Read Online Letters From Prison by Marquis de Sade - Free Book Online Page A

“In almost all of Sade’s letters of this period one meets with allusions to more or less comprehensible numbers which he often calls signals. What does this curious arithmetic signify? Imprisoned in Vin-cennes by lettre de cachet, that is, utterly at the mercy of his persecutors’ discretion, Sade found himself in tragic ignorance of how long his detention was to last; wherewith he contrived a system of deduction based upon his calculations which, while they may appear ludicrous to us, were in his mind of a nature to reveal the wildly yearned for day of his liberation . . . Actually, the Marquis’s troubling arithmetical operations constitute a kind of defense mechanism, a partly unconscious struggle to ward off the despair which, he dreaded, were it to gain the upper hand, would lead to the overthrow of his reason. Absolutely in the dark as to his captors’ concrete intentions, Sade is led ‘to ferret out the most unexpected points of departure for his calculations,’ writes Maurice Heine. ‘To his eye everything has the look of a hint of his fate, or perhaps of a mysterious indication that has escaped the censor’s notice. His mind fastens desperately upon the number of lines in a letter, upon the number of times such and such a word is repeated, even upon a consonance which, spoken aloud, suggests a figure.’ But his efforts are not confined to trying to discover the date of his return to freedom; he also seeks for clues regarding his life while in prison: upon exactly what day will he again be allowed to take exercise? When will Madame de Sade visit him? His wife’s letters are the major source from which he mines the elements for his reckonings, and sometimes when the deductions he extracts from them have a baneful or contradictory look, he accuses Madame de Montreuil of having suggested to the Marquise such signals as might demoralize or throw him into perplexity.”
    An example: “This letter has 72 syllables which are the 72 weeks remaining. It has 7 lines plus 7 syllables which makes exactly the 7 months and 7 days from the 17th of April till the 22nd of January, 1780. It has 191 letters and 49 words. Now, 49 words plus 16 lines makes 59 [sic], and there are 59 weeks between now and May 30. . . .”
    Another: “On March 28 he sent to borrow 6 candles from me; and on April 6, 6 others whereof I lent only 4 . . . Thursday the 6th of January, 9 months after the borrowing of the candles, on exactly the same day 25 were returned to me instead of the 10 I had lent, which seems very plainly to designate another 9 months in prison, making 25 in all?”
    And finally: “I know of nothing that better proves the dearth and sterility of your imagination than the unbearable monotony of your insipid signals. What! valets still sick of cleaning boots, workers reduced to idleness?. . . Recently, because you needed a 23, walks reduced by one and restricted to between 2 and 3: there’s your 23. Beautiful! Sublime! What a stroke of genius! What verve! . . . But if you must make these signals of yours, at least do so with honest intent, and not so they are forever a source of vexation!”
    To date, no one has been able to figure out the exact meaning of Sade’s deductions, which, by the way, he never again alluded to once he was free.
    These letters, covering thirteen key years—he went into Vincennes a still dashing, still seductive man of thirty-seven and emerged an obese, elderly gentlemen of fifty—in a sense reveal more about this most enigmatic of men than any of his other work. Here he is not putting on a face for the world, he is not posturing or proselytizing, he is not indulging in his outrageous philosophical fantasies of evil, which, as an act of vengeance against “the stupid scoundrels who torture me” (see letter 67), including and indeed starting with the présidente, were his therapy and psychic salvation. In short, in these letters from prison, we are as close to the real Marquis de Sade as we will