Letters From Prison (21 page)

As for your reproach,
“he says everything,”
you will explain it to me whenever it suits you, for I do not understand it, nor do I understand any better the ways you say you have used to get through to me. The only others I know are the deleted lines: ’tis from there I have taken everything I have said. This I am ready to prove. If it pertains to something else, then I do not understand what you mean, and indeed do not believe there is even any possibility of something else. If there were, or were it to come to pass, I swear to you that I would be the first to divulge it, knowing full well there is never any change in the rules except to impose one more torture. I have learned it all too well from harsh experience to seize the bait anymore, and I do not advise anyone to put me to any such test, for I would very quickly ferret out what was afoot Here I gloss over a very cruel invective on your part:
“Your friendship has tarnished my good name.
” Mademoiselle, I have the highest opinion of your good name. But I am not yet fallen so low as to fear that my friendship might tarnish it . . . You may perhaps have had some other friends, before me, who. . . How is your health today, Mademoiselle Rousset? You see where all these empty amenities must lead us both: to bitterness, and thence in the long run to hatred. I am therefore right in declaring to you that no matter what you may say or reply to that, I shall hold my tongue. In general, that is what I plan to do in the future; therefore receive from me
the most solemn oath,
and overlook this letter and the one I am going to write in response to Madame de Sade. I hereby declare to you that I intend to limit myself to asking for things I absolutely need and to talking about the weather. Go back to the first of April; examine my letters written during that period, and if they do not bear out what I say, you can call me all the names in the book. If I am to be caned like a schoolboy, at least it will not be for my letters, and I shall eliminate that pretense from my torturers. You want to deprive me of the single consolation I still have in the midst of my misfortunes, that of believing there is a fixed date to my term . . . 1) ’Tis a foul thing to do. Why break a child’s toy? 2) ’Tis false to tell me the contrary, because there is nothing more clear and obvious in the world; of that I have the most compelling proofs, and were you not yourself convinced of that I’d convince you in short order with unanswerable arguments . . . But when is the fixed date? Ah! that is what I know not, and what I do not flatter myself that I do. Thus you may without fear say on that subject that my calculations are wrong, for I have given up making any. What you tell me that I should say about my mother-in-law is precisely what I have said, and all you have done is ape me. You overly complicate, change, demolish, augment my sentences as you see fit, and all that simply to annoy me and worry me to death, isn’t that so? Well, I say to you once again that you will not succeed. And in the future, my profound silence will demonstrate how greatly I scorn all these half-starved little subterfuges that I regard as the effect of the hysteric vapors to which the people of that house are sorely prone.
They make fun of your threats,
you add,
nor do they fear them . . .
That I believe. However, the proof that they do indeed fear me is shown by the tight leash on which they keep me; one does not keep chains on people you despise. I
want to call Peter to account for cheating Paul. .
. That’s a rich one! What! do you fancy that because I am in prison my business advisers have had the right to rob me blind without my calling them to account? Think again; I shall call them most severely to account, and if they have stolen from me I shall get rid of them, that I swear to you. I conclude not with
Mademoiselle
but with
my dear friend, 
and to that I add a further most urgent request not to leave without me, no matter how long they may keep me here; I beseech you in the name of that friendship of which you assure me some spark still remains in you; I beg of you to restore it to me in full, and as proof thereof to wait for me, and not to increase my misfortunes and my despair by this threat and by the bitterness of your letters.

1
. There was a plan afoot that, if all else failed in the efforts to have Sade released, all three children would be dispatched to Versailles to beseech the king to do so. Sade was appalled at the idea.

16. To Madame de Sade

May 16, 1779

I
have no idea what all this endless repetition is about, nor why, when I ask you for objects that would make my life a trifle easier, all I get in response are crossed-out lines. You must be very weary of all those platitudes, for they are very boring. The fact is, I still am without everything I asked you for, and there is nothing to suggest that ’tis about to be granted to me. If my former room
¹
is unavailable as you indicate in your crossed-out lines, let them give me another. That one or another one, I care not. ’Tis not to the room I was attached, for most assuredly it was dreadful, but to the view and to the fresh air one could breathe there. Any room on the same floor will have the same advantages, and I am very sure that many of them on those floors are empty. I have already told you twenty times over that this past winter in the room where I presently am I suffered all one can suffer; that it is extremely humid and unhealthy, that from this room you can barely see the sky, and that its air passages have been stopped up for fear that the prisoner might fly out of them.
For in here ’tis the one thing they fear most. 
And so I ask, and ask most urgently, to be shifted to another. I ask for a room on the upper floors, I don’t care which, provided one can have a fire there in winter, which is impossible in this one, and that it have air and light; that is all I ask of it. As for the walk, which you say cannot be granted to me more than four times a week, one should start by giving me my walk four times a week, for at present ’tis only three; but even assuming there were four, I would still complain, considering that, for my health’s sake, I have the most urgent need of fresh air at least an hour each day, and that is what I am asking for. For the past fifteen nights in a row—I took the trouble to count them—I have not had a wink of sleep, or at most what they call a cat nap each night, and I hope and trust I shall soon be ill from it. If ‘twere the death of me, nothing would suit me better. Farewell. I tried to drink some barley water, my stomach couldn’t take it, I had to cease and desist.

And so I very urgently request that I be allowed at least an hour of fresh air every day. Why are some granted this favor, and not me along with the rest? Oh! verily, I am well aware that those are the commandant’s
²
little pet doggies
and that for having spoken out too truthfully I’m not one of the happy few. Let him take his little revenge, but he still does not have leave to allow a man to die! When one asks for more frequent walks, they raise the objection—or so you tell me—that ’tis out of the question because there are so many prisoners. ’Tis an outrage that the vigilant eye of the minister does not take steps to remedy the shameful and odious abuse that goes on here in this regard. Why, given the miserable little courtyard of this dreary dungeon, which is about as big as your hand, does the worthy commander begin by walling off three-quarters of it, and then forbid anyone to set foot in it? That’s the kind of horror they perpetrate here and nowhere else. In all the prisons one can name the wardens have gardens—nothing more simple, they take therefrom whatever is produced—but they are open to the prisoners, who are allowed in them as much as they like. And ’tis this abominable constriction of space here that makes the prisoners’ walks so few and far between. With the little land there is, divided as it is, four prisoners guarded by sentinels as everywhere else—and not by the employees who serve the food, which is another abuse that explains why walks cannot be granted more often—could have walks four at a time, and if I were in charge here, even with thrice as many prisoners I’d have all of them out walking twice as much as they do now.

Does the commandant fear that his apples and pears may get eaten? I do not say that hunger cannot sometimes tempt one to such an act, but one would have to be what is known as a very 
ill-bredfellow
to go and steal the fruit from a garden where one has been allowed to walk. Such a fear most assuredly does not attest to the high opinion of the people he is accustomed to have here. It seems to me that if I were in his shoes I’d have a very strong aversion to eating any fruit from a garden whose preservation I knew was being
bought by the health of some miserable inmates.
Those pears may aptly be called
choke-pears. 
Such then, my dear friend, are some of the little infamies which, together with a good many others, put me in such ill humor this past winter, at this very moment, and will continue to do so—
a little more fruitfully, I hope
—anent this odious place, and which makes me say and say again that amongst all the methods your mother has used against me, the one I am least apt to forget is that of having allowed herself to be blinded
by the entire clique
that has an interest in stocking this house, and of having had me incarcerated here. It seems to me that I have written enough about it from Aix so that at least they ought to have put me somewhere else, since I was destined to suffer even more. But in a word, I beseech you to obtain for me the objects I have so often asked you for in my more recent letters, or at least to have me transferred to another prison, since I absolutely cannot cope with the abominable existence in this one, suffering as I am here like one of the damned.

The breeches fit me very nicely; the little cookies are as always excellent, and ‘twill be quite some time before I tire of them: please keep sending them and feel free to increase the quantity; the pens are detestable: I ask you for big quills from “Griffon’s,”
³
which cost a penny; Griffon’s does an excellent job of sharpening the points. The sponge cake is not at all what I asked for: 1) I wanted it iced everywhere, both on top and underneath, with the same icing used on the little cookies; 2) I wanted it to be chocolate inside, of which it contains not the slightest hint; they have colored it with some sort of dark herb, but there is not what one could call the slightest suspicion of chocolate. The next time you send me a package, please have it made for me, and try to have some trustworthy person there to see for themselves that some chocolate is put inside. The cookies must smell of chocolate, as if one were biting into a chocolate bar.
⁴
And so in the very next package: a cake like the one I have just described, 6 ordinary ones, 6 iced, and two little pots of Brittany butter, but well and carefully selected. I believe they have a shop for that in Paris, like the one selling Provençal goods where you go for oil.

When you have proved to me that you are taking care of me by obtaining the articles I ask for, I shall do the same for you by returning posthaste the notice you wish. Meanwhile, I cover your hands with kisses.

Please do send me as soon as possible a pair of steel buckles, only shoe buckles, no other. I only want you to pay three francs at the most, since when I am free I shall buy some stylish ones. Mine have just broken; and buckles at the price I request will do just fine here. Pick a pair that La Jeunesse will like, because when I get out they shall be for him.

1
. That is, cell number 11, where he was incarcerated on February 15, 1777, two days after his arrest at the Hotel de Danemark. The cell was higher than the dungeon walls and therefore was literally “a room with a view.”

2
. The warden, Monsieur de Rougemont.

3
. A stationer, the quality of whose merchandise Sade admired.

4
. Sade loved sweets of any kind, but chocolate in any shape or form he held in the highest esteem. His ravenous appetite for sweets and his enforced sedentary ways resulted in his increasing problem of obesity, which was to plague him the rest of his life.

17. To Madame de Sade

[May, 1779]

Y
e gods! What on earth did the présidente eat during Lent in order to produce such an outburst between Easter and Pentecost? What a flood! It ends up being charming. Just look at her! Patience!
He who laughs last laughs best.
It will be my turn to laugh one of these days, and I’ll do more than laugh, of that you may be sure. During my idle moments here, I have fun drawing up plans. I have some unique ones. And, like her, I shall not really be making up anything new. I shall confine myself to imitating. Some paper, some ink, and a few bribed rascals, that’s all it will take. I won’t need any police or ministries, not I. A few stout memories, a bit of money, and the printers in the Hague.
¹
Oh! what delight! The pleasure to which I look forward alleviates all my pains. Gone in a flash all my pain and sorrow the moment I think of my revenge.

Une brochure unique, un ouvrage admirable,

Bien scandaleux, bien vrai: le style n ‘y fait rien,

Et pourvu qu ‘il instruise, il sera toujours bien!