Letters From Prison (7 page)

He set out accompanied by La Jeunesse, while Madame de Sade had with her Justine, who had asked to come along. After a long, arduous, and fatiguing journey—their coach broke down a number of times and the roads were frightful at that time of year—they arrived in Paris on February 8 and were received warmly by Sade’s former tutor, Abbe Amblet, on the rue des Fossés Monsieur-le-Prince. There they learned of the dowager countess’s death three weeks earlier, which seemed to affect Sade profoundly, despite the fact that his relations with his mother through the years had been virtually nonexistent.

Madame de Sade went to spend the night at the dowager countess’s apartment, and the next day moved into the Hotel de Danemark on the rue Jacob. At nine o’clock in the evening, as Sade was visiting his wife at the Hotel de Danemark, Inspector Marais arrived armed with a
lettre de cachet
and placed Sade under arrest. An hour later he was a prisoner in the fortress of Vincennes. Two days later he was transferred to room 11.

Madame de Sade was beside herself. She blamed the arrest on her mother’s machinations, but Madame de Montreuil hotly denied any involvement. “I know nothing about it,” she stoutly maintained. Privately, however, she admitted, “Things could not be better or more secure: it was about time.”

Thus Sade’s thirteen-year calvary as a prisoner began. However upset he was at losing his freedom, he clearly had no idea it would be for long. In fact, Inspector Marais told Sade as they made their way from the Hotel de Danemark to the Vincennes dungeon, the arrest was for his own good—it would speed up the appeals process. The présidente told Renée-Pélagie the same thing.

But in truth the présidente’s firm intent was that her son-in-law be kept locked up for as long as possible—hopefully for the rest of his days. She knew how clever and resourceful he could be, how convincing and seductive, but she felt she could more than match him move for move. In the strange symbiosis that joined them, he was now but a pawn and she the queen.

Ostensibly, Sade was incarcerated because his excesses had reached, if not exceeded, the point of madness. Various commentators have tried to argue the pros and cons of Sade’s sanity, as it is easiest to dispense with him if he is simply judged insane. But these prison letters seem anything but the product of a demented mind. As Antoine Adam wrote in his preface to the French edition of these letters:

All these scandals do not prove that Sade’s intelligence has been profoundly affected and that he is [at age 37 when he entered prison] living in a state of continued dementia. Without question he is subject to transports of anger that verge on madness. . . . But these are only momentary crises, and once they are over it is probable that he reverts to the basically likable, basically refined person he really is. His intelligence remains generally sound, his behavior is for the most part reasonable. He is even aware of the morbid aspect of his aberrations, though he is not yet at the point of planning to construct a system of morality from them. In an astonishing letter to his wife, written in 1782 [thus five years after his arrest] . . . he says: “In 1777 I was still fairly young; my overwhelming misfortune could have laid the foundation [to reform me]; my soul had not yet become hardened . . .” He dreams of a cure, which, it seems to him, is still possible. . . .

When he enters Vincennes, Sade is not the theorist of evil, the satanic genius that both his devotees and detractors would like us to believe. He is a man far too often invaded by his demons, who lead him into the most shameful follies, and he doubtless makes the most of them and through them satisfies both his sensuality and his pride; but he is also a man who, in his hours of sangfroid and lucidity, realizes the true character of his crises and, far from drawing any philosophy from them, would on the contrary prefer to conceal them.

While prison for Sade, as for most people, is humiliating, infuriating, stifling, maddening—and the letters reflect all this—he has the advantage that, in preparing his revenge, he can channel his boundless energy, his insatiable appetite, his unique experience, and considerable erudition, into a vast, creative act.

Sade is a man of many guises, and like a stag at bay, he will resort to any stratagem, any artifice, to attain his end, which is to regain his freedom. But below the surface of his immediate purpose the essence of the man does emerge in these letters. Both he and Renée-Pélagie know that their every missive will be read by not one but several watchdogs; therefore they constantly have to resort to subterfuge, to pseudonyms and code names, numbers and signals, many of which are often misread and misunderstood, especially by the prisoner. They also write each other at times in invisible ink, inserted either between the visible lines or on a partially blank page at the end of a letter, the purpose being, especially for Madame de Sade, to feed information that the prison censors would not have let pass. Later Sade would reproach his wife for failing to use this subterfuge judiciously, because, he said, her invisible ink jottings were most often nothing but idle banter, whereas if she had used the system properly it could have provided him much needed and much desired information, especially the date of his release, with which he was understandably obsessed.

Doubtless because of that obsession, Sade developed another, which lasted throughout his years in Vincennes and the Bastille and disappeared as soon as he was free, namely a fixation on “signals” in the letters he received from his wife. He would count the number of lines on a page or in an entire letter, the number of times a word or phrase recurred, he would seize on a word that implied or suggested a number or figure, and from these “clues” try to deduce some meaning. In most of these signals he was searching for the date, the month, the year of his release, which he was sure the présidente, and therefore his wife, knew for certain and was refusing to tell him. But he was also searching in these signals for secret information the censors would not allow: when his walks, which were often restricted or eliminated, would be restored; when Renée-Pélagie would be allowed to come and see him; when certain errands and commissions he had requested would be fulfilled. The problem was, his wife maintained—and one has to believe her—that she never sent him any signals, that it was all in his own mind. Sade would for a time believe her and agree to cease combing her letters for these arcane signs, but then he would revert. “You promised not to search my letter for signals,” she wrote him two years after his incarceration in Vincennes, “and then you keep going back on your word. Be assured, my dear friend, that if I could tell you what you want to know [the date of his release] I would not use signs. I would state things very clearly.”

Concerning these “numbers,” these “signals,” these “ciphers” Sade again and again refers to in his letters (and in his “Note Concerning My Detention”), Gilbert Lely writes
(L’ Aigle, Mademoiselle,
pages 153-54): “In almost all of Sade’s letters of this period one meets with allusions to more or less comprehensible numbers which he often calls
signals.
What does this curious arithmetic signify? Imprisoned in Vin-cennes by
lettre de cachet,
that is, utterly at the mercy of his persecutors’ discretion, Sade found himself in tragic ignorance of how long his detention was to last; wherewith he contrived a system of deduction based upon his calculations which, while they may appear ludicrous to us, were in his mind of a nature to reveal the wildly yearned for day of his liberation . . . Actually, the Marquis’s troubling arithmetical operations constitute a kind of defense mechanism, a partly unconscious struggle to ward off the despair which, he dreaded, were it to gain the upper hand, would lead to the overthrow of his reason. Absolutely in the dark as to his captors’ concrete intentions, Sade is led ‘to ferret out the most unexpected points of departure for his calculations,’ writes Maurice Heine. ‘To his eye everything has the look of a hint of his fate, or perhaps of a mysterious indication that has escaped the censor’s notice. His mind fastens desperately upon the number of lines in a letter, upon the number of times such and such a word is repeated, even upon a consonance which, spoken aloud, suggests a figure.’ But his efforts are not confined to trying to discover the date of his return to freedom; he also seeks for clues regarding his life while in prison: upon exactly what day will he again be allowed to take exercise? When will Madame de Sade visit him? His wife’s letters are the major source from which he mines the elements for his reckonings, and sometimes when the deductions he extracts from them have a baneful or contradictory look, he accuses Madame de Montreuil of having suggested to the Marquise such
signals
as might demoralize or throw him into perplexity.”

An example: “This letter has 72 syllables which are the 72 weeks remaining. It has 7 lines plus 7 syllables which makes exactly the 7 months and 7 days from the 17th of April till the 22nd of January, 1780. It has 191 letters and 49 words. Now, 49 words plus 16 lines makes 59
[sic],
and there are 59 weeks between now and May 30. . . .”

Another: “On March 28 he sent to borrow 6 candles from me; and on April 6, 6 others whereof I lent only 4 . . . Thursday the 6th of January, 9 months after the borrowing of the candles, on exactly the same day 25 were returned to me instead of the 10 I had lent, which seems very plainly to designate another 9 months in prison, making 25 in all?”

And finally: “I know of nothing that better proves the dearth and sterility of your imagination than the unbearable monotony of your insipid signals. What! valets still sick of cleaning boots, workers reduced to idleness?. . . Recently, because you needed a 23, walks reduced by one and restricted to between 2 and 3: there’s your 23. Beautiful! Sublime! What a stroke of genius! What verve! . . . But if you must make these signals of yours, at least do so with honest intent, and not so they are forever a source of vexation!”

To date, no one has been able to figure out the exact meaning of Sade’s deductions, which, by the way, he never again alluded to once he was free.

These letters, covering thirteen key years—he went into Vincennes a still dashing, still seductive man of thirty-seven and emerged an obese, elderly gentlemen of fifty—in a sense reveal more about this most enigmatic of men than any of his other work. Here he is not putting on a face for the world, he is not posturing or proselytizing, he is not indulging in his outrageous philosophical fantasies of evil, which, as an act of vengeance against “the stupid scoundrels who torture me” (see letter 67), including and indeed starting with the présidente, were his therapy and psychic salvation. In short, in these letters from prison, we are as close to the real Marquis de Sade as we will get. In the letters to his wife, his chief correspondent and confidante, he often expresses his irritation, his frustration, even his hate for her entire clan, but more often it is affection, gratitude, and love that informs them. Renée-Pélagie was the enduring love of his life:
¹³
his passions were many and varied, but she alone remained true to him, and he both recognized and appreciated that. The terms of endearment he used to her are touching and sincere:
my pet, my turtle dove, miracle of Nature, delight of my eyes, flame of my life.
His frequent concerns about her health and her well-being are heartfelt. One summer when the weather, which had been scorching, turns cold, he hastens to write and order her to take out her warm garments again lest she fall ill. When he learns that on more than one occasion her mother had not provided a carriage when she came to see him, he flies into a rage against the stingy présidente who dared expose his darling wife to the dangers of crossing Paris on foot and unattended.

In his few letters to the présidente, he can be imperious and groveling at the same time, but he understands she wields the power and controls his fate, and he writes accordingly. In his letters to one of the few women he loved but never physically conquered, Marie-Dorothée de Rousset, also known as Milli, Milli Springtime, Fanny, or the Saint, there is a closeness, a bantering but respectful tone, an intimacy not found elsewhere. And when, after spending several months in Paris seconding Madame de Sade’s efforts to plead the marquis’s cause both with the présidente and the king’s ministers, Milli Springtime writes him that she is returning to Provence, he writes her a letter of disappointment and disdain that reveals the depths of his feeling for her. His letters to his attorney, business manager, and boyhood friend Gaufridy are those of irritated master to recalcitrant employee. While Sade sorely needs him, increasingly he cannot suffer him, and in his paranoia—here doubtless justified—taxes him for yielding to the hateful stratagems of la présidente and essentially accuses him of working for her. His letters to Monsieur Le Noir, the lieutenant-general of police, are generally respectful, both because in the main he had dealt fairly with the prisoner and had—unlike the Vincennes warden de Rougemont—treated him as the gentleman he was. As for the latter, both in the letters to de Rougemont and his references to the man in his letters to others, Sade’s vitriolic pen knows no bounds. As for the letters to his valet Carteron, a.k.a. La Jeunesse, a.k.a. Martin Quiros (pseudonyms the marquis made up for his favorite valet), Sade reserves a whole other tone, one of teasing and twitting, a complicity that can only come from those who have been through a lot together (which they surely had) and whose relationship, even though of master to servant, was one of friendship and intimacy. In his Carteron letters, Sade displays a rollicking sense of humor completely lacking anywhere else, with the possible exception of some of his buoyant tales and novellas, such as the delicious “Mystified Magistrate.”

Several years after Sade’s death, the need to excavate the Charenton Cemetery caused Sade’s grave to be dug up. Dr. L. J. Ramon, now fully aware of his early patient’s fame, attended the exhumation, where he asked for and received Sade’s skull. Phrenology
¹⁴
was all the rage then, and Ramon made a careful examination of the skull. According to that study, the prominent features of Sade’s character were theosophy and benevolence (top of the cranium), lack of combativeness (no exaggerated development behind the ears), no excess in physical love (no exaggerated distance between nostrils). In fact, Sade’s skull, Dr. Ramon concluded, “was in all respects similar to that of a Father of the Church.”