At Home With the Marquis De Sade by Francine Du Plessix Gray

Author:Francine Du Plessix Gray [Francine du Plessix Gray]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780712665223
Google: lq18PwAACAAJ
Publisher: Pimlico
Published: 2000-11-15T00:16:39.026524+00:00

The good company of M. du Puget, and Mme de Sade’s frequent visits to the Bastille, produced a radical change in Sade’s letters to his wife. Having ceased to serve as his principal emotional outlet, his written communications became far less frequent. They lost the playfulness of his Vincennes letters and turned considerably more morose, consisting chiefly of requests for creature comforts, derisive comments about Pélagie’s increasing devoutness, and continued insults to his mother-in-law. In this new phase of the spouses’ correspondence, the marquis most often referred to himself in the third person—’he’, ‘one’—and to Pélagie as ‘madame’: ‘One beseeches you to only buy comedies published this year’; ‘Mme de Sade is beseeched to instantly send the prisoner . . .’ He now addressed his wife as vous, employing the familiar tu only once in the five remaining years of his jail term.

Seemingly undeterred by this coolness, Pélagie devoted herself as ever to fulfilling her husband’s exorbitant requests—chimerical flasks, nonexistent books, rare delicacies, pens of unusual shape (‘very spread out at the top, with fine and hard tips’), clothes that he often sent back to her with sarcastic complaints: ‘I received yesterday an old pair of boots lined with dirty, stitched-up yellow stuff that might have belonged to the first cousin of the distant ancestor of the grandfather of the registrar of Vincennes.’15 Or: ‘We’re sending back to Mme de Sade the useless bonnet; we doubt it would even fit a five-year-old child.’16 Or: ‘I . . . praise the agility with which you find excuses to have fun in the country while I’m in need of everything.’17

And the marquis continued to pester his wife with yet more finicky requests: ‘A waistcoat and matching trousers of alpaca cloth, cut in the same style as the cotton trousers and waistcoats you sent me in previous winters. . . . A pint each of eau-de-vie, rose water, orange water, and eau de cologne. Six pairs of long cotton stockings, made in Paris and not in Troyes.’ Pélagie persevered; in June 1784 alone, Bastille archives reveal, she brought her husband twelve packages of strawberries.

But there were new sources of friction between the spouses. Pélagie had been fairly negligent, much of her life, about church rituals. And having been forced by her husband’s jealousy into a devout convent life, she now saw herself derided for her growing piety.

You haven’t chosen a date for your visit. Be kind enough to inform us of the one on which you’ll grace this site with your presence. The Feast of the Annunciation is in a fortnight. Would that be suitable to your sexts, matins, and nones? But then you can’t come on the Annunciation, I don’t believe you can, without announcing news at least equal to those which Gabriel whispered to Mary.18

Sade must have stepped up his criticism of Pélagie’s devoutness, for a few weeks later she protested—ever so delicately—with the following words:

Fasting at Lent, far from harming my health, is a healthy regimen, and I’m never ill during that period.

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