Letters From Prison (57 page)

Do not forget the nightcap, the spectacles, the six cakes of wax, Jean-Jacques’
Confessions
and the coat M. de Rougemont claims that you have. I am returning a boring novel and vols. 4 and 6 of Velly. With these I send a hearty screw in the buttocks and am, devil take me, going to give myself a flick of the wrist in their honor! Now don’t run off and tell the présidente so, for being a good Jansenist, she’s against wives being
molinized.
⁴
She maintains that M. Cordier has never
discharged anywhere
but in her
vessel of propagation
and that whomsoever steers any other course is doomed to roast in hell. And I who had a Jesuit upbringing, I who learned from Father Sanchez that one must avoid
plunging in over one’s depth,
and look hard lest one
swim in a vacuum,
because, as we learn from Descartes,
nature abhors a vacuum,
I cannot agree with
Mama Cordier.
But you’re a philosopher, you have a most charming misconstruction, a way of moving and a narrowness in that misconstruction and heat in
the rectum,
which is why I am able to get on with you so well.

I am yours indeed, in truth your own.

Directly this letter reaches you, will you please go in person to the shop of M. Grandjean, oculist, rue Galande by Place Maubert, and tell him to send straight to M. de Rougemont the drugs and instruments he promised to furnish the prisoner he visited in Vincennes; and while you are about it, go see
your protector Le Noir
and tell him to arrange to let me have a little fresh air. He enjoys plenty of it, does Le Noir, although a wickeder man than I by far: I’ve paddled a few asses, yes, I don’t deny it, and he has brought a million souls to the brink of starvation. The king is just: let his majesty decide between Le Noir and me and have the guiltier broken on the wheel, I make the proposal with full confidence. In addition to the neglected errands and to those requested above, attend, if you please, to procuring for me one pint of eau de Cologne, a head-ribbon, and a half-pint of orange water.

1
. Monsieur de Montreuil. The full family name was Cordier de Montreuil.

2
. One of Madame de Montreuil’s henchmen.

3
. The reference is to the Montreuil country residence, the chateau d’Echaf-four.

4
. From Luis Molina, a sixteenth-century Jesuit, much disliked by the Jansenists because of his doctrine of grace, which they staunchly opposed.

77. To Madame de Sade

[July 1783]

M
y amiable queen, there is truly nothing more entertaining than the insolence of your lackeys. Were one less than certain that your numbers are riddles (squaring nicely, by the way, with my manner of thinking), your errand boys would be in line for a sound caning one of these days. Ah! would you hear the latest? They are giving me their estimates upon how much longer I am to remain here! What a farce! ’Tis for you, charming princess, ’tis for you who are on your way to sup in intimate elegance with Madame Turnkey (at the hospital today), I say ’tis for you, my cunning one, to take the temperature of my captors, for you to divine just when it is going to suit them to unkennel me, for you to learn their pleasure of my lordships Martin,
¹
Albaret, Fouloiseau, and the other knaves of that breed whom you will deign to permit me, for my part, to consider so many cab horses fit for whipping or to serve the public convenience at whatever hour and in any kind of weather.

To refuse me Jean-Jacques’s
Confessions,
now there’s an excellent thing, especially after having sent me Lucretius and the dialogues of Voltaire; that demonstrates great judgment, profound discernment on the part of your spiritual guides. Alas, they do me much honor in reckoning that the writings of a deist can be dangerous reading for me; would that I were still at that stage. You are not sublime in your methods of doctoring, my worthy healers of the soul! Learn that it is the point to which the disease has advanced that determines whether a specific remedy be good or bad for the patient, not the remedy in itself. They cure Russian peasants of fever with arsenic; to that treatment, however, a pretty woman’s stomach does not well respond. Therein lies the proof that everything is relative. Let that be your starting point, gentlemen, and have enough common sense to realize, when you send me the book I ask for, that while Rousseau may represent a threat for dull-witted bigots like yourselves, he is a salutary author for me. Jean-Jacques is to me what
The Imitation of Christ is
for you. Rousseau’s ethics and religion are strict and severe to me, I read them when I feel the need to improve myself. If you would not have me become better than I am, why, ’tis high time you told me so! For me, good is a state both uncomfortable and disagreeable, and I ask no more than to be left to wallow in my slough; I like it there. Gentlemen, you imagine your
pons asinorum
must be used and must succeed with everybody; and you are mistaken, I’ll prove it to you. There are a thousand instances in which one is obliged to tolerate evil in order to destroy vice. For example, you fancied you were sure to work wonders, I’ll wager, by reducing me to an atrocious abstinence in the article of
carnal sin.
Well, you were wrong: you have produced a ferment in my brain, owing to you phantoms have arisen in me which I shall have to render real. That was beginning to happen, you have done naught but reinforce and accelerate developments. When one builds up the fire too high under the pot, you know full well that it must boil over.

Had I been given
Monsieur le Six
²
to cure, I’d have proceeded very differently, for instead of locking him up amongst cannibals, I would have cloistered him for a while with some whores, I would have supplied him whores in such numbers that damn me if after these seven years there’d be a drop of fuel now left in his lamp! When you have a steed too fiery to bridle, you gallop him over rough terrain, you don’t shut him up in the stable. Thereby might you have guided
Monsieur le Six
into the
right path,
into what they call the
path of honor.
You’d have brought to an end these
philosophical subterfuges,
these devious practices Nature disavows (as though Nature had anything to do with all this), these
dangerous
flights of an all too ardent imagination which, ever in hot pursuit of happiness and never able to find it anywhere, finishes by substituting illusions for reality and
indecent detours
for lawful pleasure . . . Yes, in the middle of a harem
Monsieur le Six
would have become
the friend of women;
he would have discovered and
felt
that there is nothing so beautiful, nothing so
great
as her sex, and that outside of her sex there is no salvation. Occupied solely in serving ladies and in satisfying their delicate desires,
Monsieur le Six
would have sacrificed all of his. Indulging in none but seemly practices, decency would have become a habit with him, and that habit would have accustomed his mind to quelling penchants that had hitherto prevented him from pleasing. The whole treatment would have ended with our sufferer appeased and at peace; and lo! see how out of the depths of vice I would have enticed him back to virtue. For, once again, to a very vicious heart, virtue is but a lesser vice. Think not that ’tis child’s play to retrieve a man from the abyss; your mere proposal to rescue him will cause him to cling tight to where he is. Content yourself with having him conceive a liking for things milder in their form but in substance the same as those in which he is wont to delight. Little by little you will lift him up out of the cloaca. But if you hurry him along, jostle him, if you attempt to snatch everything away from him all at once, you will only irritate him further. Only by slow degrees is a stomach accustomed to a diet; you destroy it if you suddenly deprive it of food. True, there are certain spirits (and of these I have known only one or two) so heavily mired in evil, and who unfortunately find therein such charm, that however slight it were, any reform would be painful for them; ‘twould seem they are at home in evil, that they have their abode there, that for them evil is like a natural state whence no effort to extricate them might avail: for that some kind of divine intervention would be required and, unhappily, heaven, to whom good or evil in men is a matter of great indifference, never performs miracles on their behalf. And, strangest of all, profoundly wicked spirits are not sorry for their plight; all the inquietudes, all the nuisances, all the cares vice brings in its train, these, far from becoming torments to them, are rather delights, similar, so to speak, to the rigors of a mistress one loves dearly, and for whose sake one would be aggrieved not to have to suffer upon occasion. Yes, my fairest of the fair, by God’s own truth, well do I know a few spirits of this kind. Oh! and how dangerous they are! May the Eternal spare us, thou and me, ever from resembling them, and to obtain His mercy let us both before we lay ourselves in our beds kneel down and recite a
Paternoster and
an
Ave Maria
with an
Oremus
or two in honor of Mr.
Saint
[real name excised in letter
³
]. (’Tis a signal.)

With a great kiss for each of your buttocks.

I would remind you that you have sent me beef marrow in the past when the weather was just as warm as it is at present, and that I have none left; I beseech you to send me some without fail by the 15th of the month. Also, two night-ribbons, so as not to have to wait when one needs replacing: the widest and darkest you are able to find.

Herewith the exact measurements for a case I would be obliged if you would have made for me, generally similar to the other you sent me but with these dimensions, to be observed to the sixteenth of an inch and with a top that screws on three inches from the end. No loops, no ivory clasps like the last time, because they don’t hold. This case (since your confessors must have an explanation for everything) is to store rolled-up plans, prints, and several little landscapes I’ve done in red ink. And I believe indeed [one or two words obliterated] were it for a nun, ought to put [several words obliterated]. Kindly attend to this errand as soon as possible; my plans and drawings are floating loose everywhere about, I don’t know where to put them.

Those who tell you I have enough linen are wrong. I am down to four wearable shirts and am completely without handkerchiefs and towels. So send me what I have requested, will you please, and put a stop to your silly joking upon this subject. Send me linen, plenty of linen . . . Bah! never fear, I’ve plenty of time ahead of me to wear it out.

1
. A police sheriff.

2
. That is, himself. Having been incarcerated in cell number 6 in Vincennes, he took to referring to himself as
Monsieur le Six,
the gentleman in 6.

3
. Not by Sade. Some sensitive soul, perhaps Renée-Pélagie, carefully cut the name out of the letter.

78. A Certificate

August 31, 1783

I
the undersigned do hereby acknowledge that the farce of August 31, 1783—save on the point of it being a trifle monotonous, for there have been some eighteen others that resemble this latest to a tee—but save on that one point, I say, I certify that the said farce was performed to utter perfection. The said guard was most insolent, he said, and I quote accurately,
that he could no longer lend any more of his money, that he had a wife and children to feed; that when one wanted to incur an expense one ought to have the means to pay for it, and that one should not be expected to be treated any differently than the others when one was not in a position to ask any favors; that he no longer desired to provide any further monetary advances, all the gentleman needed to do was have his money sent sooner, etc., all of which was performed with zeal, vigor, and character.
He flushed crimson. His leprosy (for ’tis worth your knowing that they choose to have me waited upon here by a leper and that, however much I protest, ’tis a complete waste of breath on this score; one day I shall inquire whether ’tis the intention of the king to have the prisoners served by lepers), his leprosy, I say, turned bright purple; and I further certify that Lekain
¹
in his mightiest rages had never been more handsome in his life.

In witness whereof I have delivered over to him the present certificate, so that his full gratuities may be paid him punctually and rigorously.

de Sade

1
. Henri Louis Cain (a.k.a. Lekain) (1729-1778), a famous French actor of the era, most famous for his roles in Voltaire’s works.

79. To Madame de Montreuil

September 2, 1783