Crimes of Love E-Book

MARQUIS DE SADE

• Herausgeber: Peter Owen Publishers
• Kategorie: Erotik
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Senneval, you see in me your sister, the girl you seduced at Nancy, the woman who murdered your son, the wife of your own father and the ignoble creature who sent your mother to the gallows... love but of its crimes? Murder, seduction, and incest are among the cruel rewards for selfless love in his stories; tragedy, despair, and death the inevitable outcome. Sade's villains will stop at nothing to satisfy their depraved passions, and they in turn suffer under the thrall of love. at his best. A skilled and artful storyteller, he is also an intellectual who asks questions about society, about ourselves, and about life, for which we have yet to find the answers. This new selection includes 'An Essay on Novels', Sade's penetrating survey of the novelist's art.

Leseprobe

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The Crimes of Love

Who but the Marquis de Sade would write, not of the pain, tragedy, and joy of love, but of its crimes? Murder, seduction, and incest are among the cruel rewards for selfless love in these stories; tragedy, despair, and death the inevitable outcome. Sade’s villains will stop at nothing to satisfy their depraved passions, and they in turn suffer under the thrall of love. Psychologically astute and defiantly unconventional, these tales show Sade at his best. A skilled and artful storyteller, he is also an intellectual who asks questions about society, about ourselves, and about life, for which we have yet to find the answers.

THE MARQUIS DE SADE was born in Paris in 1740 and served as a cavalry officer in the Seven Years War. His debauched life led to long periods of imprisonment, during which much of his work was written. The revolution freed him and he became a zealous revolutionary; however, the publication of such works asJustineandLa Philosophie Dans La Boudoirresulted in his renewed imprisonment and in 1803 he was declared insane and committed to the asylum at Charenton, where he died in 1814.

Translated from the French and with an Introduction by

Margaret Crosland

Peter Owen

London and Chicago

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Contents

Introduction

Faxelange or The Wrongs of Ambition

Dorgeville or The Criminal through Virtue

Rodrigo or The Enchanted Tower: An Allegorical Tale

Lorenza and Antonio: An Italian Story

The Comtesse de Sancerre or Her Daughter’s Rival: Anecdote from the Court of Burgundy

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Introduction

The five stories in this collection were written by the Marquis de Sade some time after February 1784 and included sixteen years later in the four-volume collectionLes Crimes de l’Amour, Nouvelles Historiques et Tragiques, published in 1800, Year VIII of the Revolutionary Calendar. Bonaparte, who had no sympathy for Sade, had recently been made First Consul. The author had been in prison since 1777, detained bylettre de cachetat the request of his mother-in-law Madame de Montreuil. This old-established autocratic system enabled anyone, with the King’s approval, to place in detention any person they chose, often allegedly to protect others, sometimes to protect the detainee himself.

Sade had been in prison on several previous occasions for relatively brief periods and had made a daring escape in 1773 from the fortress of Miolans in Savoy. He had also escaped in 1778 from Vincennes prison and had even enjoyed a month’s freedom until he was recaptured. He was to spend twelve consecutive years in prison now, and if he used much of his time in frenzied appeals for his release, or at least for a fair hearing, the period of seven years in the gloomy fortress of Vincennes, followed by five in the Bastille (1784–9), transformed him into an omnivorous reader of history, extending too his concentration on the works of thephilosophes, which he already knew. Very soon he became a non-stop writer. As a young man – he was already thirty-seven in 1777 – he had written a little, as many of the eighteenth-century French aristocrats did, and had been proud enough of his work to claim that one apparently obscene piece had paid for his personal amusements, hismenus plaisirs, for several months. He had also been so pleased with his melodramatic love-letters to young women, before and after his marriage, that he kept copies, which have survived. Drama fascinated him. He had written many plays, in which his family and friends acted, but by 1782 he had embarked on the major prose works by which he is now mainly remembered.

None of these was published until a year after his release from Charenton in 1790, following the abolition of thelettre de cachetsystem by the post-Revolution government. In June 1791Justine,ou les Malheurs de la Vertuappeared, anonymously. Four years later came his long and non-pomographic novelAline et Valcour – le roman philosophique, as he called it. He was very proud of this work and allowed it to be signed ‘Citizen S——’, for he had exchanged the title of Marquis for the democraticcitoyenand even attempted to prove that he was not an aristocrat. He did not signLa Philosophie dans le Boudoir, published that same year, 1795. The year 1797 saw the anonymous publication ofLa Nouvelle Justine, followed byL’Histoire de Juliette,Sa Soeur.As every reader of Sade knows, the former title, the second version of the Justine story, was subtitled ‘the Misfortunes of Virtue’, while the tale of Juliette extolled ‘the Prosperities of Vice’ (Les Prospérités du Vice).In 1800, after Bonaparte had decreed a new respectability in literature, a later edition ofJustinewas confiscated by the police.

IfLes Crimes de l’Amourwere published about this time, and signed ‘D.A.F. Sade, author ofAline et Valcour’,this same author, despite the precautions he had taken, was suspected of having writtenJustineandJuliette, which he always denied; but he had acquired many enemies, and part of his purpose now was perhaps an attempt to acquire a new reputation as a moralist. When he began to write short-length fiction he developed a grandiose plan: he wanted to bring out several volumes in which the stories would be alternately cheerful, even comic, and sad or tragic. He made summaries of the plots and noted his sources, but in the end he abandoned his original plan, andLes Crimes de l’Amourappeared separately, eleven stories in all, each volume with an engraving and a quotation from the poet Edward Young’sNight Thoughts, popular in France at the time. The stories that Sade described as ‘gay’ had to wait until 1926 for publication, whileDorci, a solitary and short tragic one, was published separately in 1881 by the novelist Anatole France.

The plots and the names of the characters varied sometimes from Sade’s original notes, and a few stories disappeared. He indicated his sources when relevant, attributing the basic idea ofRodrigue ou la Tour Enchantée(Rodrigo or The Enchanted Tower)to an Arab writer whose name he gave, but it is a name that is now unknown. Sade made it clear, however, that most of his plots, even when the background was historical, were his own invention. His themes were very different from those of the major novels, which are crammed with lust, desire and perversion but not with anything that could be called ‘love’. Evil and destruction are praised while anyone who is good and innocent must suffer. InLes Crimes de l’Amourthe reverse is usually the case: if the wicked heroes and heroines appear to succeed for a time – Franlo, Virginie-Cécile, Rodrigo, the Comtesse de Sancerre – they all come to a bad end and several stories could be subtitled ‘Virtue Rewarded’.

Had the author repented of his own ‘crimes’? Not at all; his attempts at self-justification were never convincing, but in any case he did not think he had done anything seriously wrong: other people were wrong, he believed. He probably had various motives now for writing in this moralistic vein. He had begun to think of himself as a ‘man of letters’ and realized that it was too dangerous to continue writing only obscene books. He hoped for an income from his writing one day, and it was safer to write on ‘respectable’ themes. In addition, the writers who had so impressed him when young, Voltaire, Rousseau, Prévost and his English hero Samuel Richardson, had given him lessons in ‘good’ behaviour and sound moral attitudes. If his century was remarkable for its licentious writing there was always a parallel current of morality, sometimes forgotten later. IfLes Liaisons Dangereuses, for example, has known a new and widespread admiring audience at the end of the twentieth century its improving messages, surely intended by Laclos, are hardly the cause of its modem appeal.

The four volumes published by Sade in 1800 contained eleven stories, and in several of them the theme is incest, fashionable with writers at the time. Thephilosopheshad helped to spread knowledge of classical legends and drama where it often formed a key element, while French explorers and travellers brought back news of distant foreign peoples who practised such relationships as part of ‘normal’ life. The most powerful treatment is to be found inEugénie de Franval, included in the English collectionThe Gothic Tales, while the most subtle is inFlorville et Courval,also in the same collection. In the group of stories presented here the unfortunate Dorgeville, whose whole life was dedicated to good works, finds to his horror that he has unwittingly married his sister, and what is worse, he cannot stop loving the memory of her even after she has been burnt alive as a criminal. Did Sade remember, however remotely, his love affair with his wife’s sister in 1772? And did he, in writing about the Comtesse de Sancerre, in love with her daughter’s betrothed, have any recollection of the time when his mother-in-law, Madame de Montreuil, now his enemy, was said to have been fascinated by him? This type of ambiguous family relationship obviously intrigued him, for in the storyLaurence et Antonio(Lorenza and Antonio)he chose an apocryphal anecdote from sixteenth-century Italy in which a prince of the Strozzi family tried hard to seduce his son’s wife, a member of the Pazzi family, but failed. Sade’s use of theatrical-type dialogue in this story reflects his passion for all aspects of the theatre which was of course frustrated by his detention, although he wrote many plays during that period.

In the preface toLes Crimes del’Amour, Idée sur les Romans, Sade outlined the history of the novel or tale, as he saw it, and went to great lengths to explain his high moral purpose, attacking at the same time the critics ofAline et Valcourwho had said that his ‘pen attributes to vice characteristics that are too odious’. He defended himself: ‘And do you want to know the reason? I do not wish to make vice liked.’ He did not want women to ‘love the persons who deceive them. On the contrary, I want them to detest them’. There was more: ‘... never, in fact, and this I repeat, never will I paint crime other than in the colours of Hell. I want it to be seen in all its nakedness, to be feared, to be loathed ...’ And he ended this essay insisting, as he often did, that he was not the author of ‘the novel of J ...’ Was he a hypocrite? Or a changed man? He had struggled to save his skin as an aristocrat and a possible writer of ‘horrors’, but in 1801 he was to be imprisoned once more, this time as the supposed author of obscene writings, and in fact he never knew true freedom again.

So much of Sade’s life was spent in confinement that he had inevitably begun to think seriously about the whole problem of crime and punishment. The storiesFaxelangeandDorgevilleinclude some of his findings which show far-sightedness on his part, although he had surely been influenced, like his contemporaries, by the radical theories of the Italian jurist the Marchese de Beccaria (1738-94). Did punishment and imprisonment help to prevent crime? No, claimed the bogus Baron de Franlo inFaxelangewhose passion for gambling had reduced him to the life of a trickster, a robber and a murderer. In the same way Dorgeville, defending ‘Cécile’, who later turns out to be his sister, believed that she should not be treated as a criminal because she had had a lover and produced an illegitimate child: she was obeying ‘nature’. Sade was no doubt remembering the theories put forward by one of his heroes, the Baron d’Holbach, in hisSystème de la Nature, published in 1770.

Although the plots of these stories are not complex, and some of the characters are stock figures, there are reminders in all of them of the writer who was intrigued by the unconscious mind, insisting as inFaxelangethat dreams should be taken more seriously, or making the Comtesse de Sancerre remind Monrevel that we are not always aware of our own thoughts or feelings. In the same way most of the stories, like the long novels, are dominated by the women characters. The aristocrat who had flagellated working-class women and complained that his devoted wife was failing to help him continued to be intrigued by his fictional heroines: if Virginie/Cécile blames her lover Saint-Surin for her misdeeds, the author makes no attempt to explain the man’s behaviour, he concentrates on his heroine, and the Comtesse de Sancerre is infinitely more interesting than the ‘verray parfit gentil knight’ with whom she is in love. She has in fact been compared to Racine’s heroine Phèdre, who was in love with her son-in-law, Hippolyte.

If the author looked back with some nostalgia to classical and heroic times, he also seemed to look forward to the romantic themes of the nineteenth century when lovers would die together or kill themselves. Sade also attacks, in bothFaxelangeandDorgeville, the way wellborn girls were brought up by protective parents and then pushed into the inescapable arranged marriage system (which he himself had had to accept before he was twenty-three), for he believed it made parents ‘greedy’ and daughters too ‘ambitious’. The intriguing fantasyRodrigo or The Enchanted Towerends with a woman’s revenge: the Spanish king pays with his life in punishment for his early sexual abuse of young girls. Florinda, in disguise, is sent back to earth from the kingdom of the dead and after defeating Rodrigo in single combat she takes off her helmet, expressing a final insult: he has been killed by a woman.

Nearly two hundred years have gone by since Sade published his eleven ‘heroic and tragic tales’, with the quotation from Young which questioned why love, which was intended to produce happiness, should bring about crimes, and why men abuse everything. That problem has not yet been solved. The reception of the book was mixed:Le Journal de Paris(6 brumaire, Year IX, 28 October 1800) would have preferred more history but approved the author’s intention as a moralist, for the reviewer believed that the contemporary stories reflected the moral decline of France, since ‘reality among us continues to outdo fiction’.

The previous week, however (30 vendémiaire, 22 October), a hack writer called Villeterque had tried to destroy the author inLe Journal des Arts.This reviewer obviously thought that Sade, despite his declared intention, was no moralist: ‘These horrible depictions of crime,’ wrote Villeterque, ‘can only make it more odious; they are therefore useless and dangerous.’ Sade replied to this condemnation with a minor masterpiece of verbal flagellation: Villeterque was an ignoramus, he had obviously not read the stories, and much more in the same vein. Worse still, as an author he would remain unread. Villeterque, describing himself as a ‘former soldier and an associate of the Institut National’, attempted a reply, but Sade’s prophecy was correct. He, Sade, was read, is still read and is likely to remain a controversial ‘moralist’ for ever.

The texts used for these translations and the Introduction are from theOeuvres Complètes, edited and published by Jean-Jacques Pauvert, Volume X (Paris, 1988), and in the selectionLes Crimes de l’Amouredited by Beatrice Didier (Livre de Poche, Librairie Générate Française, Paris, 1972).

Margaret Crosland

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Faxelangeor The Wrongs of Ambition

Monsieur and Madame de Faxelange, who possessed an income of 30 to 35 livres, usually lived in Paris. They had an only daughter, as beautiful as the very goddess of Youth. Monsieur de Faxelange had served in the army but had retired young and from that time he concerned himself only with the running of the household and the upbringing of his daughter. He was a very quiet man, not highly intelligent and of excellent character. His wife, who was more or less of the same age, that is between forty-five and fifty, had a slightly more subtle mind, but on the whole this couple had more naïveté and good faith than guile and distrust.

Mademoiselle de Faxelange had just reached her sixteenth year. She had the kind of romantic good looks in which every feature reflects a virtue; a very white skin, fine blue eyes, a mouth that was rather wide but full, a slight and supple figure, and the most beautiful hair in the world. Her mind was as gentle as her nature; she was incapable of wrongdoing and had not yet realized that anyone could commit it. In short, she personified innocence and naïveté embellished by the hand of the Graces. Mademoiselle de Faxelange was well educated; nothing had been spared in order to achieve this; she spoke English and Italian very well, she played several musical instruments and painted miniatures with good taste. As an only daughter, destined therefore to inherit one day the family fortune, even if it was not great, she could look forward to a good marriage, which for eighteen months now had been her parents’ sole preoccupation.

But Mademoiselle de Faxelange’s heart had not waited for the decision of her parents and she had dared to commit herself totally, she had not been mistress of her affections for over three years. Monsieur de Goé, who was distantly related to her, and because of this often came to her house, was the cherished object of this affectionate girl’s love. She loved him with a sincerity and consideration reminiscent of days gone by, feelings now corrupted by our depravity.

Monsieur de Goé no doubt deserved such happiness. He was twenty-three years old, had a fine figure, attractive looks and a frankness of character totally suited to harmonize with that of his beautiful cousin. He was an officer in the dragoons, but hardly rich; he needed a girl with a large dowry, while his cousin needed an opulent man, since, even if she were an heiress, she did not have a vast fortune, as we have just said. As a result they both perceived clearly that their hopes would never be fulfilled and the love that burned within them both would be consumed in sighs.

Monsieur de Goé had never informed Mademoiselle de Faxelange’s parents of the feelings he cherished for their daughter; he thought he would be rejected and was too proud to place himself in the position of hearing them say so. Mademoiselle de Faxelange, who was infinitely more timid still, had also taken care not to say a word about her feelings. And so this gentle and virtuous intrigue, strengthened by the links of the most tender love, was nourished quietly within the shadow of silence, but both parties had faithfully promised each other that, come what may, they would yield to no other demands and would never belong to anyone except each other.

Our young lovers had reached this stage when a friend of Monsieur de Faxelange came to ask permission to introduce him to a man from the provinces who had recently been indirectly recommended to him. ‘It is not without a purpose that I am making this suggestion to you,’ said Monsieur de Belleval. ‘The man I am telling you about has vast properties in France and superb houses in America. The one purpose of his journey is to look for a wife in Paris. He may take her to the New World, that is the only thing I am afraid of, but apart from that, if the possibility does not alarm you too much, it is quite certain that from all points of view this man would suit your daughter. He is thirty-two, his face is not very attractive ... there is something slightly dark about his eyes, but he has a very noble bearing and he is remarkably cultivated.’

‘Bring him to see us,’ said Monsieur de Faxelange, and, addressing his wife, he asked, ‘What do you say to that, madame?’

‘We shall have to see,’ she replied. ‘If he really is a suitable party, I agree to it with all my heart, however upset I may feel by the separation from my daughter. I adore her, her absence will break my heart but I shall certainly not stand in the way of her happiness.’

Monsieur de Belleval, who was delighted with his first overtures, made arrangements with the husband and wife and it was agreed that the following Thursday the Baron de Franlo would be introduced to Madame de Faxelange. Monsieur le Baron de Franlo had been in Paris for a month, occupying the most splendid apartment in the Hôtel de Chartres. He had a very handsome carriage, two lackeys, avalet de chambre, a large amount of jewellery, a wallet full of letters of credit and the finest clothes in the world. He did not know Monsieur de Belleval at all, but he knew, he alleged, a close friend of this Monsieur de Belleval who, since he was a long way from Paris for eighteen months, could not be of any service to the baron. The latter had presented himself at this man’s door and had been told that he was away, but, since Monsieur de Belleval was his best friend, he should go to see him. As a result it was to Monsieur de Belleval that the baron had presented his letters of recommendation, and Monsieur de Belleval, in order to be of service to an honourable man, had no objection to opening them. He had given the baron all the help that this stranger would have received from Monsieur de Belleval’s friend, had he been present.

Belleval was not acquainted with the persons in the provinces who had recommended the baron, he had never even heard them mentioned by his friend, but it was quite possible that he did not know all the people whom his friend knew; therefore nothing stood in the way of the interest he showed from then on in Franlo. He is a friend of a friend of mine, is that not more than enough to justify in the heart of an honourable man the reason which commits him to be of service?

So Monsieur de Belleval, who was responsible for the Baron de Franlo, took him everywhere, on walks, to the theatres, to the shops; they were never seen except together. It was essential to establish these details in order to justify the interest that Belleval took in Franlo, and the reasons for which, believing him to be an excellent suitor, he introduced him to the Faxelange household.