Letters From Prison (51 page)

5
. It is difficult to tell what Sade is using as his starting date, and therefore difficult to discern the date of this letter. If he’s using as his starting date his rearrest at La Coste on August 26, 1778, then the letter would have to have been written in early September, 1782. The French edition indicates variously the months of June and July, 1782, as the date for this letter.

61. To Madame de Sade

[1782]

I
don’t know what they plan for me when I leave here. I told you, and I persist in saying, that what I desire is to go home with you. Still, I am not loath to spending two or three days in Paris before that, wanting absolutely to see my daughter, on whom I’ve never laid eyes; and they would be hard-pressed to keep me from satisfying my o’erwhelming desire to see her. You ask what my plans are: I have made none, and I swear to you that I have refrained from building any castles in Spain; I’ve been misled far too often. I want to leave here an entirely free man, with no strings attached. The time of exile is far behind us. That would have been acceptable at the time my sentence was handed down; it would have been welcome; it would have been a punishment to fit the crime; it would have spared me the indignity of completely ruining my reputation in my native province, a shame that can only have been concocted by my cruelest enemies working in concert. Now I must leave here free. If that happens, my plan is to go spend a year on my estates in order to set things right there, and thence to take up my abode there, where I shall spend the remainder of my days. I shall have lived sufficiently for the piddling pleasures of others; ‘twill be time to live for myself. But where will that be? Ah! you should know it well, if you remember all our earlier conversations. If they set me free on the condition of exiling me, even were it to my own estates, then let them keep a close watch on me day and night, for I shall not remain there, I shall abscond to Florence or Naples. If ’tis exile, doubtless there will be a guard in attendance: in which case I state categorically that having had my fill of paying the police and their henchmen, I shall most assuredly not pay them any more than I paid the lackey in Aix-en-Provence, and I hereby give my word of honor that I shall not pay a penny to anyone. I have written it before, I have written it since, and I shall repeat it to my dying day. May I be looked upon as the lowest of men if ever I pay a penny for that purpose. Is it possible that these gentlemen do not have, in the entire length and breadth of Paris, other fools, other pigeons than me, that they have had me and only me for the past ten years to ante up and pay off their
alguazils?
You do not know who the triumvirate
¹
consists of—someone I know has been exceedingly remiss in that case: the triumvirate consists of three white-wigged gentlemen, one of whom is in fact quite handsome and in his day enjoyed a certain reputation in Paris. This past summer there was on this score a rather charming story upon the occasion of a certain
powdering episode
that took place during the month of July, at a slight remove from the earth. It was reported that this be-wigged one’s valet had tried to leave his master, because after the powdering exercise his master became so swelled up with pride that he had to add six extra plaits to his wig. His valet, having already fashioned no fewer than fourteen on each side, said to him:
“Monseigneur, I fear I must leave your employ,
” and without further ado he up and left. How stupid the people of Provence are, to tell stories that are as dull as they are
blasphemous!
In any event, to come back to the triumvirate, here’s one to top all others: since I point all of them out to you only in order to remind you of my reasons for challenging their testimony against me, reasons that your mother should ponder a bit more profoundly, to avoid having the wool pulled over her eyes, I shall cite, next to each one, just what the reason is. Regarding the first-named, the reason is so overwhelming that I cannot find any way to tone it down sufficiently so that the censors will let it pass. All I ask is that you remember that ’tis infinitely overpowering and of such a nature as to nullify completely anything and everything he may testify against me. I swear ’tis so, and shall prove it. The second character of the triumvirate held some position in the province to which I was posted in June 1764.
²
I did not go and pay him an official visit, and when that was brought to my attention, I replied that,
firmly believing I held a much higher position than he, I should not be the one to call upon him first.
This remark was passed on to him. A certain Malhiver, a captain of dragoons with whom you may recall I later became involved on the rue Neuve-Luxembourg, told me that he had personally heard from a most reliable source that this captain
had been piqued by my remark and stated that he would never forgive me.
I replied to Malhiver, who was not a close friend, that I didn’t give a f-. Alas! in those days I was not aware that, like the Romans, we would go and seek out our dictators behind a plow: the bewigged one has since risen in life, I have fallen, and only the remark I made has remained unchanged. What further proof does one need that, when a man’s freedom is at stake, a judge such as he, who swears that he will never forget the slight he has suffered, must be deemed untrustworthy? Madame de Montreuil will back me up on that. As for the third personage of the triumvirate, whom I compare to Lepidus, his reason for keeping me in prison is quite obvious. I know from Marais—for you know that I always quote my sources—that the prisons of
Paris, Vincennes, the Bastille,
and
Charenton
bring him in no less than twenty-five thousand livres per annum in revenues. Given that figure, ’tis simple enough to figure out that the gentleman in question wants to keep these prisons as full as possible. At this point, ’tis to my mother-in-law I direct my remark, she who is fair-minded, equitable, she whom I have heard say a thousand times over: I
know all too well the horrors of these prisons; they make you pay when they put you in, they make you pay when they release you; ’tis a complex network of horrors.
So the question I raise to her is whether she should listen to the advice of man-number-one, whose motives for keeping me in I shall not go into, etc., of a second who has sworn that he will never forgive me for a remark I made, and of a third who grows rich at my expense? Let us have her response! Let her not forget that she is a mother, that I am perhaps the most obedient and the most loving of all her children.
³
In any case, enough of all that. You asked me to tell you what the triumvirate was; I told you. My letter must be let through.
⁴
If what I say is false, they should laugh and let it pass. If they stop it, then ’tis proof positive that my complaints are justified. With what weapons they are then arming me when, having made all these allegations, I might just as well add:
And when I lodged my complaints on this score, when I shed tears of blood in the bosom of my wife, they intercepted my letters and would not let them through, in the fear that such disastrous truths might come to light.

What in the world does this sentence mean? Do you remember our butterflies at La Coste? That sentence is extremely peculiar: I am in fact dumbfounded by it. They are two different ways to interpret it. Did you really mean to put butterflies? If it is butterflies, you know that butterflies are something special we have between us, something only the two of us can do together. You offer to find me some, which therefore is tantamount to saying you are ready and willing to come to terms with me. If ’tis that, yes; and that’s the way I understand it, and that’s the way I want to understand it. If on the contrary you used the term butterflies generically, by which you meant or implied snails or vipers, which the meaning of the sentence seems to indicate, then no, no, no, my dear friend, my feelings for you are such that I cannot even hear such language as that. But whichever way you meant it, since ’tis nonetheless passing strange, I beg you to send me which of the two meanings you intended; I am more curious than I can say. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [The balance of the letter is missing.]

1
. He is referring to the three-judge panel in Provence that passed sentence on him, which, he is maintaining, was heavily prejudiced against him.

2
. Sade is doubtless referring to his trip that month to Dijon, where on June 26 he made his acceptance address to the High Court of Burgundy upon the occasion of formally assuming the position of lieutenant-general of the king for the provinces of Bresse, Bugey, Valromey, and Gex.

3
. Though an in-law, Sade is suddenly including himself among the hated Mme de Montreuil’s offspring.

4
. By the censors.

62. To Madame de Sade

[October 21, 1782]

I
have, my dear friend, but one favor to ask of you, no more, and I still hope that your former friendship for me, or if you prefer your pity, will not let you say nay. That favor is to have me transferred from here to anywhere else, even were it shackled hand and foot to the cage of Mont-Saint-Michel. I would prefer it and mercifully ask that you cause it to happen. Yes, I prefer it a thousand times more than being constantly exposed to the odious attempts by that scoundrel de Rougemont to have me poisoned, he who doubtless has come to some arrangement with your mother to finish me off. For the past six weeks that rogue has been doing everything in his power to give me drugs that are having a serious negative effect upon my health and are causing me pain and anguish more violent than any criminal could ever endure on the wheel. And the proof that this rogue de Rougemont has sold me down the river is that they now keep me confined to my room and serve my food through a trapdoor, the way they do with the insane. They carry their outrageous behavior to the point of not letting the surgeon visit me, proof positive that my life is no longer worth a penny. Farewell, that is my last word to you. May heaven make you happy without me, since they fancy that my death is necessary for your happiness. If that is true, then I leave you without remorse, and I swear and solemnly declare that if I have but one regret, ’tis that in leaving this world I am unable to take along with me the odious scoundrel who stooped not only to fatten his own purse but then to use the monies he is raking in at the price of my life to indulge in his own unworthy pleasures. Have me transferred where you will and under whatever conditions, I beg of you on bended knee, if you still have an ounce of pity left for me in your heart. If you do not, I shall have to believe that you yourself are an accomplice to my death.

63. To Monsieur Le Noir

October 22, 1782

D
espite the fact that I am quite certain none of my letters has ever been delivered to you, and that you have unjustly, if I may be so bold, abandoned the most important role wherewith your situation endows you, namely that of doing me justice and enlightening me concerning the results of the rage of those who continue to harry me relentlessly, despite that, I say, I owe it to myself to inform you personally of my complaints relating to the most recent horrors that have been visited upon me, which I shall set forth as truthfully and briefly as possible.

From September 3 to October 20 inclusive, Monsieur de Rougemont, doubtless paid off by my wife’s family, has upon thirteen different occasions had the villainy to mix in with the normal foods allotted me here a drug that has the effect of making me painfully ill to my stomach, so much so in fact that had they fed me poisons the reaction would have been no less violent. As soon as I had detected what they were doing, I asked to be given only soft-boiled eggs, on the assumption that they would be impossible to tamper with: on the second or third day my request was denied. I lodged a complaint about the pain I was suffering. They laughed in my face. I appealed to the surgeon into whose hands I have been entrusted to cure the ills that had been foisted upon me. I asked that he speak to Monsieur de Rougemont on the matter. All I was able to elicit from him by way of response were some cock and bull stories. At which point I said that, since they were refusing to deal with me according to the law, if it happened again I would take matters into my own hands. And they did it again. I took my revenge on whomever I could, Sir, and in that I was guided by this axiom of the law of nature, which shall be my guiding principle throughout my life:
whenever justice has been denied me, respond by taking matters into my own hands.
Whereupon Monsieur de Rougemont has taken it upon himself, doubtless to cover up his little sport, to withdraw the few pleasures necessary to my health that had hitherto been granted me, as a result of which, Monsieur, either I must allow myself to be poisoned or if I object to it, then I am punished.

No, Monsieur, no, they are not and cannot be the orders of the king. ’Tis impossible they be such, and I beseech you therefore in the name of fair-mindedness that I be treated in strict accordance with those orders. You may be sure, Sir, that one day I shall lodge a most serious and vigorous complaint in connection with an infamy of that sort. I shall state that I first brought this complaint to your attention. Would you be pleased, therefore, if ‘twas said that you refused to see that justice was done me? I most earnestly ask of you that I not be punished because others are in their wrong; I ask you most urgently that this kind of misdeed not be repeated and that they enjoin this infamous scoundrel who within these walls trafficks with the lives of the poor wretches through whom and by whom he has been allowed to earn his sad and somber living, that he be enjoined, I say, from any longer poisoning the already poor nutrition that he gives me, and that I at least be allowed to remain alive, which is not the case at present, since my refusal to go along with his double-dealing compels me to restrict my diet to milk. There in a nutshell, Monsieur, is the essence of my complaint to you and concerning which I have the right to expect, both by your position and your person, justice that will be both prompt and swift. When a prisoner brings such serious complaints as these to your attention, Monsieur, ’tis quite impossible that you refuse to see him yourself or send someone in your place, and that is all I ask of you.