196
PARTISAN REVIEW
priest as happy as he intends to be himself in his final minutes . In the
neighboring room are the six lovely women he has been saving for this
occasion. He offers to share them with the priest, who is promptl y
con verted .
The change of hear t is unrealisti c, and so is the vigor the dying
man displays in arguing and in making love. But the dialogue belongs
to
the convention by which litera ture- obliged, in self-defence to prove
itself morally useful-had been combining the arts o f ora tory and
fable. Though the development by which Sade was making himself
into a professional writer was too gradual for us to give it a da te, the
letters of 1782-3 are incomparabl y better written than the earlier ones.
He had always been capable of iron y, but it had taken him a long time
to convert outrage at his immobili za ti on into a powerhouse o f ri gh–
teous indigna tion . After five years of screaming out about the injusti ce
of his punishment, he was able to take it for granted that justice was
unavailable.
If
the letters to Renee-Pelagie had served no o ther pur–
pose, they h ad a t leas t apprenti ced him to the craft of arranging words
in sentences, and now, if he could keep his mind aIm, he could pick
up threads from several earlier phases of his life-the study of rhetoric
with the J esuits, the philosophical reading he had don e in the earl y
seventies, the sensual and sacril egious experi ences of his libertine
adventures. But there is nothing bl asphemous in his
Dialogu e:
the
solitude h e would never have experienced-given freedom of choice–
had brought him to a coo l-headed synthesis he could n ever otherwise
have achieved .
From 1782 onwards, the letters to Renee-Pelagie are illumina ted
with shafts of literary brilliance that reach a long way beyond the
priva te suffering.
It
did not ma tter tha t she was incapable of apprecia t–
ing the nuances of his satire or answering on the same intellectual
level. Prison had taught him to be self-suffi cient. H e would have
written neither the letters nor the pl ays without having someone to
read them, but his dependence on her reactions was superficial and
sometimes sadistic: he took pleasure in knowing she would be totall y
nonplussed by such Swift-like salli es as the one in his letter of Jul y
1783. Was there any truth, h e enquired, in the rumors that after his
arres t in the Hotel de Danemark, Mme de Montreuil wanted an expen
to
confirm whether M. de Sade had "outraged" his wife's buttocks? He
has been told, he says,
that you then tucked up your petticoat. The magistrate Le Noir, put
on his spectacles, Albaret held the candl e, the offi cers of the Inquisi–
tion took notes. And an inventory of fixtures was written in these
terms: Item . .. we avouc;h the sa id PeIagie du Chauffour to be well
