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Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de SADE

Lettre à Henri Grandjean, chirurgien oculiste du roi

Prison de Vincennes 1783, 19x23,5cm, une feuille.

Autograph letter titled 'Mémoire pour Monsieur Grandjean oculiste', on one leaf folded in two. Provenance: archives of the de Sade family. Unpublished document.
A leaf of laid paper, folding in two, revealing the address on the back. The address is not written in the same direction as the letter, but inverted.
Incarcerated since 1778 in the Vincennes prison, the Marquis spoke of his ailments in his first letter to his wife Renée-Pélagie, dated February 4, 1783: 'I beg you to send me an eye doctor, and the best in Paris'. From 1783, Sade suffers from violent ophthalmia, which causes him unbearable secondary symptoms. The doctor sent to him, to whom this letter is addressed, was indeed the most renowned in Paris and served as occulist to the king and the royal family.
The first distinctive feature of this letter is its third-person handwriting, which begins as follows: 'The person Monsieur Grandjean came to see at Vincennes [...]'. Sade's repeated refusal to name himself in numerous letters, notably those to his wife, can of course be explained in the simplest terms by his confinement and the need to be as invisible as possible to his censors. However, his signature appears on his correspondence, depending on the identity of the recipient. The anonymity or deliberate ommission of his name is first and foremost dictated by his imprisonment, which has deprived him of his name and rank, not only symbolically but also in reality. At Vincennes, he is known only as Monsieur 6, the number of his cell. This impersonalization, however, takes on a new light in this letter, distinguished both by its address to a doctor and by the doctor's view of his own body.
In the present letter, this dissociation is particularly evident in Sade's current use of a single eye: '[...] he [Sade himself] is even beginning to notice a terrible weakening since this other eye works alone (a word crossed out, the word 'works' having been added above)'. The letter thus bears witness, in its observance of the medication imposed on Sade by Grandjean (and carefully respected by Sade who attested to this very fact in another letter), to a body and symptoms that do not belong to him, as if external to himself.
The ophthalmia of which Sade rightly complains could never be cured medically, but nonetheless never prevented him from writing. Paradoxically, it even seems that this symtom, which follows on from many others, committed him decisively to writing and literature. It was at the height of his apparently incurable ophthalmic pain that Sade embarked on the road to a certain voluptuousness and re-appropriation of his body. Condemned by his pain to a form of inactivity, he began to think, thus transforming his own ills into words, as  confessed in a letter of April 1783: 'My eye is still the same, and they are very far from even thinking of curing it [...]. Besides, I care for it less, I read less, I work less, and my head wanders over other things with such prodigiously greater force, that in reality, except for the inconvenience that it is very great, I would almost be tempted not to be angry about it! I'd always heard it said that an affected sense triples the power of the imagination, and I've experienced it. It's made me invent a peculiar rule of voluptuousness. It's because I'm very convinced that the pleasures of love can be made as strong as possible by damping down one or two senses, or even more, each time you want to enjoy'.
The deprivation of one sense, in this case sight, becomes the necessary condition for the elaboration of greater enjoyment: the beginning of the Marquis de Sade's work. And if this letter is all about the deprivation of sight, it's clear that the essential deprivation Sade suffers is that of his freedom and his name. The reclamation of the latter will begin with a first symbolization, thoughts, which will lead the divine Marquis to the realization of his literary work.
This letter, in which impersonalization and dissociation are inscribed and written, is an account of a passage: a precious announcement of the Sade to come but not yet arrived, still a prisoner of himself and his incarceration.

 

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