Crimes of Love

387 Pages·2005·2.31 MB·English

by  Marquis de Sade

 ’ 
THE CRIMES OF LOVE
D-A-F, M  S, was born
in Paris in  into an old patrician family. He was educated at the
Jesuit college of Louis-le-Grand and at military school at Versailles.
The end of the Seven Years War in  dashed his hopes of a
military career, and that same year he reluctantly made the good
match his impoverished father forced on him by marrying Renée-
Pélagie de Montreuil, daughter of a recently ennobled but wealthy
lawyer. Serious sexual misdemeanours brought him to the attention
of the police and he was jailed twice for his excesses. In , for
attempted murder and sodomy, he was sentenced to death and his
effigy was burned in his absence. In , after years spent in not
uncomfortable hiding, mainly at his chateau at La Coste near
Avignon, he was jailed and not released until . During his
prison years study was his therapy and writing his salvation. It was
now that he developed a coherent system of atheistical materialism
and wrote plays, novels, and the stories of Les Crimes de l’amour
(The Crimes of Love), which he published in . In the s,
having no love for the ancien régime which had deprived him of his
freedom, he played a minor role in the revolution. Jailed as a polit-
ical moderate, he escaped the guillotine in July  by an adminis-
trative accident. Describing himself as ‘a man of letters’, he tried to
make a living from the novels (Justine, ; Aline et Valcour, ;
La Nouvelle Justine and L’Histoire de Juliette, both ) which
justified their obscenities by reference to a comprehensive system of
sexual realpolitik. In  he was jailed as the author of Justine, and
in  was transferred to the lunatic asylum at Charenton, diag-
nosed as suffering from ‘libertine dementia’. He continued to write
and even helped to stage plays for the inmates. His applications for
release were consistently rejected, and he remained a captive until
his death in December . Against his wishes, he was given a
Christian funeral, but was buried in an unmarked grave.
D C is the author of studies of Marivaux, Marguerite
Duras, Marcel Pagnol, and Restif de la Bretonne, and of a History of
French Literature. For Oxford World’s Classics he has edited eight
novels by Alexandre Dumas père and translated Dumas fils’s La
Dame aux camélias, two selections of Maupassant short stories,
Sade’s Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales, Diderot’s Jacques
le Fataliste, and Beaumarchais’s Figaro Trilogy. Winner of the 
Scott-Moncrieff Prize for translation, he reviews regularly for the
Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and other
literary periodicals.
 ’ 
For over  years Oxford World’s Classics have brought
readers closer to the world’s great literature. Now with over 
titles––from the ,-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the
twentieth century’s greatest novels––the series makes available
lesser-known as well as celebrated writing.
The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained
introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene,
and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading.
Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and
reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry,
religion, philosophy and politics. Each edition includes perceptive
commentary and essential background information to meet the
changing needs of readers.
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
THE MARQUIS DE SADE
The Crimes of Love
Heroic and Tragic Tales,
Preceded by an Essay on Novels
A Selection translated with an Introduction and Notes by
DAVID COWARD
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford  
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide in
OxfordNew York
AucklandCape TownDar es SalaamHong Kong KarachiKuala Lumpur
MadridMelbourneMexico City Nairobi New DelhiShanghaiTaipeiToronto
With offices in
ArgentinaAustriaBrazilChileCzech RepublicFranceGreece
GuatemalaHungaryItalyJapanSouth KoreaPoland Portugal
SingaporeSwitzerlandThailand TurkeyUkraineVietnam
Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press
in the UK and in certain other countries
Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press Inc., New York
© David Coward 2005
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Database right Oxford University Press (maker)
First published as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2005
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,
or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate
reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction
outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Sade, marquis de, 1740–1814
Crimes de l’amour. English. Selections]
The Marquis de Sade, The crimes of love: heroic and tragic tales;
preceded by an Essay on novels: a selection/translated with an introduction
and notes by David Coward.
p. cm. – (Oxford world’s classics)
Summary: ‘Murder, seduction, and incest are among the cruel rewards
for selfless love in Sade’s stories; tragedy, despair, and death the inevitable
outcome. In this text Sade asks questions about society, about ourselves, and
about life, for which we have yet to find the answers’ – Provided by publisher.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Erotic literature, French. I. Title: Crimes of love. II. Coward, David.
III. Sade, marquis de, 1740–1814. Idée sur les romans. English. IV. Title.
V. Oxford world’s classics (Oxford University Press)
PQ2063.S3A65213 2005
843′.6 – dc22
ISBN 0–19–280507–X 2004026058
13 57910 864 2
Typeset in Ehrhardt
by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd., St. Ives plc., Suffolk
CONTENTS
Introduction vii
Note on the Text xxxiii
Select Bibliography xxxvii
A Chronology of the Marquis de Sade xl
THE CRIMES OF LOVE
An Essay on Novels 
Miss Henrietta Stralson, or The Effects of Despair.
An English Tale 
Faxelange, or the Faults of Ambition 
Florville and Courval, or Fatality 
Rodrigo, or The Enchanted Tower. An Allegorical Tale 
Ernestine. A Swedish Tale 
The Countess of Sancerre, or Her Daughter’s Rival.
An Anecdote of the Court of Burgundy 
Eugénie de Franval. A Tragic Tale 
Appendix I. Draft of the Author’s Foreword () 
Appendix II. The Controversy with Villeterque 
. Review of The Crimes of Love by Villeterque 
. The Author of ‘The Crimes of Love’ to Villeterque,
Hack and Scribe 
. From Le Journal des Arts,  nivôse, An IX
( January ) 
Explanatory Notes 
This page intentionally left blank
INTRODUCTION
T M  S spent a third of his life under lock and key.
Until  he was jailed for his actions. After  he was
imprisoned for his writings. He never believed he had done anything
wrong, and blamed his unjust captivity on the prejudices of his
enemies. He was, however, jailed by every political regime he lived
under, monarchical, republican, and imperial, as though no form of
government could tolerate his provocations and excesses.
Even before he published a word, his name was associated with
cruelty and perversion. His brushes with the law were widely
reported and, as they passed from pen to pen, they turned into lurid
travesties of the facts. In  Restif de la Bretonne offered readers
of Les Nuits de Paris glimpses of a ‘monster’ who cut up women,
wallowed in blood, and was Caligula and Bluebeard rolled into one.
When Justine was published in  reviewers pronounced it ‘odi-
ous’, ‘depraved’, and ‘monstrous’, and compared it to a poisonous
mushroom which, if tasted, would prove fatal. Restif claimed to have
evidence that two hundred women had already died agonizing deaths
at the hands of men who had read it, and he warned the authorities
that if it were ever to fall into the hands of common soldiers, the fate
of a further twenty thousand would be too gruesome to contemplate.
Sade tried to make The Crimes of Love () conform to the more
conservative social climate inaugurated by Napoleon, but he was
arrested in  and deprived permanently of his liberty. Thereafter,
Church and State continued to ban his books and moralists to think
of him as the ultimate threat to everything civilization stands for.
Was the Marquis de Sade the wickedest man in the world?
The Life and Prisons of the Marquis de Sade
Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade was born in Paris in . His
family had been noble for three centuries, not long enough perhaps
to warrant the patrician arrogance with which he treated his
inferiors, but the line was certainly ancient and honourable. Its roots
were in Provence. One ancestor, Louis de Sade, financed the
construction of the famous bridge at Avignon in : the family
viii Introduction
escutcheon was inscribed under the first arch and is still visible.
Another, Laure de Sade, was the muse of Petrarch, an ideal of spiritual
perfection. On his mother’s side he was connected to the Great
Condé, one of the seventeenth century’s most celebrated generals,
and he was born in the Condé palace and lived there with his Condé
cousin, the Prince de Bourbon, until he was four. Unfortunately, his
parents did not have the wealth to match their connections. In ,
in the absence of his father, the spendthrift, womanizing Comte de
Sade, a diplomat then on a mission to Germany, his mother decided
that the boy should be sent to the family estates near Avignon, where
he was cared for by his grandmother, assorted aunts, and an uncle,
the licentious Abbé de Sade.
In  he was enrolled at the Jesuit College of Louis-le-Grand in
Paris. His progress was guided by a tutor, the kindly Abbé Amblet,
to whom Sade, never overburdened with parental affection, always
remained close. In  he entered military college at Versailles. He
was appointed sub-lieutenant in an infantry regiment the following
year, became captain of cavalry in , and saw active service in the
Seven Years War. He also acquired a reputation for wayward, lewd
behaviour, to the point that his father complained that he had
become ‘furiously combustible’.
His parents separated in about , and the family’s fortunes did
not improve. The outbreak of peace in  dashed Sade’s hopes of a
military career. His father overrode his wish to marry a Mademoiselle
de Lauris, to whom he was genuinely attached, and instead arranged
his marriage with Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil, daughter of a wealthy
but recently ennobled middle-class family. Sade obeyed reluctantly
and acquired money, a wife whose social origins he despised, and a
mother-in-law whom he would learn to fear and hate.
He preferred the pleasure-haunts of Paris to home, and he soon
attracted attention there. In October , after subjecting Jeanne
Testard, a fan-maker, to a night of sado-masochistic terror and––
graver still––‘horrible impiety’, which included the desecration of a
crucifix and other religious symbols, he was hauled before the just-
ices, who jailed him briefly at the prison-fortress at Vincennes in
eastern Paris. Unrepentant, he soon resumed his bad habits and
consorted openly with expensive actresses, one of whom he passed
off as his wife on a visit to his chateau at La Coste in the Midi. In
, on the death of his father, he inherited large debts and the title
Introduction ix
of ‘Comte’, which he never used, preferring to style himself
‘Marquis’. By this time he was well known to the men who policed
the capital’s buoyant vice trade. On  October  one of them
predicted the worst:
It will not be long before more is heard of the horrors perpetrated by the
Comte de Sade. He is presently moving heaven and earth to persuade
Mademoiselle Rivière of the Opera to live with him and has offered her 
louis a month on the condition that the days when she is not performing
on stage she will spend with him at the little house he owns at Arcueil.
The lady has refused because she is currently in receipt of the attentions
of Monsieur Hocquart de Coubron, but Monsieur de Sade continues to
pester her. Until such time as he can overcome her resistance, he has
applied persistently this week to Madame Brissault [one of Paris’s leading
madams] asking her to furnish him with girls he can take to supper at his
little retreat. But she has refused, for she knows all too well what he is
capable of. However, he has probably approached others among her col-
leagues who are either less scrupulous or else do not know him, and one
thing is clear: it will not be long before more is heard of him.
And so it proved.
On Easter Day , in the Place des Victoires, he made an
approach to Rose Keller, , who claimed to be a widow, an
unemployed cotton-spinner reduced to begging for her bread:
Monsieur de Sade ... going alone to his residence at Arcueil near Paris,
chanced upon a beggar-woman whom he took with him to his house on
the pretext that out of charity he wished to add her to his household, for
his service. But when she arrived, he led her into an isolated room, bound
her hands and feet, and stopped up her mouth to prevent her crying out.
Taking a small knife, he made a number of incisions in various parts of her
body and then melted some kind of Spanish wax into the cuts. Having
done this, he calmly went out to take the air, leaving the victim of his
ferocity under lock and key. However, she managed to free herself and
jumped from the window without adding any more injury to herself than
she had already sustained. All the villagers who saw her would have mas-
sacred the Comte de Sade if he had not fled. It is thought that he has lost
his reason. His family has been granted an order for him to be detained at
the chateau of Saumur, and the perforated woman has withdrawn the
complaint she had made in court in consideration of a sum of money.
Like most reports of the ‘Arcueil Affair’ published at the time, this
account in the Gazette d’Utrecht on  April was not altogether