Anthology of Black Humor. André Breton
to detect precious new veins. On the death of Maurice Heine in 1940—coinciding with the bicentennial of Sade’s birth—the noble relay was picked up by Gilbert Lely, who, seconded in turn by the greatest luck in his love and his zeal, is preparing to unveil a number of works and documents that up until now have been concealed from us, certain of which throw new light on the Marquis’s extremely elusive profile. L’Aigle, Mademoiselle [The Eagle, Mademoiselle], which inaugurates this series of publications, takes us as if for the first time to the burning core of his passion, and in human terms allows us to penetrate all the way to their source. In the frenzy of that moment, of which the following letter reproduces the paroxysm, we will see that humor demands the role of the eagle and assumes it more than anywhere else in the secret structuring of its arithmetic operations, to which Sade attributed the meaning of signals—operations which, according to Gilbert Lely, “constitute a kind of reaction of his psyche, an unconscious struggle against the despair into which his sanity might have collapsed without the help of such a distraction.”
TO MADAME DE SADE
This morning I received a letter from you that went on forever. Do not write me such long letters, I beg of you: don’t you think I have better things to do than read your constant prattling? You must have an awful lot of time on your hands to write letters of that length, as must I to answer them, you will agree. And yet, as the subject of my letter is of great consequence, I would ask you to read it with a level head and a calm spirit.
I have just come upon three signals of the utmost beauty. I cannot keep them from you. They are so sublime that I am convinced that when you read them, in spite of yourself you’ll applaud the extent of my genius and the richness of my knowledge. One could say of your clique what Piron said of the Academy: you are forty who have wit enough for four. It’s the same with your little gang: you are six who have wit enough for two. Well, with all your genius, and although you have been working on the great work for only twelve years, I’ll bet you double against simple,* if you like, that my three signals are worth more than everything you’ve ever done. Hold on, I’m mistaken, my goodness, there are four of them.… Well, anyway, it’s three or four, and you know that three-four is very strong.
1st signal invented by me,
Christophe de Sade:
The first time you have to inform me of a cut or tear, you will cut off Cadet de la Basoche’s (Albaret’s) b——s and send them to me in a box. I shall open the box and cry out, “Oh, my God! what is this?” And Jacques, the prompter, who will be looking over my shoulder, shall answer, “It’s nothing, Sir. Can’t you see that it’s a 19?” “No, not really,” I’ll say.… All vanity aside, do you have anything to match that?
2nd signal by the same:
When you want to indicate the 2, the double, the duplicata, your second self, paying twice, etc., this is how you go about it: You must set a beautiful creature posing in my room (doesn’t matter which sex; I take after your family a bit there, I don’t look too closely; and besides, mad dog and all that), you must, I was saying, put in my room a beautiful creature in the pose of the Farnese Callipygian Venus, showing it off nicely. I have nothing against that part of the body; like the magistrate, I believe that it’s fleshier than the rest and that, consequently, for whoever likes flesh, that’s always better than things that are level.… Coming in, I’ll say to the prompter, or to the prompted, “What is this infamous thing doing here?” (just for form’s sake), and the prompter will answer, “Sir, that is a duplicata.”
3rd signal,
again by the same:
When you want to make a large bridge, like this summer, with lightning and the rod (horrible effect that almost made me die in convulsions), you will have to set fire to the powder stores (it is turned vertically toward the study where I sleep): the effect will be sublime.
Oh! here’s the best of them all, don’t you think?
For the 4th, finally:
When you want to make a 16 into a 9 (pay attention now), you must take two death’s heads (two, do you hear; I could have said six, but, although I served in the Dragoons, I’m modest: so I’ll just say two) and, while I’m in the garden, you’ll have all that arranged in my room, so that I’ll find the decoration all ready when I come in. Or else you’ll tell me I’ve just received a package from Provence, one that has already been signed for: I’ll open it eagerly… and it will be that—and I’ll get quite a scare (I’m really quite timid by nature, as I’ve proved two or three times in my life).
Ah, good people, good people! believe me, do not invent anything, for it isn’t worth the effort to invent things that are so flat, so stupid, so easy to guess. There are so many better ways to spend your time than inventing, and when you don’t have a mind for invention, you’re better off making shoes or cannulas, than inventing heavily, clumsily, and stupidly.
The 19th, sent on the 22nd.
By the way, hurry up and send me my linens; and tell those who judge that I couldn’t care less, that they judge very badly, for M. de Rougemont, the director, who judges very well, has just judged that my stove was due for some serious repairs, and he’s having them done. And so, for once in your life, if it’s possible, pull the cart together; for however horrid you all may be, you should still try not to be so horrid that one of you is pulling to the right while the other is pulling to the left. Pull like M. de Rougemont, the director; there’s a man with good common sense, who always pulls straight—or who has himself pulled when he isn’t doing the pulling. My valet commends himself to you so that the magistrate’s wife won’t forget that if he indeed gave the signal, she had promised to have his son made a sergeant.
* Cf. Maurice Heine on “the case of the Marquis de Sade’s ‘Spanish-fly’ candies” (Hippocrate, March 1933) and on “Rose Keller, or the Arcueil affair before the Parliament” (Annales de Médecine légale, March 1933).
* L’Evidence poétique.
* Hey! double against simple: that’s a good one. Don’t you wish you’d thought of it? [Sade’s note]
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
1742 – 1799
To believe or not to believe: this dilemma has never been debated with more pathos or genius than by a man such as Lichtenberg, endowed as he was to the highest degree with a sense of intellectual quality. We see him in 1775, in the front row of a London theater, eyes riveted on the actor Garrick as he delivers Hamlet’s monologue: “Dignified and serious, he looks to the ground, to the side. Then, removing his right hand from his chin (but if I remember correctly, his right arm nonetheless remains supported by his left), he utters the words: ‘To be or not to be,’ in hushed tones. But because of the great silence (and not the exceptional quality of his voice, as some have written), he can be heard everywhere.” Lichtenberg’s voice was no less admirably posed, and his particular inquiry into the realm of knowledge managed to draw the most unexpected benefits from his physical deformity (he was a hunchback), even as it provoked only unparallelled silence, which at present has grown into total neglect. It would be rather pointless to call him back from that silence, which has rarely been broken since his death, if not for the fact that many of the figures Lichtenberg inspired were precisely those for whom posterity most counted. Goethe, for example, despite some very definite