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Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de SADE

Enveloppe rédigée de la main du Marquis de Sade

Paris s.d. (circa 1780), 11,5x9cm, une enveloppe.

Envelope addressed by hand by the Marquis de Sade
Envelope addressed by hand by Sade to Mademoiselle de Rousset, upper cover and flap preserved and later reused on verso as notepaper for some calculations.
To add to his elation, [Sade] had found on his arrival at la Coste a delightful woman, Marie-Dorothée de Rousset, who was engaged as a governess…she had previously been a playmate of the young Donatien’s at Saumane, despite being four years younger. It was Madame de Sade who had had the idea of bringing her to the castle to run the house. Marie-Dorothée won over the Marquis from their very first meeting, not so much by the features of her face, less shapely than those of the Marquise, but by her spirit…They were often seen together, talking on a stone bench. Their meetings seemed to be intellectual exchanges between two people equally adept at games of both love and language. Mademoiselle de Rousset batted off the libertine’s advances with a charming smile of friendship. Far from getting angry, as he would have done faced with recalcitrant virtue, the Marquis let himself be drawn into the sinuous dialectic of this woman, full of feeling and intellect. Completely inured to her partner’s attempts at seduction, she nonetheless knew how to turn them to the good in the form of the deepest and yet lightest emotion, something that resembled love without its gravity, and which above all quieted the body’s impulses to give itself freely up to the pleasures of conversation.” (Lever, Sade, p. 322).
It was with her that Sade spent his final days of freedom before being arrested at La Coste and imprisoned in the Château de Vincennes on the 7 September 1778.
Mademoiselle de Rousset, whom the Marquis took pleasure in nicknaming Milli Rousset, tried to intercede for her friend with his mother-in-law the Présidente de Montreuil, as well as ministers of state. In his letters during this period to this close friend, the Marquis took on the sobriquet of "Monsieur le 6", the number of his cell in the dungeons of Vincennes. She died on the 25th January 1784, leaving behind her "poulido caro" and the important correspondence between them.
Remains of wax seal and postal stamp. Calculations on the back probably in Sade’s hand and dated 1791.
Provenance : family archives.
cf Lever, p. 348.

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