Marquis de sade philosophy in the bedroom 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 ) . But far

1 This essay dates from 1946.-Tr.

Jean Paulhan *' 7

more surely, to all his adventures and to all his books there is a single end, and tha: i s pri son. There i s even a mystery in so many arrests and illternments.

Let us see how 'veil the crime corresponds to the punishment. I t seems e;tabl i shed that Sade gave a spank­ ing to a whore in Pari�, : does that fit with a year in ja il? Some aphrodis iac sweets to some girls in Marseill es : does that justi fy ten years i n the Bastille? He seduces h is si ster­ in-law : does that justi f;' a month in the Conci e rgerie? He causes no end of bother to his powerful, h is redoubtable in­ laws, the President and the Presidente de :'v1ontreuil: does that justi fy two years in a fortress? He enables several moderates to escape (we are in the midst of the Terror ) : does that just ify a yeaI' in Madelonnettes? It i s acknowl­ edged that he published some obscene books, that he at­ tacked Bonaparte's entomage; and i t is not impossible that he feigned madness. Does tlat justi fy fourteen years in Charen­ ton, three in Bicetre, and one in Sainte-PeIagie ? \Vould it not strongly appea r as i f, for a whole string of French govern­ ments, any and every excuse sufficed for clapping him behind bars? and, who knows, is if Sade did about all he could to get himself imprisoned? Perhaps; one thing however i s certain : we know that �ade ran his risks; that he accepted them-that he multiplied them. We also know that in read­ ing him we are possibly running risks of our own. Here am I, free to think what thoughts I will about that descendant of the chaste Laure de :�oves ,2 to wonder what there may have been that was gooe in him, and at any rate delightful; to muse upon that extreme distinction, upon those blue eyes into which, when he waf a child, ladies liked to look; upon tha t faint hint of effeminacy about his figure, upon those sparkling teeth;3 upon those wartime triumphs; upon that

2 Wife o f Pau l de S ade, w 10m she married in 1325. Famous for her beauty, she was the "Laur a" of Petrarch's Sonnets. \Vhether she was actu ally Petrarch's mistress or .lOt ha s never been proved.-Tr.

3 Of Sade not a single port",it from life has come down to us. I borrow these details from letters, frOID police descriptions, also from the image Sade gives of himself in A line et F aleaur.

Sade paid, and paid more than his share

8 + THE MARQUIS DE SADE

violent bent for pleasure ; upon those repartees, impetuous but subtle and perhaps tinged with something of cockiness and vainglory ; upon the young Provenc;al nobleman whose vassals come to do him homage, and who i s accompanied wherever he goes by the too faithful love, the love-in-spite­ of-everything of that tall and somewhat equine and rather boisterous Renee-his wife-at bottom a good and gentle woman.

III . THE DIVINE MARQUIS

I shall leave aside the special efficacity Duclos had in mind when he spoke of "those books you read with only one hand." Not that it isn't interesting, and to a certain extent sensational: more than one very serious and even abstruse writer has dreamed that his writings might exert a similar influence, generate similar repercussions ( on other levels, o f course ) . But touching all thi s there i s not much to be said, since such results are Ilsually unpredictable. Then, too, it i s u sually agreed that veiled language and allusion ( or i f you prefer, teasing and smuttiness) a r e more apt to produce them than forthright and unadorned obscenity. Now, veiled language and allusion are rare in Sade, and smuttiness non­ existent. Indeed, that may be what i s held against him. Nothing i s further from him than that kind of smug smile, of malicious innuendo which Brantome displays in his tales of thoroughbred distractions, which Voltaire or Diderot show in their spicy passages, and that mincing deviousness which Crebillon, in his stories of alcoves and sofas, brings to discouraging perfection. There is in literature a free­ masonry of pleasure, whose winks and nods and half-spoken enticements and ellipses are known to all i ts members. But Sade breaks with these conventions. He i s a s unhampered by the laws and rules of the erotic novel as was ever an Edgar Allan Poe by those o f the detective story, a Victor Hugo by those of the serial ized novel. He i s unceasingly direct, explicit-tragic too. If at all costs he had to be

Jean Paulhan + 9

classified, i t would b,! among those authors who, as Montaigne once said, castrate you . Surely not among those who titilla te you. And there is another sort of device he spurns.

It i s the one we rrust term the l iterary device . Many a famous work owes it� value-and in any case i ts renown -to the incorporation of an intricate system of l iterary allusions. Volta ire in lli s tragedies, Delille in his poems evoke in every lin e , and take credit in evoking, Racine or Corneill e , or Vi rgil, or Homer. To cite only the nearest rival of Sade ( and, as i 1 were, his competitor in the domain of Evil) it i s fairly obvious that Laclos is steeped to satura­ tion in a l iterature-whereof, moreover, he makes the cleverest, the most inter igent use. Les Liaisons danqereuses i s the j oust of courtly love ( fo r everything consists in find­ ing out whether Valmollt will succeed in meriting Madame de M erteuil ) , waged by R acinian heroines ( neither Phaedra nor Andromache i s lacking ) within the l ists of the facile society p ainted by Crebillon, by N erciat, by Vivant-Denon (fo r everything p rocee,jg straight and briskly to the bed­ chamber-everything at least is envisaged with this denoue­ ment in view). Such i s the key to i ts mystery : discreetly wrapped up inside Les Liaisons i s a l i ttle course on the history of l i terature for grownups . For the most mysterious authors are generally th e most l iterary, and the strangeness in their writings i s owing predsely to the disparate elements they contain, to this yoki 19 together of characters come from the remotest milieux-nd works-who are quite astonished to encounter one anothe r . Laclos, moreover, was never able to rep roduce his prodigious feat again.

But Sade, with h.s glaciers and his gulfs and his terrifying castles, with the unremitting onslaught he de­ livers against God-ard against man himself-with his drumming insi stence and h is repetitions and his dreadful platitudes, with his stubhorn pursuit of a sensational but ex­ haustively rational ized action, with this constantly main­ tained presence of all the parts of the body ( not a one of them but somehow serves ) , of all the mind' s ideas ( Sade

Neither a pornoqrapher nor a littera­ teur

One of those dreams whose source IS In ins tinct

1 0 .. THE MARQUIS DE SADE

had read as widely as Marx ) , with this singular disdain for l iterary artifices but with this unfaltering demand for the truth, with this look of a man forever animated and en­ tranced by one of those undefinable dreams that sometimes take rise in the instinct, with these tremendous squanderings of energy and these expen ditures of l i fe which evoke re­ doubtable primitive festivals-or great modern wars, festi­ vals of another sort perl: aps-with these vast ra idings of the world or, better still , this looting he i s the first to perpetrate on man, Sade ha �; no need of analyses or of alter­ natives, of images o r of dramati c turns o f events, of elegance or of ampl ifications. He neither distingu i shes nor separates . He repeats himself over again. His books remind one of the sacred books of the great rel igions. From them emanates , for br ief instants caught in s ome maxim-

Dangerous moments there are when the physical self is fired by the mind's extravagances . . . . There i s no better way to familiarize oneself with death than through the medium of a libertine idea.

They declaim against the passions without bothering to think that i t i s from their flame philosophy l ights its torch . . . .

- ( and what maxims they are ! ) that mighty and obsessing murmur which sometimes arises from l i terature, and is perhaps i ts just ification : A:l1iel ,4 Montaigne , the Kalevala , the Ramayana . I f i t be obj ected that these I include among sacred books have never had their religion nor their fai th­ ful , I shall begin my reply by saying that it is a very good thing and that we should be glad ( thereby being in a freer position to judge the books on the i r own merits instead of by their effects ) . Upon further thought , I shall add that I am not so sure a fter all , and that the religion in question was by i ts very nature condemned to clandestinity-but able , from hid ing , to address an appeal to us now and then : three l ines out of Baudelaire :

Who hide a whip under thei r trailing robes And mingle, in the dismal wood and lonely night, The foam of pleasure with the flow of tears.

-----

• Of al l Arnie! wrote only a twentieth has so far been published.

I can Paulhan .. 1 1

Joseph de Maistre 's remark : "Woe unto the nation that were to ban torture" ;5 Swinburne ' s phrase "the martyred Marquis" ; Lautreamon : 's "Cruelty 's delights ! They are delights that endure" ; P ushkin's observation upon "the j oy we are hurled into by whatever heralds death." As for Chateaubri and-I am way of the somewhat murky pleasure that Chateaubriand, among others , derives from the death of women who once love i him, o f regimes he fought for, of the religion he believes the true one. And there are reasons, Sade divine though they are not ea �ily elucidated reasons, why Sade if n o t a has so often been des ignated as the Divine Marquis . marquis \Vhether or not he actudly was a marquis is open to ques- tion ; but there is no que:;tion that a certain number of per- sons, and apparently re: ;pectable persons, held him to be divine-or properly diaholical, which i s something akin.

Still, on this score 1 doubt does assail me. I wonder, when today I behold so many writers struggling so hard and so consciously to avoid I i :erary a rtifice in the ir treatment of an indescribable event o f whose e rotic and at the same time frightful character we a re given every assurance, mindful in all ci rcumstances to mi sconstrue Creation, and busy look­ ing for the sublime in the infamous, the great in the sub­ versive, demanding furti lermore that every work commit and compromise i ts author forever in keeping with a kind of efficacity ( which i s n,>t without its resemblance to the wholly physiological and local efficacity I referred to earl ier ) , I wonder if Oll( i s not compelled to recognize, in a terror so extreme, less an invention than a remembrance , less an ideal than a nosta 19i a , and in short i f our contempo­ rary literature, in that area where i t seems to us most alive -most aggressive , in a ly case-is not oriented enti rely toward the past and, to )e precise, dominated, determined by Sade as eighteenth-cen tury tragedy was by Racine.

But my aim was only to talk about Ius tine.

5 Cf. "The submission of the reople is never due to anything other than violence and the frequent use of t orture . . . . " (La Nouvelle Justine, Book IV. )

The riddle of the Go thic novel

1 2 + THE MARQUIS DE SADE

IV. THE SURPRISES OF LOVE

Well, Justine posses:;es every virtu e , and for each of them she finds herself punished. C ompassionate Justine i s robbed by a beggar. Piou s , she i s raped by a monk. Honest, she i s fleeced by a usurer. She refuses to become the accom­ plice in a la rceny, a poi soning, an a rmed assault ( for ill luck and poverty cast her into strange company ) , and it is she, the clumsy one, who is charged with theft, with brig­ andage, with murder. And so it goes with her throughout. And yet, against villainies of every description the only weapons Justine knows how to use are a pure heart and a sensitive soul. They prov,:: inadequate : to whomever abuses her she brings good fortu 1e, and the monsters who torment her become a minister, sll fgeon to His Maj esty, a milli on­ aire . Here's a novel which bears every resemblance to those edifying works in which vice i s seen punished every time, and virtue rewarded. Except that in Ius tine it 's the other way around ; but this novel ' s failing, strictly from the view­ point of the novel ( which is our viewpoint ) , remains the same : the reader always knows how things are going to end. Now I us tine' s endini� fails even of the tri teness which finally made an unduly v i rtuous conclusion one o f the con­ ventions of the novel, a convention hardly less tried and true than a novel ' s division into chapters o r episodes. Sade, from all evidence, takes h is unhappy denouements extremely seriously, and shows himself taken unaware by them every time. And the strangest thing of all i s that they take us una ware too.

This sllfprise ending poses a singular problem. S ingu­ lar , for Sade will have none of the facil it ies that were com­ monly being employed at about the same period by his rivals, the Gothic novelists. Amazing the reader i s too easy when, like M rs. Radcliffe or M atthew Lewis, you enlist the help of phantoms, supernatural events, infernal machineries, all inherently startling. However, it is with man alone Sade

Jean Paulhan .. 1 3

wishes t o deal ; and, h e specifies, with natural man such as he had been p ainted by, for example, Richardson or Fielding.' Therefore no ogres or wizards, no angels or demons­ above all no gods! -but rather the human faculty which forges these gods, angels, or demons, rather the vices or virtues which, when they lead us into startling situations, set this faculty to work. The riddle thus posed has two or three words, the first of them being a very plain and every­ day one : modesty.

It is a curious thing that the eighteenth century, to which we owe the most cynical descriptions of manners in our literature, also gave us two great portraitists of modesty : one of them, as everybody knows, was M arivaux. The other, and i t is beyond me why everybody persists in not knowing it, was Sade. I t is curious, o r rather i t i s not curious at all. So much fear and trembling in the face of love and so much defiance of fear , so many self-respects to preserve and so many withdrawals into the self, and this refusal to use one' s eyes and ears which reveals and at the same time protects everything that was finally to go under the title of marivaudage-for- M a rivaux shares with Sade the dubious distinction of having left his name to a certain form of amorous behavior : and I am not sure, indeed, that the attribution i s any more correct or better understood in the case of Sade than in that of M a rivaux ; that shyness and that dread of being hurt are only explicable , only under­ standable if there are chances of being hurt and if, in sum, love i s a perilous affair. M a rivaux' heroines are modest to such a degree one would think they had read Jus tine. While Justine herself . . .

Whatever be falls her , Justine is unprepared for it. Experience teaches her nothing. Her soul remains ignorant, her body more ignorant still. One cannot even allow her an occasional flutter of the eyelashes, a hint of a smile. N ever will she take the first step. Even when i n love, i t ' does not occur to her to kiss Bressac. "Although my imagi-

6 Cf. "Idee sur Ie. romans," S ade's preface to Les Crimes de l'Amour.

Sade, pain ter of modes ty

1 4 '*' T H E MARQ U I S DE SADE

nation ," she �ays, "may sometimes have strayed to these pleasures, I beli eved them to be chaste as the God who in­ spired them, given by Nature to serve as consolation to humans, engendered of love and of sensibility ; very far was I from believing that man, after the example of beasts . . . " Each time she i s amazed when upon her are performed operations whose meaning she scarcely suspects, and whose inte rest she fails totally to comprehend. She is the image of the most heart-rending virtue-and, alas , of virtue most heartlessly ren t. " Modesty," they used to say in those days, "is a quality you put on with pins . . . . " But as worn by Justine, the pi ns go through into her flesh and bring forth blood when iler dress is removed. Shall it be said that i t re­ quires conside rable good grace on the part of the reader to let himself be surprised and hurt along with her ? No ; for that reader i s free to interpret as moral and sentimental anguishes all the very p hysical anguishes displayed before him. In its movement Jus tine i s kin to those fairy tales where we are told Cinderella i s shod in glass slippers-and we understand immediately ( unless we a re a l i ttle dull ) that Cinderella walks with infinite caution. And then too we live on the verge o f the strange. What, when you come down to it , is more str:mge than at the end of one's arms to have these queer prehensile organs, reddish and wrinkled, one's hands, and l i t}le transparent gems a t the divergent ex­ tremities of th�se hands ? Sometimes we catch ourselves in the act of eating, wholly absorbed in grinding fragments of dead animals between the other gems that stud our mouth. So i t is with the rest ; and among all the things we do there is perhaps not a single one which will brook prolonged at­ tention. However, there exists a domain wherein strange­ ness enters neither by chance nor exceptionally, but where it i s constant and the rule.

For, when all i s sa id and done , we are not greatly bewildered by eating : we have ( vaguely ) the impression that our presen t meal i s the sequel to a thousand past meals, which it strongly resembles and which serve as its gua rantee. Whereas each time we fall in love again, it seems to us-so

Jean Paulhan .. 1 5

incomparable and so indescribable i s every feature o f our beloved-that we have never loved before. Poets speak of cool fountains, of bowers of bliss, of hyacinths and roses ; they speak in vain, for they evoke hardly more than a faint reflection of the greatest surprise life reserves for us.

On another plane, the same surprise stamps the expres­ sions and proverbs used when in common speech the secret organs are referred to as "li ttle brother," "li ttle man," "little friend," "the l i ttle creature that l ives under a bush and lives on seed." What in the world can they have done to us , these organs, that we are thus unable to talk about them simply ? Ah, they do at least this : they refuse to be treated with familiarity. In such sort that the prose writer, regarding them, can only record surprise and bewilder­ ment ?

Yes, doubtless. Or else he may each time vary and renew the reasons for this surprise, so that it i s ever fresh for the reader and never, instead of suggesting the wonder­ ful to him, imposes bewilderment upon him. Thus does Sade proceed, in his own manner. For what finally do such a multitude of approaches to pleasure and so many different and curious ways of making love signi fy if not that the ways of love and pleasure perpetually amaze us , are per­ petually unpredictable ? Jus tine, I have said, reads-or should be read-like a fairy tale. We may add that it is a tale solely concerned with that particular feature of love, paradoxical and in i tself nigh unto incredible , which driv6s lovers, as Lucretia put i t , to ravage the bodies of those they love.

However, there is one final word to the riddle.

V. JUSTINE, OR THE NEW OEDIPUS

Sade did not wait until he reached pri son before be­ ginning to read. He devoured the favorite books of his age. He knew the Encyclopedia by heart. For Voltaire and Rousseau his feelings were a mixture of sympathy and

Love and pleasure are unpredictable

Sade, disciple of the Encyclopedia

16 .. THE MARQUIS DE SADE

aversion. The aversion was on grounds of logic : Sade con­ sidered those two thinkers incoherent. Inconsequent, that was the word for i t then. But he accepted thei r exactingness, thei r principles--and their prejudices. Of which this i s the gist.

The eighteenth century had just made a di scovery, and was not a l ittle proud of it, that a mystery is not an explana­ tion. No, and that a myth isn't an explanation either. On the contrary, i t was noticed that no sooner i s a myth forged than, in order to stand, it needs another myth to support it. The Indians hold that i t i s upon the back of a tortoise that the world is carried. So be i t ; but upon whose back i s the tortoise borne ? It i s God that created the world. All right ; but who created God ? To be sure, this discovery ( if i t deserves the name of one ) had been made earl ier ; but the Encyclopedists now excel in giving i t this popular and, at the same t ime, fashionable form. Henceforth, all talk of God will be for memory's sake ; and it wil l be of a God against whom Voltaire-and later Sade-range man alone, man ( they go on to say ) who i s nothing other than man. Man ( Voltaire adds ) who i s not noble. Natural man, man minus the Fable .

Thi s was to reject straight off all the current charm­ all the perennial facilit ies-of l iterature. This was also to lay oneself open to a new difficulty. For, you know, this lonely man did a fter all have to go and invent God, and the spir its , and the satyrs, and the Minotaur. Now you'll not be very far advanced toward acquaintance with him unti l you have managed--by consulting nothing outside the bounds of human nature-to account for not just our real societies and the passions that agitate them, but also for those vast fantastic societies which accompany them like their shadow. Such is the weight with which , all of a sudden, the death o f God falls upon Letters. Voltaire i s human, I know. He even belongs among the better specimens of common everyday man. However, there is no getting away from the fact that there have been wars and great religions, migrations and

Jean Paulhan .. 1 7

Empires, the Inquisition and human sacrifice-and that, in fine, men have not very often resembled Voltaire.

"N ever mind," replies the Encyclopedia. "We are not p resumptuous . We shall have the necessary patience. We already have man for a start : he is right here, we have him before our eyes. We are companions in exile ( if it be a question of exil e ) . We have but to observe man objectively, to submit him to our investigations. Sooner or later he'll come clean. Should he contrive to hide ( for he i s crafty ) some one or other of his penchants from us , our grand­ children will get a t them. Time is on our s ide. For the present, let us compile our notes and assemble our collec­ tions."

Sade belongs to his age. He too begins with analyzing and patient collecting. That gigantic catalogue of perver­ sions, The 120 Days of Sodom, was for a long time taken to be the summit and conclusion of his work. Not at all ; i t i s the foundation of his work, and the breaking of ground for it. Such a beginning would have won approval from the Encyclopedia. Indeed, for rigorousness Sade outdoes any of the Encyclopedists , who ( thought he) all fall more or less rapidly into dishonesty : some, like Rousseau, because they are weak-na tured and prone to tears, forever being embarrassed by things as they are , always ready to shrink from the sight, from the touch, from the sound of man such as thei r senses perceive him to be , and to chase instead after some sort of kindly savage ( whose existence the history of peoples denies a thousand times over ) . Others, like Vol­ taire , because of their hardheadedness and unemotional character , being quite incapable of believing in the truth of passions they themselves do not experience. Or still others, l ike Diderot, brill iant but frivolous, skipping from one idea to the next. Voltaire's version of man may explain how humankind came to invent the spade ; J ean-Jacques' , the hayloft ; Diderot' s , conversation. But ogres and inquisitions and wars ? "Eh," replies Voltaire , "those poor people were mad. \Ve shall correct all that." "That is exactly wha t I call chea ting," rejoins Sade ; "we set out to understand man, and

Where Vol­ taire and Jean-Jacques cheat

1 8 .. T H E MARQU I S DE SADE

before we have even begun you are already trying to change him."

This rigor-I am much tempted to say, this heroism­ might, it cannot be denied, have played Sade false and led him astray ( as i t did, at about the same period, that hot­ blooded l i ttle fool and very able writer, Restif de la Bre­ tonne ) . Such was not the case. Reiterating them through ten volumes and supporting them with a thousand examples, a Krafft-Ebing was to consecrate the categories and di stinc­ tions the Divine M arquis traced. Later, a Freud was to adopt Sade's very method and principle. There has not, I think, been any other example, in our Letters , of a few novels provi ding the basis , fi fty years after their publication, for a whole sci ence of man. I t must surely be agreed that, before h e was deprived of his liberty, Sade must have been an even keener observer than he was a tireless reader. Or else that a certain fire in him caused him to feel-and also enabled him to intu it-the broadest range of passions. And to me it seems strange that this has not earned him more gratitude. That sa id , i t i s all too obvious that scientific rigor, in such matters, entails i ts danger : it usually leads to award­ ing overmuch and too exclusive importance, in the study of the p assions, to the physical aspect of love ( as, in social economy, i t leacls to overemphasis upon individual interest ) . For the existence o f the soul, even the existence of the mind, may be easily denied ; but not copulation.

Another facility ; and Sade refuses it no less severely. That which is common to most erotic books, and which i s absent from his , i s , a s w e have noted, a certain superior tone ( and it could j ust as well be called an inferior tone ) , a certain a ir of sufficiency ( or insufficiency, if you prefer to call i t that ) . More preci sely, a certain stiltedness, an aloof­ ness of style , a certain abrupt divergence of style from content. For l iterature halts, and so almost does language, before an event ( which is sometimes called animal, or bes­ ti al ) wherewith the mind seems to have nothing to do ; and which one therefore confines oneself to ascertaining and recording, either-like Boccaccio or Crebillon-with an

Jean Paulhan + 1 9

amused sati sfaction, o r with a few reservations, like Mar­ garet of Navarre or Godart d'Aucourt. But this divorce they establish, this di stance they preserve is unacceptable to Sade. " Man is all of a piece ," says he, "and lucid. There is nothing he does but he does it as a reasoning being." Whence it is his heroes accept themselves for what they are, con­ stantly, down to their last aberrations, and keep themselves under the ir mind's survey. "We buggers ," one of them declares ( but all the others speak in the same vein ) , "pride ourselves upon our frankness and upon exactitude in our principles." Speeches and reflections are what set them in action.

Therein resides thei r weakness. For reflections and speeches could then also appease them. No argument, how­ ever wise, does not accept in advance to bow before a re­ buttal i f in the latter it recognizes wisdom superior to i ts own. Thus does the Leonore o f A line e t J7 alcour more than once elude rape by means of the excellent pretexts she invents on the spur o f the moment. Justine herself is again and again invited to refute her persecutors. There is never any deviation from the rule : "No transports ," she i s told. "Give me arguments. I 'll cede to them if they are good." Now, Justine has a head on her shoulders. The problem presented to her is so honestly presented-so detailed, so explic it-that we expect her to find the solution to i t a t any moment. One word and the riddle would be solved. Justine , or the new Oedipus.

VI. THREE RIDDLES

Most of these riddles have provided no end of diver­ sion since Sade's t ime. The danger is that we today tend to consider them separately whereas Sade poses them simul­ taneously and in combined form ; the danger is also that, detached from one another, they are too familiar to us, and the answer to them-or the difficulty of answering them­ too evident. But let 's have a close look at the texts.

Man under­ takes no thing that is n o t subject t o the scru tiny of his reason

The unique and its property

20 + THE MARQUIS DE SADE

"First o f all , " says Sade, "the exact details. Who are you, and what are you after in this world ? Only too often I behold you asleep, inert, or just barely alive, coming and going like some organic statue . This statue-is it you ? No, you would have yourself a conscious being, as conscious as possible , and rat ional. You seek happiness, which increases consciousness tenfold. What happiness ? Ordinarily i t is located in pleasure and in love . All well and good. But one thing : avoid con fusing the two. To love and to taste pleas­ ure are essentiall y different ; proof thereof i s that one loves every day without tasting pleasure, and that one still more frequently tastes pleasure wi thout loving. Now, while an indisputable pleasure goes with the gratification of the senses, love, you will admit, i s accompanied by nuisances and troubles of every sort. 'But moral pleasures , ' do you say ? Indeed. Do you know of a single one that originates any­ where but in the imagination ? Only grant me that freedom i s this imagination's sole sustenance ; and the joys it dis­ penses to you are keen to the extent the imagination i s unhampered by r e ins or laws. Wh:lt ? F ix some a priori rule upon the imagination ? Why, is i t not imprudent merely to speak of rules ? Leave the imagination free to follow its own bent.

"Pleasure, that was what we were discussing. Here we still have to distinguish the pleasure you sense from that which you think you bestow. Now, from Nature we obtain abundant inforrr ation about ourselves, and precious l i ttle about others. About the woman you clasp in your a rms, can you say with ce-tainty that she does not feign pleasure ? About the woman you mistreat, are you quite su re that from abuse she does not derive some obscure and lascivious satis­ faction ? Let us confine ourselves to simple evidence : through thoughtfulness, g entleness, concern for the feelings of others we saddle our o,,'n pleasure with restrictions, and make this sacrifice to obtain a doubtful result. Rather, i s i t not normal for a man to prefer what he feels to what he does not feel ? And have we ever felt a single impulse from Nature bidding us to give others a preference over ourselves ?"

Jean Paulhan .. 2 1

"Still i n all ," Justine replies, "the moral Impera­ tive . . . "

"Ah, morals," Sade goes on, "a word or two about morals, i f you like. Are you then unaware that murder was honored in China, rape in New Zealand, theft in Sparta ? That man you watch being drawn and quartered in the market place, what has he done ? He ventured to acquit him­ self in Paris of some Japanese virtue . That other whom we have left to rot in a dank dungeon, what was his crime ? He read Confucius. No, Justine, the vice and virtue they shout about are words which, when you scan them for their mean­ ing, never yield anything but local ideas. At best, and i f you consider them rightly, they tell you in which country you should have been born. Moral science is simply geography misconstrued. "

"But we who were born in France," says Justine. "I was coming to that. It i s indeed true that, from

earliest childhood, we hear nothing but lectures on charity and goodness. These virtues, a s you know, were invented by Christians . Do you know why ? The answer is , that being themselves slaves, powerless and destitute, for their pleas­ ures-for their very survival-they could look nowhere but to their masters' bounty. Their whole interest lay in per­ suading those masters to behave charitably. To that end they employed all their parables, their legends, their say­ ings, all their seductive wiles. Those masters, great fools that they were, let themselves be taken in. So much the worse for them. But we philosophers, with more experience behind us, we shall, by pursuing pleasure in the manner we wish and pursuing it with all our might, do exactly what your beloved slaves practiced, Justine, and not what they preached."

"And remorse ?" Justine timidly asks. "What shall you do about remorse ?"

"Haven't you already noticed ? The only deeds man is given to repent are those he is not accustomed to perform­ ing. Get into the habit, and there's an end to qualms and regrets ; whereas one crime may perhaps leave us uneasy, ten, twenty crimes do not."

A slaves' morality

2 2 .. THE MARQUIS DE SADE

"I have never tried." "Why not try i t and find out ? Furthermore, i t i s

vouched for by the innumerable examples offered to us day in, day out by those thieves and brigands who, most appro­ priately, are call ed hardened criminals. The further one sinks into stupidity, the better disposed one becomes for faith ; similarly, o ft-repeated crime renders one callous. There you have the very best proof that virtue is but a superficial principle in man."

"However," Justine insinuates, "had there formerly been some agreement entered into by men, some understand­ ing binding man to man, which our honor or our well­ being might enjoin us to uphold-"

"Ah, ha ," says Sade, "you raise there the entire ques­ tion of the social contract."

"Perhaps I do." "And I fear you misunderstand it. But let us see. You

claim that in the earliest stage of their societies men con­ cluded a pact along these lines : 'I shall do you no ill so long as you do me none. ' "

"I t could have been a tacit arrangement," Justine re­ marks. "Anyhow, I fail to see how, without some such thing, any society could be founded or last one day."

"All right. A pact, and one which must constantly re­ ceive fresh adhert:nts, one which must be reindorsed by each of us."

"Why not ?" "I would simply draw your attention to one thing, that

a pact of this kind presupposes the equality of the contract­ ing parties. I renounced doing you harm ; which means I was free to harm you up until then. I renounce harming you now ; this means I have been free to harm you up until now."

"Well ?" "Imagine however that you are delivered utterly into

The s ocial my power the way a slave is into his master's, the way a man con tract condemned to die i s handed over to his e.xecutioner. How

could i t possibly occur to me to strike a bargain with you whereby you acquire illusory rights through my foregoing

Jean Paulhan .. 2 3

real rights ? If you a r e unable to hurt me , why in the world should I fear you and deprive myself for your sake ? But let us go still further. You wi l l grant me that everybody draws his pleasure from the exercise of his particular facult ies and attributes : like the a thlete from wrestling, and the generous man from his benevolent actions ; thus also the violent man from his very violence. I f you are completely in my power, i t i s from oppressing you that I am going to reap my grea test j oys."

"Is i t possible ?" wonders Justine. "Is it human ?" "That man be human i s not something I 'd stake my

l i fe on. However, observe thi s also : a s the mighty man takes pleasure from the exercise of his strength, so does the gentle or the weak man profit from his compassion. He too has a good time. It i s his own way of having a good time ; and that i s his business. Why the devi l must I further reward him for the enjoyment he gives himself ?"

"Thus you see ," says Justine, " that there are a thou­ sand varieties of weakness and strength. "

"I don' t doubt that. C ivil ization has changed the as­ pect of Nature ; civi l ization nonetheless respects her laws. The rich of today are just as ferocious in their exploitation of the poor a s the violent used to be in their vexation of the helpless. All these financiers, all these important personages you see would bleed the entire popula tion dry i f they fancied i t s blood might yield a few grains of gold."

"It is indeed dreadful, " Justine admits , "and I must own I have seen some examples of i t ."

VII . THREE MORE RIDDLES

That religion, conventional morality, society itself are among those malignant inventions which enable certain in­ dividuals , they being none other than the most powerful individuals, to victimize the lower classes-this is a proposi­ tion contradicted by no eighteenth-century writer concerned with ideas. The wise, the modest Vauvenargues himself ap-

Primitive mentality

24 .. THE MARQUIS DE SADE

peals in the name of Nature. Voltaire simply finds religion to blame for the state of affairs, Rousseau blames society, Diderot the going morality. And Sa de blames them all at the same time. Aye , the laws are harsh, their enforcement is implacable, the authorities are despotic. ( We are rushing, says Sa de-and Sa de is the only one saying i t-toward Revolution.7 ) Very well. What i s left for him to do who has grasped this truth, and who i s nevertheless powerless to put a speedy end to so many oppressions ?

I f nothing else he can at least free himself of them, inwardly defeat their influence upon him. Grimm, Diderot, Rousseau, Mademoiselle de Lespinasse or Madame d'Epi­ nay cleave, as regards morality, to a single tenet which they sometimes proclaim openly, sometimes conceal : that one must in every case discover and then heed the heart's first and most spontaneous prompting ; by dint of patience and of weeding out obstructions, restore the primitive man in onesel f ; and in oneself restore-they add-natural good­ ness.

Of the various Savages of Tahiti, Bougainville's Voy­ ages, His toire des Severambes, Supplemen ts to the Voyages and SupplementJ to the Supplements, which toward 1 7 60 were the fare of sensitive souls, modern sociology has left nothing intact. N othing except the yarns. It could have been expected.

For I see very well that Tahitian savages know nothing of our laws and of our moral codes. But what i f they know others, no less severe or, who can tell, crueler still ? Shall we go a l i ttle further ? I can see very well that they do not have our coaches or our cannons. And if this were deliber­ ate ? What i f trey had known our civil i zation, and then given i t up ( as you are tempted to do ) ? I t i s said, after all, that the Chinese invented gunpowder long ago, and the Romans the elevator. The Tahitians you behold are perhaps the last vestiges of a glorious and prosperous society, which had its palaces and i ts pomp-and then came to know the vanity of riches and of display. Regarding languages, Meillet

7 In A lint! e t IT alcour.

Jean Paulhan + 25

points o u t t h a t there i s no particul a r o n e about which w e c a n s a y with certainty t h a t i t i s closer t o i ts origins than others. Likewise, not a single people exists that we can with complete honesty call primitive.

"Why, " J ean-J acques replies , "as for this primitive man, i t ' s enough for me to experience him in myself. And I kRow he is good."

"I'm not so sure o f i t ," says Sade. Everybody has complained, and rightly enough, that

there are too many tortures in Justine-and in La Nouvelle Jus tine a hundred times too many. Too many strappadoes and needles, gibbets and pulleys, whips and i rons. All the same, let's not be hypocrites. Our European l i terature in­ cludes another work, a greatly esteemed one, which contains ( together with illustrations ) more tortures by far than all of Sade's writings, and in i ts tortures more refinements, and in its refinements more ingenuity : not thirty or forty, but one hundred thousand women bundled in dry straw and then slowly burned alive ( a fter h aving first been gagged, to re­ duce the level of their screaming ) ; and other women sprea d­ eagled on nail-studded beds, and raped in front o f thei r i mpaled husbands ; a n d princes a n d p rincesses grilled over l ive coals ; and peasant women in chains ( those sweet , lamb­ like creatures, says the author ) lashed and clubbed while dying o f systematic starvation. At the end of which it isn't by the dozen ( as in La Nouvelle Justine ) the victims are counted, but by the mill ion. Twenty mill ion, according to the author. He i s a respectable author, and reli able h is­ torians ( such as Gomara and Fray Luis Bertram ) are there to confirm his allegations to within a round million ; for this we are referring to i s no novel but a p iece o f pure and simple reportage : the Brief Relation of the Des truction of the Indies of Father Bartolome de Las Casas, whom no one is l ikely to accuse of designing to fl a tter our wicked instincts. N or were the Spanish soldiers who set out for the New World selected for their cruelty. Who were they ? Sight­ seers, ordinary a dventurers, like you and me. What hap­ pened ? Why, native populations were turned over to them.

About the pleasures of cruelty

26 ,,� T H E MARQ UIS DE SADE

That man is able to derive the livel iest pleasure from cutting man ( and woman ) to pi ecell, and first-and perhap s especially-from the i d e a of cutting them t o pieces, th i s i s a fact, an obviou� fact which we customa rily h i d e from our­ selves out of I don ' t know what sort of cowardice. I do not know because, so far as I can see, there is nothing in all th i s that could for o n e minute conflict wi th Christian bel ief-nor moreover wi th Moslem o r Taoist-which maintains that man once upon a time pa rted ways with God. And as for the unbel iever, by what right could he refuse to observe that man with unbi ased eyes ?

Yet refuse he does once he i s in a hurry to build, to slap together, a natu ral philosophy-the nineteenth century's term for it will be " a l ay ethic"-untrammeled by laws and by authority, untrammeled by God. And as o f now integ­ r ity is of sl ight importance to him. Well ! how preci ous Sade thus becomes to u s in h is refusal o f l ies , in his refusal to seek short cuts, in h is refusal to cheat ! His refusal i s a li ttle too vehement ? Ah, Sade i s not a patient man. And do you suppose he i s not exasperated by the others, with their ecstasies before Nature , the ir weepings over waterfalls, the i r quiverings upon the soft greensward ? To so much sott ishness an antidote was needed.

"A queer antidote , " Justine murmurs. "So pray tell m e : what life shal l be mine to lead ?"

"An absurd l ife ," answers Sade. "But let's have a look at i t ."

The scene i s usually la id in some awesome and almost The absurd inaccessible castle , Or in some monastery lost in the depths world of a forest. Justine is there, a captive, and locked in the

tower with her are three gi rls , the sober Omphale, the addle­ brained Florette , Corne\ie the inconsolable , all slaves o f the perverse monks. Are they alone ? No, everything would in­ dica te tha t within the walls o f the cloister there are other towers , other women. Sometimes this o r that slave vani shes. What becomes of her ? Everything leads to the suspicion that in leaving the monastery she takes leave of l ife . For

I can Pauthan + 2 7

what reason is she taken away ? I t i s impossible t o know. Her age has no bearing upon i t : " I have seen a seventy-year­ old woman here," Omphale tells Justine, "and during the time they retained her in service I saw more than a dozen girls dismissed who were under sixteen." Nor i s her be­ havior a factor. " I have seen some who flew to do thei r every desire , and who were gone within six weeks ; o thers, sullen and temperamental, whom they kept a good many years." Well-clothed girls, well-fed. I f they but knew where they stood, and what conduct . . . but no. "Here, ignorance of the law is no excuse. You are forewarned of nothing, and you are puni shed for everything . . . . Yesterday, though you made no mistakes, you were given the whip. You shall soon receive i t again for having committed some. Above all, don' t ever get the idea tha t you are innocent." ( Thus are the themes of the ca stle and of the trial interwoven throughout Ius tine . ) "The essenti al thing," Omphale goes on to say, " i s never to refuse anything . . . to be ready for everything, and even so, though this be the best course to follow, i t does not much insure your safety . . . . "8

What remedies for so many ills ? There i s but one. The mise rable � � n take consolation in the fact they are sur­ rounded by o thers who are equally miserable, tormented by the same enigmas , victims of the same absurdity.

But i t would be naive to suppose that in this adventure Sade's sole concern is the fate of four li ttle lambs.

VI I I . SADE'S DISAPPOINTMENT

In 179 1 Sade was to have his hour, and his months, o f triumph.

For the Revolution, which recognized in him one of i ts Fathers , made him a free and honored man. At the Theatre Moliere his Le Comle Oxtiern is being played ; in the streets th e people hum a Can tata to the Divine M arat whose author i s the Divine Marqui s . The brill iance o f his

X LI's In/ortunt·s d e f a I' ertu.

Th e President of Piques

28 + THE MARQUIS DE SADE

conversation, the breadth of his learning, the force of his hatred, everythi ng about Sa de spells a shining and safe career ahead. 'W ith his new friends he differs upon not more than one or two points : for example , like Marat, he favors a communist State ,9 but he would also like to retain a Prince to oversee the application of the new laws . Graver however is this : these new laws are to be mild and moderate. Capital punishment is ruled out of them. Though the heat of his passions may sometimes justify an individual' s crime, noth­ ing can excuse crime' s presence in the legal codes "which are by their very definition rational and of a dispassionate na­ ture. But here we have one of those delicate distinctions which escape a great many people, who are manifestly un­ able either to th ink clearly or to count . You put a man to the gallows, my good friends, for having killed another man : and 10 ! thc.t makes two men the less instead of one . " 10

Thus, and not without insolence, speaks Citizen-Secre­ tary Brutus Sade before a meeting of the Section of Piques. How does he sound ? how does he look ? He stands not so straight as he used to, after his years in the tyrant' s dun­ geons ; and he has put on weight, too. But ever the grand style , and the gr:lcious air, the same warmth of personality. A hint of obseqt: iousness. An engaging smile.

He smiles , as all disappointed people do. He is dis­ appointed. To be free, to be in the midst of life again, that's not everything. Troubles, problems are beginning to beset him from all sides. There's his notary, that insect Gaufridy, demanding money ; his sons, behaving as though their father did not exist ; his castles in Provence, threatened with demo­ lition, and being pillaged in the meantime. Right here in the Section he sees h imself closely watched by his fellow citizens. They expectcd >omething else from the ferocious Sade. Something else chan this level-headedness, these cantatas, this politeness ( at a time when the enemy besets us from

9 The theories put forward by Zame in A line et J7 alcour seem fairly exactly to represent Sade'. own political views.

10 Cf. Philosophy in the Bedro om, "Yet Another E ffort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans."

Jean Paulhan + 29

without while from within the fifth column saps our finances and seeks to starve us into submission) . Secretary-and even, a little later, President-of Piques : very nice, but one must s till earn one ' s living. He files a request for a head librarian's post . No reply. The theaters turn down his new plays which, i t would appear , are lacking in civism. "So they want civism, do they ? I ' ll give them all they can swallow," Sa de mutters, seated behind h i s President's desk. I t ' s a t that point that a l ittle old gentleman sn,eaks into his office on tip­ toe, somebody with an aristocratic past who'd like, thinks the Secretary, to become one of the boys ; who sits down off in a corner. Who positively looks, thinks the Secretary , as i f he were pissing in his pants. Who sits there fiddling stupidly with his cane ; who plainly deserves nothing better than to be purged, with his face of a weasel. Why, good heavens, if i t isn't the President de Montreuil ! The Enemy, the Persecutor to whom Sade i s indebted for some thirteen years in j ai l .

Well , Sade simply goes over and shakes hands with him. And cheers him up a bit. No need to worry, they'l l admit h im into the Section. And, you know, i t ' s not a l l fun and frolic at the Section. Poor Mon treui l puts on a big grin all the same. Three days l a ter an officer in the Army of the Somme, one Major Ramand, is brought before Sade. "You have a ided emigres to escape ?" E,ade demands. "I have." "That means death, you real ize ." "I real ize i t ," s ays the good Major. "Bah," says Sade. "Here's three hundred iivres and some i dentity papers. Off with you."n Another three days la ter, Ramand i s safe somewhere in the country­ side and Sade is behind bars in Les Madelonnettes. If he misses being executed it 's by a hairsbreadth and because Robespierre is sent to the guillotine. Sade i s released from pri son ; but he'll be back there shortly. This time it is for having printed a pamphlet against Josephine. Why a pam­ phlet, why against Josephine ? Probably for the same reason he treated Montreuil as a friend and released the Major.

1 1 "They wanted me to commit an inhumane act. I have never wanted to," Sade will l ater write in a l etter to Gaufridy.

Wherein Sade re turns to prison

3 0 .. THE MARQUIS DE SADE

The simplest explanation is the first one that comes to mind. In prisor . Sa de had become a writer. To be sure , he 'd already scribbl �d a l i ttle , pr ior to then, here and there. In­ deed, he'd sho1Vn himself able to wield a pretty pen, a s they say ; in the Troubadour manner (of course ; for he is Pro­ venc;al ) . But ir prison writing had been accompanied by a sort of revelati on.

I t i s impo ,sible to measure, even to glimpse, the whole extent of an achievement of which a bare fourth has sur­ vived the effect; of persecution ; the rest having been burned, pulped, l ost. Rather, i f you wish to obtain an idea of the fury-of the r;J ge-with which Sade proceeds, consider how for Les I nfort ;mes de fa Vertu he works out a meticulous outline, then writes the novel a first time, then writes it again, then wr tes i t yet again, each time expanding upon each detail, cor recting the least phrase or, better still , rein­ venting i t ; and the second version i s twice the length of the first ; the thi rd-fifteen hundred pages long-three times the l ength of the second. With Sade, writing is worse than a vice or a drug. It has simultaneously to do with passion and wi th duty. Now, directly he is set a t large, everything conspires agai l lst continuing-politics, children, business. How is one to keep afloat while writing ? Parasite, pimp, blackmailer-a , we know only too well, for him who has the need to write, • t 's write by hook or by crook. And the un­ lucky individu

Jean Paulhan 1- 3 1

nobleman up on nobody knew exactly what count. "What's that one in here for ?" Sade's j ailers used to wonder. "Seems like they got him for conspiracy against God." "Ever heard the l ike of i t ?"

Yes, the argument i s plausible . But shall we look a li ttle farther ? Sometimes a man will pursue fame, love, in­ dependence with such fervor that he overshoots the mark, with such passion that his passion will sometimes come to scorn what at first i t sought, to deri.de the meager products of such efforts. The glory you strove so hard after, was it this tattle in the press, these silly interviews, this being elected to Academies, and this popular tune whose author nobody knows ? Liberty, was it this ( scanty ) applause from the front rows ; these defiant approbations ; these votes which tomorrow will swing against you ? No, in order to be satisfied with a pittance, pride is not enough, you need vanity of the most stupid sort. Vanity, and also a fondness for being shortchanged, a desire to be cuckolded. At this point the driving forces within a man undergo a mysterious change in direction ; and the victor senses he has been van­ quished by his victory ; and the lover flees his mistress, and for the spirit that lusted after riches, poverty i s now the mark of well-being. Our hero delights in and at the same time i s exasperated by the silence his extravagant preten­ sions create around him ; the lover of liberty turns around and goes back to prison. Totally disgusted.

Yes, the explanation is plausible. However, I cannot say that i t greatly pleases me. Let us return to our ill-starred lambs.

IX. SADE HIMSELF, OR THE SOLUTION TO THE RIDDLE

Sadism did not used to be much talked about. Nowa­ days it is, in the newspapers and in serious books. The change is for the better. For this is an entirely natural and immediate trait in man, a trait he has possessed since the very beginning and which, when you come down to it , may

Causes of ti disappoint­ ment

Masochism 1S tncom­ prehensible

32 + THE MARQUIS DE SADE

be summed up in a few words: we demand to be happy ; we also demand that others be rather less happy than we. That this trait. may, under the pressure of circumstances, degener­ ate into frightful manias-this i s a matter upon which psychiatrists are qualified to speak, not I. Whether Sade was a sadist or not I don't know : the trial records shed l i ttle light upon the question. In the case we are best acquainted wi th-the Marseilles affair-Sade figures as a masochist, which i s the very opposite. I see that a t least once he flatly refused to be sadistic in spite of all sorts of encourage­ ment : his past grievances, his feelings of the moment, and the chorus of the Section of Piques . But it could be argued that the true sadist i s the one who declines to practice sadism on easy terms, who will not stand to be told when and where to give expression to his i diosyncrasy. Each of us is proud in his own way.

Over the l ast fifty years or so we have got into the habit of talking about masochism (which is what I have just done) as we do about sadism. With the same natural­ ness, in the same matter-of-fact way. As if it were a human characteristic no less simple, no less necessary than sadism ; and no less susceptible of becoming a mania either. I have no obj ection to that. But if i t is a natural characteristic, you'll admit i t is a very queer one ; queer almost to the point of being incredibl e ; and that to call i t natural requires considerable forjearance on our part.

If I take th e eye, for example , I note that i t i s subj ect to a wide range of anomalies. It can be farsighted, or my­ opic. I t can present yet rarer and ( l ike sadism ) yet more distinguished defects : amaurosis or diplopia . It is sometimes able to put its faultiness to profi t : it can be nyctalopic, and content to be so. ( Just as a sadist turns his sadism to advan­ tage ; a fter all , a well-ordered society can hardly do without public executioners ; at any rate, without judges and nurses and surgeons. ) So far so good. But never, never has there been found an eye that was afflicted by buzzings, hypera­ cusia or colored audition. Well, that, all else being equal, is what some claim in behalf of masochism.

Jean Paulhan + 33

When pa in experienced by others gives me pleasure, this pleasure I feel i s obviously an unusual feeling ; and doubtless a reprehensible one. In any case it i s a clear and comprehensible feeling, and an a rticle upon it can be in­ cluded in the Encyclopedia. But that my own pain be pleasure to me, that my humiliation be to me a dignification -thi s is no longer reprehensible or unusual , it is simply obscure, and it is only too easy for me to reply that if it i s pain, i t i sn ' t pleasure, if it's dignification, then it's not humili­ ation. If it's . . . And so on and so forth. Yet, however that may be, there does indeed exist, nobody will deny it , some­ thing which can be rightly termed masochism. To be more precise, there do indeed exist men, and women also, whom we must call masochists.

For there are some who seek nothing so eagerly as mockery and ridicule , and who thrive better on shame than on bread and wine : Philip of N eri, who used to caper in the streets and shave only one side of his face, preferred to pass for a madman than for a saint ; the sheik Abu Yazid al Bisthami would give urchins a couple of walnuts in exchange for a slap. There is no lack of persons who to their friends -and to those foremost among all the ir friends, themselves -fondly wish "suffering, abandon, infirmity, ill-treatment and dishonor and profound self-contempt and the martyr­ dom of self-distrust ."12 And others too who say with the Portuguese nun : "Increase the number of my affiictions ." To Masochism is anyone contending that behind whatever it may appear to be a universal this amounts to a clever attempt to assure oneself of the trait weal which follows after woe, and the honor which follows dishonor, and the triumph of esteem which follows after the ordeal of disdain, in keeping with some natural law of com- pensation, the reply would have to be that he had not very well grasped the question. But let me continue.

We see other persons who steer a steady course toward vexations and abuse , who, no matter where they happen to be, are extraordinarily alert and, through the workings of some unerring instinct, as if sensi t ized to the presence of a

12 Nietzsch e : The Will to Power.

The riddles find their solution

34 .. THE MARQUIS DE SADE

possible source of mistreatment and as if fascinated in ad­ vance, attracted, summoned by the cruel potenti alities they have somehow detected in a man everybody else sees as a decent and unexceptional chap. (Thus Justine . . . ) Or else, o f their own accord, with pecul iar willfulness march straight to where prison, trials, and death await them. (Thus Sade . . . )

Let there be no mistake : I do not pretend to be clear­ ing up the mystery, I do not in the least claim to be explain­ ing a difficult fact, a truly mysterious fact, which defies analysis now and has never yielded to i t in the past. No. Instructed by experience, my inclination would instead be to acknowledge th at in masochism we are deal ing with some­ thing veritable but incomprehensible ; with, to put it more vaguely, an oCCllrrence-a frequent occurrence , perhaps, but at any rate an obscure one, and one which remains impene­ trable to my in tell igence . ( After all, why these people are the way they a re i s more than I can fathom. ) In short, I concede to mystery its share in all this-and, doing so, I am at once rewarded for my modesty. I venture no comments about proud sp i ri ts who seek silence or greedy spi rits who seek poverty ( for I must own that the explanation I offered a li ttle while ago was, while banal, rather farfetched : that the proud spiri t , the greedy or the libertarian spirit , having been acquainted beforehand with the signs of glory, wealth, liberty, were in a poor posi tion to complain afterward ) .

For i f it h appens that man sometimes experiences that which i s not al together human, and to which no familiar habits or everyday usages apply-but natural man is not o ther than civi l ized man, nor I o ther than other human beings, nor kindliness o ther than perfidy, nor pain o ther than pleasure--sadism, in the final analysis , i s probably nothing else than the approach to and, as it were the (per­ haps maladroit and certainly odious ) testing of a truth so difficult and so mysterious that once it is acknowledged as such, the problems we have been helpless to resolve-and the very riddles Sade puts to Justine-become instantly and miraculously transparent. I t is as though i t were enough for

Jean Paulhan .. 3 5

me, in order to be able to see clearly ( to see my way clearly through questions and a world both mightily confused and absurd ) , to have once and for all taken obscurity into ac­ count.

Here it will be sa id to me, and very justly said, that the truth we are seeking is too inaccessible, and is as foreign to our language as to our understanding. So indeed it is, and i t should be plain that, rather than express it, I am simply endeavoring, once having set aside a space for i t to occupy, to encircle i t, to surround it. Though he fails to formulate it in thought or speech, the man who has suffered it one time and a thousand times, who has experienced it , still retains the resource of living i t, of being it . And I finally understand i n what sense Sade, like Pascal, Nietzsche, or Rimbaud, paid,. in what sense also he was able to merit the t itle of divine as i t was conferred upon him by a popular idiom which sometimes i s o f greater justness than the j udgments of critics, sometimes rings truer than the lines of poets.