Marquis de Sade: Letters From Prison
translated by Richard Seaver
Harvill £20, pp402

In advance of the forthcoming film Quills, in which a leering Geoffrey Rush overplays the incarcerated sodomite, this is the definitive collection of Sade's correspondence. It is notable primarily for its lack of carnal interest. The letters are written from the dungeons of Vincennes and the Bastille, and from the asylum of Charenton in which he was held, on charges of 'offence against the morals of the kingdom' from 1777 for 13 years, until he was 50. Most are directed to his wife: lugubrious, impassioned, self-absorbed entreaties for her to be more attendant on his every sacrosanct whim.

In one, for example, he requests a shopping list of absolute essentials to make his stay in his subterranean cell more bearable: 'Two dozen meringues and two dozen lemon cakes from the Palais Royal pastry shop; the architectural plans for the new Italian Opera in Paris; a dark green jacket, with a silk fringe, with or without silver, the size being the same as the one the tailor sent me a fortnight ago; some chocolate; and a little dog, preferably a pup, so that I may have the pleasure of raising it, either a spaniel or a setter...'

Otherwise, he uses his apparently unlimited quotas of paper and ink to harangue his mother-in-law, Madame de Montreuil, who initially turned him in while he was attendant on his own mother's deathbed: 'Remember, Madame, that you will never derive any good from making my soul more savage and my heart more immune to feeling, the only possible results of the frightful state to which you have had me put.'

As if to prove the point, Sade, never a man to stand on ceremony, in prison conceived of the works which made his name, and destroyed that of his family: Justine, Juliette and Philosophy in the Bedroom. Apollinaire once called him, somewhat grandly, 'the freest soul who ever lived' and, in chains, he let his imagination run riot, counting himself lord of infinite space.

His letters, however, make scant mention of his literary or libidinous ambitions and are evidence more of his place within what he called 'an age of total corruption'. There are, thus, plea bargains for manservants and ever more urgent demands for oculists as his eyesight fails by candlelight; moreover, he employs every rhetorical device at his disposal in a vain effort to use family influence to hasten his release.

When this liberation is not forthcoming the letters seem to become a vehicle of his enforced impotence - 'I am most assuredly not incapable of writing you,' he explains to his long-suffering wife at one point (as if she were in any doubt), 'and the day I am, for fear of worrying you, knowing how you feel about me, I shall manage so well that you won't even notice it.'

At least, in them, he appears to sublimate his sexual frustrations into his sentence construction, which is often engorged and always tortured.