Marquis de sade justine english pdf

! MARQUIS

DESADE Justin�1 Philosophy in th� B�Jroom/& Oth�r Writings

rJhe Ul(arquis

decJade

Justine

Philosophy in the Bedroom

and other • •

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Works by the Marquis de Sade Published by Grove Press

Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings

The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings

Juliette

CJhe Ut[arquis

decSade Justine,

Philosophy in the Bedroom, and other writings

compiled and translated by Richarri Seaver & Austryn Wainhouse

with introductions by Jean Paulhan of l'Acadimie Francoise

& Maurice Blanchot

� Grove Press New York

Copyright © 1965 by Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

Printed in the United Slates of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sade, marquis de, 1740-1814. [Selections. English. 1990] The complete Justine, Philosophy in the bedroom, and other

writings / the Marquis de Sade : compiled and translated by Richard Seaver & Austryn Wainhouse, with an introduction by Jean Paulhan & Maurice Blanchot.

p. cm. Translated from the French. ISBN 0-8021-3218-9 I. Sade, marquis de, 1740-1814-Translations, English.

2. Erotic literature, French-Translations into English. 3. Erotic literature, English--Translations from French. I. Seaver, Richard. II. Wainhouse, Austryn. III. Title. PQ2063.S3A275 1990 843'.6-nc20 90-3153

Grove Press 841 Broadway New York, NY 10003

00 01 02 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12

Ackn(JlO)ledgments The essay by Jean Paulhan, "The Marquis de Sade and His Accom­ plice," was originally published as a preface to the second edition of Les Infortunes de la Vertu published in 1946 by Les Editions du Point du Jour, copyright 1946 by Jean Paulhan. The essay was later reprinted, under the title "La Douteuse Justine ou Ies R£wnches de la Vertu," as an introduction to the 1959 edition of Les Infortunes de la Vertu published by Jean-Jacques Pauvert. It is here reprinted by permission of the author. The essay "Sade" by Maurice Blanchot forms part of that author's volume entitled Lautmamont et Sade, copyright 1949 by Les Editions de Minuit, and is here reprinted by permission of the publisher. The editors wish to thank Grove Press, Inc. for permission to include certain information in the Chronology in the form of both entries and notes, taken from TIte Marquis de Sade, a Difinitive Biograplry, by Gilbert Lely, copyright © 1961 by Elek Books Limited. This work is a one-volume abridgment of the two-volume La Vie du Marquis de Sade by the same author, to which the editors have referred in their Foreword, wherein further acknowledgments have also been made. Finally, the editors wish especially to thank Miss Marilynn Meeker for the meticulous job of editing, and for the number and diversity of her suggestions.

Contents

Foreword

Publisher's Preface

Part One Critical & Biographical

The Marquis de Sade and His Accomp lice

Xl

XVll

by Jean Paulhan, of l'Academie Fran�aise 3 Sade by Maurice Blanchot 37

Chronology 73 Seven Letters (1763-1790) 121

Note Concerning My Detention (1803) 151 Last Will and Testament (1806) 155

Part Two Two Philosophical Dialogues

Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man (1782) 161 Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795) 177

Part T hre e Two Moral Tales

Eugenie de Franval (1788) 371 Justine, or Good Conduct Well Chastised (1791) 447

Bibliography 745

My manner 0/ thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor /001 indeed is he who adopts a manner 0/ thinking lor others! My manner 0/

thinking stems straight from my considered reflections;

it holds with my existence, with the way I am made. It is not in my power to alter it; and were it, 1'd not do so.

This manner 0/ thinking you find fault with is my sole

consolation in life; it alleviates all my sufferings in

prison, it composes all my pleasures in the world out­

side, it is dearer to me than life itself. Not my manner

0/ thinking but the manner of thinking of others has

been the source 0/ my unhappiness. The reasoning man

who scorns the prejudices of simpletons necessarily be­

comes the enemy of simpletons; he must expect as much,

and laugh at the inevitable. A traveler journeys along a fine road. It has been strewn with traps. He falls into one. Do you say it is the traveler's fault, or that of the scoundrel who lays the traps? If then, as you tell me, they

are willing to restore my liberty if I am willing to pay for it by the sacrifice of my principles or my tastes, we

may bid one another an eternal adieu, for rather than part with those, I would sacrifice a thousand lives and a thousand liberties, if I had them. These principles

and these tastes, I am their fanatic adherent; a"nd fanati­

cism in me is the product of the persecutions I have en­

dured from my tyrants. The longer they continue their

vexations, the deeper they root my principles in my

heart, and I openly declare that no one need ever talk

to me of liberty if it is offered to me only in return for

their destruction.

-THE MARQUIS DE SADE, IN A LETTER TO HIS WIFE

Foreword

That the Marquis de Sade also wrote books is a fact now known to almost everyone who reads. And knowledge of Sade as a writer ordinarily ends there . For of his immense and incomparable l iterary achievement, and o f his capital importance in the hi story of ideas, hardly a suspicion has been conveyed by occasional collections of anodyne fragments culled from his writings or by more frequent and flagrantly spurious "adaptations. " ( Of the two, cheap-paperback pastiche and more tastefully contrived anthology of excerpts, the latter, equally meretricious, i s hardly the less dishonest. ) To date, this is Sade bibliography in the United States. To date, Sade re­ mains an unknown author.

For this, censorship, Puritan morality, hypocrisy, and lack of cultivation may be blamed, although not very usefully, since Sade sought condemnation. Ultimately, the fault for i t i s all his own, and the fate of his books is his triumph. Strange ? To be and to stay an unknown author, that has always been his status and his destiny, that was the status he coveted, that was the destiny he created for himself, not by accident or unwittingly, but deliberately and out of an uncommon perversity. To write, but to go unread-this has hap­ pened to many writers. To write endlessly and under the most un­ favorable conditions and as though nothing mattered more than to write, but to write in-such a way, at such length, upon such subjects, in such a manner and using such language as to render oneself un­ approachable, "unpublishable ," "unknown," and yet upon succeed­ ing generations to exert the most intense and enduring influence­ this , it will be admitted, is rare indeed.

Xl

XII .. THE MARQUIS DE SADE

Secrets cannot survive their disclosure j to bare Sade to the public would seem to be rendering him a disservice. Against this "betrayal"-a graver one by far than any accomplished by the obscure tradesmen who from time to time get out a child's version of fustine-Sade has a defense : it consists in maintaining the reader at a di stance, not merely at arm' s length but a t a remove one is tempted to call absolute. Or, to put i t more simply, in forcing every reader-every so-called reasonable reader-to reject him.

Thus, the present attempt-which i s the first to be made in the United States-to provide the basis for a serious understanding of Sade is in a certain sense bound to fail . In this sense : the "reason­ able" man (we repeat) can come to no understanding with this exceptional man who rejects everything by which and for which the former lives-laws, beliefs, duties, fears, God, country, family, fellows-everything and the human condition itself, and proposes instead a way of l ife which is the undoing of common sense and all its works, and which from the point of view of common sense re­ sembles nothing so much as death j and which is, of course, impos­ sible . Such must be the judgment of the "reasonable" man-of him who builds, saves, increases , continues , and thanks to whom the world goes round.

Even so, however firmly he be establ ished in the normality that makes everyday l i fe possible, still more firmly established in him and infinitely more deeply-in the farther reaches of his in­ ali enable self, in his instincts, his dreams, his incoercible desires­ the impossibl e dwells, a sovereign in hiding. What Sade has to say to us-and what we as normal social beings cannot heed or even hear-already exists within us, like a resonance, a forgotten truth, or like the divine promise whose fulfillment is finally the most sol­ emn concern of our human existence.

Whether or not i t is dangerous to read Sade is a question that e asily becomes lost in a multitude of others and has never been settled except by those whose arguments are rooted in the convic­ tion that reading leads to trouble. So i t does j so it must, for reading leads nowhere but to questions. I f books are to be burned, Sade's certa inly must be burned along with the rest. But i f, ultimately, freedom has any meaning, any meaning profounder than the facile utterances that fill our speeches and l itter the columns of our peri-

Foreword .. Xlll

odicals, then, we submit, they should not. At any rate, it is not our intention to enter any special plea for Sade. Nor to apologize for one of our civil ization's treasures. Disinterred or left underground, Sade neither gains nor loses. While for us . . . the worst poverty may be said to consist in the ignorance of one ' s riches.

* * *

Grea t writing needs no j ustification, no complex exegesis : i t is its own defense. Still, the special nature of Sade's work, the legend attached to his name, and the unusual length of time intervening between the writing and the present publication seemed to call for some introduction, both critical and biographical. Thus, Part One of the p resent volume aims at situating Sade in his times and among his familiars. For the brief biography in the form of a Chronology, the editors have relied primarily upon, and are indebted to, Maurice Heine ' s outline for a proj ected Life contained in Volume I of his (Euvres chois ies et Pages Magis trales du Marquis de Sade. We also owe a p articular debt to Gilbert Lely, Heine's close friend and heir to the grea t scholar 's papers. The extent o f both thei r contributions to the establishment of a valid Sade biography, and to a fuller understanding of both the man and his work, is de­ tailed elsewhere.

Sade's letters are p articularly revealing. We have included seven, ranging over an almost thirty-year period from the year of his marriage when he was twenty-three to the time of his release from the Monarchy' s dungeons by the Revolutiona ry government, when he was over fifty. Letter I i s from an unpublished manuscript, and is cited in Volume I of Lely's biography ; Letters I I , I I I , IV, and V are from L'Aigle Mademoiselle . • . ;1 Letters VI and VII are from Paul Bourdin's Correspondance.

We have included two exploratory essays on Sade. The first, by Jean Paulhan, was written in 1946 as the Preface for a second edition of Les Infortunes de la r erlu published that year. The second, by Maurice Blanchot, forms part o f that author's volume

1 For full details of publication, see the Bibliography.

XlV .. THE MARQUIS DE SADE

entitled Lautreamont el Sade which was published by Les Editions de Minuit in 1 949 . They form part of a growing body of perceptive Sade criticism which has developed over the past two or three decades.

The "Note Concerning My Detention" was first published in Cahiers personnels (1803-1804) . Sade's "Last Will and Testa­ ment" has only recently been published in its entirety in French,2 and is here offered in English for the fil-st time.

I f, through the ma terial in Part One, we have tried to situate Sade, we have not attempted to conceal the singularity of his tastes or in any wise to depict him other than he was. He was a volup­ tuary, a libertine-let it not be forgotten that the latter term derives from the Latin liber: "free"-an exceptional man of ex­ ceptional penchants, passions, and ideas. But a monste r ? In his famous grande lettre to Madarp.e de Sade, dated February 20, 1 7 8 1, and written while he was a prisoner in the Bastille, Sade declares:

I am a libertine, but I am neither a criminal nor a murderer [italics Sade's], and since I am compelled to set my apology next to my vindica­ tion, I shall therefore say that it might well be possible that those who condemn me as unjustly as I have been might themselves be unable to offset their infamies by good works as clearly established as those I can contrast to my errors. I am a libertine, but three families residing in your area have for five yean lived off my charity, and I have saved them from the farthest depths of poverty. I am a libertine, but I have saved a de­ serter from death, a deserter abandoned by his entire regiment and by his colonel. I am a libertine, but at Evry, with your whole family looking on, I saved a child-at the risk of my life-who was on the verge of being crushed beneath the wheels of a runaway horse-drawn cart, by snatching the child from beneath it. I am a libertine, but I have never compromised my wife's health. Nor :lave I been guilty of the other kinds of libertinage so often fatal to children's fortunes: have I ruined them by gambling or by other expenses that might have deprived them of, or even by one day foreshortened, their inheritance? Have I managed my own fortune badly, as long as I had a say in the matter? In a word, did I in my youth herald a heart capable of the atrocities of which I today stand accused? ... How therefore do you presume that, from so innocent a childhood and youth, I have suddenly arrived at the ultimate of premeditated horror? no, you do not believe it. And you who today tyrannize me so cruelly, you do not

2 In Volume II of Lely's biog,aphy.

Foreword + xv

believe it either: your vengeance has beguiled your mind, you have pro­ ceded blindly to tyrannize, but your heart knows mine, it judges it more fairly, and it knows full well it is innocent.s

I t was as a l ibertine that Sade first ran afoul of the authorities. I t was society-a society Sade termed, not unjustly, as " thoroughly corrupted"-that feared a man so free it condemned him for half his adult life, and in so doing made of him a writer. If there i s a disparity between the life and the writings, the society that immured him i s to blame. With his usual perception about himself, Sade once noted in a letter to his wife that, had the authorit ies any insight, they would not have locked him up to plot and daydream and make philosophical disquis itions as wild and vengeful and absolute as any ever formulated ; they would have set him free and surrounded him wi th a harem on whom to feast. But societies do not cater to strange tastes ; they condemn them. Thus Sade became a writer.

In presenting Sade the writer, in Parts Two and Three of the present volume, we made a number of fundamental decisions at the outset. We first decided to include nothing but complete works. Otherwise, in our opinion, the endeavor was pointless. Further, as Sade was a writer both of works he acknowledged and works he disclaimed ( and who is to say which of the two types most fairly represents him ? ) i t seemed essential to offer examples of both sorts. Without which, again, the endeavor was pointless-and hypocriti­ cal. Finally, in making our selections we have obviously chosen works we believe represent him fairly and are among his best.

Part Two consists of two of his philosophical dialogues. The first, Dialogue between a Pries t and a Dying Man, written in 1782 and until recently thought to be Sade's earliest literary effort, was not published until 1 926. The present translation i s from the origi­ nal edition. The second, Philosophy in the Bedroom, was first pub­ l ished in 1 7 9 5 , not under Sade's name, or only by inference : it appeared simply as "by the Author of Ius tine." It i s a major work, represents a not unfair example of the clandestine writings, and contains the justly famous philosophical-political tract, "Yet An­ other Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans," which i s a s good, as reasonably concise a summation of his view-

3 Marquis de Sade: L' Aigl�, Mademoiselle ...

XVI + THE MARQUIS DE SADE

point as we have. It is a work of amazing vigor, imbued throughout with Sade's dark-but not bitter-humor, and creates a memorable cast of Sa dean characters. Although Lely deems it the "least cruel" of h i s clandestine writings, Philosophy will reveal wha t all the clamor is about. The translation is from the 1 95 2 edition published by Jean-Jacques Pauvert.

Two of Sade's moral tales make up Part Three. Eugenie de Franval, which dates from 1 788, is generally judged to be one of the two or three best novella-length works which Sade wrote and i s , in the opinion of many, a minor masterpiece of eighteenth-century French l iterature. The translation is from the 1 9 5 9 edition of Les Crimes de l'Amour published by Jean-Jacques Pauvert. Finally, the inclusion of Justine, here presented for the first time in its complete form, was mandatory. It i s Sade's most famous novel, although there are several more infamous. I t is the work, too, which bridges the gap between the avowed and the clandestine, and is thus of special i nterest. For if it is true that, consciously or unconsciously, Sade was seeking condemnation, with Justine he was seeing to wha t lengths he could go and remain read. The translation is from the 1 950 edi tion published by Le Soleil Noir, which contains a preface by Georges Bataille.

Each of the four works presented i s di rectly p receded by a historical-bibliographical note which will , we trust, help s i tuate i t.

It i s our hope that this volume will contribute to a better understanding of a man who has too long been steeped in shadow. I f i t does, i t will be blt slight retribution for the countless ig­ nominies to which Sade was subjected during his long, tormented, and incredibly patient life, and during the century and a half since his death.

In his will, Sa de ordered that acorns be strewn over h is grave, "in order that, the spot become green aga in, and the copse grown back thick over i t , the traces of my grave may di sappear from the face of the earth, as I trJst the memory of me shall fade out of the minds of men .... " Of all Sade's prophecies small or splendid, thi s one , about himself, seems the least likely to come true.

R.S . , A.W.

Publisher's Preface

Donatien-Alphonse-Franc;ois de Sade, better known to history as the Marquis de Sade, has rarely, i f ever, had a fair hearing. A good portion of his adult l ife was spent in the prisons and dungeons and asylums of the sundry French governments under which he lived­ Monarchy, Republic, Consulate, and Empire. During his li fetime , or shortly a fter h i s death, most of h i s wri tings were destroyed either by acts of God or by acts of willful malice, not only by Sade' s enemies but also by h i s friends and even h i s family-which was chiefly concerned with erasing his dark stain from its honored escutcheon. As recently as World War I I , some of Sade' s personal notebooks and correspondence, which had miraculously been pre­ served for over a century and a quarter, fell into the hands of the pillaging Germans and were lost, rendered unintelligible by ex­ posure to the elements, or simply destroyed. Of Sade's creative work-excepting his letters and diaries-less than one fourth of what he wrote has come down to us .

"Come down to us" i s hardly an apt description, for though this quarter has indeed survived, only a small fraction has ever been made public, at least until very recently. The aura of infamy about the author's name has been such that even the most innocent­ meaning "relatively non-scandalous ," for in Sade nothing is wholly innocent-of his works has often been proscribed by the censors or by acts of self-censorship on the part o f scholars and publishers. Although he was far from forgotten throughout the nineteenth century-as Jean Paulhan notes in his now classic essay on Justine, Sade was read and consulted by many of the most significant writers

XVII

XVlll + THE t-lARQlJIS DE SADE

of the preceding century-he was relegated and confined to a nether region, to a clandestinity from which, it seemed tacitly to be agreed, he should never emerge. If, as many, including the editors of the present volume, tend to believe, this scandalous neglect-or neglect due to scandal-was the fate to which Sade truly aspired, then the nineteenth century represents the zenith of his triumph, for it was the nadir of his influerce. Dominated as it was in spirit by the plump , prim figure of Victoria Regina, this age would doubtless have echoed the lofty sentiments expressed by Charles Villiers, who issued the following exemplary challenge to his compatriots:

Let all decent and resp(�ctable people conspire together to destroy as many copies of Justine as they can lay their hands upon. For myself, I am going to purchase the three copies which are still at my booksellers and consign them to the fire. i\1ay my action serve as a general alarm.1

As the century waned, however , a few influential voices were raised in dissent, not only refusing to share the prevailing opinion but daring to take issue with it. "It is necessary," wrote Baudelaire, "to keep coming back to Sa de, again and again." Swinburne pub­ licly acknowledged his debt to Sade :

I deplore with all my heart this incurable blindness, this reiterated, philis­ tine stubbornness whid yet holds you in the chains of the goddess Virtue and prevents you from appreciating the true worth of this Great Man to whom I am indebted (and what, indeed, do I not owe to him?) for whatever I have inadequately been able to express with regard to my sentiments toward God and man. I am compelled to believe that God has hardened your heart; I can find no other explanation for your indifference to the singular but surprising merits of the Marquis.

He then went on to prophesy ecstatically:

The day and the century will come when statues will be erected to him in the walls of every city, and when at the base of every statue, sacrifices will be offered up unto him.2

While that day, and that century, are not yet at hand, our own era has witnessed an evolution , if not a revolution , in the attitude of at l east the more enlightened, regarding both the life and writ-

1 Maurice Nadeau: "Exploration de Sade," in Marquis de Sade: (Euvrcs, Textcs chaisies par l'vIaurice Nadeau, La Jeune Parque, Paris, 19-+7.

2 Gilbert Lely: Marceaux ch"isis de Danatien-A lphanse-Fran(ais At arquis de Sad" Pierre Segher., Paris, 19+8.

Publisher's Preface .. xix

ings of the Marquis de Sade ( for both have been condemned, and as the name of the author affects one's attitude toward the work, so the work affects and colors the legend of the l i fe) .

In 1909, the amazingly eclectic Guillaume Apollinaire, as a result of his research in the Enfer o f the Bibliotheque N ationale in Paris , published a selection of Sade's work and, in his Introduction, proclaimed him to be " th e freest spirit that ever lived." In the ensuing half-century, an increasing number of voices were raised in Sade ' s behalf ; writers and critics not only extolled him vaguely, but were reading him, examining his work as i t had never been examined before. Among them were Andre Breton, Jean Paulhan, Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Klossowski , Simone de Beauvoir, and Maurice Nadeau, all of whom applied themselves diligently to discovering the secret of this extraordinary man, the likes of whdm the world had never seen e i ther before or since. However much these critics may differ as to their conclusions, they are all agreed on one funda­ mental point : Sade i s a writer of the first importance, and one who must be taken seriously. As Maurice Blanchot aptly notes : It i s not incredible to think that, in Sade, we have the most absolute writer who has ever lived, and, yet, for a century and a half, we have chosen to ignore him? And is not this choice voluntarily to ignore him, on the grounds that his work and doctrine are too somber, too anarchistic, too blasphemous, too erotic-the charges vary with the censor-bo th doubtful and dangerous, a choice on the side of dark­ ness ?

N one o f this serious criticism and intellectual speculation would have been possible, however, without the work, during the third and fourth decades of this century, o f that exemplary Sade scholar , Maurice Heine. For fifteen years, with p ainstaking care , h e sifted through the mountain of manuscripts entombed in the Bibliotheque N ationale in Paris and in a dozen other libraries and museums throughout France, constantly revealing new material that had been believed lost, meticulously comp aring various manuscripts and published versions and thus restoring to their pristine state works that h a d been truncated or emasculated. Thanks to him, during the ten-year span from 1926 to 1935, the following works of Sade were published :

xx 4- THE MARQUIS DE SADE

Historiettes, Con tt·s et fabliaux, in 1 926 j Dialogue en tre un pretre et un moribond, also in 1 926; Les Infortunes de La Vertu, being the original draft of Justine,

in 1930; Lcs 120 JOllrnces de Sodome, ou I'Ecole du Libertinage, the

"lost manuscript of the Bastille" miraculously recovered and finally publ ished, i n three volumes, from 1 931 to 1 935.

Since Heine's death in 1 940,3 his work has been carried on with equal devotion and unflagging enthus iasm by Gilbert Lely, who had first met the elder scholar in 1933, and from almost the moment of that firs t encounter took up the torch which he still bears today.4 Lely's defini tive, two-volume biography, La Vie du Marquis de Sade, was published by Librair ie Gallimard in 195 2 and 1957, and offers a more complete and detailed view of Sade than has ever before been available. Moreover, Lely's research led him to dis­ cover, in the Conde-en-B rie chateau of Count Xavier de Sade, an unhoped-for collection of previously unknown Sade material, in­ cluding more than a hundred and fifty letters-most of which are addressed to the Marqris' w i fe-which the author wrote between 1 777 and 1 786, while he was a pr isoner in Vincennes and the Bas­ tille. To date, Lely has published ninety-one of these letters, in three different volumes ;Ii they form a remarkable record of Sade's exis tence during this crucial and yet so productive period of his l i fe and, together with the earl i er correspondence, offer a formi-

3 M aurice Heine, 1884-1 940. A poet as well a. a scholar, Heine h as often been de­ scribed as "the inventor of Sade." Andre B reton, in his eulogy to Heine, published in 1 948, makes mention of him as a man .prung "from the depths of the eighteenth cen­ tury, with his encyclopedic culture . . . a man .0 l ost among us." (Cahirrs de la Pliiade, Summer, 1948 ) .

4 Much, one might add, a s Heine took up the torch from Apoll inaire. Heine, in his Preface to HisloriellC!, Conies et tabliaux, rel ates that, shortly before Apollinaire's death, the two men met and dedded that together they would "search out and publish the disjecta membra of Sade. " Apo.llinaire's premature death p"t an end to the joint p roject, but Heine, in spite of roor and failing health, devoted himself for the next twenty years to the task.

5 The three volumes are: L'Aig!e, Madrmoiulle . . . , George Artigues, Paris, 1 949; Le Carillon de Pincennes, Arcanes, Paris, 1 953; Monsieur Ie 6, Juillard, Paris, 1 954.

Publisher's Preface + XXI

dable record of , and cast new light upon, this much maligned and misunderstood man.

To this constantly increasing store of newly discovered ma­ terial has been added new editions, based on sound documentation, of Sade's major writings. In France, over the past fifteen years, a courageous young publisher, Jean-Jacques Pauvert, has systemati­ cally brought out the complete works of Sade, in twenty-seven vol­ umes, prefaced by the most cogent of contemporary essays. More recently, in Scandinavia , integral editions of the major Sa de writ­ ings have begun to appear, and in tiny Denmark a project similar to Pauvert' s pioneering effort is underway.

In English, however, there is still precious little material avail­ able, and, a s the editors have indicated, even that, at best, i s in the form of largely innocuous fragments carefully culled so as not to offend ; at worst, and this is a more recent development, totally spurious editions of Sade have appeared-what the editors have referred to as the "cheap-paperback pastiche"-baldly proclaiming to be complete. One can only lament that these gross misrepresenta­ tions may yet accomplish what all the censors and calumniators have thus far failed to do over the past two hundred years : these shoddy, and indeed execrable rehashes of his work may yet bury Sa de.

We boast that we have shrugged off the hypocriti c coils of Victorianism, that the last bastions of censorship are on the verge of falling, and yet Sade still remains locked in the library keeps of the world. "I address myself only to those persons capable of hear­ ing me," Sade once remarked. To date we have never allowed his works to seek that audience of hardy "capables ," preferring to judge and sentence them without a public hearing. Thus today we only know him by the words he contributed to the language: sadism, sadistic, sadist. But to know him and judge him by these epithets alone i s to ignore what Sade i s and means. He is, for example , much more than that shunned and restricted pillar of pornography on which his reputation rests, for it has been adequately demonstrated that nothing dates more quickly than real obscenity, in whatever sphere, and Sade has steadfastly refused to date or die. To endure, a writer cannot rely or base his work upon that dubious foundation,

XXll .. THE MARQUIS DE SADE

and those writers over the span of the past century who have been attacked as too coarse or too candid for public consumption and who have survived-B audelaire, Flaubert, Zola among the late­ nineteenth-century Frerch notables; Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Henry Miller more recently and in our own language-have sur­ vived precisely because of other qualities. So is it with Sa de.

What is strange, and worth investigating, is how, given the neglect, the quasi-total condemnation of his writings-how has Sade survived? What is there in his work that has caused it so to endure? Its eroticism? To be sure. Its shock qualities, based on a philosophy of negation which, as the editors note, no "reasonable man can understand, much less accept? No doubt. Its imaginative power, which is of such scope and magnitude as to create an entire uni­ verse, a self-contained world not of human comedy but of human (and super-human) tra gedy, surreal rather than real, a writhing,

insensate universe at the pole opposite Gethsemane and Golgotha? Yes, that too. And yet, to date, we have preferred to immure the man and ignore his writings, fearing his absolute vision.

To profit from that extraordinary vision, however, we do not have to subscribe to it. But if we ignore it, we do so at our own risk. For to ignore Sade is to choose not to know part of ourselves, that inviolable part which lurks within each of us and which, eluding the light of reason, can, we have learned in this century, establish absolute evil as a rule of conduct and threaten to destroy the world.

Now, twenty years after the end of the world's worst holo­ caust, after the burial of that master of applied evil, Adolph Hitler, we believe there is added reason to disinter Sade. For though his works speak for themselves and need no apology, they will also serve to remind us, in an age which legislates billions to construct bigger and better doomsday machines, bombs that can wipe out entire populations and missiles to deliver them with incredible swiftness and unerring aim, of the absolute evil of which man is capable. Surely, if we can accept to live with the daily specter of the absolute bomb, we can accept as well to live with the works of this possessed and exceptional man, who may be able to teach us a trifle more about ourselves.

THE PUBLISHER

CJhe UY(arquis

der:Jade

Part (9ne Critical

6fJ Biographical

The Marquis de Sade and His Accomplice

by Jean Paulhan, of l'Academie Fran�aise

I. THE SECRET

Ov�r the past few years we have come to understand what has made for the greatest best seller of all time, the success of the New Testament. I t is because this book has its secret. On every page, in every line, this book implies some­ thing never flatly stated, but which intrigues and involves us all the more on that account. And since in this piece we shall not have anything further to say about the Gospel, nothing need prevent us from disclosing its secret.

It is that Jesus Christ is light of heart. As shown us by the New Testament, he is solemn and rather pensive , ir­ ritated sometimes, at other times in tears, and always very serious. But we detect something else, something the New Testament does not tell us : that Jesus is not against an occasional j oke. That he is full of humor . That he now and again talks without rhyme or reason, just to see what will happen ( when he addresses the fig trees, for instance) . In short, that he enjoys himself.

I would not like to hurt anyone 's feelings by comparing the Gospel o f Good with the most ingenious, and also the most extensive, of all Gospels of Evil which a clear-minded and eminently sane rebel once composed. But I still must say it: if Jus tine deserved to be favorite reading-at least during a certain period of their lives-with Lamartine ,

3

4 .. THE MARQUIS DE SADE

Baudelaire, and Swinburne, with Barbey d'Aurevilly and Lautreamon t, with Nietzsche, Dostoevski , and Kafka (or, on a slightly different plane, with Ewerz, Sacher-Masoch, and M i rbeau ) it is because this strange although apparently simple book, which the writers of the nineteenth century­ hardly ever designating i t by name-spent their time pla­ giarizing, util izing, applying, refuting, this book which posed a question so grave that to answer i t and to fall short of answering i t completely was as much as an entire century could achieve, this book contains i ts secret too. I shall come back to i t. But first let 's settle the question of immorality.

II . CONCERNING CERTAIN DANGEROUS BOOKS

Is there anything to be added to what has already been sai d about the advantage and need of punishment for the wrongdoer ? There are a thousand opinions on the subj ect, and a hundred thousand treatises have been written ; and yet it seems to me that the crux of the matter has been neglected , possibly because i t is too obvious, because it goes without saying. Well, saying it will make it better still.

The first point is only too evident: that criminals are a menace, tha t they imperil society and are a threat to the human race i tself, from whose standpoint, for example , i t would be better i f there were no murderers. If the law left each o f us at l iberty to kill his neighbors (as often we woul d l i k e to do ) a n d h i s p arents (which t h e psychoanalysts claim is what we basically desi re ) , there would not b e many people left al ive on earth. Only friends would be left. Not even friends would be left, for finally-though this is a detail we usually forget to consider-our friends are themselves the fathers, sons, or neighbors of somebody. I move on to the second point, which is equally obvious once one gives it a l ittle thought.

This s econd point i s that criminals are in general curious people, more curious than law-abiding people: I mean unusual, giving more food for thought. And though

Jean Paulhan + 5

i t may happen that they u tter nothing but banalities , they are more surprising to l i sten· to-owing precisely to this contrast between the dangerous content within and the inoffensive appearance without. Of all this the authors of detective s tories are very aware: no sooner do we begin to suspect the honest country lawyer or the worthy pharmacist of having once upon a time poisoned a whole family, than the sl ightest thing he s ays warrants our most avid a ttention, and he needs but predict a change in the wea ther for us to sense he is meditating some new crime. Moralists declare that it suffices to have brought an end, even through negli- gence, to a single human l i fe in order to feel oneself utterly changed. And moralists are imprudent in saying so, for all of us desire to feel such a change in ourselves. It's a wish as old as the world; i t's more or less the story of the Tree of Good and Evil. And i f discretion ordinarily restrains us from changing ourselves to this extent, we nevertheless have the keen desire to frequent those who have undergone the experience, to befriend them, to espouse their remorse (and the Knowledge that comes thereof). The only point to remember here is the conviction I referred to earl ier that an assassin is not someone to encourage; and that through a dmiring him we participate in some vast plot against man and society. And here i s where even those among us who are not overly scrupulous find themselves all of a sudden betwixt and between, torn by conflicting feelings, de- prived alike of the advantages of a good conscience and of a bad. Here is where punishment intervenes.

I may safely assert that it straightens out everything. As of the moment the thi e f i s robbed in h i s turn-if not always of his money, at least of some years of h i s l i fe , which are worth money and a good deal more besides-and the assassin assassinated, we may without hesitation associate with them, and for example, while they are still alive, bring

Shortcomings and merits of criminals

them oranges in prison; we may become fond of them, Advantages of enamored of them, we can even feast upon their words : punishmen t they are paying, they have paid. This we know; i t was yet better known by the kings and queens and saints who in

6 .. THE MARQUIS DE SADE

olden days used to accompany criminals up to the scaffold, and who would even, l ike Saint C a therine, catch a few drops of thei r blood to save. (And who today is not stirred by gratitude toward the handful of men who teach us, as they pay the extreme penalty, the danger and the very meaning, which had become lost to m., of treason ? 1)

This i s what I have been driving a t : for one hundred and fi fty years i t has been the custom to frequent Sade through the intermediary of other authors. We do not read Les Crimes de I ' Amour, instead we read L' Auberge de I ' ange gardien; nor do we read Philosophy in the Bedroom but Beyo nd Good and Evil; nor Les In/ortunes de la f/ ertu, but The Castle or The Trial; nor Juliette, but Weird Women; nor La Nouvelle Jus tine, but Le Jardin des sup­ plices; nor Le Porte/euill.:' d'un homme de leures (which has , moreover, been lost ) but Les Memoires d'ou tre-tombe. And in such timidity one <:an find l i ttle else than the effect of the scruples I mentioned earl ier . Yes, it i s true that Sade was a dangerous man : sensual, violent-tempered, a knave upon occasion, and (in his dreams if not elsewhere ) atro­ ciously cruel. For not only does he invi te us to slay our neighbors and our parents, he would have us kill our own wives. He would go even furthe r : he would with pleasure see the whole of mankind done away with, to make room for some new invention of Nature. He was not particularly sociable ; nor social e i ther. He cared about liberties . He had l iberties on the bra in . But these are scruples we can set a t rest.

For Sade paid, and paid dearly. He spent thirty years of his l i fe i n various b astilles, fortresses, o r keeps of the Monarchy, then o f the Republic , of the Terror, of the Con­ sulate and of the Emp i re . "The freest spirit," sa id Apol­ l inaire , "tha t has ever lived." The most imprisoned body, a t any rate. It has sometimes been maintained that to all his novels there is a single key, and that it i s cruelty (and that, I would maintain, i s to take a simple view of them ) .