CHAPTER III
DE SADE AND THE NORMAL MAN Pleasure is paradox Jules J anin wrote of de Sade's booksl "There are bloody corpses everywhere, infants torn from their mothers' arms, young women with their throats slit after an orgy, cups full of blood and wine, unimaginable tortures. Cauldrons are heated, racks set up, skulls broken, men flayed alive; there is shouting, swearing, blasphemy; hearts are ripped from bodies; all this on every page and every line. What an indefatigable scoundrel he is! In his first book2 he shows us a poor girl at bay, lost, ruined, shrinking under a rain of blows, led by inhuman monsters through one underground vault after another, from graveyard to graveyard, beaten, broken, devoured alive, wilting, crushed ... When the author has committed every crime there is, when he is sated with incest and monstrosities, when he stands panting above the corpses he has stabbed and violated, when there is-no church he has not sullied, no child he has not sacrificed to his rage, no moral thought on which he has not flung the foulness of his own thoughts and words, then at last this man pauses, looks at himself, smiles to himself and is not frightened. On the contrary . . ." If this examination is far from exhaustive, at least it describes in appropriate language a figure intentionally cut by de Sade: the horror and the ingenuousness of the feelings In Revue de Pan¡s, 1834. The book referred to is Justine, or more precisely La nouvelle Justine, the freer version, that is, published by the author in 1797 and reissued by Jean-Jacques Pauvert in 1953. The first version was published in the Editions Fourcade in 1930, by Maurice Heine, published in the Editions du Point du Jour in 1946 with a preface by Jean Paulhan, and published again by Jean-Jacques Pauvert with a different version of the present study as a preface in 1954. I 2
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