Free Letters From Prison by Marquis de Sade

loaned him the skull in connection with a number of lectures Spurzheim was scheduled to give in England and America. Spurzheim died some years later, and no trace of the famous skull was ever found.
    Sade would doubtless have highly approved of both Dr. Ramon’s extraordinary conclusions about his character and Dr. Spurzheim’s supreme carelessness in losing his demon-filled head.
1 . Only the first three survive. Conversations from the Chateau de Florbelle, or The Days of Florbelle as it came to be known, was seized by the police in 1807. After Sade’s death, Sade’s son Donatien-Claude-Armand not only gave the order that it be destroyed but personally witnessed the manuscript’s burning.
2 . Sade’s father-in-law, Claude-René Montreuil, was president of the Court of Taxation. As such, his wife had the right to be called “presidente,” and whenever that title is used here, it refers to Madame de Montreuil.
3 . The titles “count” and “marquis” were used alternately from generation to generation. When Sade’s father died early in 1767, he therefore assumed the title “count,” though history has linked him forever under his original title.
4 . Learning of his son’s “illness,” the Count de Sade immediately assumed it was the lovely Laure who had given his son “the pox.” Hardly likely.
5 . In referring to the count, Marais of course meant our marquis.
6 . A royal warrant bearing the king’s seal that took precedence over other legal documents and offered no appeal. It had the added virtue for wayward nobles of taking their case outside the workings of the normal judicial system.
7 . One of Sade’s two surrogate mothers (and probably a former mistress of Sade’s father). When Sade was a student at Louis-le-Grand, he spent part of at least one summer, and perhaps two, at Madame de Saint-Germain’s country home. She loved the boy and lavished all sorts of kindnesses upon him. Sade, whose relations with his mother were virtually nil, remained devoted to Madame de Saint-Germain throughout his life.
8 . Later, investigators would find notches carved in the mantelpiece, the anal marquis’s recording of the number of beatings he endured.
9 . In truth, Sade was guilty of neither in the strict sense of the term. When asked if the marquis had sodomized them, all the girls said they would never commit such a horrible act; for them to have said the contrary would have put them in jeopardy, because sodomy, though practiced frequently enough in the whorehouses of the time, was by law punishable by “death by fire” and the victims’ ashes scattered to the wind. If sodomy there was, it was between the two men, which was not in question by the prosecution. As for poisoning, two master pharmacists of Marseilles, who examined the unused pills and regurgitations of the two girls, found no traces of arsenic or any other corrosive matter. That he used Spanish fly is unquestioned, but so did hundreds if not thousands of other bordello clients. In fact, pills containing the substance were known in France as Richelieu’s pills, for he himself was a known exponent. Used in moderation, Spanish fly had been known since Roman days as an effective aphrodisiac. Sade’s crime, obviously, was having given both girls what amounted, in today’s parlance, to an overdose.
    Years later, in his letters from Vincennes, Sade is still arguing not his innocence but his “right” to use such an aphrodisiac, which, he maintains in one of his letters to his wife, whores are well aware of: “There are, I think, very few who do not know what it is,” he writes.
10 . Sade took the name from one of the ancestral properties he owned in Provence, the Chateau de Mazan.
11 . Though under the law newspapers could say nothing disparaging about aristocrats, the foreign press and broadsheets—a kind of underground press— were under no such restriction and thrived on scandal, especially royal scandal.
12 . Italics mine.
13 . In all