Books: The Wicked Mister Six

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MARQUIS DE SADE, SELECTED LETTERS edited by Gilbert Lely. 188 pages. October House. $8.50.

The jailers in the big prison at Vincennes called him Monsieur le 6. The name of the arrogant prisoner in the tower had not yet become an eponym for conscienceless cruelty, but there was something about him that the warders did not like, and they preferred to poke his dinner to him through a trapdoor in the floor.

Perhaps the warders were right about Mister Six. No one, neither the King of France nor the Republican revolutionaries nor Napoleon himself, knew what to do with the Marquis de Sade except lock him up. And no one has quite known what to make of him since.

Dyspeptic Glutton. He was in jail because he liked to whip girls. Sometimes even a prostitute's pay is not enough for this sort of thing—De Sade's flagellating apparatus could be pretty damaging—and there were complaints about this, and also about sodomy, which carried the death penalty. His rank saved him from the gallows but not from himself. His trouble seems to have been that he was a stupendous sexual glutton and at the same time a sexual dyspeptic; too much was not enough. His pleasure was pain, and pain was his pleasure. Jail confined him to the not inconsiderable pleasures of his imagination, and over 20 years he wrote his blue masterpieces, The Bedroom Philosophers, The 120 Days of Sodom, Justine, and Juliette, in which he gave literary form if not, as he hoped, philosophic status to his aberrations.

He also wrote letters, mostly to his wife, his mother-in-law, his mistress and his valet. Unlike his fictive fantasies, these painful letters are not designed to give pleasure. Most of them are wheedling pleas to be let out of prison, or the usual prisoner's complaint about the food or the class of person he is compelled to associate with. Some are funny, some unconsciously so, including one in which he suggests that a few girls as cellmates would relieve him of the urge to write books.

Somewhere Over the Rimbaud. This new collection was discovered in 1948 by Gilbert Lely, a French scholar, at the chateau of the Marquis Xavier de Sade, a direct descendant. It would be impolite to call Lely a sadist, but he certainly is a Sadean, and a doting one at that. Lely hopes that the letters will help readers to "enjoy De Sade's dark erotic paradise without guilt." Freud and Havelock Ellis ("the supreme triumph of human idealism") are cited. Fair enough from these specialists, but Lely insists that one letter can be compared only to "the music of Mozart." In other places, Shakespeare and Aristophanes are somehow invoked. The correspondence foreshadows De Lautreamont, Arthur Rimbaud and Alfred

Jarry. Finally, De Sade can now be considered "an admissible genius like Shakespeare, Pascal or Nietzsche."