Beasts of the Bastille - 1

Woodcut of the Beast of Gévaudan, 18th Century

EDITOR’S FOREWORD

This collection of documents, amounting to an exchange of letters between imprisoned siblings, a dossier of official reports, and the memoirs (or fictions) of the Marquis de Sade, were discovered in the Archives Nationales in Paris last year and in this volume are made available to the public.

It is not the aim of the present editor to determine the nature of these documents, whether genuine personal correspondence and factual eyewitness accounts, or else fictitious entertainments, or even an attempt at perpetrating a hoax.

I will only note in passing that the following incidents, all mentioned in the text, did in fact occur and are historically attested: The Beast of Gévaudan, a creature reportedly the size of a lion, or bigger, and in the form of a wolf, sighted in the Margeride Mountains at this time; Tararre the grotesque everything-eater who was employed as a spy in the French Royal Army just prior to the revolution; the ergot-poisoning outbreak which made sufferers feel like their skin was changing into a hairy pelt; and the revolts which resulted from this psychological disturbance.

It is also well-known that the Marquis de Sade was imprisoned in the Paris Bastille until he appeared on the rooftop shouting that the prisoners were being massacred, an incident said to have inspired both the storming of the Bastille on the 14^th of July 1789 and the subsequent September Massacres of royalist prisoners in 1792.

There has been no attested meeting of the Marquis de Sade and the revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat, but it is known that when Marat was murdered in his bathtub by Charlotte Corday on 13^th July 1793, de Sade, going by his ‘revolutionary name’ of Citoyen Louis Sade, was invited to deliver the eulogy by his section of the Jacobin Club.

Therefore this text is offered to the reader and researcher as is, with no prejudice as to its veracity or otherwise. Read it as a fanciful tale, or read it as a historical document.

As the Marquis himself would say: What you will is the whole of the law.

PART 1 – The Correspondence Between the Twins

My dearest sister,

When you were taken away from us, I lived a while alone with father but he wearied me with his eternal complaining by day and his unwanted attentions at night, and so I soon left that place never to return. Left separated from you at only ten years old, I had no inkling of what to do next — you were always the clever one with a plan while I was the one with a flame of passion inside but no sense of where to aim that fire of mine. I was, then, a lost child.

As I wandered the highways and forest paths I told myself I was seeking you, but really I was seeking something else. I don’t know how to say it clearly, but I know you’ll understand since we are of the same womb, the same blood, the same mind and soul. I was looking for something not-you, and by the reasoning that you and I are the same person, something not-me. A refuge from the burden of being a person, is the best I could express it.

Later I found what I was searching for, and I will tell you all about how that came out. It may lead to one death, or it may lead to many deaths. But there will be death at the end of it, surely. The path I’m on is hard. I don’t know, it may in the end lead to deaths that will become a new light and life for us. Perhaps a life for many. If so, it will be like the stories the priest used to tell us about Jesus and his agony on the cross, which apparently cleansed us of our sin; but I don’t see many clean people as I go about in the world. What was the point of taking away our original sin, the one we are born with without choosing, only to give us free will to sin again and again? Will the deaths we cause ever change anything? But enough of that.

I’m in prison, and I hear that you also are in the women’s prison at Delboutville, to which place I shall address this letter. It took me much bribery to locate clues of your whereabouts, and much more to secure pen, ink and paper with which to write you. I do not worry so much that this will be read by my captors, as the jailer here, a brutal troglodyte called Gérard (though I don’t know if that’s his first or last name, perhaps it’s his only name) cannot read. What I fear is that he will take my bribe, take my letter, and then throw it away unsent. I promised him another payment on receipt of your reply, so that inducement might encourage him to mail the thing.

That’s all, dear sister. I’m well of body, but unhappy of course, plagued by the melancholy, but that won’t be news to you as you sense what I sense. By the same token, I know you’re well and alive, I’ve always known about how you are, but I don’t know your circumstances. Some I’ve heard say you’re a witch, others that you’re a wolf woman and you eat babies. You and I know the truth of these accusations, so I won’t put anything on paper, and I suggest you likewise are discreet and speak only in our private way about those things to avoid incriminating yourself. They say you are to be burned in the public square after the assizes and condemnation in the spring. But I know it won’t be so, and so I send you courage.

At nights I burn like a candle — with jail fever, they say, but also with a strange need I have. To hold you, perhaps, but maybe also to be like you, to run as you do and know your knowings. That’s enough.

With wishes and a thousand kisses

Your ever-loving sibling

Joseph-Marie

My Heart,

If only you knew how hard I tried to get back to you. Father sold me to that merchant. The one with the blue wagon that had little partridges painted in gold on the sides. He was always jealous of me. The old brute. The merchant was a brute, too. My sweet Joseph the world is full of them, brutish men to whom we are but objects. That merchant kept me chained inside his cart. I was to cook for him and keep his washing done. Among other horrors, as you can no doubt imagine. Hours I spent on the road, trapped inside that dark, roving prison. Merely a morsel in its greedy belly, earning a new scar for every mile the wheels turned.

He kept me until I splashed scalding water in his eyes and broke free of him. Like you, I too wandered the forest in search of something. I had no idea what. What I found was an institution of learning, framed by birch and oak, and with teachers of many kinds, who taught me many trades. I have been so many things. I am still so many things. But always, always, I am your sister.

Of course I’ve always known you were still alive, but to have a letter placed into my hands with your name and your scent upon the paper… I cried for hours, joy at your finding me. Sorrow at all we’ve lost. All I’ve lost. I cannot write too much to you of what I’ve been through. Not until I’m sure of the security of what is within. Suffice it to say, I am no longer the innocent you once knew. I am a woman now of hard wrought talents.

They treat me so wrong here. For days and nights on end I do not sleep or eat until I am so overcome with deprivation that I chew at the plaster walls and sing tuneless melodies of madness that I’m certain do me no good in their judging eyes. They refuse me a chair and make me stand until my legs give out. I am forced to walk endlessly for hours back and forth upon the same tedious road, my guard forever changing as they tire. But I am rather lifted or dragged if I grow weary. Never allowed to rest. I can receive no rest in this castigating place. Yet I will not confess. I will not. Though death take me, I will not.

My guards come hither, I am to take more torture today. Of what manner I know not…

With all my blessings,

Your dearest,

Marie-Joseph

Sweet Sister,

I suffer with you I feel your torments and I always have. It’s the only thing that keeps me from perfect equanimity, the tranquil serenity of the warrior who has already given himself up as a dead man and now only awaits the date and time of his fate’s culmination.

Let me briefly tell you how I came to be here, like you a prisoner, like you awaiting a final condemnation. I told you how I started off on the road, knowing you were out there somewhere. Sometimes I felt your sufferings, other moments I felt your joys, but you were always there like a whisper in my innermost ear. I joined a group of travelers as they went around the country selling their trinkets and doing whatever else they could to survive. You could say they adopted me, or you might say they abducted me. Kidnap or care, what difference does it make in the end? We survive and we learn, and the circumstances of our learning are given to us by fate and the world.

It was a good enough education for me to see the ways of the undertrodden all over this land, the weavers who craft beautiful cloths on their looms while they themselves dress in patched rags, the miners who dig coals for the fires of the rich but who huddle without warmth in frosted hovels. I learned much of life and also of thievery, and Papa Moritz our clan chieftain was a man of letters and some learning. He taught me reading and the ways of speaking like the rich and educated, and he lent me his volumes of Voltaire and Diderot.

Much later, after I became a revolutionary, he would pass me his hidden volumes of the Marquis de Sade, that strange man full of passion for wanton excess. His writings haunt me still; how can such an animal be so human? How can a person of such intelligence be ruled by such base pleasures? How can such a man attract me so?

For eight years with the gypsy band I travelled the length and breadth of France, also the Austrian Netherlands, Navarre and Switzerland. I had my childish loves and got into my childish scrapes. It shames me now to say that I tried to put the whisper of you out of my head, to consider you my dear sister as lost to me or even dead. Yet I know it was I who was the lost one during those times when I denied our deep connection.

All changed in 1784. We were passing through the Gévaudan country, a land much disturbed with rumors of some strange Beast wandering the forests and mountains. There were soldiers all over the countryside then. One night as we camped in a clearing by the King’s Highway, the soldiers set upon us gypsies in a surprise attack. They moved through the camp bayonetting children and pulling up young women by the hair, intending to ravish them. Papa Moritz faced the sergeant who led those men then, and his calm and his dignity cowed them utterly. He offered the sergeant gold in exchange for being left in peace. The sergeant accepted the offer of gold but said he wanted more.

“What more?” said Papa Moritz. “A girl for our pleasure,” said the sergeant. “It gets cold and lonely and boring out in our forest camp.”

“I can’t spare you any women, my dear sergeant” said Papa Moritz. “We need them simply to continue our race, you see. It’s nothing personal, it’s a matter of survival for our people. I’m sure you understand.”

The sergeant shrugged. “What can you give me instead?”

“Why not this boy?” said Papa Moritz. He gestured towards me and gave me a look that said you are not of our blood but you are of our people — do this thing for us.

I understood then that there was more than one way to comprehend an unspoken message and from that time I began again to hear your whisper in my head.

From this moment as well I became the King’s man — the King’s soldier to fight and die for His Majesty as well as the King’s Catamite to be used by his rough soldiery.

Soon I will tell you of what happened in the army and out of it. For now the unlettered jailer comes, and I must send you this letter through him. Of course there is more in this message than appears at first sight, but this you understand without my even telling you.

With love

Your devoted brother,

Joseph-Marie

Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité

End of Chapter 1

For the continuation read HERE