Letters From Prison (68 page)

106. To Monsieur du Puget, Knight of the Kingdom

1787

T
omorrow during your visit they have been most kind as to allow this tragedy of Beauvais, which we talked about briefly the other day, to be performed. Will Sir du Puget decline to offer his opinion? The author would be most grateful to have it, but the request is ill-timed, we know . . . To give up an entertaining day for something you know will be boring! I can’t conceive how such things come to pass, and I remember clearly that when I was part of the social whirl I used to look upon these invitations as traps, or ambushes. . . to which I asked my doctor to respond and make my excuses.

107. To Madame de Sade

[October, 1788]

I
am greatly disturbed, my dear friend, to be costing you so much money, especially at a time when you are ill; but when I committed to that expenditure I was quite unaware that you were not feeling well: if I had known, I most assuredly would never have made it.

I was sorely mistaken about the cost of my move.
¹
The expenditures are considerably more than I had thought; not that I spent any more than was absolutely necessary, and the only item that might be thought of as extravagant cost but one louis; everything else was of basic necessity, and is limited to an old wall hanging, an army cot, and some paper: that is strictly all there is in my room, and yet I am still twenty louis short. Please, my dear friend, do me the favor of seeing to it that they will be ready for me without fail at the end of the month, for everything is virtually finished, ’tis not the time to hold back. If you are at all concerned about my well-being in the context of the wretched situation in which I find myself, have no regrets, for at least I shall be as well off as one can possibly be in prison, and reasonably healthy to boot, which is the most important. I embrace you and beg of you to take care of yourself. You have no idea how much the knowledge that you’re not feeling well upsets me, and how much I am distressed to know that, at this very moment, I am the cause of so much trouble and expense.

You must without fail acknowledge receipt of this letter within the next few days, failing which I shall be obliged to ask the officers to inform you of its contents. Adieu. News of your health, I beg of you.

1
. In September Sade had requested transfer to another cell, number 6 in the same tower, a request that was granted. But any costs involved in the move had to be borne by the prisoner. In addition, because of his obesity and continuing eye problems, he was granted a disabled man of the prison staff to attend to his needs when he was ill and run errands for him, which was an added expense, however modest.

For the eight months between October 1788 and mid-June 1789, Madame de Sade was allowed to visit her husband at the Bastille virtually every week or ten days. Thus there are few if any letters between them during this period. They met in the council room of the prison, always under the watchful eye of a guard, which continued to irritate Sade no end, but he generally managed to control himself, knowing any temper tantrum would curtail or end the visits. Throughout the spring Renée-Pélagie brought him news of the increasing unrest of the city, where worsening food shortages and the seeming indifference of both court and clergy to the people’s plight had brought them closer and closer to open rebellion.

On the second day of summer Madame de Sade, bedridden and unable to make her planned visit to the Bastille that day, wrote Gaufridy that she had heard of a meeting held at the Jeu de Paume, during which an “infuriated populace” had demanded that “the damn priests be taken out to the gallows and strung up,” adding that some of the local bishops had also been insulted. She doubtless would not have reported the incident to her husband had she been able, for his views of the clergy had not changed, but hers had. Still lodged at the convent of Sainte-Aure, she was increasingly under the influence of her father confessor, who kept reminding her that, approaching fifty as she was, she should soon make peace with God. Her indefatigable mother was working on her just as assiduously, and the combined effort was having its effect. She even hoped, it turned out, that she might convince her husband that he too should make peace with the deity, the priests having assured her that it was never too late, even for one gone so far astray as the marquis. Thus her grave concern about the treatment of the clergy at the hands of the populace was all the more understandable.

In the course of the following week, Madame de Sade was able to inform her husband about the growing unrest in the streets, but inside the fortress he had already noted the heightened preparations: gunpowder had been placed on the tower platforms, the cannons had been loaded, and additional troops had hurriedly been brought in. In the late morning of July 2, as Sade was waiting for a guard to escort him from his cell to his daily exercise walk on the towers, a disabled war veteran named Lossinotte, who roughly a year before had been assigned to help Sade in his housekeeping, arrived to announce that his walk had been canceled. Furious, Sade ordered the man, whom he had described to Major de Losme-Salbray, the second in command at the Bastille, as the “stupidest and most insolent valet I have ever seen,” to go back to de Launay, the commandant, and ask him to reverse the decision. When Lossinotte reported back that his request had been denied, Sade seized what some have described a stovepipe and others as a funnel used for emptying the contents of chamber pots into the moat below, and thrust it through his window bars. With the help of this makeshift megaphone, he began to shout to the people in the street that the prisoners’ throats were being slit and urged them to come and save them. At which point guards rushed him, wrestled the “megaphone “from him, and subdued him. The Bastille prison logbook for July 2 duly noted the incident, and de Launay, made understandably nervous by the unrest in the neighborhood, sent a runner to Versailles, armed with a letter to Monsieur de Villedeuil,
¹
minister of state, requesting the immediate transfer of Sade. Relating the details of the incident, de Launay wrote:

I have the honor of informing you that, having yesterday been obliged, because of the current circumstances, to revoke the walk that you were kind enough to permit Monsieur de Sade on the towers, at noon he went to his window and began to shout at the top of his lungs—which was heard by everybody who lives in the area as well as by passers by—that the Bastille prisoners’ throats were being slit, that they were being assassinated, and that the people should come to their aid. He kept repeating his shouts and loud complaints. This is a time when it seems extremely dangerous to keep this man here, where he will be disruptive to the maintenance of order. I therefore feel bound to recommend, My Lord, that this Prisoner be transferred to Charenton or some similar establishment where he cannot disrupt the order, as he constantly does here. This would be a propitious moment to relieve ourselves of this person, who cannot be controlled and over whom none of the officers has any influence or authority. It is impossible to allow him to exercise on the towers, since the cannons are loaded and to do so would be extremely dangerous. The entire officer corps would be infinitely obliged if you would be kind enough to have Monsieur de Sade promptly transferred.

DE LAUNAY
²

For once, French bureaucracy was swift and sure.

That same day, Monsieur de Villedeuil responded, not to de Launay but to Lieutenant Crosne of the Paris police:
³

Versailles, July 3, 1789

Enclosed please find the orders of the king. Given the circumstances described in the enclosed letter from M. de Launay, I felt obliged to suggest to his majesty that the Count de Sade be transferred from the Bastille to Charenton. I ask that you be kind enough to expedite this move as quickly and secretly as possible, unless you find a more efficacious manner of remedying this problem, which you are authorized herewith to put into effect immediately.

Please be kind enough to send M. de Launay ‘s letter back to me, indicating what action you have taken in this matter.

DE VILLEDEUIL
⁴

At one in the morning of July 4, six men entered Sade’s cell, tore him from his bed “naked as a worm” as the prisoner himself described it, hustled him downstairs, and threw him into a waiting carriage. With Inspector Quidor of the Paris police holding a pistol to his throat, he was driven through the dark streets of Paris to Charenton, an insane asylum run by the order of friars known as the Petits P
è
res, or Brothers of Charity.
⁵
The Charenton logbook for July 4 reads as follows:

BROTHERS OF CHARITY CHARENTON ASYLUM—His lordship the Count de Sade (Louis, Aldonce, Donatien). Order of July 3, 1789. Period— without limit. Deprived of his liberty since 1777, at the request of his family, following a criminal trial on a charge of poisoning and sodomy, of which crimes he was subsequently found innocent, and further because of his extreme immorality, indulging in a great deal of debauchery coupled with periods of insanity, which make his family fearful that in one of his attacks he may disgrace them.

Though originally an asylum for the mentally ill, Charenton had over the previous century allowed itself to become as well a veritable prison for perfectly sane people held under lettres de cachet. One of Sade’s contemporaries was quick to deplore that subtle but meaningful evolution, praising the order’s care but adding that he was most upset to see the Brothers of Charity’s hospitals turned into “little Bastilles.”

Sade himself was more harsh. He described the place as “a dark building buried in the earth up to its roof, a horrid place so arranged that air can never reach the interior, and the sobs and screams of the prisoners cannot be heard by any except for seven or eight jailers.” And, he added, as for the Brothers of Charity, here were the grounds for becoming one: laziness, baseness, a taste for the dissolute, lust, gluttony, or the need to flee a world in which one had dishonored oneself.
⁶

But Sade had more immediate concerns than the dismal nature of his new surroundings. The day of his departure from the Bastille, his cell there had been sealed by order of Monsieur Chenon, commissaire of the Chatelet district. Sade desperately needed to regain his possessions, especially his precious manuscripts, “fifteen volumes in all ready for the printer,” the fruit of his past ten years’ efforts. He signed a power of attorney to his wife giving her the authority to break the seals, in the presence of Commissaire Chenon, and reclaim his manuscripts, books, furniture, and portraits. There is some question as to the date he signed that power of attorney: Lely has it July 9, but a document recently discovered by the historian Robert Darnton, which is Monsieur Le Noir’s account, places it at the 13th. The difference may seem slight but in fact is crucial, for Sade accused his wife of gross negligence in not acting more swiftly, which might be justifiable if she had received the document on the 9th. If it was the 13th, however, she actually would have acted quite expeditiously, for promptly on the morning of the 14th she went to see Commissaire Chenon, their plan being to proceed forthwith to the Bastille. But fortunately for both, an insurrection broke out in Chenon ‘s part of town and he was compelled to remain at his post throughout the day. Had they gone to the fortress earlier, they might have been caught there by the storming masses, who sacked and pillaged Sade’s cell.
⁷

Five days later, doubtless realizing that whatever extenuating circumstances there might be, she would be blamed for the irreparable loss by her irascible husband, the marquise wrote Chenon disclaiming any further responsibility in the matter and asking him to recoup and dispose of the cell’s contents however he saw fit, asking however that he do his best to make sure the papers and effects were not seen by all and sundry, since, she said, “I have personal reasons for wishing not to be burdened with them.”

Foremost among the papers was the manuscript of
The 120 Days of Sodom,
which Sade had composed, on the basis of some earlier sketches, over a roughly five-week period commencing October 22, 1785. Fully aware of the dangerous and inflammatory nature of the work, Sade made care to work on it only in the evening, from 7 to 10 p.m., when there was the least chance of a guard’s interruption. For further security, he wrote the work on very thin pieces of paper, each less than five inches wide, in a minuscule hand. As soon as he had completed one sheet, he pasted it to another, until at the end of twenty days he had completed one side, which was over thirty-nine feet long. At that point he turned it over and wrote the balance on the other side, finishing the work on November 28. The virtue of the format was that it could be rolled into a tight scroll, which he could easily conceal between the stones of his cell. And now it was gone. Lely rightly suggests that it was doubtless especially over this lost manuscript that Sade shed “tears of blood,” as he later described it.