Juliette

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In their frustration and their shock, they go into incredible detail about how wrong Sade gets life, often reaching for a pen just so they can get all their thoughts down on paper.

You know how, when a minor character dies in a regular novel, you have to feel some kind of court-appointed guilt? However, one single hint of resistance, let me repeat, one reluctant gesture were fatal: it will cost you the loss of all you have won by complacency heretofore: yield: unless you acquaint yourself with everything, you’ll know nothing; and if you’re so timid as to pause in your conversation with her, Nature will escape you forever. Almost every single character has at least one multi-paged monologue where they act as a mouthpiece for de Sade's philosophy on politics, society, religion, morality, and sexuality. Euphrosine was there: the weather was incredibly warm, and this excessive ardor of the sun afforded them an excuse for the disarray I found them in: apart from an undergarment of transparent lawn maintained by nothing more than a large bow of pink ribbon, they were perfectly naked. The word conscience, my beloved Juliette, denominates that as it were inner voice which cries out when we do something—it makes no difference what—we are forbidden to do: and this eminently simple definition lays bare, to even the most casual glance, the origins the conscience has in prejudices inculcated by training and upbringing.Refer yourself again and again to the great theses of Spinoza, of Vanini, of the author of Le Systéme de la Nature. If because it has been detected this deed brings us unhappiness in its wake, let us bend our keener faculties to ferreting out the reasons why it came to public intelligence; and without shedding a superfluous tear over something we are powerless to arrange otherwise, let us mobilize every effort so that the next time we shall not be wanting in tact, let us turn this mishap to our advantage, and from this reversal draw the experience necessary to improve our methods: henceforth, we will ensure our impunity by swathing our irregularities in thicker veils and more entire obscurity. If then this most unrigid organ is, depending merely upon latitude and longitude, able to excuse and justify any extreme behavior, true wisdom must advise us to adopt a rational, a moderate, position between extravagances and chimeras, and to evolve attitudes which will prove compatible simultaneously with the penchants we have individually received from Nature and with the laws of the country we happen to dwell in; and these are the attitudes out of which we must elaborate our conscience. But, he did fight in the Seven Years’ War (1754-1763) as a young Colonel of a Dragoon regiment, and he was briefly a leftist politician in the 1790’s, even dropping the Marquis title. Sade: the pleasure of reading him clearly proceeds from certain breaks (or certain collisions): antipathetic codes (the noble and the trivial, for example) come into contact; pompous and ridiculous neologisms are created; porno­graphic messages are embodied in sentences so pure they might be used as grammatical models.

I took the Greyhound Bus all the way from LA to New York, stopping off to admire the King’s twinkling jumpsuits at Graceland and walk around the mysterious streets of New Orleans.

After having taught you how to deal with the remorse born of the pain one suffers from having done evil rather too conspicuously, it is of the essence, dear little friend, that you permit me now to indicate the manner of totally silencing that inner and confusion-breeding voice which, when thirsts have been slaked, wakes now and again to upbraid us for the follies into which passions have plunged us.

In other words, sex always means something in de Sade; there is no such thing as “casual” sex in his writings. But let us take the word in its most elementary and most common acceptation: in this case, guilt—that is to say, what prompts the utterances of the inner mechanism we have just designated as the conscience—in this case, guilt is a perfectly useless debility, a weakness whose grip upon us we have got to break with all possible dispatch and with all the determination we can muster. The enacted deed produces another; and who is there doubts that this multiplying of delights very speedily induces a soul to adopt the lineaments and character it has got to have, however painful at first may have been the difficulties wherewith, perforce, it was beset by the deed in question? Well, this cure is quite as sweet as it is sure, for it consists simply in reiterating the deeds that have made us remorseful, in repeating them so often that the habit either of committing these deeds or of getting away scot free with them completely undermines every possibility of feeling badly about them. exclaimed our young friend as she cast herself upon Delbéne’s breast; “’tis you I am indebted to for an understanding of myself and of the meaning of my existence.

The evil act once committed, one of two things must follow: either the act is punished, or it is not. Then those two minxes, laughing merrily, stepped up to me and soon had me in a state identical to theirs; whereupon Madame Delbéne’s kisses assumed a completely different character. Juliette boards a train from Paris and comes back to her hometown hoping for a low-key visit with family and old friends. And so ’tis madness, ’tis true extravagance to refrain from doing whatever we please, and, having done it, to repent thereof. Guilt, thus, is merely an unpleasant reminiscence; it crops out of the customs and conventions one happens to have adopted, but it never results from, never has any connection with, the character of the deed one happens to have performed.