SADE writes to his wife from his prison cell in Vincennes.

Donatien Alphonse François de Sade (1740-1814). Marquis de Sade.

Autograph letter to his wife, Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil.

One page in-12° on two sheets. Autograph address.

Two small burns at the top of the letter. (Vincennes Prison – February 1783)

"So I'm here for years? Goodbye, I'm in despair."

Sade, imprisoned in the Donjon de Vincennes and forbidden from receiving visitors for more than two months, sends his wife a dense letter mixing thanks, suffering, complaints, love, hate, supplications and reproaches.

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“I received the doctor’s letter, thank you. I will reply when I can, or when my mind can. For God’s sake, tell me what I should write to him, or I’ll leave him there. I begged you most earnestly not to send me anything until March 1st. For God’s sake, let me breathe for at least two weeks, without overwhelming me like you are with stabbing me in the back.”

I added to this that if you could manage to come and see me towards the beginning of Lent, the greatest service you could render me would be to bring me these things yourself, which would be my undoing if I were to face them without you. Grant me, therefore, what I ask of you at least once in your life, and do everything in your power to bring all of this to me yourself; I need nothing, I tell you, before March 1st, ^and who can wait until the 8th if you can come to see me then.

Oh my God, for six years I have suffered, so cruelly and always at the hands of you and yours! Will I never obtain the slightest favor from the tormentors who surround you? Are they not yet weary of persecuting me—for I am weary of suffering, oh my God, I am at the end of my rope. If you could see me, you would pity me, and if you were so kind as to be told of my dreadful condition, you would not redouble your daily suffering (…) As you do with your execrable letters, what a monster! Oh my God, what a monster whispers the languid expressions you use, and am I here for years? Farewell, I am in despair .

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It was at the beginning of 1783 that the Marquis suffered severe eye inflammation; he almost completely lost the use of his eyes from January to July 1783. Sade wrote a detailed account of his ailments in a valuable document entitled * Journal de mon œil . Regarding his headaches, he wrote in his Journal for the month of February: “On the 9th, suffering horribly, I had a good night but great headaches. On the 10th, my head hurt so much that I could not get up until three o'clock.” It is, in fact, this single reference to headaches that allows us to precisely date this letter.

The " doctor " in question here is none other than Henri Grandjean, oculist-surgeon to the king and the royal family, sent to examine the prisoner following his insistent requests: "I beg you to send me an oculist, and the best in Paris." (Letter to Renée-Pélagie of February 4, 1783).

It was, however, under the influence of this incipient blindness and the pains that deprived him of all distraction and forced him into inertia that Sade began to imagine his future erotic odysseys, as he would confess a few months later in a letter from April 1783: “My eye is still the same, and there is very little thought of even curing it […]. Besides, I pay less attention to it, I read less, I work less, and my mind wanders to other things with such prodigiously greater force that, in reality, apart from the considerable inconvenience, I would almost be tempted not to mind! I had always heard it said that an affected sense triples the power of the imagination, and I am experiencing it. It has led me to invent a singular rule of pleasure.” "It's because I'm very convinced that we could achieve the pleasures of love to the highest possible degree of intensity by suppressing one or two senses, or even more, each time we want to experience pleasure. "