit them out. That same evening he amused himself—alone this time—with another prostitute, Marguerite Coste, whom he convinced to down even a greater quantity of the aniseed candies. The following day, his sexual appetite presumably satiated, Sade and Latour peacefully returned to La Coste by postal coach. But the pastilles he had fed the two girls were having an effect that would cost the marquis dearly. The most severely afflicted was Marguerite Coste, who fell ill the same night she had been with Sade and whose condition worsened over the next two days, during which she was wracked by terrible vomiting. A doctor was summoned, and when he heard the source of her illness he reported it to the police. Convinced the man with the pastilles had tried to poison the girls, the police had the vestiges of the girls’ regurgitations—plus two untouched pastilles found at Marie Borelly’s place—analyzed and found absolutely no trace of poison. Puzzled, the police never thought of Spanish fly, which can be dangerous if taken in more than moderate doses. Sade’s doses were clearly immoderate, and Marguerite Coste came close to death, so close in fact that she was administered last rites. The police took depositions from all six girls, and on July 4 a warrant was issued for the arrest of both Sade and Latour. Before it could be carried out, however, someone came to La Coste to warn the marquis of the impending danger, adding that one of the “poisoned” girls had died and now the marquis and his manservant would be arrested for murder. Sade and Latour beat a hasty retreat. Anne-Prospère de Launay, Renée-Péelagie’s younger sister by eleven years, who had been visiting at La Coste for some time, also disappeared, and one could only suppose she had, inexplicably, followed the marquis into hiding. When she resurfaced several days later, she was in a state of great agitation. Thus Renée-Pélagie was left by herself to face the music and deal with the police, who arrived in large numbers, headed by the bailiff of Apt. Finding neither of the accused, and being told by one and all—the marquise, the notary Fage, the townspeople, the servants—that both men had been “away” for a good week now, the police finally left. As usual, in her despair Renée-Pélagie turned to her mother for help and succor, but the présidente wanted no part of this new development. She had bailed out her son-in-law for the last time, she declared, not because his conduct this time was even worse than the others, but because she had by now learned from good authority what she had feared but refused to believe before, namely that Sade had done the unthinkable, even for him: he had seduced her young daughter, Anne. To his many other crimes against not just society but, far more important, the family, he had now added the unthinkable: incest. To make matters worse, Renée-Pélagie, her formerly docile elder daughter, seemed to accept this quite unacceptable situation. As for Anne-Prospère, Anne-the-Pure, Anne the canoness, she had apparently fallen madly in love with her mad brother-in-law.

The seduction and debasement of Anne-Prospère was the third event, and the one that finally pushed Madame de Montreuil over the edge, that caused her to shift her allegiance and expend all her energies henceforth to isolate and incapacitate her son-in-law, to have him put away where he could do the family no more harm. Henceforth, if she had her way, they would lock him up and throw away the key.

Unlike her mother, however, Renée-Pélagie was far from ready to give up on her husband. That was, and remains, one of the great Sadean mysteries: How, after such conduct, with clearly not the slightest remorse on his part, could she remain so attached to the man? So faithful to him? So in love with him? In any event, in early August she managed to round up four thousand livres and set off for Marseilles where, enlisting the help of a local notary, she managed to buy off Marguerite Coste and Marianne Laverne, both of whom agreed to withdraw their charges. A victory, yes, but after several days in Marseilles she returned to La Coste in shock, for while there she had heard all the gossip, seen the scandal sheets, listened to all the wild rumors about her husband—one of which maintained that the marquis had poisoned his wife because he had fallen in love with her younger sister. The port city seethed with stories about and hatred for her husband, whose latest case seemed to be all anyone was talking about. The story was fast escalating into fantasy, and the magnitude of the marquis’s crime exploded with each retelling. Memories of Arcueil resurfaced. Why had he been let off so leniently then? It
was
true that there were two levels of justice, one for the aristocrats, another for common folk; a scapegoat had to be found, if only to appease the popular anger, which was growing day by day.

Later that month Renvée-Pélagie’s father arrived at La Coste, presumably to visit his two daughters, salvage Anne-Prospère if he could, see what he could do to keep the lid on this latest scandal, and use his personal connections among the judiciary to influence its decision regarding his son-in-law. Monsieur de Montreuil was an excessively passive man—la présidente ruled the roost almost single-handedly—and at sixty he surely did not come all the way from Paris, a journey of several days, on his own. He came at the instigation and demand of his wife, to seal Sade’s doom.

On September 2, the royal prosecutor handed down his decision. Sade was found guilty of poisoning and he and Latour were both found guilty of sodomy.
⁹
Both were required to “expiate their crimes at the cathedral entrance before being taken to the Place Saint Louis, where a scaffold was to be erected, and there Sade was to be beheaded and Latour hanged or strangled until he was dead, after which their bodies were to be burned and their ashes scattered to the wind.” On September 11 the Parlement of Provence confirmed the prosecutor’s sentence, and the following day both Sade and Latour were burned in effigy on the Place des Prechêurs in Aix. Though the act was symbolic, for Sade it had grave repercussions, because he was stripped of his civil rights. From a libertine and dissolute, the Marquis de Sade was henceforth a marked man, a fugitive from justice, his name and acts linked in infamy in the press and in the minds of the public. Though he would escape the verdict of the Marseilles court, he would be guilty, fettered even if not behind bars, condemned for the rest of his life. To make sure, Monsieur de Montreuil had set off for Aix-en-Provence on September 7 to confer with the authorities of the appeals court to which the Marseilles sentence had been referred and to try to accomplish a dual and delicate task: make sure the case was handled in such a way as to bring no dishonor to the family name and see to it that his son-in-law was, once and for all, prevented from doing any further damage.

But it was already too late. Sade had decamped, fleeing as fast as the Provençal coaches could take him, to Italy, where he traveled under the name of the Count de Mazan.
¹⁰
The damage he was inflicting even more deeply on his wife’s family—not to mention his wife herself—was his choice of companion, for Anne-Prospère de Launay had fled with him. They went first to Venice, thence on to several other Italian cities. Then, abruptly, and for reasons still unknown, Anne left her brother-in-law—and all her baggage—and returned to La Coste on October 2, roughly a month after their idyllic flight had begun.

What of this incestuous relationship between Sade and Anne-Prospère? How could a well-brought-up young lady who, barely past twenty and presumably pure not only of heart but of body—she was a canoness when she appeared at La Coste to visit her sister and brother-in-law—engage in such a total act of folly that she must have known would ruin her relations with her sister, her parents, and endanger her own future? Sade’s every act was now followed avidly, and this most juicy tidbit could scarcely be kept out of the press.
¹¹
There is no simple answer, but there are some reasonable surmises. At thirty-two, Sade was still attractive, possessed of an undeniable charm, and highly seductive. Anne-Prospère could also see that her sister, once submissive and unassertive, had taken on a new air: despite all her husband’s myriad escapades and betrayals, all the scandal surrounding him, it was obvious that Renée-Pélagie still loved the man and was ready to defend him to the last ounce of her energy, to such a degree in fact that she was fully prepared to stand up even against their tyrannical mother. What manner of man could have wrought such change in her older sister? For the young canoness, the temptation to be seduced, to taste those forbidden pleasures that had had such a tonic effect on Renée-Pélagie, must have been strong, especially there in the confines of La Coste, where the marquis felt completely at ease and could be his most charming, seductive self. From Sade’s point of view, the temptation must have been even greater, although he knew—as he surely did—that he was courting trouble. One senses that, if anything, the threat of trouble, of unredeemable scandal, acted on him as an aphrodisiac far more powerful than Spanish fly.

After Anne-Prospère deserted him, Sade left Italy and settled in Chambery, then a part of Piedmont and Sardinia. After roughly a month of secluded existence in an isolated house he had rented outside that city, Sade, who was still traveling incognito under the title the Count de Mazan, was arrested one evening upon a warrant from the king of Sardinia and incarcerated in Fort Miolans, which was known as the Bastille of the Counts of Savoy. How had the marquis’s real identity been discovered, and why had a foreign king issued a warrant for his arrest? Very simply, the présidente, to whom Sade had rashly written a letter revealing his whereabouts, immediately set about having him clapped behind bars. For the next four months he remained at Fort Miolans as the most famous, but also the most closely watched, prisoner in the keep. In March, the indomitable Marquise de Sade journeyed to Savoy disguised as a man and made desperate efforts to visit her husband, to no avail. On the night of April 30, by as clever a ruse as the novel or theater has ever invented, Sade, another prisoner, the Baron de l’Allee, and Sade’s manservant Latour escaped from the impregnable fortress. Thence Sade and Latour made their way back to La Coste.