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    The 120 Days of Sodom & Other Writings
    The 120 Days of Sodom & Other Writings
    The 120 Days of Sodom & Other Writings
    Ebook1,047 pages13 hours

    The 120 Days of Sodom & Other Writings

    By Marquis de Sade, Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse

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    • Literature

    • Power Dynamics

    • Morality

    • Philosophy

    • Literary Criticism

    • Forbidden Love

    • Epistolary Novel

    • Coming of Age

    • Star-Crossed Lovers

    • Historical Fiction

    • Sexual Awakening

    • Philosophical Debate

    • Libertine

    • Love Triangle

    • Fish Out of Water

    • Punishment

    • Politics

    • Orgies

    • Sexual Deviancy

    • 18th Century

    About this ebook

    The definitive compilation of texts from “a great, horrifying, but also vastly illuminating figure . . . one of the most radical minds in Western history” (Newsweek).
     
    The Marquis de Sade, vilified by respectable society from his own time through ours, apotheosized by Apollinaire as “the freest spirit that has yet existed,” wrote The 120 Days of Sodom while imprisoned in the Bastille. An exhaustive catalogue of sexual aberrations and the first systematic exploration—a hundred years before Krafft-Ebing and Freud—of the psychology of sex, it is considered Sade’s crowning achievement and the cornerstone of his thought. Lost after the storming of the Bastille in 1789, it was later retrieved but remained unpublished until 1904.
     
    In addition to The 120 Days, this volume includes Sade’s “Reflections on the Novel,” his play Oxtiern, and his novella Ernestine. The selections are introduced by Simone de Beauvoir’s landmark essay “Must We Burn Sade?” and Pierre Klossowski’s provocative “Nature as Destructive Principle.”
     
    “Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change.” —Marquis de Sade’s last will and testament
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateDec 1, 2007
    ISBN9780802199034
    The 120 Days of Sodom & Other Writings
    Author

    Marquis de Sade

    The Marquis de Sade was a French aristocrat, revolutionary and writer of violent pornography. Incarcerated for 32 years of his life (in prisons and asylums), the majority of his output was written from behind bars. Famed for his graphic depiction of cruelty within classic titles such as ‘Crimes of Love’ and ‘One Hundred Days of Sodom’, de Sade's name was adopted as a clinical term for the sexual fetish known as ‘Sadism’.

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    Reviews for The 120 Days of Sodom & Other Writings

    3/5

    190 ratings17 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Only one essential is missing from our happiness--pleasure through comparison, a pleasure which can only be born from the sight of the unhappy, and we see none of that breed here It's at the sight of the man who isn't enjoying what I have and who is suffering that I know the charm of being able to say: I am happier than he is. Wherever men are equal and differences do not exist, happiness will never exist.

      Following such ill-found advice I am left unable to rate or compare 120 Days of Sodom with anything. I support the publication of all ideas. That said, this is a vacuum, one absolutely bereft of pleasure or value. Steven Moore notes, "the 500 foam flecked pages that survive are admirable only for their balls-out daring." Reading this is the most uncomfortable experience. There is a philosophical undercurrent at play but one obscured by the buggery, shit-eating and torture. As noted in the introduction, the novel was written on a scroll while Sade was imprisoned and presumed lost in the storming of the Bastille. The project is only a third completed, the remaining sections exist only as notes punctuated by horribly explicit accounts. Based on the completed text, I think it fair to not shed any tears over the unwritten detail.
    • 2/5
      I really don't quite know how to review this book. I know that this was supposed to have been his magnum opus. But, "The 120 Days of Sodom" is one of the sickest books that I have read. It is one long series of sick stories after another. There is very little that redeems the book. No philosophy, nothing. I think that, by the time de Sade had come to writing this book, his mind had become quite unhinged with all the problems and sufferings that he had faced throughout his life. I think that, somehow, this book was his revenge against high society, that same society that had condemned him without mercy.
    • 5/5
      I know, I know...this book has a bad reputation. However, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I am all about freedom of speech, and this book has long been suggested as a prime example of why some people believe that we need censorship (which makes me love it even more). Please note, though, that this is an extremely graphic book and you may want to take very cautious measures whenever reading it. Once you start reading it, it's not something that can easily be forgotten.
    • 2/5
      Normally, a book this big doesn't take me this long to read. The subject matter, while expected to a point, was more graphic than I thought it would be.
    • 2/5
      Don't have a problem with sex, violence. But when you start involving children in it......I don't care how much of a literary legend you are supposed to be. Your book is getting closed. I knew what I was going into when I started reading this but I had no idea how casual the happenings would be described and to the extent in which these atrocities would be played out. This really is some VILE material. I am not squeamish but I wanted to take a bleach shower after reading this.
    • 4/5
      Rather interesting. I found it more readable than Justine. I've got to say that I wouldn't recommend it to very many people; parts of it made me uncomfortable (and if I get uncomfortable while reading a book, most people I know would be tempted to throw the book across the room!).
    • 2/5
      This is the only book that, upon reading, has made me feel physically ill. I believe that is a recommendation, of sorts.
    • 5/5
      A classic, in some circles. I'm not sure how much of a review this book actually needs, as it holds up to it's name. Anyone who recognizes the name Marquis de Sade will immediately visualize what words just sometimes do not justify. Most interesting, I find, is history likes to label this period as being morally above-all and to know that people like de Sade existed en mass makes one realize that "vulgarity" and fetish has merely become more mainstream rather than being born in this modern age.
    • 2/5
      This is the only book that, upon reading, has made me feel physically ill. I believe that is a recommendation, of sorts.
    • 3/5
      I would like to have given it an extra half star but my laptop skills let me down. I love the idea of this guy writing this and causing moral outrage at the time. The literary skill is very high and I admire the thought gone into the story line. The father of modern erotica deserves to be read - even if the subject matter is sometimes hard to enjoy.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      (Original Review, 2008)Good old erotica. Instead of just 'lets do it'.....wine and dine, ballroom dance, see the city lights, drink some coffee, and then 'lets do it'.The book is quite mildly interesting regarding the psychology of sexuality. It describes the the progression/escalation of some types of non-normative types of sexuality and sexual fetishes to serious deviations from the norm. One example in the book is the evolution from 'normal' sexual penetration in the first part to full-scale mass piquerism in the last part. Which is why Bloch, Hirschfeld and Eulenberg found the book very relative to their studies of human sexuality.On the other hand, this book is deeply unpleasant, I forced myself to read almost all of it and somewhat regret the experience. It took me some time ( years ) to get over it, 120 Days is certainly not a titillating pornographic novel like American Psycho, which is disturbing as you can 'get off' on the sex and murder thinly veiled as literature. Arguing over whether it is literature misses the point. Philosophically, it describes a particular point on the map. A brutal, bleak, horrifying philosophical space, but a space nonetheless. The main characters in Sade don't just torture people to death, they describe in great detail why they are doing it. It's a description of what happens when power ends up in very bad people's hands, at the same time as it's a rational refutation of religion and superstition.Personally,I think the way to understand De Sade is as a global pioneer in the art of trolling. His actual sexual acts were fairly tame in the broad scheme of things - 15 year-old servants, but people were getting married at that age in his time. As far as history records, his actual practical sexual tastes didn't extend much further than a little light flagellation and buggery. What he really loved was to shock and upset people with what he wrote, and he was extraordinarily good at it. In 'Philosophy in the Bedroom', he extends the theory that God must want us to have anal sex, or he wouldn't have made our arseholes so deliciously tight. In one paragraph he lands a perfect hit on both sexually prudish Christians and atheistic, Rousseau-ite Pangloss / Natural Man types. Troll perfection! But it's more about unpacking what the concept of 'troll' might mean. There have always been people who enjoy poking away at society's dark places through transgressive writing. De Sade was very good at spotting the hypocrisy of the morality and dogma of his time, and at picking it to pieces and laying it bare. During the period, Christians (as some do now) were prone to explaining the world in terms of God's intentions, within a tradition that goes back to Boethius. But Rousseau had painted a picture of a world in which everything is as nature intends, and that if we follow nature, all will be well. In the example I gave, De Sade managed to poke fun at both parties in one go, pointing out by implication that all of the distasteful things in life might also be made the way God or nature intended, including the most distasteful human desires. I used the term 'troll' because I think that De Sade would have loved the internet, and would have totally understood the urge to get a reaction by giving calculated offence. But I also think that you can see a broader picture around the people who do that now if you put it into historical context. Many contemporary 'trolls' probably also feel that they are exposing hypocrisy and broadening minds.De Sade was 'lucky' enough to exist at a time of great personal affluence in his class, and huge personal peril. I think he would have loved the internet with its infinite possibilities.Bottom-line: No, the book is not really aiming to be titillating at all. It's an experiment to see how far boundaries and morality can be pushed...and then push a step further, and a step further, on and on to see what the logical conclusion is. I think I'm pretty unflappable but I couldn't make it through it. Nauseating. Very boring reading, out of this world monologues and almost no smut.
    • 5/5
      I love this book. It is an absolute masterpiece.
    • 2/5
      I just don't get it. A laundry list of horrifying events.
    • 2/5
      Ok ok, so I know the Marquis De Sade is known for his graphic and sometimes skewed depictions of sexuality, but I found this to be a bit much. Don't get me wrong, I highly respect the fact that he did a lot for freedom and sexual expression, but from an English standpoint, I found the book to be very repetitive (though I understand this was a draft copy and the final would have probably been much better). Some parts went on much to long. Case in point, the coprophilia. I found the novel to be one of the most graphic I have ever read. Overall, I give De Sade credit because the novel brought a lot of weird tastes forward and helped pave the way for modern erotica, though I don't have any desire to read the novel again...
    • 3/5
      It is De Sade after all. If you have no clue who he is I highly suggest searching him on the net before you pick up the book. Not for those who want only to see the happy bright side of life. It is a very dark book with graphic descriptions including child sexual abuse, scatology and sexual murder of children.

      Did I enjoy the content? It was revolting. It's a shame the man couldn't produce any other type of book. His writing itself was fantastic. [No, writing does not mean content]

      That being said, the man can write to a 5 level but most will consider the content a negative 5. The content is a negative 5 but the writing itself is a 5
    • 1/5
      A word to those who put this on their to-read list: I'm fairly certain this version of the book is the watered down version. If you want to read the original, there's an e-book version floating around online. That's what I read. Of course I didn't like it. This was the most disgusting book I've ever read, and I doubt there is any as vile out there in the world. For grammar and wording it would receive 5 stars; de Sade is certainly intelligent...the more to fear him. Th...more A word to those who put this on their to-read list: I'm fairly certain this version of the book is the watered down version. If you want to read the original, there's an e-book version floating around online. That's what I read. Of course I didn't like it. This was the most disgusting book I've ever read, and I doubt there is any as vile out there in the world. For grammar and wording it would receive 5 stars; de Sade is certainly intelligent...the more to fear him. The book is about four disgusting men who decide to assign men to kidnap hundreds of children, choose from ten young boys and girls (the others are sold as prostitutes), then hole themselves in a secluded location. Along with them are four old women (employed to keep watch over the chilren), several well-endowed men used for the purpose of you-guess-what to the four men in charge and the children, and four women storytellers who amuse the main men (the self-proclaimed libertines) by recalling stories from their lives of prostitution. The libertines are disgusting...in the introduction we are told of how they've killed their own children and raped all of them, as well as killed many others, so you know what's in store for later. However, they like to prolong everything, which is why they don't deflower the children from the very beginning, and why the stories start out only slightly shocking. As time goes on, the stories get more disgusting (bodily functions come into play), but still readable. After the stories are told, the libertines like to re-enact much of that told in the stories. Over time one begins to feel like Sade exhausted all of his perverse ideas...this is a false security. The real horrors begin in the second-to-last chapter, the forty-third day, in which violence begins to mingle with sexual acts. It's like a Saw series from the 1700s, but with violence AND sex, which makes it all the worse in my opinion. There are innumerable horrors done to pregnant women, toddlers and even an infant mentioned to have been raped, teeth being pulled out to be replaced with red-hot nails, arms twisted...I'm only scratching the surface here. As I read, I felt like I was going to faint from horror, disgust, and shock, or puke...whichever came first. There was even a point where I felt like screaming in terror because of what I read. I had to use my courage to press on, and even then I had to skim sometimes. The whole thing is more terrifying if you imagine what went through the children's minds during those months of sexual and violent torture. Of course, the libertines can't control their violent lust, so the elders, the studs, the storytellers, their own wives, and even some of the hired help are tortured. They start declaring who's to die each day: one of the deaths is described in great detail and is probably one of the most squeamish events in the book. At the very end, de Sade lists the number of all those holed up in this secluded place, and the number who survived: 16 out of 46, and not one of those survivors left without missing some fingers, an eye, a broken bone, etc. Most who end up reading this story, like me, did so just to prove they can finish. I sincerely hope there weren't any who got enjoyment out of it...if you can masturbate to this, you should feel guilty. This is one of the books people read and come away feeling a complete despair for humanity; most can only stomach a chapter a day. If you want to sicken your friends at a party, whip the book out and have them read a certain portion out loud.
    • 2/5
      The tags give a fair idea of what to expect. No real plot, but the framing device is that a group of French lords gather in a large country house along with various servants and prostitutes and proceed to have sex in as many different ways as possible.The book splits into four parts, the first is the most detailed, whilst the other three are little more than lists. The acts described become more and more extreme, culminating in mutilation and murder. The prose is at best indifferent and the whole is difficult to recommend, except as a curio.

    Book preview

    The 120 Days of Sodom & Other Writings - Marquis de Sade

    The Marquis de Sade

    The 120 Days of Sodom and other writings

    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

    The Marquis de Sade

    The 120 Days of Sodom and other writings

    COMPILED AND TRANSLATED BY

    AUSTRYN WAINHOUSE & RICHARD SEAVER

    WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY

    SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR & PIERRE KLOSSOWSKI

    Copyright © 1966 by Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver

    Must We Burn Sade? by Simone de Beauvoir copyright © 1955 by Editions Gallimard, Paris, France; translation copyright © 1953 by Grove Press, New York. Nature as Destructive Principle, by Pierre Klossowski copyright © 1964 by Au Cercle du Livre Précieux, translation copyright © 1965 by Yale French Studies.

    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, of the facilitation thereof, 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.

    Published simultaneously in Canada

    Printed in the United States of America

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Sade, marquis de, 1740–1814.

    The 120 days of Sodom and other writings.

    Bibliography: p.

    Includes index.

    1. Sade, marquis, de, 1740–1814—Translations, English. 2. Erotic literature, French—Translations into English. 3. Erotic literature, English—Translations from French. I. Wainhouse, Austryn. II. Seaver, Richard. III. Title. IV. Title: One hundred twenty days of Sodom and other writings. V. Title: Marquis de Sade.

    PQ2063.S3A28     1987       843’.6                            87-7394

    ISBN-10: 0-8021-3012-7

    ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-3012-9

    Grove Press

    an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

    841 Broadway

    New York, NY 10003

    Distributed by Publishers Group West

    www.groveatlantic.com

    08 09 10 25 24 23 22 21 20

    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: The essay by Simone de Beauvoir Must We Burn Sade? was originally published in the December 1951 and January 1952 issues of Les Temps Modernes as Faut-il brûler Sade? and was subsequently reprinted in the collection of the author’s essays entitled Privilèges. The English translation first appeared in The Marquis de Sade, published by Grove Press in 1954, and is here reprinted in a slightly revised translation by permission of the publisher and the translator. Nature as Destructive Principle, by Pierre Klossowski, served as an introduction to the Au Cercle du Livre Précieux edition of Les 120 Journées de Sodome. This essay is a slightly revised and condensed version of the chapter entitled Esquisse du Système from the author’s book, Sade mon prochain, published by Editions du Seuil, Paris, France, 1947. It is here reprinted by permission of the author and of the editor of Yale French Studies. The editors wish especially to thank Miss Marilynn Meeker for her meticulous job of editing, and for the number and diversity of her suggestions.

    To the memory of Maurice Heine, who freed Sade from the prison wherein he was held captive for over a century after his death, and to Gilbert Lely, who has unselfishly devoted himself to this same task of liberation and restitution.

    Contents

    Foreword

    Part One Critical

    Must We Burn Sade? by Simone de Beauvoir

    Nature as Destructive Principle by Pierre Klossowski

    Part Two from Les Crimes de l’ Amour

    Reflections on the Novel (1800)

    Villeterque’s Review of Les Crimes de l’Amour (1800)

    The Author of Les Crimes de l’Amour to Villeterque, Hack Writer (1803)

    Florville and Courval, or The Works of Fate (1788)

    Part Three The 120 Days of Sodom (1785)

    Part Four Theater

    Oxtiern, or The Misfortunes of Libertinage (1800)

    Ernestine, A Swedish Tale (1788)

    Bibliography

    Foreword

    There is an opinion worth pondering, which may perhaps become the prevailing one among Sade’s more thoughtful readers: according to it, the immense fragment occupying the better part of the present volume deserves to be considered his crowning achievement, his masterpiece. Certainly, behind that estimate lie special criteria. Perverse criteria, one may feel, as one penetrates into a world where, as though in the Château of Silling itself, the appeal to ordinary standards evokes only sardonic silences. Nowhere, indeed, is Sade at such a remove from literature and its reassurances, nowhere does his assault upon ordinary standards reach such a pitch of unpitying absoluteness, nowhere is its violence so categorical or sustained for so long as in The 120 Days of Sodom. To this darkest of novels, to this book of purest destruction, to this unsurpassed novel of terror and signal act of terrorism, Sade attached a capital importance. Chronologically, it was his first major work: the year was 1785, he was forty-five and by then had made up his mind about what his writer’s task was to consist of. This psychopathia sexualis was to be its beginning and end. It was—it would have been—his definitive labor and crime of love.

    In themselves, the details of the manuscript’s disappearance and rediscovery make a remarkable story, whose essentials are given in the note preceding the work; here we need only say that the grand event inaugurating the Revolution Sade awaited so impatiently cost him the text in which he had consigned everything of the most intimate and extreme of his own revolt. Over the loss of his 120 Days, which was engulfed in the pillage that followed the Bastille’s capture, they were tears of blood he wept. It was, and Sade knew it, his masterpiece that had gone astray, insists Maurice Heine in his preface to the first edition. The remainder of his literary life was to be dominated by the concern to remedy the consequences of that irreparable accident. With painful perseverance he strove to attain again the mastery that had been his at the supreme height of his solitude and his misanthropy.

    The life of the Marquis de Sade was an incredible series of misfortunes, and what is perhaps most incredible of all was his capacity to withstand them. No doubt whatsoever, he invited trouble; it came his way unfailingly. Adversity or, more exactly, the cruel privations of confinement made Sade a writer in the first place—he said so, jubilantly, promising to take a prodigious revenge. Upon the prisoner’s fare of eternal anxiety his genius thrived, and the very frailty of words scratched on thin paper, the constant possibility that his persecutors intervene, that authority arbitrarily confiscate or tear to pieces all he had toiled to put together, lent a further dimension to his helpless vulnerability and his rage.

    It was thanks to the Revolution that Sade obtained his freedom. Overjoyed at his release, eager to participate in the movement of his times, he soon found himself in another nightmare. His disappointment was almost immediate and withering; but this too he overcame. In prison he had learned patience and cunning and duplicity and the techniques of unfeeling indifference, of what he called apathy; and these were the resources he drew upon to survive in the midst of the Nation and to outlast the Reign of Virtue. When his lawyer Gaufridy wondered about the Marquis’ political views, Citizen Sade assured him they were just what circumstances demanded, and nothing if not mobile. Today it requires, more than mere naïveté to tax Sade with insincerity. If anyone hated the ancien régime, it was he; but he realized at once something it has taken French historians until now to be clear on: that, precious misunderstandings and popular duperies aside, 1789 was a proprietors’ uprising calculated to secure and consolidate the position and interests of the bourgeoisie alone. How little he sympathized with the Incorruptible’s aim to bring forth a Republic cemented by blood Sade was able to illustrate when, as a judge, and to his mortal peril, he declined to sentence members of the opposition to death, explaining that while one might commit crimes for the sake of pleasure, it was not among his principles to murder in the name of justice.

    Elusive, paradoxical figure! On the one hand, Le Comte Oxtiern ou les Effets du Libertinage, presented to a public whose approval mattered so deeply to the playwright Sade; on the other hand, that Theory of Libertinage¹ Restif de la Bretonne had got wind of and shrilled against in advance of its eventual publication by the monster-author—the contrast is extreme and it is strange. What conclusions must one arrive at regarding the man who, while citing Samuel Richardson and the creator of Joseph Andrews as the outstanding explorers of the human heart, Nature’s veritable labyrinth, was filling the more than one hundred notebooks of Les Journées de Florbelle, ou la Nature dévoilée, his effort to reconstitute The 120 Days?

    Again and again we are led back to a fundamental contradiction in Sade; and there, one senses, lies the entire problem of situating him. Introducing the volume that preceded this one, we alluded to the difficulty when we spoke of the two designs corresponding to two drives: to write in order to be read, and to write unreadably, in such a way as to preclude being read, and in answer to a very different but equally real purpose. To be known, and to be unknown; to divulge, and to conceal. To reintegrate society and broad daylight, and to hold to his cell, immuring himself in the night. Sade wanted both, and both at once.

    It was he who classified his works as L (lumière) or S (sombre), or else signed some and refrained from acknowledging others, and even disavowed Justine, his spiritual autobiography, so vigorously and so systematically protesting the allegations that the book was his as to establish the solidest grounds for suspicions to the contrary. Thus his public and his clandestine writings—if they represent antithetical attitudes and intentions—were in a dialectical sense complementary, and in a psychological sense inseparable. The drama of his life, precisely, was their reconciliation.

    A.W., R.S.

    The Marquis de Sade

    Part One

    Critical

    Must We Burn Sade?

    by Simone de Beauvoir

    1

    Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change.

    They chose to kill him, first by slow degrees in the boredom of the dungeon and then by calumny and oblivion. This latter death he had himself desired. The ditch once covered over, above it acorns shall be strewn in order that, the spot become green again and the copse grown back thick over it, the traces of my grave may disappear from the face of the earth as I trust the memory of me shall fade out of the minds of all men. . . .¹ This was the only one of his last wishes to be respected, though most carefully so. The memory of Sade has been disfigured by preposterous legends,² his very name has buckled under the weight of such words as sadism and sadistic. His private journals have been lost, his manuscripts burned—the ten volumes of Les Journées de Florbelle at the instigation of his own son—his books banned. Though in the latter part of the nineteenth century Swinburne and a few other curious spirits became interested in his case, it was not until Apollinaire that he assumed his place in French literature. However, he is still a long way from having won it officially. One may glance through heavy, detailed works on The Ideas of the Eighteenth Century, or even on The Sensibility of the Eighteenth Century, without once coming upon his name. It is understandable that as a reaction against this scandalous silence Sade’s enthusiasts have hailed him as a prophetic genius; they claim that his work heralds Nietzsche, Stirner, Freud, and surrealism. But this cult, founded, like all cults, on a misconception, by deifying the divine marquis only betrays him. The critics who make of Sade neither villain nor idol, but a man and a writer, can be counted upon the fingers of one hand. Thanks to them, Sade has come back at last to earth, among us.

    Just what is his place, however? Why does he merit our interest? Even his admirers will readily admit that his work is, for the most part, unreadable; philosophically, it escapes banality only to founder in incoherence. As to his vices, they are not startlingly original; Sade invented nothing in this domain, and one finds in psychiatric treatises a profusion of cases at least as interesting as his. The fact is that it is neither as author nor as sexual pervert that Sade compels our attention; it is by virtue of the relationship which he created between these two aspects of himself. Sade’s aberrations begin to acquire value when, instead of enduring them as his fixed nature, he elaborates an immense system in order to justify them. Inversely, his books take hold of us as soon as we become aware that for all their repetitiousness, their platitudes and clumsiness, he is trying to communicate an experience whose distinguishing characteristic is, nevertheless, a tendency to be incommunicable. Sade tried to make of his psycho-physical destiny an ethical choice; and of this act, in which he assumed his separateness, he attempted to make an example and an appeal. It is thus that his adventure assumes a wide human significance. Can we, without renouncing our individuality, satisfy our aspirations to universality? Or is it only by the sacrifice of our individual differences that we can integrate ourselves into the community? This problem concerns us all. In Sade the differences are carried to the point of outrageousness, and the immensity of his literary effort shows how passionately he wished to be accepted by the human community. Thus, we find in his work the most extreme form of the conflict from which no individual can escape without self-deception. It is the paradox and, in a sense, the triumph of Sade that his persistent singularity helps us to define the human drama in its general aspect.

    In order to understand Sade’s development, in order to grasp the share of his freedom in this story, in order to assess his success and his failure, it would be useful to have precise knowledge of the facts of his situation. Unfortunately, despite the zeal of his biographers, Sade’s life and personality remain obscure on many points. We have no authentic portrait of him, and the contemporary descriptions which have come down to us are quite poor. The testimony at the Marseilles trial shows him at thirty-two, a handsome figure of a man, full faced, of medium height, dressed in a gray dress coat and deep orange silk breeches, a feather in his hat, a sword at his side, a cane in his hand. Here he is at fifty-three, according to a residence certificate dated the 7th of March, 1793: Height: five feet two inches; hair: almost white; round face; receding hairline; blue eyes; medium nose; round chin. The description of the 22nd of March, 1794, is a bit different: Height: five feet two inches, medium nose, small mouth, round chin, grayish blond hair, high receding hairline, light blue eyes. He seems by then to have lost his handsome figure, since he writes a few years later, in the Bastille, I’ve taken on, for lack of exercise, such an enormous amount of fat that I can hardly move about. It is this corpulence which first struck Charles Nodier when he met Sade in 1807 at Sainte-Pélagie. An immense obesity which hindered his movements so as to prevent the exercise of those remains of grace and elegance that still lingered in his general comportment. There remained, nevertheless, in his weary eyes an indefinable flash and brilliance which took fire from time to time, like a dying spark on a dead coal. These testimonies, the only ones we possess, hardly enable us to visualize a particular face. It has been said³ that Nodier’s description recalls the aging Oscar Wilde; it suggests Robert de Montesquiou and Maurice Sachs as well, and it tempts us to imagine a bit of Charlus in Sade, but the data is very weak.

    Even more regrettable is the fact that we have so little information about his childhood. If we take the description of Valcour for an autobiographical sketch, Sade came to know resentment and violence at an early age. Brought up with Louis-Joseph de Bourbon, his contemporary, he seems to have defended himself against the selfish arrogance of the young prince with such displays of anger and brutality that he had to be taken away from court. Probably his stay in the gloomy château of Saumane and in the decaying abbey of Ebreuil left its mark upon his imagination, but we know nothing significant about his brief years of study, his entry into the army, or his life as an amiable man of fashion and debauchee. One might try to deduce his life from his work; this has been done by Pierre Klossowski, who sees in Sade’s implacable hatred of his mother the key to his life and work. But he derives this hypothesis from the mother’s role in Sade’s writings. That is, he restricts himself to a description of Sade’s imaginary world from a certain angle. He does not reveal its roots in the real world. In fact, we suspect a priori, and in accordance with certain general notions, the importance of Sade’s relationship with his father and mother; the particular details are not available to us. When we meet Sade he is already mature, and we do not know how he has become what he is. Ignorance forbids us to account for his tendencies and spontaneous behavior. His emotional nature and the peculiar character of his sexuality are for us data which we can merely note. Because of this unfortunate gap, the truth about Sade will always remain closed to us; any explanation would leave a residue which only the childhood history of Sade might have clarified.

    Nevertheless, the limits imposed on our understanding ought not to discourage us, for Sade, as we have said, did not restrict himself to a passive submission to the consequences of his early choices. His chief interest for us lies not in his aberrations, but in the manner in which he assumed responsibility for them. He made of his sexuality an ethic; he expressed this ethic in works of literature. It is by this deliberate act that Sade attains a real originality. The reason for his tastes is obscure, but we can understand how he erected these tastes into principles, and why he carried them to the point of fanaticism.

    Superficially, Sade, at twenty-three, was like all other young aristocrats of his time; he was cultured, liked the theater and the arts, and was fond of reading. He was dissipated, kept a mistress—la Beauvoisin—and frequented the brothels. He married, without enthusiasm and in conformance to parental wishes, a young girl of the petty aristocracy, Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil, who was, however, rich. That was the beginning of the disaster that was to resound—and recur—throughout his life. Married in May, Sade was arrested in October for excesses committed in a brothel which he had been frequenting for over a month. The reasons for arrest were grave enough for Sade to send letters, which went astray, to the governor of the prison, begging him to keep them secret, lest he be hopelessly ruined. This episode suggests that Sade’s eroticism had already assumed a disquieting character. This hypothesis is confirmed by the fact that a year later Inspector Marais warned the procuresses to stop giving their girls to the Marquis. But the interest of all this lies not in its value as information, but in the revelation which it constituted for Sade himself. On the verge of his adult life he made the brutal discovery that there was no conciliation possible between his social existence and his private pleasures.

    There was nothing of the revolutionary nor even of the rebel about young Sade. He was quite prepared to accept society as it was. At the age of twenty-three he was obedient enough to his father⁴ to accept a wife whom he disliked, and he envisaged no life other than the one to which his heredity destined him. He was to become a husband, father, marquis, captain, lord of the manor, and lieutenant-general. He had not the slightest wish to renounce the privileges assured by his rank and his wife’s fortune. Nevertheless, these things could not satisfy him. He was offered activities, responsibilities, and honors; nothing, no simple venture interested, amused, or excited him. He wished to be not only a public figure, whose acts are ordained by convention and routine, but a live human being as well. There was only one place where he could assert himself as such, and that was not the bed in which he was received only too submissively by a prudish wife, but in the brothel where he bought the right to unleash his fantasies.

    And there was one dream common to most young aristocrats of the time. Scions of a declining class which had once possessed concrete power, but which no longer retained any real hold on the world, they tried to revive symbolically, in the privacy of the bedchamber, the status for which they were nostalgic: that of the lone and sovereign feudal despot. The orgies of the Duke of Charolais, among others, were bloody and famous. Sade, too, thirsted for this illusion of power. What does one want when one is engaged in the sexual act? That everything around you give you its utter attention, think only of you, care only for you . . . every man wants to be a tyrant when he fornicates. The intoxication of tyranny leads directly to cruelty, for the libertine, in hurting the object that serves him, tastes all the pleasures which a vigorous individual feels in making full use of his strength; he dominates, he is a tyrant.

    Actually, whipping a few girls (for a consideration agreed upon in advance) is rather a petty feat; that Sade sets so much store on it is enough to cast suspicion upon him. We are struck by the fact that beyond the walls of his little house it did not occur to him to make full use of his strength. There is no hint of ambition in him, no spirit of enterprise, no will to power, and I am quite prepared to believe that he was a coward. He does, to be sure, systematically endow his heroes with traits which society regards as flaws, but he paints Blangis with a satisfaction that justifies the assumption that this is a projection of himself, and the following words have the direct ring of a confession: A steadfast child might have hurled this giant into a panic. . . he would become timid and cowardly, and the mere thought of even the mildest combat, but fought on equal terms, would have sent him fleeing to the ends of the earth. The fact that Sade was at times capable of extravagant boldness, both out of rashness and generosity, does not invalidate the hypothesis that he was afraid of people and, in a more general way, afraid of the reality of the world.

    If he talked so much about his strength of soul, it was not because he really possessed it, but because he longed for it. When faced with adversity, he would whine and get upset and become completely distraught. The fear of want which haunted him constantly was a symptom of a much more generalized anxiety. He mistrusted everything and everybody because he felt himself maladjusted. He was maladjusted. His behavior was disorderly. He accumulated debts. He would fly into a rage for no reason at all, would run away, or would yield at the wrong moment. He fell into every possible trap. He was uninterested in this boring and yet threatening world which had nothing valid to offer him and from which he hardly knew what to ask. He was to seek his truth elsewhere. When he writes that the passion of jealousy subordinates and at the same time unites all other passions, he gives us an exact description of his own experience. He subordinated his existence to his eroticism because eroticism appeared to him to be the only possible fulfillment of his existence. If he devoted himself to it with such energy, shamelessness, and persistence, he did so because he attached greater importance to the stories he wove around the act of pleasure than to the contingent happenings; he chose the imaginary.

    At first Sade probably thought himself safe in the fool’s paradise which seemed separated from the world of responsibility by an impenetrable wall. And perhaps, had no scandal broken out, he would have been but a common debauchee, known in special places for rather special tastes. Many libertines of the period indulged with impunity in orgies even worse. But scandal was probably inevitable in Sade’s case. There are certain sexual perverts to whom the myth of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is perfectly applicable. They hope, at first, to be able to gratify their vices without compromising their public characters. If they are imaginative enough to see themselves, little by little, in a dizziness of pride and shame, they give themselves away—like Charlus, despite his ruses, and even because of them. To what extent was Sade being provocative in his imprudence? There is no way of knowing. He probably wished to emphasize the radical separation between his family life and his private pleasures, and probably, too, the only way he could find satisfaction in this clandestine triumph lay in pushing it to the point where it burst forth into the open. His surprise is like that of the child who keeps striking at a vase until it finally breaks. He was playing with fire and still thought himself master, but society was lying in wait. Society wants undisputed possession. It claims each individual unreservedly. It quickly seized upon Sade’s secret and classified it as crime.

    Sade reacted at first with prayer, humility, and shame. He begged to be allowed to see his wife, accusing himself of having grievously offended her. He begged to confess and open his heart to the priest. This was not mere hypocrisy. A horrible change had taken place overnight; natural, innocent practices, which had been hitherto merely sources of pleasure, had become punishable acts. The young charmer had changed into a black sheep. He had probably been familiar since childhood—perhaps through his relations with his mother—with the bitter pangs of remorse, but the scandal of 1763 revived them dramatically. Sade had a foreboding that he would henceforth, and for the rest of his life, be a culprit. For he valued his diversions too highly to think, even for a moment, of giving them up. Instead, he rid himself of shame through defiance. It is significant that his first deliberately scandalous act took place immediately after his imprisonment. La Beauvoisin accompanied him to the château of La Coste and, taking the name of Madame Sade, danced and played before the Provençal nobility, while the Abbé de Sade was forced to stand dumbly by. Society denied Sade illicit freedom; it wanted to socialize eroticism. Conversely, the Marquis’ social life was to take place henceforth on an erotic level. Since one cannot, with any peace of mind, separate good from evil and devote one’s self to each in turn, one has to assert evil in the face of good, and even as a function of good.

    Sade tells us repeatedly that his ultimate attitude has its roots in resentment. Certain souls seem hard because they are capable of strong feelings, and they sometimes go to rather extreme lengths; their apparent unconcern and cruelty are but ways, known only to themselves, of feeling more strongly than others.⁵ And Dolmancé⁶ attributes his vice to the wickedness of men. ’Twas men’s ingratitude dried out my heart, their perfidy which destroyed in me those baleful virtues for which, perhaps, like you, I was also born. The fiendish morality which he later established in theoretical form was first a matter of actual experience.

    It was through Renée-Pélagie that Sade came to know all the insipidity and boredom of virtue. He lumped them together in the disgust which only a creature of flesh and blood can arouse. But he learned also from Renée, to his delight, that Good, in concrete, fleshly, individual form, can be vanquished in single combat. His wife was not his enemy, but like all the wife-characters she inspired, a choice victim, a willing accomplice. The relationship between Blamont and his wife is probably a fairly precise reflection of Sade’s with the Marquise. Blamont takes pleasure in caressing his wife at the very moment that he is hatching the blackest plots against her. To inflict enjoyment—Sade understood this 150 years before the psychoanalysts, and his works abound in victims submitted to pleasure before being tortured—can be a tyrannical violence; and the torturer disguised as lover delights to see the credulous lover, swooning with voluptuousness and gratitude, mistake cruelty for tenderness. The joining of such subtle pleasures with the performance of social obligation is doubtless what led Sade to have three children by his wife.

    And he had the further satisfaction of seeing virtue become the ally of vice, and its handmaiden. Madame de Sade concealed her husband’s delinquencies for years; she bravely engineered his escape from Miolans, fostered the intrigue between her sister and the Marquis, and later lent her support to the orgies at the château of La Coste. She went even so far as to inculpate herself when, in order to discredit the accusations of Nanon, she hid some silverware in Nanon’s bags. Sade never displayed the least gratitude. In fact, the notion of gratitude is one at which he keeps blasting away most furiously. But he very obviously felt for her the ambiguous friendship of the despot for what is unconditionally his. Thanks to her, he was able not only to reconcile his role of husband, father, and gentleman with his pleasures, but he established the dazzling superiority of vice over goodness, devotion, fidelity, and decency, and flouted society prodigiously by submitting the institution of marriage and all the conjugal virtues to the caprices of his imagination and senses.

    If Renée-Pélagie was Sade’s most triumphant success, Madame de Montreuil, his mother-in-law, embodies his failure. She represents the abstract and universal justice which inevitably confronts the individual. It was against her that he most eagerly entreated his wife’s support. If he could win his case in the eyes of virtue, the law would lose much of its power, for its most formidable arms were neither prison nor the scaffold, but the venom with which it could infect vulnerable hearts. Renée became perturbed under the influence of her mother. The young canoness grew fearful. A hostile society wormed its way into Sade’s household and dampened his pleasures, and he himself yielded to its power. Defamed and dishonored, he began to doubt himself. And that was Madame de Montreuil’s supreme crime against him. A guilty man is, first of all, a man accused; it was she who made a criminal of Sade. That is why he never left off ridiculing her, defaming her, and torturing her throughout his writings; he was killing off his own faults in her. There is a possible basis for Klossowski’s theory that Sade hated his own mother; the singular character of his sexuality suggests this. But this hatred would never have been inveterate had not Renée’s mother made motherhood hateful to him. Indeed, she played such an important and frightful role in the life of her son-in-law that it may well be that she was the sole object of his attack. It is certainly she, in any case, whom he savagely submits to the jeers of her own daughter in the last pages of Philosophy in the Bedroom.

    If Sade was finally beaten by his mother-in-law and by the law, he was an accomplice to this defeat. Whatever the role of chance and of his own imprudence in the scandal of 1763, there is no doubt that he afterward sought a heightening of his pleasures in danger. We may therefore say that he desired the very persecutions which he suffered with indignation. Choosing Easter Sunday to inveigle the beggar, Rose Keller, into his house at Arcueil meant playing with fire. Beaten, terrorized, inadequately guarded, she ran off, raising a scandal for which Sade paid with two short terms in prison.

    During the following three years of exile which, except for a few periods of service, he spent on his estate in Provence, he seemed sobered. He played the husband and lord of the manor most conscientiously. He had two children by his wife, received the homage of the community of Saumane, attended to his park, and read and produced plays, including one of his own, in his theater. But he was ill-rewarded for this edifying behavior. In 1771, he was imprisoned for debt. Once he was released, his virtuous zeal cooled off. He seduced his young sister-in-law, of whom he seemed, for a while, genuinely fond. She was a canoness, a virgin, and his wife’s sister, all of which lent a certain zest to the adventure. Nevertheless, he went to seek still other distractions in Marseilles, and in 1772 the affair of the aphrodisiac candies took on unexpected and terrifying proportions. While in flight to Italy with his sister-in-law, he and Latour, his valet, were sentenced to death in absentia, and both of them were executed in effigy on the town square of Aix. The canoness took refuge in a French convent, where she spent the rest of her life, and he hid away in Savoy. He was caught and locked up in the château of Miolans, but his wife helped him escape. However, he was henceforth a hunted man. Whether roaming through Italy or shut up in his castle, he knew that he would never be allowed a normal life.

    Occasionally, he took his lordly role seriously. A troupe of actors was staying on his estate to present Le Mari cocu, battu et content. Sade, irritated perhaps by the title, ordered that the posters be defaced by the town clerk, as being disgraceful and a challenge to the freedom of the Church. He expelled from his property a certain Saint-Denis, against whom he had certain grievances, saying, I have every right to expel all loafers and vagrants from my property. But these acts of authority were not enough to amuse him. He tried to realize the dream which was to haunt his books. In the solitude of the château of La Coste, he set up for himself a harem submissive to his whims. With the aid of the Marquise, he gathered together several handsome valets, a secretary who was illiterate but attractive, a luscious cook, a chambermaid, and two young girls provided by bawds. But La Coste was not the inaccessible fortress of The 120 Days of Sodom; it was surrounded by society. The maids escaped, the chambermaid left to give birth to a child whose paternity she attributed to Sade, the cook’s father came to shoot Sade, and the handsome secretary was sent for by his parents. Only Renée-Pélagie conformed to the character assigned to her by her husband; all the others claimed the right to live their own lives, and Sade was once again made to understand that he could not turn the real world of hard fact into a theater.

    This world was not content to thwart his dreams; it repudiated him. Sade fled to Italy, but Madame de Montreuil, who had not forgiven him for having seduced her younger daughter, lay in wait for him. When he got back to France, he ventured into Paris, and she took advantage of the occasion to have him locked up, on the 13th of February, 1777, in the château of Vincennes. He was sent back to Aix, was tried and fined there for his Marseilles escapade, and on his way back to Paris, under guard, he escaped and took refuge at La Coste, where, under the resigned eye of his wife, he embarked on the idyl with his housekeeper, Mademoiselle Rousset. But by the 7th of September, 1778, he was back again at Vincennes, locked up behind nineteen iron doors, like a wild beast.

    And now begins another story. For eleven years—first at Vincennes and then in the Bastille—a man lay dying in captivity, but a writer was being born. The man was quickly broken. Reduced to impotence, not knowing how long his imprisonment would last, his mind wandered in delirious speculation. With minute calculations, though without any facts to work on, he tried to figure out how long his sentence would last. He recovered possession of his intellectual powers fairly quickly, as can be seen from his correspondence with Madame de Sade and Mademoiselle Rousset. But the flesh surrendered, and he sought compensation for his sexual starvation in the pleasures of the table. His valet, Carteron, tells us that he smoked like a chimney and ate enough for four men while in prison. Extreme in everything, as he himself declares, he became wolfish. He had his wife send him huge hampers of food, and he grew increasingly fat. In the midst of complaints, accusations, pleas, supplications, he still amused himself a bit by torturing the Marquise; he claimed to be jealous, accused her of plotting against him, and when she came to visit him, found fault with her clothes and ordered her to dress with extreme austerity. But these diversions were few and pallid. From 1782 on, he demanded of literature alone what life would no longer grant him: excitement, challenge, sincerity, and all the delights of the imagination. And even then, he was extreme; he wrote as he ate, in a frenzy. After Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man came The 120 Days of Sodom, Les Infortunes de la Vertu, Aline et Valcour. According to the catalogue of 1788, he had by then written thirty-five acts for the theater, half a dozen tales, almost all of Le Portefeuille d’un homme de lettres, and the list is probably still incomplete.

    When Sade was freed, on Good Friday of 1790, he could hope and did hope that a new period lay open before him. His wife asked for a separation. His sons (one was preparing to emigrate and the other was a Knight of Malta) were strangers to him; so was his good, husky farm wench of a daughter. Free of his family, he whom the old society had called an outcast was now going to try to adapt himself to the one which had just restored to him his dignity as a citizen. His plays were performed in public; Oxtiern was even a great success; he enrolled in the Piques Section and was appointed President; he enthusiastically wrote speeches and drew up petitions. But the idyl with the Revolution did not last long. Sade was fifty years old, had a questionable past and an aristocratic disposition, which his hatred of the aristocracy had not subdued, and he was once again at odds with himself. He was a republican and, in theory, even called for complete socialism and the abolition of property, but insisted on keeping his castle and properties. The world to which he tried to adapt himself was again an all too real world whose brutal resistance wounded him. And it was a world governed by those universal laws which he regarded as abstract, false, and unjust. When society justified murder in their name, Sade withdrew in horror.

    Anyone who is surprised at Sade’s discrediting himself by his humaneness instead of seeking a governor’s post in the provinces, a post that would have enabled him to torture and kill to his heart’s content, does not really understand Sade. Does anyone suppose that he liked blood the way one likes the mountains or the sea? Shedding blood was an act whose meaning could, under certain conditions, excite him, but what he demanded, essentially, of cruelty was that it reveal to him particular individuals and his own existence as, on the one hand, consciousness and freedom and, on the other, as flesh. He refused to judge or condemn, or to witness anonymous death from afar. He had hated nothing so much in the old society as the claim to judge and punish, to which he himself had fallen victim; he could not excuse the Terror. When murder becomes constitutional, it becomes merely the hateful expression of abstract principles, something without content, inhuman. And this is why Sade as Grand Juror almost always dismissed the charges against the accused. Holding their fate in his hands, he refused to harm the family of Madame de Montreuil in the name of the law. He was even led to resign from his office of President of the Piques Section. He wrote to Gaufridy: I considered myself obliged to leave the chair to the vice-president; they wanted me to put a horrible, an inhuman act to a vote. I never would. In December, 1793, he was imprisoned on charges of moderatism. Released 375 days later, he wrote with disgust: My government imprisonment, with the guillotine before my eyes, did me a hundred times more harm than all the Bastilles imaginable. It is by such wholesale slaughters that the body politic shows only too clearly that it considers men as a mere collection of objects, whereas Sade demanded a universe peopled with individual beings. The evil which he had made his refuge vanished when crime was justified by virtue. The Terror, which was being carried out with a clear conscience, constituted the most radical negation of Sade’s demoniacal world.

    The excesses of the Terror, wrote Saint-Just, have dulled the taste for crime. Sade’s sexuality was not stilled by age and fatigue alone; the guillotine killed the morbid poetry of eroticism. In order to derive pleasure from the humiliation and exaltation of the flesh, one must ascribe value to the flesh. It has no sense, no worth, once one casually begins to treat man as a thing. Sade was still able to revive his past experience and his old universe in his books, but he no longer believed in them with his blood and nerves. There is nothing physical in his attachment to the woman he calls The Sensitive Lady. He derived his only erotic pleasures from the contemplation of the obscene paintings, inspired by Justine, with which he decorated a secret chamber. He still had his memories, but he had lost his drive, and the simple business of living was too much for him. Liberated from the social and familial framework which he nevertheless needed, he dragged on through poverty and illness. He quickly ran through the money realized from the unprofitable sale of La Coste. He took refuge with a farmer, and then in a garret, with the son of The Sensitive Lady, while earning forty sous a day working in the theatricals at Versailles.

    The decree of the 28th of June, 1799, which forbade the striking of his name from the list of aristocratic émigrés on which it had been placed, made him cry out in despair: Death and misery, this then is the recompense I receive for my everlasting devotion to the Republic. He received, however, a certificate of residence and citizenship; and in December, 1799, he played the part of Fabrice in Oxtiern. But by the beginning of 1800, he was in the hospital of Versailles, dying of cold and hunger, and threatened with imprisonment for debt. He was so unhappy in the hostile world of so-called free men that one wonders whether he had not chosen to be led back to the solitude and security of prison. We may say, at least, that the imprudence of circulating Justine and the folly of publishing Zoloé, in which he attacks Josephine, Tallien, Madame Tallien, Barras, and Bonaparte, imply that he was not too repelled by the idea of another confinement.⁷ Conscious or not, his wish was granted; he was locked up in Sainte-Pélagie on the 5th of April, 1801, and it was there, and later at Charenton—where he was followed by Madame Quesnet, who, by pretending to be his daughter, obtained a room near his own—that he lived out the rest of his life.

    Of course, Sade protested and struggled as soon as he was shut up, and he continued to do so for years. But at least he was able again to devote himself in peace to the passion which had replaced sensual pleasure: his writing. He wrote on and on. Most of his papers had been lost when he had left the Bastille, and he thought that the manuscript of The 120 Days of Sodom—a fifteen-yard roll which he had carefully hidden and which was saved without his knowing it—had been destroyed. After Philosophy in the Bedroom, published in 1795, he composed a new opus, a modified and completely developed version of Justine, followed by Juliette. These two volumes, of which he disclaimed the authorship, appeared in a ten-volume edition in 1797. He had Les Crimes de l’Amour publicly printed. At Sainte-Pélagie, he became absorbed in an immense ten-volume work, Les Journées de Florbelle. The two volumes of La Marquise de Gange must also be attributed to him, though the work did not appear under his name.

    Probably because the meaning of his life lay henceforth in his work as a writer, Sade now hoped only for peace in his daily life. He took walks with The Sensitive Lady in the garden of the retreat, wrote comedies for the patients, and had them performed. He agreed to compose a divertissement on the occasion of a visit to Charenton in 1812 by the Archbishop of Paris. On Easter Sunday, 1805, he distributed the holy bread and took up the collection in the parish church. His will proves that he had renounced none of his beliefs, but he was tired of fighting. He was polite to the point of obsequiousness, says Nodier, gracious to the point of unctuousness . . . and he spoke respectfully of everything the world respects. According to Ange Pitou, the ideas of old age and of death horrified him. This man turned pale at the idea of death, and would faint at the sight of his white hair. He expired in peace, however, carried off by a pulmonary congestion in the form of asthma on the 2nd of December, 1814.

    The salient feature of his tormented life was that the painful experience of living never revealed to him any solidarity between other men and himself. The last scions of a decadent aristocracy had no common purpose to unite them. In the solitude to which his birth condemned him, Sade carried erotic play to such extremes that his peers turned against him. When a new world opened to him, it was too late; he was weighed down with too heavy a past. At odds with himself, suspect to others, this aristocrat, haunted by dreams of despotism, could not sincerely ally himself with the rising bourgeoisie. And though he was roused to indignation by its oppression of the people, the people were nevertheless foreign to him. He belonged to none of the classes whose mutual antagonisms were apparent to him. He had no fellow but himself. Perhaps, had his emotional make-up been different, he might have resisted this fate, but he seems always to have been violently egocentric. His indifference to external events, his obsessive concern with money, the finical care with which he worked out his debauches, as well as the delirious speculations at Vincennes and the schizophrenic character of his dreams, reveal a radically introverted character. Though this passionate self-absorption defined his limits, it also gave his life an exemplary character, so that we examine it today.

    2

    Sade made of his eroticism the meaning and expression of his whole existence. Thus, it is no idle curiosity that leads us to define its nature. To say with Maurice Heine that he tried everything and liked everything is to beg the question. The term algolagnia hardly helps us to understand Sade. He obviously had very marked sexual idiosyncrasies, but they are not easy to define. His accomplices and victims kept quiet. Two flagrant scandals merely pushed aside, for a moment, the curtain behind which debauch usually hides. His journals and memoirs have been lost, his letters were cautious, and in his books he invents more than he reveals a out himself. I have imagined everything conceivable in this sort of thing, he writes, but I have certainly not done, and certainly never will, all that I have imagined. His work has not unreasonably been compared to the Psychopathia Sexualis of Krafft-Ebing, to whom no one would dream of attributing all the perversions he catalogued.

    Thus, Sade established systematically, according to the prescriptions of a kind of synthetic art, a repertory of man’s sexual possibilities. He certainly never experienced nor even dreamed them all up himself. Not only does he tell tall stories, but most of the time he tells them badly. His tales resemble the engravings that illustrate the 1797 edition of Justine and Juliette. The characters’ anatomy and positions are drawn with a minute realism, but the awkward and monotonous expressionlessness of their faces makes their horrible orgies seem utterly unreal. It is not easy to derive a genuine testimony from all the cold-blooded orgies that Sade concocted. Nevertheless, there are some situations in his novels which he treats with special indulgence. He shows special sympathy with some of his heroes, for example, Noirceuil, Blangis, and Gernande, and particularly Dolmancé, to whom he attributes many of his own tastes and ideas. Sometimes, too, in a letter, an incident, or a turn of dialogue, we are struck unexpectedly by a vivid phrase which we feel is not the mere echo of a foreign voice. It is precisely such scenes, heroes, and texts as these that we must examine closely.

    In the popular mind, sadism means cruelty. The first thing that strikes us in Sade’s work is actually that which tradition associates with his name: beatings, bloodshed, torture, and murder. The Rose Keller incident shows him beating his victim with a cat-o’-nine-tails and a knotted cord and, probably,⁸ slashing her with a knife and pouring wax on the wounds. In Marseilles, he took from his pockets a parchment cat covered with bent pins and asked for switches of heather. In all his behavior toward his wife, he displayed obvious mental cruelty. Moreover, he has repeatedly expressed himself on the pleasure to be derived from making people suffer. But he hardly enlightens us when he merely repeats the classical doctrine of animal spirits. It is simply a matter of jangling all our nerves with the most violent possible shock. Now, since there can be no doubt that pain affects us more strongly than pleasure, when this sensation is produced in others, our very being will vibrate more vigorously with the resulting shocks. Sade does not eliminate the mystery of the conscious pleasure which follows from this violent vibration. Fortunately, he suggests more honest explanations elsewhere.

    The fact is that the original intuition which lies at the basis of Sade’s entire sexuality, and hence his ethic, is the fundamental identity of coition and cruelty. Would the paroxysm of pleasure be a kind of madness if the mother of the human race [Nature] had not intended that anger and the sexual act express themselves in the same way? What able-bodied man . . . does not wish . . . to bedevil his ecstasy? Sade’s description of the Duc de Blangis in the throes of orgasm is certainly to be interpreted as a transposition in epic terms of Sade’s own practices: . . . frightful cries, atrocious blasphemies sprang from the Duc’s swollen breast, flames seemed to dart from his eyes, he foamed at the mouth, he whinnied like a stallion . . . and he even strangled his partner. According to Rose Keller’s testimony, Sade himself began to shriek very loud and fearfully before cutting the cords which immobilized his victim. The Vanilla and Manilla letter proves that he experienced orgasm as if it were an epileptic seizure, something aggressive and murderous, like a fit of rage.

    How are we to explain this peculiar violence? Some readers have wondered whether Sade was not, in fact, sexually deficient. Many of his heroes—among them his great favorite, Gernande—are inadequately equipped, and have great difficulty in erection and ejaculation. Sade must certainly have been aware of these problems but such semi-impotence seems rather to have been the result of excessive indulgence, as in the case of many of his debauchees, several of whom are very well endowed. Sade makes frequent allusions to his own vigorous temperament. It is, on the contrary, a combination of passionate sexual appetites with a basic emotional apartness which seems to me to be the key to his eroticism.

    From adolescence to prison, Sade had certainly known the insistent, if not obsessive, pangs of desire. There is, on the other hand, an experience which he seems never to have known: that of emotional intoxication. Never in his stories does sensual pleasure appear as self-forgetfulness, swooning, or abandon. Compare, for example, Rousseau’s outpourings with the frenzied blasphemies of a Noirceuil or a Dolmancé, or the flutters of the Mother Superior in Diderot’s La Religieuse with the brutal pleasures of Sade’s tribades. The male aggression of the Sadean hero is never softened by the usual transformation of the body into flesh. He never for an instant loses himself in his animal nature; he remains so lucid, so cerebral, that philosophic discourse, far from dampening his ardor, acts as an aphrodisiac. We see how desire and pleasure explode into furious crisis in this cold, tense body, impregnable to all enchantment. They do not constitute a living experience within the framework of the subject’s psycho-physiological unity. Instead, they blast him, like some kind of bodily accident.

    As a result of this immoderation, the sexual act creates the illusion of sovereign pleasure which gives it its incomparable value in Sade’s eyes, for all his sadism strove to compensate for the absence of one necessary element which he lacked. The state of emotional intoxication allows one to grasp existence in one’s self and in the other, as both subjectivity and passivity. The two partners merge in this ambiguous unity; each one is freed of his own presence and achieves immediate communication with the other. The curse which weighed upon Sade—and which only his childhood could explain—was this autism which prevented him from ever forgetting himself or being genuinely aware of the reality of the other person. Had he been cold by nature, no problem would ever have arisen; but his instincts drove him toward outside objects with which he was incapable of uniting, so that he was forced to invent singular methods for taking them by force. Later, when his desires were exhausted, he continued to live in that erotic universe of which, out of sensuality, boredom, defiance, and resentment, he had constructed the only world which counted for him; and the aim of his strategies was to induce erection and orgasm. But even when these were easy for him, Sade needed deviations to give to his sexuality a meaning which lurked in it without ever managing to achieve fulfillment, an escape from consciousness in his flesh, an understanding of the other person as consciousness through the flesh.

    Normally, it is as a result of the vertigo of the other made flesh that one is spellbound within one’s own flesh. If the subject remains confined within the solitude of his consciousness, he escapes this agitation and can rejoin the other only by conscious performance. A cold, cerebral lover watches eagerly the enjoyment of his mistress and needs to affirm his responsibility for it because he has no other way of attaining his own fleshly state. This behavior, which compensates for separateness by deliberate tyranny, may properly be called sadistic. Sade knew, as we have seen, that the infliction of pleasure may be an aggressive act, and his tyranny sometimes took on this character, but it did not satisfy him. To begin with, he shrinks from the kind of equality which is created by mutual pleasure. If the objects who serve us feel ecstasy, they are then much more often concerned with themselves than with us, and our own enjoyment is consequently impaired. The idea of seeing another person experience the same pleasure reduces one to a kind of equality which spoils the unutterable charms that come from despotism. And he declares, more categorically, Any enjoyment is weakened when shared.

    And besides, pleasant sensations are too mild; it is when the flesh is torn and bleeding that it is revealed most dramatically as flesh. No kind of sensation is keener and more active than that of pain; its impressions are unmistakable. But in order for me to become flesh and blood through the pains I have inflicted, I must recognize my own state in the passivity of the other. Therefore, the person must have freedom and consciousness. The libertine would really deserve pity if he acted upon an inert, unfeeling object. That is why the contortions and moans of the victim are necessary to the torturer’s happiness, which explains why Verneuil made his wife wear a kind of headgear that amplified her screams. In his revolt, the tortured object asserts himself as my fellow creature, and through his intervention I achieve the synthesis of spirit and flesh which was first denied me.

    If the aim is both to escape from one’s self and to discover the reality of other existences, there is yet another way open: to have one’s flesh mortified by others. Sade is quite aware of this. When he used the cat-o’-nine-tails and the switch in Marseilles, it was not only to whip others with, but also to be whipped himself. This was probably one of his most common practices, and all his heroes happily submit to flagellation. No one doubts nowadays that flagellation is extremely effective in restoring the vigor destroyed by the excesses of pleasure. There was another way of giving concrete form to his passivity. In Marseilles, Sade was sodomized by his valet, Latour, who seems to have been accustomed to render him this sort of service. His heroes imitate him sedulously, and he declared aloud in no uncertain terms that the greatest pleasure is derived from a combination of active and passive sodomy. There is no perversion of which he speaks so often and with so much satisfaction, and even impassioned vehemence.

    Two questions immediately arise for those given to labeling individuals. Was Sade a sodomite? Was he basically a masochist? As to sodomy, his physical appearance, the role played by his valets, the presence at La Coste of the handsome, illiterate secretary, the enormous importance which Sade accords to this fantasy in his writings, and the passion with which he advocates it, all confirm the fact that it was one of the essential elements of his sexual character. Certainly, women played a great role in his life, as they do in his work. He knew many, had kept Mlle. Beauvoisin and other less important mistresses, had seduced his sister-in-law, had gathered young

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