"C'est le chant du cigne."

Vincennes, 21 May 1779. One leaf measuring 15.5 x 13.5 cm, 20 autograph lines.

Autograph letter by the Marquis de Sade to his wife, Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil, written from the keep of Vincennes and dated “This twenty-first of May 1779”. The upper edge of the leaf is irregularly cut and the verso bears traces of two folds. Closely written in brown ink. Without an opening form of address, the letter ends with a simple flourish.

This letter of 21 May 1779 to Madame de Sade is cited in studies of Sade’s prison correspondence, notably for his characteristic phrase “milch cow of the police”. It was published in the Lettres et mélanges littéraires écrits à Vincennes et à la Bastille.

At the head of the leaf, framed by two cross-shaped marks, Sade inscribes the strange caption: “this is the swan song”. The same mark reappears within the body of the letter to indicate the passage to which this phrase refers. Through this system of cross-reference, Sade effectively gives a title to one of the darkest moments of his lament, turning the letter into a staging of his own distress.

From his cell, he describes his health as seriously deteriorated and declares himself incapable of becoming accustomed to the regime at Vincennes. Rather than simply asking for his freedom, he requests transfer to a “more humane fortress” where he might be allowed daily exercise. He suggests Saumur or Doullens. The first name was not unfamiliar to him: following the Rose Keller affair, Sade had already been confined at the Château de Saumur in April 1768, when it was used to hold prisoners detained by lettre de cachet.

The lament soon turns into accusation. Convinced that his captivity benefits those who prolong it, Sade portrays himself as the unfortunate “milch cow of the police”. The image is not unique in his correspondence: it belongs to his obsessive denunciation of the prison system, in which gaolers, police officers and magistrates become, under his pen, the true beneficiaries of the prisoner’s misfortune.

The letter finally moves from a complaint addressed to his wife to an indictment of her mother, the Présidente de Montreuil. Sade regards her as the instigator and, above all, the guarantor of the lettre de cachet that keeps him imprisoned. Throughout his Vincennes correspondence she becomes the central figure of his persecution, variously described as a “viper”, a “detestable beast” or a “soul of filth”.

Here the attack reaches particular violence:

“O you whom I once called my mother [...] who could have told me that one day it would be with my blood and the honour of your grandchildren that you would purchase your base influence with the police tribunal.”

The letter belongs to Sade’s second period of imprisonment at Vincennes. Transferred to Aix in June 1778 in order to obtain a review of the Marseille proceedings, Sade had succeeded in having the death sentence pronounced against him in 1772 overturned. The lettre de cachet nevertheless remained in force, and he was to be returned to Vincennes. He escaped from his escort near Valence in July, reached La Coste, was recaptured there on 26 August and returned to his cell at the beginning of September. He would not leave Vincennes again until his transfer to the Bastille in 1784.

By the spring of 1779, imprisonment was thus beginning to produce the extraordinary correspondence in which Sade continually transforms his body, his cell and his persecutors into literary figures.

Animal imagery is omnipresent: he himself becomes the exploited “milch cow”, while Madame de Montreuil elsewhere assumes the features of a viper or a rabid beast. The prisoner’s genuine suffering and his dramatic representation of it become inseparable. Uncertainty over the duration of his confinement, lack of exercise and the material conditions at Vincennes fed both his despair and his activity as a writer.

The small inscription at the head of the leaf condenses this theatrical self-fashioning. By naming his own lament “this is the swan song”, Sade does more than recount his suffering: he already gives it a scene, a title and almost an epitaph.

A striking Vincennes letter of 21 May 1779, addressed to Madame de Sade, in which the prisoner’s physical suffering gradually turns into an accusation against the police and an imprecation against the Présidente de Montreuil. Between the “milch cow of the police” and the “swan song” inscribed in his own hand at the head of the page, Sade is already transforming his captivity into literary material.