Donatien-Alphonse-François, Marquis de SADE. L.A.S., Paris [ - Lot 161

Donatien-Alphonse-François, Marquis de SADE. L.A.S., Paris [Sainte-Pélagie prison] 3 thermidor X (July 22, 1802), to his wife, "Madame de Sade" in Paris; 3pages in-4, envelope. He learns that she has just "made an oppossition on the income from the goods I own in Provence; at the frightening ridicule of this demarche it became easy for me to see, and what and how dangerous your advice was!" She objected to Mazan and Saumane, despite the fact that "the income from these two estates is specifically and solely allocated to the payment of family creditors", an arrangement that was difficult to get people to accept: "your objection, by upsetting the balance of this equilibrium, is producing a fire in my affairs that nothing will be able to extinguish", with many lawsuits... Opposition to his property in Arles affects "the only piece of bread I have left to live on. And it's while I'm in irons, while I'm suffering every kind of torture imaginable, that you, piously siding with my executioners, devoutly and quietly come to add to the tortures they make me endure, the religious kindness of making me starve to death?" This is a "project advised by the devil"... He returns to the conditions of their separation, "a separation demanded of you, which I would never have proposed, and to which I consented only unwillingly"; she had then promised not to demand anything of her husband... He denounces the scoundrels advising her, and begs her to renounce "the execrable plan to ruin both you and your children, by reducing your husband to starving himself"... Finally, he urges her "not to make me repent for not having reimbursed you in assignats as I could have done, not to force me to divulge, above all, the political motives which despair both you and your children, the mood you are all in, the use I have made of the funds from the sale of the Coste, [...] not to force me to divulge all this"...