©Nata Metlukh
In the new anthology Dead Interviews, authors imagine conversations with their favourite dead writers. Rebecca Miller, the novelist and film director, chose to interview the Marquis de Sade. “When I was shooting a film in Connecticut,” says Miller, “for some reason I felt compelled to read At Home with the Marquis de Sade, by Francine DuPlessix Gray, every night. I found it an oddly charming escape. Later, when I began my novel, Jacob’s Folly, which is partially set in 18th-century Paris, I considered making Jacob the valet of the Marquis de Sade. In the end, I decided to make Jacob another nobleman’s valet—a potential neighbour of the ‘divine Marquis.’ Yet my fascination with this terrifying and moving character, and the period that made him possible, has lingered.”
Using an exciting new app, “Time Warp,” I reached the Marquis in the Bastille on 2nd July, in the year 1789, by which time he had been imprisoned for 12 years by special order of the king, under charges of debauchery and excessive libertinage. He was 49 years old.
Rebecca Miller: Dear Marquis de Sade, I am a writer, assigned to interview you. Would you be so kind as to give me a bit of your time? Best regards, R. Miller.
Marquis de Sade: Who gave you my address?
rm: Inspector Buhot.
mds: Fuck off. How would that philistine Buhot know a writer?
rm: It’s to do with your release.
mds: The true libertine loves even the punishment he receives. The gallows itself would be for me a voluptuous throne, and there would I face death by relishing the pleasure of expiring a victim of my crimes.
rm: You really relish being a prisoner?
mds: What do you think? It’s hell. I’m talking about an ideal. You are an informer, I assume.
rm: No. I am here to interview you about your life, your character, your writing. Buhot will see none of it.
mds: What do you know about my writing?
rm: You are famous.
mds: I am infamous, my man. Why should I have a correspondence with you? Can you help my release?
rm: Your release will be imminent.
mds: Tell me any date for an end to this, for to set no limit is deliberately to reduce me to the depths of despair. Tell me, tell me, or I will smash my head against the walls that contain me!
rm: I promise you will be out of prison within the month.
mds: I can’t take it anymore. I will agree to the interview. I hope you are not an idiot.
rm: I am curious about your mother, among other things.
mds: That bitch? Who cares about her?
rm: The people who sent me.
mds: I have gone beyond believing a word anyone says. My own mother-in-law has laid the traps that destroyed my life. Mme de Montreuil.
rm: Tell me about her.
mds: Mme de Montreuil is an infernal monster, a venomous beast, a trollop of a mother. I write my letters to her in blood.
rm: Your imprisonment is not punishment for your own crimes?
mds: What crimes? I never killed anyone. Paris is filled with libertines worse than me. This exchange is a waste of time. I must do something about my hemorrhoids.
rm: My deadline is tomorrow. If we could just go through a few more questions?
mds: Fire away, then.
rm: You have a fascinating psychological profile. We would call it an inverse Oedipus complex: you hate your mother and want to be close to your father. You went on to hate all mother figures, and motherhood itself.
mds: What is this twaddle?
rm: What is your first memory?
mds: Getting furious at another boy, in the courtyard of our home.
rm: Why?
mds: No idea. Who are these people who say they can help get me out?
rm: Important people.
mds: My hemorrhoids are killing me.
rm: Have you tried sitz baths?
mds: If you could procure for me a certain little tube perforated with holes. One pumps water through it. Very soothing. I have asked my wife for one in my letters but she is refusing to contact me now. She has abandoned me.
rm: I will do my best to find one. Your wife, Renée-Pélagie. She stood by you for years, through your first arrests, scandals, show trials, the seduction of her own sister. Was she shocked by your proclivities when you were first married?
mds: She was a blank slate, so she didn’t know what to expect.
rm: You mean to say she shares your tastes?
mds: She has shared my life.
rm: I know about your castle, the Château de Lacoste. I know you two holed up there for a winter after you escaped from prison. You and your wife hired some very young servants—teenagers, some of them—and then imprisoned them in the castle. You beat them, engaged in sexual acts. I know you were up to all sorts of stuff there, but no one knows how much Renée-Pélagie was involved.
mds: Your information is foul. I refuse to go on.
rm: Do you want to get out of prison or not?
Five hours pass with no word from the Marquis. I worry I have lost him.
mds: That winter at La Coste, my wife and I lived a simple, almost monastic life. We ate dinner at three o’clock. I spent the afternoon in my study, working.
rm: Working on what?
mds: Theatre.
rm: Theatre to be played out in the castle?
mds: I had it all carefully ordered. At the top of the pyramid were me and my wife. Then came Gothon Duffé, my valet’s lover.
rm: Your valet—La Jeunesse?
mds: Yes. He left his family to be with Gothon for her enormous ass. Then we had Jean and Saint-Louis, a drunk. He was a terror, feared no one. Nanon was the housekeeper. Then we had my young male secretary, who was about 15, and five serving damsels—between 12 and 15, I think. My wife assembled the superb cast herself. Then we had a couple of dancers and a cook. All told, it was 20 people.
rm: All of whom were immured in the château, unable to escape.
mds: Nonsense.
rm: What was your role?
mds: I was the master of ceremonies. I disciplined them, created tableaux vivants, determined partners—without order the thing would have been an ugly mess. I turned the derangement of the senses into a work of art. I even controlled the emissions.
rm: You hurt the children under your care?
mds: A great deal of pleasure was had in those two months.
rm: Until one of the little abused girls escaped to her parents and scandal erupted.
mds: That child was a real hysteric.
rm: How much was your wife involved in the theatre of lust you created? I must know—did Renée-Pélagie participate? Did your wife, that meek, plain, dumpy woman—did she or did she not indulge in your sadistic pranks?
mds: Renée-Pélagie was the steward of my fantasies. She was my angel. I raised her above other women. Above the law. She and I were like demigods for a time.
rm: But did she participate?
mds: Why are you so obsessed with sex? I honour my wife—our intimate life is not for observation. But no, in answer to your sordid question.
rm: Where I come from, you are a famous writer. You have become a symbol of personal freedom for some, of monstrous excess for others. We can’t get enough of you.
mds: Are you Swedish? Are they performing my plays in Sweden and I don’t know it?
rm: Your plays... no, I’m afraid they are forgotten. The books are remembered: Philosophy in the Bedroom, Justine, The 120 Days of Sodom.
mds: How is this possible? The manuscript for The 120 Days of Sodom is...
rm: ...hidden in a chest in your prison cell.
mds: I don’t know what you are talking about. What are Philosophy in the Bedroom and Justine?
rm: Oh. Sorry. You haven’t written those yet.
mds: You are obviously a lunatic.
rm: If you had never been imprisoned you might never have become a writer. You would have just organised orgies. Being in prison is perhaps the ideal place for a writer to get any work done.
mds: How delightful are the pleasures of the imagination! In these delectable moments, the whole world is ours. Not a single creature resists us, we devastate the world, we repopulate it with new objects, which, in turn, we immolate. The means to every crime is ours, and we employ them all, we multiply them a hundredfold.
rm: Well, the crimes of your body and your imagination have earned you an adjective out here. And noun! Sadism. Sadistic. Meaning “taking pleasure in cruelty.”
mds: They boiled me down to that!
rm: For the most part.
mds: I am a man of the theatre. I... staged things.
rm: But in so doing you sometimes tied children up and beat them.
mds: My godfather used to shoot workers off of rooftops, and he got pardoned by the King. But when I paddle a prostitute, I am penalised.
rm: According to Inspector Buhot, when you were 28, you locked a woman in a room, threatened her with a knife until she beat you, then you masturbated with a crucifix and forced her to do the same.
mds: She was a prostitute! And she never pressed charges.
rm: All that desecration, though. For an atheist, you seem very angry at a God you don’t believe in.
mds: The invention of God is the one thing I truly cannot forgive man for.
rm: Why?
mds: I imagine the Last Judgement this way: God will upbraid the good. He will say, “When you saw everything was vicious and criminal on Earth, why did you stray into the path of virtue? Did not the perpetual misery with which I covered the universe suffice to convince you that I love only disorder and chaos, and that to please me you must irritate me? Did I not daily provide you with the example of destruction? Seeing which, fools, why did you not destroy? Why did you not do as I did?”
rm: So you believe in God—but not a merciful God?
mds: It is in the name of Nature that I wage war against God and morality.
rm: But your tastes are unnatural. Your cruelty is unnecessary. Nature is dictated by necessity.
mds: It’s true, my desire to desecrate Nature is stronger than my need to offend God. I would like to upset her plans, arrest the wheeling courses of the stars, destroy what serves Nature and protect what is harmful to her... and this I am unable to do.
rm: You would be a god.
mds: I would be a completely free human being. That is all.
rm: The personal freedom you describe leaves no room for a social contract. For ethics. For social responsibility.
mds: Oh, please. There is no possible comparison between what others experience and what we sense. The heaviest dose of agony in others means nothing to us, yet the tiniest dose of pleasure, registered in us, does touch us deeply.
rm: It makes me think of disasters on the news—or accidents on the road. They elicit curiosity more than compassion . . .
mds: The source of all our moral errors lies in the ridiculous fiction of brotherhood the Christians invented. The truth is we are all born enemies, all in a state of perpetual warfare.
rm: That’s depressing.
mds: What is depressing is the lies the Christians came up with.
rm: This freedom you speak of. It’s only for men, I suppose?
mds: In the future as I imagine it, there will be houses of libertinage for women, under the government’s protection. In these establishments there will be all the individuals of either sex a woman could desire.
rm: Really?
mds: O charming sex, you will be free! Women have been endowed with considerably more violent penchants for carnal pleasure than we. In my ideal society they would be allowed to give themselves over to it, free of all encumbering family ties, false notions of modesty—restored to a state of nature. I want laws permitting women to give themselves to as many men as they see fit. I would also have a law whereby all women must give themselves to whatever man wants her. We owe it to them that they get the same privilege.
rm: So women have to give themselves to any man who wants them. But also, they can have any man—
mds: Or woman—
rm: Any man or woman whom they desire. What about families?
mds: What can the family matter in the new Republic, where every individual must have no mother but the nation, where everyone born is the motherland’s child? Children should be separated from their family and raised by the state. No child must know the identity of his father. All children must be children of their country.
rm: I had no idea how radical you were.
mds: These are just ideas I am batting about.
rm: Not what you actually believe?
mds: I believe I need clean linen.
rm: Doesn’t your wife send you any?
mds: Not for weeks.
rm: There’s going to be a revolution in France.
mds: Probably.
rm: No. There is.
mds: Anarchy?
rm: For a time.
mds: Finally. The rule of law is inferior to that of anarchy. But then... no more?
rm: Anarchy, chaos for a time, in France. Then a dictator. A little bourgeois Corsican.
mds: Oh, God.
rm: Have you ever been in love?
mds: Many times.
rm: With a man or a woman?
mds: Women! I succumb happily to men, but I always love the sight of a woman’s white bottom, with its little puckered rose beckoning me.
rm: You prefer sodomy even with women?
mds: Vastly. The vagina is the ultimate cul-de-sac. If you are timid enough to stop with what is natural, Nature will elude your grasp for ever.
rm: Do you love to be hurt as you love to hurt?
mds: I take pleasure in being whipped and in whipping. But there is no slavishness or shame in my liking for degradation. For a mind as organised as mine, that humiliation serves as an exquisite flattery to my pride.
rm: What do you crave above all things?
mds: Right now? A roast chicken.
In the new anthology Dead Interviews, authors imagine conversations with their favourite dead writers. Rebecca Miller, the novelist and film director, chose to interview the Marquis de Sade. “When I was shooting a film in Connecticut,” says Miller, “for some reason I felt compelled to read At Home with the Marquis de Sade, by Francine DuPlessix Gray, every night. I found it an oddly charming escape. Later, when I began my novel, Jacob’s Folly, which is partially set in 18th-century Paris, I considered making Jacob the valet of the Marquis de Sade. In the end, I decided to make Jacob another nobleman’s valet—a potential neighbour of the ‘divine Marquis.’ Yet my fascination with this terrifying and moving character, and the period that made him possible, has lingered.”
Using an exciting new app, “Time Warp,” I reached the Marquis in the Bastille on 2nd July, in the year 1789, by which time he had been imprisoned for 12 years by special order of the king, under charges of debauchery and excessive libertinage. He was 49 years old.
Rebecca Miller: Dear Marquis de Sade, I am a writer, assigned to interview you. Would you be so kind as to give me a bit of your time? Best regards, R. Miller.
Marquis de Sade: Who gave you my address?
rm: Inspector Buhot.
mds: Fuck off. How would that philistine Buhot know a writer?
rm: It’s to do with your release.
mds: The true libertine loves even the punishment he receives. The gallows itself would be for me a voluptuous throne, and there would I face death by relishing the pleasure of expiring a victim of my crimes.
rm: You really relish being a prisoner?
mds: What do you think? It’s hell. I’m talking about an ideal. You are an informer, I assume.
rm: No. I am here to interview you about your life, your character, your writing. Buhot will see none of it.
mds: What do you know about my writing?
rm: You are famous.
mds: I am infamous, my man. Why should I have a correspondence with you? Can you help my release?
rm: Your release will be imminent.
mds: Tell me any date for an end to this, for to set no limit is deliberately to reduce me to the depths of despair. Tell me, tell me, or I will smash my head against the walls that contain me!
rm: I promise you will be out of prison within the month.
mds: I can’t take it anymore. I will agree to the interview. I hope you are not an idiot.
rm: I am curious about your mother, among other things.
mds: That bitch? Who cares about her?
rm: The people who sent me.
mds: I have gone beyond believing a word anyone says. My own mother-in-law has laid the traps that destroyed my life. Mme de Montreuil.
rm: Tell me about her.
mds: Mme de Montreuil is an infernal monster, a venomous beast, a trollop of a mother. I write my letters to her in blood.
rm: Your imprisonment is not punishment for your own crimes?
mds: What crimes? I never killed anyone. Paris is filled with libertines worse than me. This exchange is a waste of time. I must do something about my hemorrhoids.
rm: My deadline is tomorrow. If we could just go through a few more questions?
mds: Fire away, then.
rm: You have a fascinating psychological profile. We would call it an inverse Oedipus complex: you hate your mother and want to be close to your father. You went on to hate all mother figures, and motherhood itself.
mds: What is this twaddle?
rm: What is your first memory?
mds: Getting furious at another boy, in the courtyard of our home.
rm: Why?
mds: No idea. Who are these people who say they can help get me out?
rm: Important people.
mds: My hemorrhoids are killing me.
rm: Have you tried sitz baths?
mds: If you could procure for me a certain little tube perforated with holes. One pumps water through it. Very soothing. I have asked my wife for one in my letters but she is refusing to contact me now. She has abandoned me.
rm: I will do my best to find one. Your wife, Renée-Pélagie. She stood by you for years, through your first arrests, scandals, show trials, the seduction of her own sister. Was she shocked by your proclivities when you were first married?
mds: She was a blank slate, so she didn’t know what to expect.
rm: You mean to say she shares your tastes?
mds: She has shared my life.
rm: I know about your castle, the Château de Lacoste. I know you two holed up there for a winter after you escaped from prison. You and your wife hired some very young servants—teenagers, some of them—and then imprisoned them in the castle. You beat them, engaged in sexual acts. I know you were up to all sorts of stuff there, but no one knows how much Renée-Pélagie was involved.
mds: Your information is foul. I refuse to go on.
rm: Do you want to get out of prison or not?
Five hours pass with no word from the Marquis. I worry I have lost him.
mds: That winter at La Coste, my wife and I lived a simple, almost monastic life. We ate dinner at three o’clock. I spent the afternoon in my study, working.
rm: Working on what?
mds: Theatre.
rm: Theatre to be played out in the castle?
mds: I had it all carefully ordered. At the top of the pyramid were me and my wife. Then came Gothon Duffé, my valet’s lover.
rm: Your valet—La Jeunesse?
mds: Yes. He left his family to be with Gothon for her enormous ass. Then we had Jean and Saint-Louis, a drunk. He was a terror, feared no one. Nanon was the housekeeper. Then we had my young male secretary, who was about 15, and five serving damsels—between 12 and 15, I think. My wife assembled the superb cast herself. Then we had a couple of dancers and a cook. All told, it was 20 people.
rm: All of whom were immured in the château, unable to escape.
mds: Nonsense.
rm: What was your role?
mds: I was the master of ceremonies. I disciplined them, created tableaux vivants, determined partners—without order the thing would have been an ugly mess. I turned the derangement of the senses into a work of art. I even controlled the emissions.
rm: You hurt the children under your care?
mds: A great deal of pleasure was had in those two months.
rm: Until one of the little abused girls escaped to her parents and scandal erupted.
mds: That child was a real hysteric.
rm: How much was your wife involved in the theatre of lust you created? I must know—did Renée-Pélagie participate? Did your wife, that meek, plain, dumpy woman—did she or did she not indulge in your sadistic pranks?
mds: Renée-Pélagie was the steward of my fantasies. She was my angel. I raised her above other women. Above the law. She and I were like demigods for a time.
rm: But did she participate?
mds: Why are you so obsessed with sex? I honour my wife—our intimate life is not for observation. But no, in answer to your sordid question.
rm: Where I come from, you are a famous writer. You have become a symbol of personal freedom for some, of monstrous excess for others. We can’t get enough of you.
mds: Are you Swedish? Are they performing my plays in Sweden and I don’t know it?
rm: Your plays... no, I’m afraid they are forgotten. The books are remembered: Philosophy in the Bedroom, Justine, The 120 Days of Sodom.
mds: How is this possible? The manuscript for The 120 Days of Sodom is...
rm: ...hidden in a chest in your prison cell.
mds: I don’t know what you are talking about. What are Philosophy in the Bedroom and Justine?
rm: Oh. Sorry. You haven’t written those yet.
mds: You are obviously a lunatic.
rm: If you had never been imprisoned you might never have become a writer. You would have just organised orgies. Being in prison is perhaps the ideal place for a writer to get any work done.
mds: How delightful are the pleasures of the imagination! In these delectable moments, the whole world is ours. Not a single creature resists us, we devastate the world, we repopulate it with new objects, which, in turn, we immolate. The means to every crime is ours, and we employ them all, we multiply them a hundredfold.
rm: Well, the crimes of your body and your imagination have earned you an adjective out here. And noun! Sadism. Sadistic. Meaning “taking pleasure in cruelty.”
mds: They boiled me down to that!
rm: For the most part.
mds: I am a man of the theatre. I... staged things.
rm: But in so doing you sometimes tied children up and beat them.
mds: My godfather used to shoot workers off of rooftops, and he got pardoned by the King. But when I paddle a prostitute, I am penalised.
rm: According to Inspector Buhot, when you were 28, you locked a woman in a room, threatened her with a knife until she beat you, then you masturbated with a crucifix and forced her to do the same.
mds: She was a prostitute! And she never pressed charges.
rm: All that desecration, though. For an atheist, you seem very angry at a God you don’t believe in.
mds: The invention of God is the one thing I truly cannot forgive man for.
rm: Why?
mds: I imagine the Last Judgement this way: God will upbraid the good. He will say, “When you saw everything was vicious and criminal on Earth, why did you stray into the path of virtue? Did not the perpetual misery with which I covered the universe suffice to convince you that I love only disorder and chaos, and that to please me you must irritate me? Did I not daily provide you with the example of destruction? Seeing which, fools, why did you not destroy? Why did you not do as I did?”
rm: So you believe in God—but not a merciful God?
mds: It is in the name of Nature that I wage war against God and morality.
rm: But your tastes are unnatural. Your cruelty is unnecessary. Nature is dictated by necessity.
mds: It’s true, my desire to desecrate Nature is stronger than my need to offend God. I would like to upset her plans, arrest the wheeling courses of the stars, destroy what serves Nature and protect what is harmful to her... and this I am unable to do.
rm: You would be a god.
mds: I would be a completely free human being. That is all.
rm: The personal freedom you describe leaves no room for a social contract. For ethics. For social responsibility.
mds: Oh, please. There is no possible comparison between what others experience and what we sense. The heaviest dose of agony in others means nothing to us, yet the tiniest dose of pleasure, registered in us, does touch us deeply.
rm: It makes me think of disasters on the news—or accidents on the road. They elicit curiosity more than compassion . . .
mds: The source of all our moral errors lies in the ridiculous fiction of brotherhood the Christians invented. The truth is we are all born enemies, all in a state of perpetual warfare.
rm: That’s depressing.
mds: What is depressing is the lies the Christians came up with.
rm: This freedom you speak of. It’s only for men, I suppose?
mds: In the future as I imagine it, there will be houses of libertinage for women, under the government’s protection. In these establishments there will be all the individuals of either sex a woman could desire.
rm: Really?
mds: O charming sex, you will be free! Women have been endowed with considerably more violent penchants for carnal pleasure than we. In my ideal society they would be allowed to give themselves over to it, free of all encumbering family ties, false notions of modesty—restored to a state of nature. I want laws permitting women to give themselves to as many men as they see fit. I would also have a law whereby all women must give themselves to whatever man wants her. We owe it to them that they get the same privilege.
rm: So women have to give themselves to any man who wants them. But also, they can have any man—
mds: Or woman—
rm: Any man or woman whom they desire. What about families?
mds: What can the family matter in the new Republic, where every individual must have no mother but the nation, where everyone born is the motherland’s child? Children should be separated from their family and raised by the state. No child must know the identity of his father. All children must be children of their country.
rm: I had no idea how radical you were.
mds: These are just ideas I am batting about.
rm: Not what you actually believe?
mds: I believe I need clean linen.
rm: Doesn’t your wife send you any?
mds: Not for weeks.
rm: There’s going to be a revolution in France.
mds: Probably.
rm: No. There is.
mds: Anarchy?
rm: For a time.
mds: Finally. The rule of law is inferior to that of anarchy. But then... no more?
rm: Anarchy, chaos for a time, in France. Then a dictator. A little bourgeois Corsican.
mds: Oh, God.
rm: Have you ever been in love?
mds: Many times.
rm: With a man or a woman?
mds: Women! I succumb happily to men, but I always love the sight of a woman’s white bottom, with its little puckered rose beckoning me.
rm: You prefer sodomy even with women?
mds: Vastly. The vagina is the ultimate cul-de-sac. If you are timid enough to stop with what is natural, Nature will elude your grasp for ever.
rm: Do you love to be hurt as you love to hurt?
mds: I take pleasure in being whipped and in whipping. But there is no slavishness or shame in my liking for degradation. For a mind as organised as mine, that humiliation serves as an exquisite flattery to my pride.
rm: What do you crave above all things?
mds: Right now? A roast chicken.
