Letters From Prison (58 page)

I
importune you but very rarely, Madame, and you must perforce believe that when I do ’tis solely because I have a most urgent and pressing need to do so. Of all the many blows you have visited upon me since I have been here, none has affected me more deeply than the one wherewith you have torn my heart asunder. You are involved in a concerted effort to make me believe that my wife is bringing dishonor upon her name. Is it possible, great God, is there a mother anywhere who either tolerates these infamies or does her best to try to persuade her son-in-law that they are true! Your scheme is ghastly, but what lies behind it is easily brought to light, Madame. You would like to see me separate from my wife, and once I am out of here, make sure I would make no effort to take up with her again. How badly you have misjudged how I feel about her if you could even have thought that anything in the world might have produced such an effect. Were you to depict her to me holding a dagger in her hand, trying to thrust it into my heart, I would throw myself at her feet and say to her: Strike, I have well deserved it. No, Madame, nothing, nothing in the universe will ever be capable of distancing me from her, and I shall continue to worship her no matter what revenge she may seek to take. I have too much to atone for, great God, I have too many misdeeds to rectify! Do not allow me to die in a hopeless state without being able to make her forget the errors of my ways. Love, esteem, tenderness, gratitude, respect, all the feelings a soul can muster, are united in me for her, and ’tis in the name of all these, I must confess, Madame, rather than any cry of conscience, that I beseech you to give her back to me as soon as I am out of here. Do you think for a moment that having been imprisoned as long as I have has not provided me with a great deal of food for thought? Do you truly believe that my detention has not caused me to be smitten with remorse? I ask only one favor of you, Madame, and that is to let me prove it. I have no desire whatsoever that you take my word for it. I want to be put to the test. Let us be allowed back together again, under whatever surveillance and in whatever country you may choose. There let us be kept under surveillance from morning till night, for as many years as you like, and at the first sign of any misconduct on my part, however slight, let her be taken from me and may I never be allowed to set eyes upon her again, and let me one last time be deprived of my freedom or, if one prefers, let them take my life; I am ready to agree to anything. Need I say more, Madame? Can I open my heart to you any more fully? Pray have a modicum of pity for my situation, I beseech you! It is atrocious. I know that by so saying I am offering you the chance to gloat, but I care not one whit. I have, unfortunately, too greatly troubled your tranquillity, Madame, to have the slightest regret about giving you the chance to gloat at my expense. If your goal was to see me groveling in mortification, in the depths of humiliation, in a state of despair and wretchedness as profound as any man can suffer, then revel to your heart’s content, Madame, enjoy your triumph, for you have reached your goal; I defy anyone to say that there is any creature in the world whose life is more precious than hers is to me. May heaven be my witness when I say that if I am to keep her ’tis only for the purpose of trying to put my life to rights again, ’tis only in an effort to make amends to the virtuous and sensitive soul of your adorable daughter to whom, in the frightful delirium of my wild aberrations, I caused great pain and anguish. Ah! great God above, how deep is my despair and how I rue having made her suffer! Also, Madame, religion and Nature both keep you from pursuing your revenge unto the grave; they forbid you from turning your back on my repentance, and from spurning my heartfelt desires to make amends. To that ardent prayer I add another, Madame, and that is to beseech you most earnestly not to have me released from prison if you have no intention of seeing me reunited with my wife. Do not, I beg of you, toss me into a new abyss of misfortunes; do not have me released only to have me rearrested the next day. For that is what would happen, I warn you, Madame. I cannot for a moment see myself a free man unless ’tis flying into her arms. Were you to swallow her up somewhere in the entrails of the earth, I should go and seek her out and spirit her away. The minute I am free I shall go see Monsieur Le Noir and ask him again for my wife. If he turns me down, I shall rush to the minister, and if that effort fails, or any other I might undertake, I shall cast myself at the feet of the king and ask him to restore to me what heaven has given me and that no man can put asunder. Were they to place all sorts of obstacles in my way, were they to toss me back into prison, well then, I’d prefer that, I’d prefer that a thousand times more than living free without her. At least in irons my conscience is at peace; it takes comfort in the knowledge that ’tis impossible for me to make amends to her. If and when I am free, my movements will be unrestricted, and ’tis an absolute necessity then that I either make it up to her or lose my life. Do not thrust me back once again into new calamities, I beseech you, Madame, and do not have me released from here unless I am to be reunited with her, and if I am not, then leave me where I am. Have the kindness to let me see her as soon as possible, and I entreat you to make sure we can be alone. I have some very interesting and very special things to tell her, that you would be well advised be kept from third parties, no matter whether or not you believe they are completely trustworthy. Allow me to say, Madame, that as I finish this letter— which I swear will be the last letter I shall write to whomever, no matter how long my suffering may be—allow me to say that I throw myself at your feet and ask your forgiveness for everything that might have been able to wrench me from the horror of my fate. Do not take this letter as the despair of a man who has lost his mind, but view it rather as reflecting the true feelings of my heart. I hopefully await the results of your commiseration, Madame; I implore it without shame, and with you I blush for naught but my misdeeds.

I am respectfully, Madame, your most humble and most obedient servant.

de Sade

80. To Madame de Sade

[Early September 1783]

I
beseech you to write me. I am worried about your health. You have never let as much time go by without my hearing from you. To try to destroy a husband’s interest in his wife is one of the most sublime policies that has ever existed; there’s something truly angelic about it, an act I can only term inspired. By great acts are great men known! I am convinced that the man who described the state of my suffering by saying:

And his wife let eight or ten months go by without writing to him,

oh, yes, I am convinced that the knave who dreamed up a phrase such as that would consider himself greater than
Alexander
and more profound than
Lycurgus.
’Tis very much in the same vein as the homily they din into my head day in and day out. They wrote:

And because they had not added faith to the formidable mysteries of Christ’s religion, they dinned a homily into his head every day for six months; and thus you will see that that made him believe that God and bread are one and the same.

’Tis more or less in that same manner they converted the anti-papists in the Cevennes mountains. Since that took place not even eighty years ago, each of us remembers how well it worked.

Oh, no, no! I swear upon all that’s most holy that I shall never believe the lessons of a god who believes that ’tis right and good to treat his creature in a most scurrilous manner in order to honor the creator. Construct your ungodly chapels, adore your idols, O detestable pagans! But so long as you transgress the sacred laws of Nature, mark you well that by so doing you oblige me to hate you and despise you.

Be that as it may, do let me hear from you, I beg of you. If ’tis part of your practical joke not to write me, then send a brief word to the officers of the establishment; they will pass it on to me, and that semi-proof of your existence and your good health will give me some slight reassurance.

You have an excuse for writing, I gave it to you on purpose two months ago. I have a large package all wrapped up and ready to be given to you; send someone to fetch it, and when you do include a word from you.

This package contains six pieces of raw leather that require bleaching, all of which I shall need in the next two months. What am I going to do if you don’t have them done, as you always have every year in the past? ‘Twill put me in a pretty pickle. The pieces of leather are to wrap round my latest work, which I’m also most anxious to send you, so that La Jeunesse can make a fair copy of it
¹
and also so that I can turn my attention to something else, which I find impossible to do as long as the old work is here next to me. And I have a great desire to work; I have an overall plan that keeps running through my mind, which I very much want to bring to fruition. I absolutely must make up for lost time. They wake me up every day at
five o’clock
in the morning; I can use my eyes to good advantage only till four in the afternoon. So I must therefore profit from that time period. If you still are the least bit interested in what is happening to me, I would tell you that from four in the afternoon till midnight my poor wretched eyes continue to be horribly painful. But what does such a minor item mean to the daughter of a woman who has been so bold as to deprive me of the sense I hold most dear? But be patient: if men refuse me their justice, I shall still find means to take justice into my own hands. Justice too has eyes. And I shall also have
some powder.
²
All I need is some money to track down these no-good knaves; and that I shall find, and that I shall use.

1
. As noted, La Jeunesse through the years dutifully copied Sade’s prison manuscripts and drafts.

2
. Presumably gunpowder, to back up his threats.

81. To Madame de Sade

September 19 and 22, 1783

T
his morning I received a fat letter from you that seemed endless. Please, I beg of you, don’t go on at such length: do you believe that I have nothing better to do than to read your endless repetitions? In truth, you must have an enormous amount of time on your hands to write letters of that length, and you must also assume I have all the time in the world to reply. Still in all, since the present letter is one of great consequence, I beseech you to read it with a clear mind and complete composure.

I have just found three signals of most uncommon beauty. There’s no way in the world I can keep them from you. They are so sublime that I’m convinced that, in reading them, you will, despite all your efforts to the contrary, applaud the extent of my genius and the wealth of my knowledge. One might say of your clique what Piron said of the French Academy: you who number forty here have the mind of four.
¹
Your sequel is the same thing: your six there have the mind of two. Well, then, with all your collective genius, and although you have being working on
your masterpiece
for only twelve years, I am going to give you two-to-one odds,
^*
if you like, that my three signals are worth more than everything you have done to date . . . Hold it, I’m mistaken, upon my word there are four. . . Well, then! ’tis three or four, and as you know three-quarters is a strong number.

First signal I made up: Christopher
²
de Sade

From the first clipping you cut out or tore out to bring to my attention, you must cut off the b-s of Cadet de Basoche
³
(Albaret) and send them to me in a box. I shall open the box, I shall cry out in admiration, and then I shall say: Oh, good God! what the blazes can that be? —Jacques the prompter, who will be there, somewhere behind me, will answer:
’Tis nothing, Sir; can ‘t you see that it’s the number 19?
—No! I say, I can’t make that out. —With all due respect, do you have any as good as that?

Second signal, same author:

Whenever you want to indicate
the number 2, the double, a duplicate copy, your own double, paying something twice,
etc.,
⁴
here’s how you should go about it: you must place in my room a handsome creature in some theatrical pose (the sex doesn’t matter to me; to some extent I take after your own family, I’m not overly choosy in that respect; and besides, since we’re dealing with a
mad dog,
etc.), as I was saying, you must have a handsome creature in a pose not unlike that of the Callipygian Venus
⁵
there, in all its splendor. I have nothing against that part of the body; like your father the magistrate, I am of the opinion that ’tis plumper than the rest and as a result, for anyone who has a strong predilection for the flesh, ’tis always better than what is
close-cropped
. . . As I enter the room, I shall say (for the sake of appearances) to the prompter, or whoever is there: What in the name of all that’s holy is that disgraceful object? And the prompter will say: Monsieur, ’tis only a copy.

Third signal, still from the same source:

When you want to act as a major intermediary for someone, as you did this summer with the thunder and lightning rod (which I found so hilarious I almost died laughing), you should set fire to the powder keg (which is standing right next to the bed I sleep in): the effect will be sublime.
⁶