Letters From Prison (70 page)

You can easily understand, my dear lawyer, that since I shall now have to provide out of my assets for the sums drawn from my wife’s dowry (one hundred sixty thousand livres), this separation will be the ruin of me, which is what these monsters are after. Alas, great God! I would have thought that seventeen miserable years, thirteen of them in horrible dungeons, would expiate a few rash follies committed in my youth. You can see how wrong I was, my friend. The rage of Spaniards is never appeased, and this execrable family is Spanish.
¹⁴
Thus could Voltaire write in
Alzire: What? You have a Spaniard’s look— and you have the capacity to forgive?

Sade also began to renew old acquaintances, and despite the exodus of many he found several friends and relatives who greeted him warmly: the Countess de Saumane, a couple he had known earlier named Clermont-Tonnerres.
¹⁵
He also decided to mend some family fences, and three weeks after his release he wrote to his aunt, Gabriella-Eléonore de Sade, the abbess of Saint-Benoit in Cavaillon, a town about 15 miles from La Coste.

9
. Sade is wheedling, conveniently forgetting his prison fulminations against Gaufridy, whom he rightly suspected was conniving with Mme de Montreuil. Now, however, he has to be nice; Gaufridy is his sole hope for obtaining money from his estates.

10
. Sade is referring to his
Catalogue raisonn
é
des oeuvres de I’ auteur,
which he had drawn up in the Bastille on October 1, 1788.

11
. As noted, Sade is exaggerating. Obviously her hands were tied until she had his power of attorney on the thirteenth.

12
. Sainte-Aure, where their daughter, Madeleine-Laure, also resides.

13
. Madame de Montreuil.

14
. That is, the Montreuils.

15
. Count Stanislaus de Clermont-Tonnerres (1747-1792) and his wife. The countess was a cousin of Sade’s on his mother’s side. The count was a moderate reformer in the manner of the English school and one of the founders of the Anti-Jacobin Society. In August of 1792 he became a victim of the Terror.

110. To Gabriella-Eléonore de Sade

April 22, 1790

M
y dear Aunt:

[. . . ] I would be lacking in my most cherished and sacred duties if I failed to inform you that I have just regained my freedom; all I need for my cup of happiness to be full is to come and embrace you, which I would doubtless do if I were not retained here by urgent business.

’Tis only in your embrace, my dear and amiable aunt, that I can pour forth the frightful sorrows to which I am prey at all hours of the day and night at the hands of the Montreuil family; had they allied themselves to a carter’s son they would not have treated him in such a terrible and humiliating fashion. I have wronged them, true, but seventeen years of misfortune, thirteen of which were consecutive, spent in the two most horrible prisons in the realm . . . prisons where I was made to suffer all the torments imaginable; did not this assemblage of tortures and wrongs more than make up for my faults . . . faults of which they are far more culpable than I. . . I assure you that these people are monsters, my dear aunt, and the greatest misfortune of my life is to have become involved with them; in marrying into that family I acquired a whole host of bankrupt cousins, a smattering of twopenny tradesmen, a couple of relations sent to the gallows, and all that without any protection, without a friend, not to mention an honest soul; now that they cannot keep me in prison, these scoundrels are working together to bring about my ruin—they are doing their level best to separate my wife from me, and since in the early days of my marriage they encouraged me to draw on her dowry, I shall now have to pay it back, which will be my ruin.
¹⁶
I shall scarcely have enough to live on and I, who married only to have the assurance that my house would be filled in my old age, here I am bereft, abandoned, and isolated, reduced to the same sad fate that befell my father in his declining years, the very situation that I always feared the most.

Not one of those scurvy rogues—except for my children, about whom I have nothing but good to say—not a single one, I say, has extended a helping hand. When I left prison I found myself in the middle of Paris with only one louis in my pocket, without knowing where I could turn to find room or board, much less someone to lend me a crown when my louis was gone; and when I implored these unspeakable people for help, all I got in return were rebukes and backhanded compliments; the door slammed in my face everywhere, especially by my wife, which is the height of horror; no, no, my dear aunt, never has anyone been treated so shabbily, I say it once again, never has any such thing even been imagined.

I had some furniture, some linen, a great many books, and more than fifteen volumes of my own manuscripts, the fruit of my solitary labor; out of negligence, or rather out of an incomprehensible spitefulness, these frightful people allowed all that to be lost at the time the Bastille was stormed; more, fearing at that time that I might be set free they arranged to have me transferred to another prison; they never wanted me to take my possessions with me; they had my old cell sealed; eight days later the place was stormed, my cell broken into, and I lost everything . . . from the fruit of my fifteen years labor I was able to salvage nothing. . . and all that because of those miserable scoundrels upon whom I trust God will one day take revenge for me.

My dear, good aunt, you whom I have never ceased to adore, a thousand and one pardons for having bored you at such length about my problems, but my heart is so filled with sorrow that ’tis impossible not to confide in someone so good and kind hearted as yourself. I beseech you to write me, to bring me up to date about your health, to let me know that you still have a bit of love for me left in your heart. And I trust you are convinced that there is no one in the world who is as tenderly and respectfully attached to you as I am.

I also ask that you send my fond wishes to all my aunts and cousins who are still with us, and also to Madame de Raousset;
¹⁷
if she still holds any grudge against me I would be grateful if you would do your best to mend relations.

I assure you, my dear aunt, of my most profound respect.

DE SADE

Sade’s obvious pleasure at being free was clearly tempered by his wife’s refusal to see him and subsequent suit for separation with all the attendant financial stress that move imposed on him. But it was also negatively affected by the strange world into which he emerged.

16
. The amount Sade would be made to repay came to over 160,000 livres. Later on, Madame de Sade made an arrangement, ratified by the count, to allow her ex-husband to pay her only the interest on that sum annually.

17
. A Provençal relative of Sade’s with whom he had quarreled.

111. To Monsieur Reinaud

May 19, 1790

[. . . ] Essential business to be finished here, and the fear of being strung up on a
democratic
gallows, will keep me here till next spring. Then, that is to say the first days of March, I count on going with my children to Provence. Such are my plans, Monsieur, which I plan to carry out if God and the enemies of the nobility let me live. Apropos of which, do not take me for a fanatic. I assure you that I am completely impartial, angry at seeing my sovereign in irons, overwhelmed by what you gentlemen in the provinces cannot understand, namely that it is impossible for good to be done so long as the monarch’s sanctions are constrained by thirty thousand armed bystanders and some twenty cannons, though I have to add I have few regrets about the old regime; obviously it caused me too much grief for me to shed any tears over it. There you have my profession of faith, which I make without fear.

You ask me about the news here; on the one hand, the most important item is that the Assembly today refused to allow the king to have anything to do with war and peace.
¹⁸
On the other hand, ’tis the provinces that are causing us the greatest concern; Valence, Montauban, Marseilles are the scenes of horror, where cannibals daily enact plays in the English manner that make our hair stand on end . . . Ah! I have been saying for a long time that, speaking for myself, this gentle and loving
nation,
which had feasted on Marshal Ancre’s grilled buttocks, was only biding its time to be galvanized into action and show that, forever balanced between savagery and fanaticism, it would revert to its natural mode at the first opportunity.

But enough of this; we must be prudent in our letters; never has despotism pried so avidly into private lives as does freedom.

Renée-Pélagie did sue for divorce, which was granted automatically, since Sade wisely decided not to contest it. Over the next decade, Sade did his best to accommodate to this puzzling, dangerous, and fast-evolving post-revolutionary world into which he had emerged. Despite his protestations of patriotism, however, and despite a number of fiery pamphlets he penned for his revolutionary section, Citizen Sade’s heart was simply not in it. In the early 1790s, money was becoming only a fraction of face value, so even when Gaufridy performed, Sade often went to bed without any supper. Worse, his estates in Provence—La Coste, Saumane, and Mazan—the source of his sporadic income, were sacked and pillaged by the local populace, bringing Sade, as he expressed it to Gaufridy, “to the brink of suicide.” It was little consolation to him to learn that the other mansions and chateaux of the region were also being ransacked.

Though Renée-Pélagie’s door at Saint-Aure remained steadfastly closed to him, Sade did see his children. He was proud and fond of the boys and even of his daughter, now nineteen, though he had to admit the young lady’s future doubtless lay best in the convent where she was currently lodged with her mother. In a letter of August 18, 1790, to Gaufridy, Sade notes without embellishment:

I assure you that mademoiselle my daughter is as ugly as I painted her to you. I have seen her three or four times; I have examined her very carefully, and I can assure you that both in mind and body she is little more than a plump country lass. She is staying with her mother who, I can assure you, imparts neither manners nor wit to her. As far as that goes, she is very well-off where she is, seeing what her situation is: in any case, what else can be done about it?
¹⁹

A week later, Sade took up with a young actress in her late twenties, Marie-Constance Renelle, whose husband, Balthazar Quesnet, had deserted her, leaving her alone with a small child. In November, Sade rented a little house at 20, rue Neuve des Mathurins. Two months later, Marie-Constance, who was nominally if not actually his housekeeper, moved in. Upon learning of Sade’s latest adventure with an actress, the lawyer Reinaud, writing from Aix, twitted him about his penchant for actresses, slyly reminding him of La Beauvoisin. Sade was quick to correct him, both about ladies of the theater and about his relations with Marie-Constance:

Me, beware of actresses? You may rest assured I shall! All it takes is to know that breed first hand to despise it as it should be despised. Oh! no, no, we are far from the stage here, and nothing is more virtuous than my little setup! First, there is not a mention of love; she is, purely and simply, a kindly, decent bourgoise, sweet and good, with a fair measure of wit. Estranged from her husband, who is in some kind of business in America, she has agreed to take charge of my little home. She lives on the meager pension her husband has left her; I give her room and board. As of now, that is all she gets out of the arrangement.
²⁰

For the next twenty-four years, Marie-Constance Quesnet remained Sade’s devoted companion—his “angel sent from heaven” as he described her—and he became as devoted to her as she was to him. It would seem that the uncontrollable fire that had once burned inside him all the years had now indeed been, if not extinguished, at least banked. In Marie-Constance, to whom Sade gave the name
Sensible—
“Sensitivity”—he seems to have found the person who, at long last, gave him the inner stability he had always lacked.

If there was stability within, the world outside was increasingly problematic, especially for one of the old aristocracy such as Sade. Robespierre and the Committee for Public Safety were hard at work cleansing the new republic of unwanted souls, often on the flimsiest of charges. Sade trod gingerly through this parlous period, keeping as low a profile as possible, registering himself as a “man of letters,” churning out revolutionary pamphlets and letters to cover his tracks, and doggedly pursuing the dream he had had since his days in Vincennes: to see his plays performed. On that front, his success seemed always just around the corner: plays were rejected, others accepted then never performed. On October22, 1791, one of his plays,
Count Oxtiern,
had its premiere at the Moli
è
re Theater, which the author proudly reported to Gaufridy a few days later. But during that first performance there was a disturbance in the audience—often the case in those newly democratic days—and subsequent performances were canceled.