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Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de SADE

Lettre autographe à sa femme. Souffrance et philosophie : « si l'on pouvait lire au fond de mon cœur, voir tout ce qu'elle y opère cette conduite-là, je crois qu'on renoncerait à l'employer ! »

S.n., s.l. 17 août 1780, 10x16cm, 2 pages sur un feuillet.

Handwritten letter to his wife. Sufferance and philosophy: “Punish as much as you like, but do not kill me: I did not deserve it [...] Ah! If you could read to the bottom of my heart, see everything that happens there, I think you would give up using it!”

Handwritten letter from the Marquis de Sade addressed to his wife. One recto-verso leaf written in fine, tight writing. It has the partial date at the top “ce jeudi 17” “this Thursday 17th.” 
Two slight signs of folding. The end of the letter was mutilated at the time, probably by the prison administration which destroyed the Marquis' licentious correspondence. So, several months later, in March 1781 his wife wrote to him: “My dear, you really must change your style so that your letters can reach me whole. If you give the truth, it offends, turns against you. If you give any untruths, they say: this is an incorrigible man, always with the same head that ferments, ungrateful, false etc. In any case, your style can only harm you. So change it.”
The letter was found as it was when, in 1948, the Marquis' trunk, that had been sealed by the family since 1814, was open and it was published in this reduced form in the correspondence of the Marquis de Sade.
Provenance: family archives.
 
This letter was written on 17 August 1780, during the Marquis' incarceration in Vincennes Prison. Following the umpteenth altercation with the prison guard, the right to go for a walk was taken away from him on 27 June and was not reinstated until 9 March the following year. The Marquis' physical and mental health is strongly affected by not being able to go out and he constantly begs Renée-Pélagie for the right to be quickly reinstated: “I urge you to let me get some fresh air: I absolutely cannot take it any longer.”
The suffering caused by these deprivations is a pretext for setting up a mechanism of guilt and blackmail with his wife: “There, three days that I have felt an awful dizziness, with blood rushing to my head so much so that I do not know how I have not fainted. One of these days, they will find me dead and you will be responsible, after having warned you as I do and having asked you for the help which I need to avoid it.”
Here, the Marquis is intentionally pulling on Renée-Pélagie's heartstrings, really putting her Christian values to the test and giving her the role of grand inquisitor: “You can grant me what I ask for, whilst keeping, on your signal, the same strength.”
We note, as in Tancrède's letter, a new appearance of “signal,” which masks completely different semantics.
An essential component of the Marquis' prison mindset, this encoded language, like the fantasised interpretations of his correspondents' letters, feeds the theories of researchers, philosophers, mathematicians... and poet biographers. As such, Gilbert Lely estimates that, far from being symptomatic of psychosis, the return to signals is “his psyche's defence reaction, a subconscious struggle against despair where, without the help of such a distraction, his motivation could have declined.” Missing from his correspondence during his eleven years of freedom, these enigmatic semantic depths, “a real challenge to semiological judgement” (Lever p.637), reappear in his Charenton diary.
This letter is also an opportunity for the Marquis to deploy his rhetorical panel, confronting the sadistic antonyms in the same sentence. “Pleasure” is synonymous with “abominable” “revolting,” “cemetery”and “garden” are superimposed, “I suffer” is conjugated as “I enjoy” and “softness” stands alongside “darkness.” The mastered practice of this eloquence exercise is united with the depths of Sadian thought: sufferance and pleasure are closely mixed, simultaneously endured, inflicted and desired. Through these associations, we glimpse the sensitive Manicheism of the Marquis's philosophical thought, which reaches its climax at the end of the letter, perfectly clear despite having a part missing: “Yes, I perceive evil, and I perceive that it is done; it is an inevitable perversity of man; but I only perceive when some pleasure...”
Yet the Marquis's status as a martyr is a real test of Sade's philosophy that justifies the suffering of others in the name of selfish pleasure.
In reality, despite the “black wickedness” of the “sublime arrangement” “sublime arrangement” to which he is subjected, Sade, far from denying his philosophy by experiencing it, does not claim a single part of the unwarranted pleasure, but the mere consideration of an “extreme need.” “Far from asking for pleasures,” on the contrary, the prisoner justifies the lack of expected satisfaction through a lengthily argument: “They only have to grant me a half hour and only three or four times per week, such a long time that I should have to be without it. I tell you that I will count all of this time, that is to say, the time since it was taken away from me and all the time when I only had half an hour, I will count, I tell you, all of this time as not having to go out at all.”
Also, this convoluted demonstration is essential to understand the Marquis's behaviour. At the hands of his jailers – and his wife – he makes himself a willing victim, only asking for “basic help”:
“Be sure that I am only asking for what is absolutely necessary and that I am suffering a thousand times more for having to ask than I enjoy what is granted to me.”
The letter uncovers an element as essential as it is unknown about the Marquis's personality. He is not content – following the example of the Sadian characters in his novels – to be the instigator of the defect, but he takes on the position of the victim to whom only the right – and the means – to live must be granted: “Punish as much as you like, but do not kill me: I did not deserve it”.
This demand is to be compared with his future novels, in which the vulnerable characters, victims of the most unspeakable tortures, are always granted a brief moment of respite during which their executioners suspend their punishment. These interruptions take the form of philosophical intervals, during which the torturers are the standard-bearers of Sadian ideas.
Therefore, it is not the Sade persecutor but a wounded captive who will draw on the heart of his prison sufferance to incite the punishments of the 120 Days of Sodom, as evidenced by this fantastic premonitory confession: “Ah! If you could read to the bottom of my heart, see everything that happens there, I think you would give up using it!”
 

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