Justine Les Infortunes de la vertu - Marquis de Sade

Marquis de Sade, born in 1740 and died in 1814, readers of the various adventures of Justine can today give three meanings. On the one hand: how far will the writer abuse the patience of good people by describing the most infamous blasphemies, the most abominable tortures, the least justified murders, and, in general, the triumph of vice over a really unfortunate virtue? Sade’s work is a committed work, and some readers feel that his Manicheism is not in the right direction.

how far does Justine’s vicious and seemingly endless literary prosperity go? She is first the heroine of Les Infortunes de la vertu, a 120-page tale written in the Bastille in two weeks in the summer of 1787 and originally intended to appear in Crimes of Love. In 1791, she becomes the victim that all the executioners of Justine ou les Malheurs de la vertu, a 270-page novel, are after. And in 1799 she is at the heart of the Nouvelle Justine ou les Malheurs de la vertu, a 720-page novel, itself followed by the even longer Histoire de Juliette, his sister, at the end of which the new Justine dies (the Pléiade volume offers the three Justines, but not Juliette). It seems that when Sade was arrested in 1801 (he remained locked up until his death, having been locked up for a total of thirty years during his life), he was still correcting the Nouvelle Justine, Obviously, he liked this character.
After having seen at the Castel Sant’Angelo, in Rome, a bow which a Spaniard would have used to shoot poisoned arrows at passers-by, Sade wrote: “This bizarre mania of doing evil for the sole pleasure of doing it is one of the passions of man least understood and consequently least analyzed, and which I would dare to believe, however, to be included in the common class of the delusions of his imagination. He is equally indignant (that is, neither more nor less) about other vices that are hardly believable: “I will not lie when I say that I have seen in Naples little girls of four to five years of age offering themselves to satisfy the most horrible debaucheries and even begging, when one succumbed to their solicitations, to choose rather that way than the one that nature indicates (“).” The author is always very well informed and sodomy is always on his mind. In spite of (or because of?) his hatred of all popes, he refutes the rumor that Sixtus IV allowed sodomy for three months of the year: “Those who indulge in this crime, whose impetuosity is well known, are neither people to be satisfied with only three months, nor people to go and ask for permission (“).” It is obvious that Sade knows what he is talking about. His tone is a bit like Justine’s, a hypocrisy that is no longer a hypocrisy, so much so that she denounces herself as such.

He also describes a “bad joke” in a painting, but which did not escape him: the head of a man representing the devil is “put on the belly of the woman, so that his beard forms this hairy part which usually covers the entry of its stay in the women”. As for the Minotaur, he analyzes it like a second Gilles de Rais “that the unbridled passions would have led to this barbaric disorder which makes find charm in the destruction of the object which comes to satisfy our senses or which rather makes taste only with the excesses of the most reflected cruelty”. Such an abominable pervert is nevertheless more probable than a being half-man half-animal: if the existence of such “monsters” is “difficult to understand”, it is however less “than that which the fable lends them”.

From the manuscript of Les Infortunes de la vertu transcribed by Jean-Christophe Abramovici to the versions of Justine published in the Pléiade by Michel Delon, we can now better follow the adventures of the text. Repetition is one of Sade’s phobias, as he does not want different torturers to do exactly the same to his victim. A note in the margin of folio 179 shows his will not to leave a single vice available: “roland can employ the nerve of ox he is not taken. (sic) Further on, next to the connection that the writer sees between vice and storm, both beneficial to some, he writes: “this comparison is shady”. The preoccupations of the writer seem very far from those of his detractors (it is rarely his style that they reproach him).

To avoid any repetition, Sade could have made Justine not his heroine but a victim among others, so that her perpetual surprise at inevitably meeting only awful perverts would have been more plausible. (Moreover, in the Nouvelle Justine, various characters, all of them libertines, tell at length, for variety, their own lives, which have no narrative connection with the novel in progress). In the Infortunes of Virtue, as in Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu, the heroine changes her first name after a few pages, only to find her own at the end, Juliette, to whom the young girl tells her story, thus allowing for the almost final “coup de théâtre” by suddenly identifying her sister. Justine is called Sophie during most of the first version and Thérèse during the second (the Countess of Ségur only had to mix the two to find her title Les Malheurs de Sophie). The fact that the victim appears as the main character does not fit well with the theories and the various (extremely talented) reasonings exposed throughout the pages by the executioners.

All the more so as one could suppose Sade to be entangled by a single victim (even if she may have companions in each episode), since he is constantly in search of the maximum crime, and a virgin has attractions for rapists that an already “used” woman does not have. However, from rape to rape, Justine cannot keep her virginity indefinitely. Well, she can. It is a particularity of the three versions that the heroine keeps her innocence even after the worst depravities. Narrative and textual devices are multiplied so that her purity never suffers from the situations (and yet, she suffers anyway, otherwise Justine would not lament so much and her tormentors would not enjoy so much). From his first description of the girl, Sade gives her “the air of a virgin,” when in fact she is a virgin, as if to show that this appearance is meant to outlive the physical reality of things. Justine’s first rapist misses several times by an exaggerated excitement (such a beautiful virgin at his mercy) causing early ejaculations. Then, his tormentor turns out to be impotent. Then it is a woman who takes advantage of her. Another libertine penetrates her, but protects her by excess of vice, choosing to take her virginity which does not risk to attack the solidity of her hymen. When the man she has just saved finally rapes her in the right way, Justine is passed out, so Sade thinks it’s not really worth it. Later, she will be sewn up again.
After 180 pages in which we believe that she has already suffered everything (including being branded as a criminal), it is written in the Nouvelle Justine: “Apart from this withering mark” of a few vestiges of rods which, thanks to the purity of her blood, soon disappeared” of a few sodomite attacks which, directed by ordinary members, did not deform her in any way; apart from all that, we say, our heroine (“) had still lost nothing, neither of her strength, nor of her freshness (“).” She is thus only more “capable of lighting, at libertines, the most violent desires” the most irregular” the most lascivious”. A pervert can thus still “pick a rose”, certainly “a little withered” but, since the rape, “well closed by the effect of such a long abstinence, which, under more of a report, could still give to this pretty flower all the physiognomy of a virginity”. The contradiction (the fantasy) between the eternal virginity and the absolute of the depravities is expressed by the imaginative monk Sévérino when he presents Justine to his colleagues: “Here is a Lucretia who carries at the same time on her shoulders the mark of the crime, and in the heart all the naivety of a virgin.”

Sade’s characters reason a great deal. But the libertines make no attempt to justify themselves. On the contrary, they want to convince Justine, so sure are they of their good right. In fact, the only time the girl manages to deceive her tormentors (which earns her worse punishments because they eventually realize it anyway) is when she pretends, after discussion, to surrender to their arguments. It seems quite plausible to them. These arguments are, basically, that, by definition, nature could not have created anything that is against nature and that everyone tries to do only what he likes, whatever taste that nature has put in him without him being responsible for it. (“Are we the masters of our tastes?”) “True morality (“) cannot depart from nature.” What is wrong with preferring shit to roses? “And Nero found as much pleasure in slitting his victims’ throats, as Titus did in not seeing a day go by, that he would not have made a happy man.” As “egoism is the first law of nature”, it is indispensable that the woman does not have her share in the enjoyment of the man. “Is it not clear, then, that woman can share nothing with us without taking from us, and that what she steals must necessarily be at our expense? Such is the properly sadistic doctrine which is in fact extended to all victims, regardless of their sex.

Sade is also an orderly author. His libertines need their victims not to “disturb” the “scene” they have set up. If the virtuous rebellions can please for a few moments, it is necessary quickly that the unfortunate ones do not have reckless gestures, without being necessarily chained by force. This is one of the weak points in the sadistic fantasy, because victims can throw away all pleasure by resisting in a way that is not appropriate. They are therefore perpetually subdued by sheer force, blackmail or, most often, persuasion. They must inevitably “obey”. At the risk of questioning Justine’s innocence, she always ends up doing “what was desired, albeit with the utmost repugnance”. And when, on her arrival at the monks’, a companion of misfortune begins to tell her all that she will have to undergo: “What horrors! says Justine. Continue, I pray you; they are so new, that their detail is really curious.”

In 1945, in a text on “the dubious Justine” included in the preface to the Folio edition of Infortunes of Virtue, Jean Paulhan developed the then paradoxical idea that Sade’s heroine is in fact a masochist, like her creator. This interpretation seems today, no less paradoxically, both obvious and false. The very tone that Sade lends to his character, her infinite capacity to imperturbably take up the story of her misfortunes from the beginning (even within each of the three versions), her unceasingly proclaimed will to die rather than to suffer, which disappears however as soon as her life is in danger, not to mention the murderous notations that Sade allows himself with regard to his heroine (“Justine decided the question as a devout; we would have pronounced as moralists”, “Justine here reasons as an egoist”), all this shows that there is no need to be fooled. However, the impossibility of sharing pleasure (it is as much that would be stolen from the libertine) and the very differentiation between Justine and Juliette, who is going to enjoy the “prosperities of vice” (whereas Maurice Blanchot has shown how the same adventures happen to both sisters, leading one to ecstasy and the other to despair), make that the whole Sadian philosophy would collapse if Justine enjoyed her misfortunes.

What is masochism without pleasure? This is the impossible lot of Justine, who is more than a banal suffering. The three versions of Justine are committed books, the first two allegedly against vice and the third in its favor. Sade, each time, proposes a philosophical task and compares those who would reproach him for his painting of vices to the “bigots” who attacked Tartuffe. It seems here that the writer has the same relationship to his text as Justine has to her own account of the first two versions. But there is a major difference. Literally, even imprisoned or interned, Sade, unlike his heroine, was never subjected. If the crimes, the whippings, the insults and the coprophagia that they impose increase the pleasure of the executioners by increasing the suffering of the victims, these same actions, undergone (at their request) by these same executioners, then in the position, also, of victims, also contribute to stronger and stronger enjoyments. Without doubt, this is the new strangeness that we can see today: Justine never reaches masochistic pleasure because, in Sade, even masochism is the prerogative of the masters of sadists.