de Sade: Portrait of a Sadist

The streets of Paris reek of horse shit. A foul odor that clings to the nostrils like an accursed tick.

The Marquis knew the city first by smell, the way a dog knows a house, for the carriage that carried him had its shutters drawn and its curtains pinned, and nothing of Paris was permitted to him but her stink. It came up through the floorboards and in around the door seams, thick enough to chew: horse dung trodden into the stones of ten thousand streets, the tanneries along the Bièvre sighing out their rot, the Seine dragging her slow green belly past the quays, woodsmoke, lamp oil, unwashed wool, the sour breath of a million chimneys. Under it all, faint as a rumor, the smell of bread from the morning ovens. Paris fed herself at dawn and shat where she stood by noon, and the Marquis, Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade, forty-three years of age, a prisoner these seven years past, breathed her in through a crack in the shutters and was grateful, God forgive him, for the stench. At Vincennes the air had smelled of nothing at all. Stone and damp and nothing. A man could starve on such air.

Midway, the carriage halted at some obstruction — a cart shed of cabbages, by the smell and the shouting — and through the shutter crack came the symphony of a Paris morning asserting itself against an overturned vegetable cart. A fishwife rendered her opinion of the carter in a vocabulary that would have enriched the Academy. A child laughed somewhere, that high unguarded laugh that belongs exclusively to beings who have never been counted by a clerk. Someone was frying something in oil, and the oil found the crack in the shutters like a rumor finding an ear. The Marquis sat in the dark with his gloved hands folded and his eyes closed, conducting an orchestra he would never see, and thought: *This is the world. It goes on without consulting me. It fries, it curses, it laughs, it spills its cabbages, and not one soul in it knows that the most dangerous man in France is passing in a box, breathing it through a crack like a prisoner at a keyhole.* The carriage lurched, the wheels found their ruts, and the symphony receded, street by street, smell by smell, as if a hand were slowly closing over the mouth of the world.

He did not know where they were taking him. That was the refinement of the thing, the little cruelty folded inside the large one like a note in a glove. At first light the governor of Vincennes had come to his cell with the order folded in his hand and the decency, at least, to look at the floor while he read it: the prisoner was to be transferred, by command of the King, to another fortress. Which fortress, the governor would not say. The regulations forbade it. The prisoner would learn his address when the door shut on him, as he had learned everything else in this long education — by the sound it made.

So he rode in the dark of the box with his hands folded and his back straight, as a gentleman rides, and he counted the journey as prisoners count everything, in the only currencies left to them: turns of the wheels, smells, sounds. Hooves on the frozen ruts of the Vincennes road. Then streets, narrowing. The cries of the faubourgs. A church bell, then another, arguing across the rooftops about the hour. The carriage slowed, turned, and the air changed — opened — and he caught river water and the green reek of a moat, and he understood, with a cold that had nothing to do with February, that they had brought him to the castle at the gate of Saint-Antoine.

The Bastille.

Every child in Paris was threatened with it the way children elsewhere are threatened with the devil. Eight towers of stone the color of old bone, older than the Valois, squatting at the eastern edge of the city with the faubourg at its feet like a dog it had not quite decided to kick. Generations of the inconvenient had gone in through that gate and not come out: cardinals’ enemies and kings’ cousins, poisoners, printers, prophets, men whose only crime was a surname, a pamphlet, a wife’s family. The Marquis’s wife’s family, to be precise. For it was no king who had put him here — kings had better amusements — but a small, tireless, powdered woman in the rue de Sèvres, his mother-in-law, Madame de Montreuil, who had purchased the King’s signature the way one purchases candles, and lit it, and set it under his life, and watched it burn down year by year with a mother’s patience and a bookkeeper’s calm.

The carriage stopped. Doors, voices, the ring of keys — the true music of his age, he thought; other men had larks and mistresses, he had keys. Boots on stone. The door of the carriage opened and the light came at him like a slap after the long dark, and he descended, blinking, into a courtyard of wet cobbles under a sky the color of pewter, and looked up, and up, at the towers.

“Citizen of the Liberté,” said a voice beside him, dry as paper. “For the present.”

He turned. The man was perhaps fifty, in the blue coat of the fortress staff, with a limp he tried to spend as little of as possible and a face that had been arranged by long practice into an expression of perfect, professional vacancy. A ring of keys hung at his hip heavy as a bunch of iron grapes. Not the governor, then. A turnkey. The first face of his new world, and it told him nothing, which was its function.

“You know the towers, I find,” the Marquis said.

“I know the names, Monsieur. The prisoners name themselves.”

“And this Liberté — she has been expecting me?”

“She expects everyone, Monsieur. This way.”

They crossed the courtyard with the escort around them, four soldiers with their muskets slung, bored as cattle, and passed under an arch into a second, smaller court, where a house stood that would not have disgraced a provincial notary — the governor’s lodging, shuttered and smug, with smoke rising from its chimneys and a cat on its step in defiance of the cold and the century. From a window above, a curtain moved. The Marquis felt himself observed the way a parcel is observed when it changes hands: not with malice, not with interest, but with the mild attention of a man checking a seal.

The governor received him standing, which the Marquis noted, and did not offer him a chair, which he noted also. Bernard-René Jourdan, marquis de Launay, was a slight, careful man with a face like a well-kept ledger — everything entered, nothing volunteered. He held the King’s order in both hands, though he knew it by heart, and he read it aloud in the tone of a man apologizing to the furniture.

“By order of the King: the sieur de Sade, presently detained at the château de Vincennes, shall be transferred to and held in the château de la Bastille, there to remain until it shall please His Majesty to ordain otherwise.” De Launay folded the paper into exact thirds. “You hear, Monsieur. Until it shall please His Majesty.”

“I hear a door described as a decision,” said the Marquis. “What is my sentence?”

“There is no sentence. There is the order.”

“My crime, then. Read me the crime, since you read so beautifully.”

“There is no crime in the order, Monsieur.”

“Then I am the only man in France imprisoned for a text that was never written.” The Marquis smiled, and was gratified to see the ledger flinch, very slightly, at its edges. “We are both men of paper, you and I. You keep yours in a drawer. I keep mine in a family.”

De Launay set the order down and aligned it with the edge of his desk, an operation he performed as other men pray. “You will be lodged in the Liberté tower. Your effects will follow from Vincennes and be entered in the register. You will write nothing that leaves this fortress unread; you will receive nothing that enters it unread. You may walk upon the towers at the hours appointed. Your meals will be served at the hours appointed. In all things, Monsieur, the hours are appointed.” He rose, and the interview was over, having never quite begun. “I am sorry for the necessity.”

“No, Monsieur,” said the Marquis, “you are sorry for the inconvenience. There is a difference, and it is the whole of my education.”

“Your effects are being inventoried at Vincennes,” de Launay said, in the tone of a man changing the subject. “They will follow when the registers are complete. The house provides necessaries in the interval.”

“My necessaries include paper, Monsieur le Gouverneur. Pens. Ink. A man in my situation is a kettle on a fire; deny him the pen and the steam finds other exits, and I cannot answer for the plumbing of your tower.”

“You will find that the Bastille answers for everything, in time.” De Launay’s voice remained level, but something in it had taken a half-step back, the way a man steps from a stove he has touched. “Requests are made in writing.”

“With what, Monsieur? Pray picture the comedy. I am to request, in writing, the means of writing. My first composition in your fortress will be a paradox, and I shall dedicate it to you.”

For an instant — the Marquis would have sworn to it on the rack — the ledger of a face showed an entry not meant for the audit: not amusement, which would have been a comfort, but recognition, the weary acknowledgment of a clerk who sees the size of the file he has just been handed. Then the book closed. “Monsieur Guyard will show you your apartment,” said the governor, and gave the little nod by which kings and their keepers end the audiences of the unimportant, and the Marquis, who had been presented at Versailles before this man had learned to shave, bowed to the precise depth owed to a jailer by a gentleman — not one hair more — and withdrew.

They searched him in the registry office, under the portrait of a king who had been dead sixty years and still contrived to look disappointed. It was done correctly, without relish, which he ought to count among his blessings: two officers, a clerk with a quill, and the turnkey with the iron grapes at his hip, whom the clerk addressed as Guyard. Item by item, the Marquis was translated into the register’s clean hand. One watch, gold, with a portrait in the lid — the portrait was of a woman with her hair down, and the clerk hesitated, and Guyard said, “Enter it as a watch,” in the tone of a man closing a door gently, and the Marquis marked that too: mercy, or its clerk, existed even here, in denominations too small to spend. One ring. One snuffbox, tortoiseshell, empty. A rosary of olive wood that had belonged to his mother, which the officer held up between finger and thumb as if it might bite. Coins, to be held against his account. The clothes on his back, described with a tailor’s cruelty. And then, at the last, the clerk’s quill paused over the page, and de Launay, who had followed them at the distance of a man who does not attend such things, said from the door: “Nothing else?”

“Nothing else,” said the Marquis. “You have the man entire. It is the whole of your achievement and the whole of your error.”

But there was something else, and they both knew it, and it was coming behind him on the road from Vincennes in a cart under guard: eleven trunks and cases. Books, four hundred and more, in three languages. A library’s worth of paper, pens in bundles, ink in powder, reams folded and uncut. Manuscripts in his own hand, tied with tape. A bed with hangings, a desk of walnut that had been his grandfather’s, chairs, a commode, pictures for the walls, a cello he could not play and would not surrender. The apparatus of a life, entire, that the King’s order had overlooked to forbid, and which Madame de Montreuil had overlooked to deny him — because she did not hate him with her hands, this woman who was unmaking him; she hated him with the law, and the law, being a blunt and literal instrument, had not thought of the books. She meant to bury him. Very well. She had buried him with a library, and history would judge which of them had made the error.

The cell was in the second tower from the river, the Liberté, on the floor they called the second though it was the fourth ascent of a man’s breath. Guyard climbed ahead of him with the lantern and did not offer conversation, and the Marquis climbed behind him through a corkscrew of stone so old that the steps were worn into spoons, and he counted them, because counting was a way of not thinking, and arrived at a number he distrusted and began again, and arrived at another, and laughed once, without humor, in the stairwell dark.

“I shall want the official count,” he said, “for my memoirs.”

“You will have stairs enough, Monsieur, to count them again at leisure.”

The door was oak banded in iron, thick as a dictionary, with a lock that received Guyard’s key the way a mouth receives a sacrament. Beyond it, the room. It was larger than he had feared, which he understood at once to be no kindness: a round cell some twenty feet across, following the tower’s curve, with walls of stone that sweated in the cold and a floor of stone that kept the cold like a grudge. A fireplace, unlit, its throat black with other men’s winters. A bed frame. A table, a chair, a water jug, a slop pail with a lid, which the Marquis considered the most honest piece of furniture in the building. High on the wall, a window, barred, shuttered in iron — and through the shutters, a stripe of the pewter sky, and below it, if he stood on the chair, the tops of the trees in the fortress garden and the roofs of the faubourg, going down to the river in a tumble of chimneys. Paris. Near enough to hear. He had been moved thirty miles closer to the world and the world had never been further away.

On the wall beside the bed, at the height of a seated man’s hand, a former tenant had cut his name into the stone with something patient — a nail, a spoon, a life — and below the name a tally of lines, grouped in fives, and below the tally, in letters that deteriorated as they went, as if the hand had been forgetting its trade even as it worked: GOD KEEPS THE BOOKS. The Marquis read it twice. He approved of the theology, if not the bookkeeping.

“Who was he?” he asked.

Guyard, who was lighting the candle with the air of a man performing a christening, did not look at the wall. “A Monsieur who left us.”

“Left.”

“They all leave, Monsieur, one way or the other. It is the one appointment the house has never missed.” The candle caught. The room assembled itself around the small flame — shadows in the curve of the wall, amber on the stones. “Your supper at six. Your fire when the wood comes, which is when it comes. The walk on the towers when the governor appoints it. Letters out on the day they are appointed, and the governor reads them with his eyes half closed, so a man may hide a great deal in the first line and nothing at all in the second.” He said this with such perfect vacancy that it took the Marquis a moment to understand he had been given a gift, and another to understand it could never be acknowledged. Before he left, Guyard recited the house the way priests recite the offices, without emphasis, as one delivers weather. The prisoner would not leave the tower without an order. The prisoner would not speak to the sentries on the walls, nor signal, nor sing — the regulation named singing, the Marquis noted, as if song were a recognized instrument of escape — nor make noise that carried. The prisoner’s letters would be read going out and coming in; the prisoner’s books would be examined at the door of the cell and again at the door of the fortress, because a book, in this house, was treated as a visitor whose intentions were unknown. The prisoner might purchase, against his account, candles, firewood, wine, and such food as the governor’s kitchen did not provide; the prices were the prices of Paris with a Bastille premium, a tax on captivity that no assembly had ever voted. The prisoner might not possess a knife, a compass, a file, or any instrument that suggested geometry or appetite. He might possess a spoon.

“A spoon,” the Marquis repeated. “The house arms me for soup and disarms me for everything else. It knows its enemy.”

“The house knows its regulations, Monsieur.”

Guyard set the candle on the table, aligned it with nothing, and went to the door. “For tonight, Monsieur, there is the bed.”

“For tonight,” said the Marquis, “there is the floor, the wall, the ceiling, and the sky in slices. You underrate my estate.”

“Then I wish Monsieur a good night of his estate.” The door closed. The lock turned, bolt over bolt, a sound with grammar — subject, verb, and a long iron conclusion.

He stood in the center of his kingdom and took inventory the way he had been inventoried, item by item, refusing all appeal. Twenty feet of diameter. One chair. One spyhole in the door at the height of an eye, covered by an iron tongue. One window through which the world was issued in rations. Smells: lime, old ash, the iron tang of the pail, the candle’s tallow, and underneath, faint and fading already, the stink of Paris that his clothes had carried in like a smuggler — horse and river and bread, going, going. By morning it would be gone, replaced by the smell of the house, which was the smell of stone deciding.

He sat on the bed. The ropes creaked under him with a voice like an old dog complaining in its sleep, and out of a clear sky, or out of the pewter stripe of it above him, the Marquis began, quietly and without dignity, to laugh — because he had understood, sitting there, the entirety of Madame de Montreuil’s design, and it was not the design he had spent seven years cursing. She had not put him here to die. Death would have freed him into legend, and she was too intelligent for legend. She had put him here to be forgotten — filed, the way one files a letter one does not wish to answer — until the name de Sade meant nothing in Paris but a door in a tower that no one asked about. The Bastille was not his executioner. It was his editor, and its method was deletion.

Supper came at six, as appointed: a broth with ambitions, a piece of beef that had surrendered, bread, and a half-bottle of a wine so thin it seemed apologetic. The Marquis ate standing, walking the twenty feet of his diameter and back, the way he had walked the terrace at Lacoste in the hour before guests arrived — and the memory arrived anyway, uninvited, with its whole retinue. Lacoste. Provence. The hill, the white dust, the château his family had raised out of a Roman road and a vineyard, and the summer theater he had built there, and the whole perfumed machinery of a life lived at full gallop and someone else’s expense. He had been free there the way weather is free, which is to say without the least idea that freedom was a condition and not an element. At Aix they had burned him in effigy for the Marseille affair — burned a straw Marquis in the square while the real one watched from a carriage, which he had counted, at the time, as a kind of immortality. He had not yet learned the distinction the Bastille was built to teach: that effigy and erasure are the two ends of one art, and the second is practiced on men who are still breathing.

He set the tray outside the spyhole’s little door as instructed, and stood a while with his forehead against the cold oak, and composed, in the perfect calligraphy of his mind, the first letter of his new reign.

*Madame,* he wrote to his mother-in-law, though the letter would never be sent — the letters that would go to his wife with the censor’s eye upon them, would have to wear the costume of respect; this one was for the tribunal of his own skull, and in that court he pled as he pleased. *Madame, I am installed. You will be gratified to learn that the accommodations exceed your hopes: I am lodged in a tower named Liberty, which I take to be your one joke, and a good one; I laughed, and the turnkey believed me mad, which is the first honest review my work has ever received in Paris. You have purchased stone, Madame, and silence, and an administration of hours. But I observe that you have neglected to purchase my attention, which remains — I have inspected it this evening — entirely at my own disposal. A fortress may set the hours of a man’s meals. It cannot set the hours of his mind, for his mind keeps its own time, and its time is all time. You have given me, at the King’s expense, the one commodity my creditors never could: uninterrupted years. I shall fill them. When the account is settled, Madame, it will not be my name that Paris has forgotten.*

He became aware that he was smiling in the dark like an actor who has heard, from an empty house, one pair of hands begin to clap. Very well: let the house be empty. He had performed for empty houses before. It concentrated the performance.

The mind, having won its argument, proceeded to lose its war, as minds do at the frontier of sleep. He thought of his sons, growing somewhere in the world like trees in a country he had been deposed from. He thought of his wife — Renée-Pélagie, who had married a scandal at nineteen and defended it ever since with the tenacity of a woman holding a door against a flood; who visited, when visiting was permitted, and smuggled hope the way lesser wives smuggled chocolate, in parcels, in hems, in the spines of books. He thought, with an accuracy that felt like treason, that she too was serving a sentence, and that hers had no governor to petition, because her jailer was her own mother and her charge was her own marriage. He had ruined better people than himself merely by being adjacent to them. It was his one reliable talent, and the Bastille, whatever else it was, was a machine for preventing its further exercise.

He did not sleep. It is a mistake to imagine that prisoners sleep on their first night in a new prison; they lie as surveyors lie, measuring. He measured the Bastille by its sounds, and the Bastille, obligingly, performed. The changing of the guard below him, boots and iron, at hours he noted and stored. A bell somewhere in the faubourg tolling the city’s ordinary sorrows — eleven, twelve, the small hours arriving like cautious visitors. From the direction of the river, a carter shouting at his horse, profane and free. Once, very late, from some window in the streets below that did not know or care what stood above it, a woman laughed — the whole laugh, beginning, middle, and end, a complete and unbothered architecture of laughter, rising into the cold and dissolving among the towers. The Marquis sat up in the dark and listened to its echo the way a starving man regards a table through glass. He did not envy her. Envy requires the belief that the world is portioned fairly and one’s own share mislaid. He simply recorded her, filed her in the archive of the unwalled: *a woman, unknown, laughed in the rue Saint-Antoine, the night of the twenty-ninth of February, in the year of the transfer.* Let Montreuil’s clerks keep their register. He would keep his, and his was the one that would be read in a hundred years, because his recorded what the hours had felt like from the inside, and hers recorded only that they had passed.

Later still — the hour had given up its name — something tapped in the wall beside his bed. Three taps. A pause. Two. The Marquis lay rigid, his heart performing an escape attempt of its own, and understood slowly what he was hearing: above him, below him, somewhere in the honeycomb of the Liberté, another tenant of the King’s silence was announcing himself in the only grammar left to them. Three taps. A pause. Two. It was not a message; no alphabet on earth could be squeezed through so small a door. It was a census. *I am here,* it said. *One. Count me.* The Marquis raised his hand from the blanket, hesitated — for there are initiations a man refuses all his life and accepts in one night — and knocked twice on the cold stone with his knuckle, and felt the answer come back through the wall and into his bones like a pulse returning to a limb that had been pronounced dead: three taps, a pause, two. He never learned the man’s name. In all the years of that tower he would hear him in the bad seasons and miss him in the good, and when the tapping finally stopped for good he would grieve in a way he permitted no one to witness — for a man he knew by nothing but the fact that he, too, had refused to be only a silence in a register.

Toward dawn he gave up the pretense of the bed and stood on the chair at the window, gripping the bars, his face close to the iron shutters’ seams, watching the stripe of sky alter from pewter to the color of wet ash, and then — slow as mercy, sudden as accusation — to the first diluted gold. Below him the garden of the fortress lay in its geometry, bare trees in rows like a court at attention; beyond the wall, the rooftops of the faubourg were acquiring chimneys, then slates, then windows that caught the light and threw it back at him one by one, insolent and ordinary. Paris was waking. Paris was making her noises and her smells, hanging her washing, beating her rugs, sending her carts down to the river, living at the top of her voice, entirely unaware that the Bastille stood in her ear like a stone in a shoe. He breathed the cold air off the shutters and tried to find Paris in it, and found only stone and lime and the ash of his own dead fire: the house had already replaced the city’s stink with its own. One night had sufficed. He understood then that the Bastille’s genius was not in its locks, which were honest iron, but in its curriculum of small replacements: the appointed hour for the free one, the register for the name, the stripe of sky for the sky — until a man forgot the originals and defended the substitutes as the world itself. *They will not have my memory,* he thought, with the violence of a man swearing an oath in an empty room. *Whatever else is rationed here, that warehouse is mine, and I shall keep its inventory nightly, like a miser, like a monk, like a clerk of the court of myself.*

The lock turned. Morning entered in the person of Guyard, with a jug of water, a towel, bread, and the particular silence of a man who has decided that the new prisoner is not a screamer.

“Did Monsieur sleep?”

“Monsieur conducted an inspection,” said the Marquis. “The fortress is damp, the towers are crooked with age, and your late tenant believed that God keeps the books. I intend to dispute the accounts.”

Guyard set down the jug. Somewhere behind the vacancy of his face, an opinion occurred and was filed. “Monsieur will find the days long for disputing.”

“Then Monsieur will require the instruments of his trade.” The Marquis stepped down from the chair with what dignity a man may muster in his shirt, and faced the turnkey as an ambassador faces a throne. “Paper,” he said. “Pens. Ink. In quantity. My effects from Vincennes contain them, and until the cart arrives, the house will supply them. Enter it in your register, Monsieur Guyard, and spell my name correctly — it has two words in the world’s ear and will have more.”

“It will be asked, Monsieur.”

“Ask it in a tone that suggests the Bastille fears what I may write on an empty stomach and no breakfast wine.” He paused, and permitted himself the first genuine smile of the new reign — the smile that had once emptied rooms and filled theaters. “Because it should.”