Read Letters From Prison for Free Online Page A

keep him out of the clutches of the Paris criminal court—was granted a letter of annulment by the king on June 3. In the tug of war between the court and the judiciary, such a royal pardon was final, and essentially expunged the case from the books, much to the chagrin of President de Maupeou. The high court, with de Maupeou presiding, met and approved the king’s decision. In all this, once again the long arm of Madame de Montreuil could be seen. Now, purely for form, the prisoner was brought to the Conciergerie in Paris for trial on June 10, where he was nominally fined “alms of one hundred livres to be used for bread for the prisoners of the Conciergerie.” After that he was returned to Pierre-Encize to await the king’s pleasure for release. On November 16, 1768, the king ordered Sade to be released and sent to his estate at La Coste. Thus Sade’s first long-term acquaintance with prison life—by now he had been in jail seven months—was over. The question was, had it proved a sobering experience? The answer came in the form of a resounding no less than four years later.
    The second event that sealed his fate with the long-suffering Madame de Montreuil began to unfold in the afternoon of June 23, 1772, when Sade and his valet Latour set off from La Coste for Marseilles, ostensibly to attend to some business there. In fact, he and La-tour spent the next five days visiting the city’s bordellos. On the fifth day Sade ordered his valet to round up several girls—all prostitutes— and a “meeting” was scheduled for ten o’clock in the morning at the house of one of them, Marie Borelly, on the rue d’Aubagne, for Sade rightly judged that to indulge the fantasies he had in mind he needed privacy. There Sade and Latour proceeded to hold a matinal debauch involving five prostitutes, all of whom whipped the gentlemen and were whipped by them in turn, with Sade dictating the action and sometimes reversing roles, calling his valet “Marquis” and referring to himself as Lafleur, and, in one further strange twist, keeping a concrete count of the beatings he had received. 8 But the heated action, which went on for at least two hours, was not the cause of Sade’s impending downfall: from a little gold-rimmed box he had in his coat, he took out some aniseed candies, whose sugar coating was soaked with the extract of what is commonly known as Spanish fly, and tried to force them on the girls. Only one, Marianne Laverne, ate any, though another pretended to but spit them out. That same evening he amused himself—alone this time—with another prostitute, Marguerite Coste, whom he convinced to down even a greater quantity of the aniseed candies. The following day, his sexual appetite presumably satiated, Sade and Latour peacefully returned to La Coste by postal coach. But the pastilles he had fed the two girls were having an effect that would cost the marquis dearly. The most severely afflicted was Marguerite Coste, who fell ill the same night she had been with Sade and whose condition worsened over the next two days, during which she was wracked by terrible vomiting. A doctor was summoned, and when he heard the source of her illness he reported it to the police. Convinced the man with the pastilles had tried to poison the girls, the police had the vestiges of the girls’ regurgitations—plus two untouched pastilles found at Marie Borelly’s place—analyzed and found absolutely no trace of poison. Puzzled, the police never thought of Spanish fly, which can be dangerous if taken in more than moderate doses. Sade’s doses were clearly immoderate, and Marguerite Coste came close to death, so close in fact that she was administered last rites. The police took depositions from all six girls, and on July 4 a warrant was issued for the arrest of both Sade and Latour. Before it could be carried out, however, someone came to La Coste to warn the marquis of the impending danger, adding that one of the “poisoned” girls