204
PARTISAN REVIEW
in a letter of July 1783 that
Monsieur No.6 should have been shut up not ·with cannibals but
with girls.... I would have provided him with so many of them that
the devil take me if during the seven years he has been there he would
not have used up all the oil in his lamp.... No m9re of these
philosophioal subterfuges,
of these researches disowned by nature (as
if nature concerned herself with all that) of these
dangerous
devia–
tions of an imagination which is too ardent, always chasing after
happiness, without ever finding it, ending up by replacing reality
with fantasies, honest orgasms with
dishonest deviations.
...
Put in
the r:.iddle of a seraglio, Monsieur No. 6 would have become the
friend of women.
He would have acknowledged and
felt
that nothing
is
greater
or more beautiful than sex, and that there is no other
salvation. Occupied exclusively with serving the ladies and satisfying
their delicate desires, Monsieur No.6 would have sacrificed all his
own.
Like the idea of a priest sharing six beautiful women with a dying
man, this is one of the fantasies that afforded Sade all the more pleasure
for being committed to paper.
For the sadist, one of the greatest disadvantages of solitude is that
he cannot feel superior to anyone else. Sade put his dissatisfaction into
the mouth of Durcet:
What we are lacking is comparison.... I need the satisfaction of
seeing someone who is suffering from not having what I have....
Happiness will never exist without inequality.
It
is like the man who
does not understand the value of health until he is ill. The greatest
sensual pleasure in the world is watching the tears of those over–
whelmed with misery.
Though he was still in the process of schooling himself in
detachment, Sade's moods were liable
to
vary as much as the handwrit–
ing in his letters. In the letters written at this time the volatility is
phenomenal. Occasionally, full of exuberance, he would express
himself straightforwardly. In the morning of 3 July 1783, h e wrote to
Renee-Pelagie: "I embrace you with all my heart, my dear friend, and
write to you quite simply from gaiety of spirit and to tell you that I am
feeling well and to ask you to come soon to see me because it is tiresome
to go so long without embracing you."
Sometimes the mood changes within the space of a few lines, and
such was his power or irony that he could sustain two dissonant moods
throughout several pages of prose. In the letter of
23-24
November
1783, there is a pungent mixture of teasing tenderness and scathing
