Sade, Vanille et Manille: Urology and the Body of the Text
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Sade, Vanille et Manille: Urology and the Body of the Text
William Donoghue
French Forum, Volume 29, Number 3, Fall 2004, pp. 13-26 (Article)
Published by University of Pennsylvania Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/frf.2005.0007
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/177714
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]020 ff29-3 (13-26) 12/9/04 5:16 PM Page 13
William Donoghue
Sade, Vanille et Manille
Urology and the Body of the Text
The malady that D. A. F. Sade complained about to his wife in the famous
“La Vanille et la Manille” letter from the Bastille at the end of 1784 has
never been satisfactorily identified. Sade thought his suffering was due
to a congenital defect of some kind, while modern opinion has tended
more towards the notion that he had venereal disease.1 In either case,
scholars have had little to go on and have generally preferred to focus on
Sade’s mental rather than physical condition when interpreting his life
and work.2 The body, however, has made a comeback in criticism in
recent years, so it may be timely once again to ask not only what it was
Sade suffered from, but how one is to locate the articulation of that com-
plaint in his work. This is matter for a longer study—one that would con-
tinue the line Annie Le Brun first took on the body in Sade—but I would
propose at least the following thoughts and ruminations on both the
nature of the illness and how it intersects with Sade’s writing.
Sade was adamant that there was to be no autopsy performed on his
body, so the only real information we have on his illness comes from
the above letter. As always in Sade, pain and sexual release go together,
but the detail and figural language of the Vanille et Manille letter
remind us that this conjunction has a material rather than mental ori-
gin. Writing to his wife, he uses a bow and arrow metaphor to describe
his painful ejaculations:
ce n’est pas que l’arc ne soit tres tendu—oh ne vous fachés pas, il y aura sur cela
tout ce qui pourra vois plaire—mais la fleche ne veut pas partir—et c’est ce qui
tue—parcequ’on veut quelle parte—faute d’objet la tete va—
Lacking a sexual “object” in prison, Sade goes slightly crazy with
the time and effort needed to reach what are finally unnatural and020 ff29-3 (13-26) 12/9/04 5:16 PM Page 14
14 / French Forum/Fall 2004/Vol. 29, No. 3
painful orgasms. Prison is bad, he says, because solitude gives strength
only to ideas. And it is these “ideas”—the countless imagined scenar-
ios of Sade’s hallucinatory sexual prowess and pain—that fill and ani-
mate his writing.3 He continues:
Mais j’ai parfaitement pris mon parti sur l’opiniatreté de cette fleche a ne vouloir
point partir, d’autant plus que quand elle fait tant que de fendre les airs.—c’est ve-
ritablement une attaque d’epilepsie—et sans d’ennuiy[eu]ses precautions, je suis
bien sur qu’on s’en douterait au faubourg St antoine . . .
There then follows the likeness, or metaphorization of the problem
as thick cream that cannot escape through the narrow neck of a bottle, so
that the thickness inflates “les vaisseaux” and tears them. Sade writes:
si j’avais ces autres moyens que j’emploiye quand je suis libre—la fleche devanant
moins retive et partant plus souvent, la crise de son depart ne seroit plus ni aussi
violente, ni aussi dangereuse—car son danger s’explique par sa difficulté . . . si la
fleche, plus fluide, partait plus souvent; et d’apres cela moins d’episodes—et
reversiblement episodes terribles efforts violens, si la fleche trop nourrie par son
trop long sejour, est obligé de dechirer le carquois en le traversant—
And we then get the even more striking rifle metaphor where Sade
asks us to imagine a rifle with a bullet that grows larger in the firing
chamber the longer it is not fired, until finally “elle faira crever le
canon” (Œuvres 12, 449–50).
This is the best Sade can do to tell us about what he suffers: he
likens it to an attack of epilepsy. The notion put forth by Jean-Jacques
Pauvert and du Plessix Gray, therefore, that what Sade called “un
defaut de conformation” and likened to an epileptic seizure was really
some kind of undiagnosed venereal disease runs up first against the fact
that Sade himself, who had some experience in these matters, thought
otherwise. Second, when Sade is freed from prison and has access once
again to the objects of desire he needs to maintain his required fre-
quency of orgasms, the complaint disappears. The symptoms decrease
in severity when the frequency of his ejaculations increases, and this
also is hard to reconcile with any known strain of venereal disease.
Even if there were different strains in Sade’s day that we no longer
know about, he certainly would have known about them. In other
words, when Sade says he is quite certain the problem is congenital we
should probably believe him.020 ff29-3 (13-26) 12/9/04 5:16 PM Page 15
Donoghue: Sade, Vanille et Manille / 15
Pauvert cites Annie Lebrun in his comment on the “maladie vénéri-
enne mal soignée” as if Le Brun also held this view, but she did not.
Le Brun offers a slightly different diagnosis:
Renseignements pris deux siècles après, il paraîtrait, à considérer les symptômes
de cette “crise,” que Sade aurait été alors affecté d’une infection du carrefour
prostato-vésiculaire qui a pour effet de modifier l’aspect et la consistance des
sécrétions (le sperme devient épais et granuleux) et de rendre toute éjaculation
extrêmement douloureuse et même anhédoinique. (46)
Indeed, a genito-urinary infection might seem to cover more possi-
bilities than venereal disease alone, although the specific pathology Le
Brun cites, apparently gleaned from some reliable sources, is hard to
locate in present-day literature. However, there are good reasons for
doubting this diagnosis as well. It is difficult, for example, to believe
that Sade could have had a chronic infection like this for sixteen years,
that was not specifically venereal disease, without it either becoming
worse or being cured—he would have talked about it in his letters and
said what he was taking for it. In other words, he would have recog-
nized an infection, which tends to spread rather than remain localized
and stable. The problem, therefore, had to be more complex. Given that
the male genito-urinary tract is itself a complex labyrinth of winding
passages and tortuous turnings, it seems more likely that Sade’s trou-
ble was similarly complex and located somewhere in the twists and
turns of these passages. Urological studies of this male plumbing even
have a Sadean ring to them: descriptions of the vascular passages lead-
ing from the testis to the urethra in both nineteenth- and twentieth-
century literature on urology, for example, regularly include the word
“tortuous” to describe their tight turnings, convoluted foldings and
constricted channels. Eisendrath and Ralnick describe the ejaculatory
duct at the outlet of the seminal vesicles as “a tortuous inelastic duct,”
refer to the “winding course” of the vas deferens as “quite tortuous,”
and discuss the “tortuosity” of its various compartments and foldings
(56–57).
Reading these descriptions one is reminded of the similarly deep
and tortuous plumbing in Sade’s vascular underground of corridors and
passageways. They too are inevitably made up of tortuous windings
and, perhaps more to the point, considering Sade’s urological com-
plaint, filled with blockages. Stones are always being removed, often020 ff29-3 (13-26) 12/9/04 5:16 PM Page 16
16 / French Forum/Fall 2004/Vol. 29, No. 3
starting in a church, to facilitate the passage of the characters to some
site of sexual apotheosis. Physical release and relief is always the goal,
even though accompanied by pain. The sex haven of Delbène, for
example, in Juliette, is in “les souterrains,” accessed through a tunnel
blocked first by a tombstone and then halfway along by another stone
that must be swung aside before the travelers can reach the scene of
action, this time rendered garden-like by windows bringing in air
(Œuvres 8, 63). In La Nouvelle Justine, Roland’s sex haven is also
underground. He leads Justine into a darkened passage that winds
about, is blocked by a door, descends a hundred paces, is blocked by
another door, and finally becomes “un petit chemin . . . rempli de sinu-
osités.” Justine remarks “l’horrible humidité” of the passage as they
come upon a final door “dans les entrailles de la terre” that must be
laboriously unlocked and swung back. Only then are the travelers
released upward into the site of sexual release (Œuvres 7, 305). The
castle in Italy that Juliette, Sbrigani and their servants visit at the invi-
tation of Minsky is almost as difficult to get to as Silling in Les Cent
Vingt Journées. The trip involves a series of blockages, gates and walls
through which the travelers must force a passage. The first and second
walls feature “[des] porte[s] de fer” and the third is ten feet thick with
no door at all. Minsky, a hearty eater, has to remove “une pierre de taille
énorme” before they pass. A stairway leads them down into a long tor-
tuous underground passage which they follow until their way is again
blocked by another stone, and so on, until finally they emerge into the
site of sexual release (Œuvres 8, 556). These underground passages
and chambers are usually understood as products of Sade’s paranoia
and fear of the police, which is how he explains them himself,4 but they
are also disturbingly anatomical, even urological in nature.
There is an interesting parallel here with the eighteenth-century
English novelist Daniel Defoe, who underwent lithotomy surgery for
bladder stones in 1725. The appearance of scenes of torture in Defoe’s
“criminal lives” followed fast on this gruesome experience—Defoe
claimed afterward that hanging was an easier way to die than the
“Tortures of the Stone” and describes the operation in a 1725 Apple-
bee’s essay. “Here’s a Man . . . torn and mangled . . . cut open alive,
and bound Hand and Foot to force him to bear it; the very Apparatus
is enough to chill the Blood, and sink a Man’s soul within him.”
The event, along with the apparatus is appropriately Sadean and is020 ff29-3 (13-26) 12/9/04 5:16 PM Page 17
Donoghue: Sade, Vanille et Manille / 17
described in detail by Paula Backscheider in her biography of Defoe:
“Hospitals had special tables on which the reclining patient was bound
and held. Defoe would be strapped to the board at his back and his
wrists tied to his ankles.” Taking her own description from a 1743 text
on surgery, Backscheider goes on: “three or four strong and courageous
‘Attendants’ were ‘generally necessary’ ‘to secure the Patient firmly in
the proper posture’” and “would hold him down and keep his bent legs
apart” (493). Sade has many similar sado-medical contraptions and
operations throughout his fiction. In the sixty-fifth Criminal Passion in
Les Cent Vingt Journées, for example, the female victim is placed
“dans un fauteuil à ressorts; de son poids elle fait partir tous les ressorts
qui répondent à des cerceaux de fer dont elle se trouve attachée;
d’autres ressorts présentent en partant vingt poignards sur son corps”
(Œuvres 13, 377). The point is that we should recognize, as Back-
scheider does with Defoe, just how directly related to his body Sade’s
fiction is. His work is bio-graphical, as Annie Le Brun’s approach sug-
gests, in a quite literal way.
Sade did not “suffer from the stone” as Defoe did, at least as far as
we know; but his ejaculatory dysfunction may have had some etiolog-
ical kinship to such blockages. The blockages are also more credible
as an explanation for the relentless and always larger-than-life sexual
events in Sade’s fiction than the usual psychological or psycho analyt-
ical theories, which focus on a sick mind rather than Sade’s sick body.
The word “algolagnia”—first used by Lely to describe Sade’s condi-
tion—means obtaining sexual pleasure from the infliction and experi-
ence of pain. But it says nothing about its physiological basis. With
Sade, the general view is indeed that this conjunction of pain and plea-
sure was a mental aberration of the sort described by Krafft-Ebing in
his Psychopathia sexualis, rather than a physical disorder. Simone de
Beauvoir, for example, in her famous 1951 essay, “Faut-il brûler
Sade?” recognizes that there was probably some physical basis for
Sade’s obsessions—sexual impotence, she suggests—but feels that
there is some deeper psychological explanation for the Sade phenom-
enon. Noting that a number of Sade’s male characters cry out at the
point of orgasm she nonetheless chalks this up to “un ‘isolisme’ affec-
tif radical” in Sade. And this leads her to forego the physical altogether
and state that “[l]a sexualité chez Sade ne ressortit pas à la biologie:
c’est un fait social.” While it is certainly quite true that Sade’s assorted020 ff29-3 (13-26) 12/9/04 5:16 PM Page 18
18 / French Forum/Fall 2004/Vol. 29, No. 3
fictional orgies are always profoundly social in nature—“toujours col-
lectives” as de Beauvoir says—her denial of biology amounts to a
rejection of Sade’s body in any reading of his work (34, 46). The gigan-
tism of Sade’s couplings, however, seems to both precede and exceed
the social in their pathology.5 Troubled with painful and difficult
orgasms, Sade invented characters like Minsky, Hermit of the
Appenines, who, in Juliette, tells the heroine that when he ejaculates
“les jets de sperme élancés pour lors s’élèvent au plancher, souvent
dans le nombre de quinze ou vingt,” and that his ejaculations are “aussi
abondantes à la dixième fois qu’à la première.” He also, however,
warns Juliette (“je vous prévienne”) of “des effrayants symptômes de
cette crise . . . d’épouvantables hurlements” that precede and accom-
pany them (Œuvres 8, 560).
Sade himself never tires of urging upon us a physical model and
stating, as Le Brun points out, that the physical always precedes the
moral (46). He explains himself regularly using the materialist para-
digm familiar from La Mettrie and d’Holbach and reminds us that
“sensibilité” is a physical state that has no conscience. He corrects
Rousseau’s Julie in this regard with his Juliette, and Rousseau’s benign
“nature” with his own more violent and malignant one.6 Sade’s defer-
ral to Nature to explain his own tastes and practices corroborates what
his characters themselves tell us. Their explanations are never psycho-
logical; instead, they are strictly material in nature. Minsky, for exam-
ple, credits his diet of girls, from five to twenty years of age, for his
excellent sexual constitution. He collects them and fattens them up,
then, “quand, à force de luxure, elles se trouvent suffisamment morti-
fiées,” he eats them. He tells Juliette that eating human flesh “contribue
beaucoup à l’augmentation et à l’épaisseur de la matière séminale.
Quiconque essayera de ce régime, triplera bien sûrement ses facultés
libidineuses . . .” (Œuvres 8, 559–60). In this model, one cannot change
one’s sexual proclivities any more than the shape of one’s body.
Sade’s mysterious symptoms may be part of a medical condition
that has vanished, but a look through the literature of urology today
provides a few possibilities for what may have been wrong with him
that fall between his own “congenital defect” diagnosis and Le Brun’s
idea that he suffered from a genito-urinary infection. Sade may have
had some kind of seminal vesicle cysts, for example, that caused him
pain when he was sexually aroused for long periods of time. Meacham020 ff29-3 (13-26) 12/9/04 5:16 PM Page 19
Donoghue: Sade, Vanille et Manille / 19
and Rose note that these can be either acquired or congenital, although
the symptoms they describe for those who suffer from them today do
not exactly correspond to Sade’s eighteenth-century ones. The seminal
vesicles are single tubes four to five inches long that are coiled upon
themselves so any blockage would be serious. Meacham and Rose also
discuss ejaculatory duct obstruction. Sade might have had an irregu-
larity or stricture in the ejaculatory duct, for example, at the junction
of the proximal portion of the seminal vesicle and the vas deferens, that
caused him pain. Cysts in the Müllerian duct can, as a result of the
duct’s extrinsic compression, also lead to blockage of the ejaculatory
ducts, although again this does not seem to produce symptoms today
that exactly match Sade’s (189ff).
The vocabulary and symptoms change, however, when one looks
back into the world of nineteenth-century urology. The Victorians suf-
fered from a number of sexually related illnesses and neuroses that are
no longer with us, so the same may apply to Sade’s century. Joseph W.
Howe in Excessive Venery tells us that paroxysms experienced with
orgasm were quite common in his day. “Hospital records,” he writes,
“are full of them.” Howe thinks of them as closely related to epileptic
seizures and concludes that epilepsy is therefore “one of the goals
towards which all masturbators and libertines are hastening.”7 He also
discusses blockages, not only in the urethra but elsewhere in the male
genito-urinary tract, and notes that the complicated nature of this tract
in the male makes locating them difficult. The testis, for example, con-
tains over two hundred and fifty lobules containing the tubuli semi-
niferi—five hundred tubes per testicle that if stretched out would reach
to about sixteen feet; two hundred fifty lobules would come to about
four hundred eighty feet. Howe notes that strictures or blockages in the
tract are rare but not unknown (99).
A cyst or defect somewhere could also conceivably cause pain dur-
ing the muscular contractions of the perineal striated muscle. Lecht-
enberg and Ohl, in a 1994 study of urology and sexual dysfunction,
note that contractions during emission are produced by sympathetic
input to the genitalia and involve “contraction of the seminal vesicles,
prostate, vas deferens, balbourethral glands, and ampulla,” which
pushes seminal fluid into the proximal urethra and produces “the feel-
ing of ejaculatory inevitability.” However, there appears to be no evi-
dence in their study that men, at least today, suffer from blockages that020 ff29-3 (13-26) 12/9/04 5:16 PM Page 20
20 / French Forum/Fall 2004/Vol. 29, No. 3
would make these contractions painful. Instead, male sexual dysfunc-
tion today, aside from erectile disorders, is for the most part related to
impotence or idiopathic anejaculation—what Sade would call having
no bullet in the gun, or power behind it, rather than the bullet being too
large. Lechtenberg and Ohl nonetheless note that one form of impo-
tence involves “problems in the innervation of the balbocavernosus
and ischioicavernosus muscles”; and it is possible that Sade had some
congenital defect in one of these muscles that made prolonged stimu-
lation painful (40).
A more likely location for Sade’s trouble, however, is the narrow
convoluted tube called the epididymis, which is located on the poste-
rior margin of each testis, and in which spermatozoa are stored before
being conveyed along to the vas deferens. Eisendrath and Ralnick
describe it as a single tubule that is “coiled and twisted upon itself . . .
a number of coils of the tubule are grouped and bunched together . . .
producing a compartment-like formation.” As Howe points out, a
blockage here would be difficult to locate. The entire epididymis, if
unwound, would stretch to about twenty feet, and is “blocked off into
a continuous compartment of coils,” where a cyst or congenital defect
could have a serious effect on the passage of fluid. At the junction of
the body and the tail, the tubule makes a number of acute angles upon
itself, where a defect would again be serious, before becoming larger
and thicker (57). Nor is the interior passage of this tubule smooth;
rather, it is irregular and broken by protrusions in the interior wall that
stick out like room dividers. The vas deferens, which is the continua-
tion of the epididymis, would also be a possible candidate for trouble.
It is a small, thick-walled tube about two feet long, and joins the sem-
inal canal at the duct. Strictures in any of these passages, although rare,
might have caused Sade pain during periods of prolonged stimulation.
Sade also might have suffered from some form of amyloidosis. The
seminal vesicles synthesize and secrete protein and a disturbance in
protein metabolism can result in starch-like or amyloid deposits in
the seminal vesicles or urethra—deposits that form waxy translucent
blockages. The condition is slightly more common with older men and
is often a secondary effect of tuberculosis, and we know that Sade had
tuberculosis. Doctors in the nineteenth century, again, seem to use lan-
guage that gets closer to what Sade describes. G. M. Phillips, in his
Handbook of Genito-Urinary Surgery and Venereal Diseases (1898),020 ff29-3 (13-26) 12/9/04 5:16 PM Page 21
Donoghue: Sade, Vanille et Manille / 21
discusses blockages in the urethra as “partitions” and “apertures” that
obstruct the passage with deposits of “a hardened, inelastic tissue,
through which the canal may run as a narrow, irregular tortuous pas-
sage. This form of stricture is called tortuous.” Like Howe, Phillips is
concerned with excessive venery. “Prolonged and unrelieved con-
gestion occurring in young men whose minds are ever upon matters
sexual,” he writes, “may cause stricture” (185; 88). Sade does not com-
plain of pain in passing water, so any such strictures, deposits or even
cysts, if present, would have been located anterior to the urethra. In any
of these cases it would seem possible that pain could either be associ-
ated with prolonged stimulation, or aggravated by the build-up and
subsequent discharge of seminal fluid.
Krafft-Ebing, it should be noted, was clear on the distinction be-
tween physical and mental ailments: he distinguished between “per-
version,” which he called a disease, and “perversity,” which he called a
vice.8 “Perversion of the sexual instinct . . . is not to be confounded with
perversity in the sexual act” (56). He treats sadism in Section Three of
his work, under the heading of “General Pathology,” rather than in the
section devoted to psychology. It is a medical condition. The associa-
tion of lust and cruelty, pain and pleasure, is a physiological matter,
Krafft-Ebing insists, since it exists among animals, where the female is
passive, pursued, and finally subjugated, often violently, by the male
(59). For Krafft-Ebing, the moral feeling is inhibitory, but the drive
itself is physiological. “Sadism is thus nothing else than an excessive
and monstrous pathological intensification of phenomena—possible,
too, in normal conditions in rudimental forms—which accompany the
psychical vita sexualis, particularly in males” (60). This includes
another aspect of Sade’s “perversion”—the occasional tendency of
characters like Minsky to eat their victims. Krafft-Ebing cites numer-
ous examples of anthropophagy, where the male predator literally cuts
out parts of the female victim’s anatomy and eats them, including a con-
temporary one where the killer is at large as he writes. The Whitechapel
murder victims are all missing their uterus, ovaries and labia, which
Krafft-Ebing presumes the killer is eating (64).
These grisly examples are cited by Krafft-Ebing with all the horror
that a scientific treatise like his will allow, but it is clear that he sees them
in strictly medical terms, where the individuals are suffering from a dis-
ease. He discusses them as tied to different forms of illness, atrophy of020 ff29-3 (13-26) 12/9/04 5:16 PM Page 22
22 / French Forum/Fall 2004/Vol. 29, No. 3
the frontal lobe of the brain, and genetic factors. He does not deny they
must necessarily also have a psychological aspect, but often is content
to leave this part of things to the inhibitory function of the moral feeling.
When it fails, a simple suggestion can spark the atavistic instinct. He
cites a nineteenth-century work, Jacob’s Curiosités de l’histoire de
France, that includes the case of Gilles de Rais, executed in 1440 for the
murder and mutilation, over a period of eight years, of some eight hun-
dred children, who confessed that his acts gave him “inexpressible plea-
sure.” Lacking the necessary psychological inhibitors, his act was
sparked, in his own account, by reading Suetonius on the orgies of
Tiberius.9
Flagellation was another of Sade’s algolagnic addictions whose eti-
ology even in his day was known to be purely physiological. It had
been an accepted fact that the “English vice” was linked to sexual plea-
sure in some, albeit mysterious, physical way, for hundreds of years.
Krafft-Ebing cites Paullini’s 1698 Flagellum Salutis, which includes
the 1580 case of a Carmelite nun from Florence called Maria Mag-
dalena, a “heroine of flagellation” who had been whipped “from her
earliest youth” and enjoyed it. Krafft-Ebing writes “she frequently
cried, ‘Enough! Fan no longer the flame that consumes me. This is not
the death I long for; it comes with all too much pleasure and delight’”
(28–30). Paullini insisted it was a well-known fact that Persian and
Russian women were easily aroused by beating, and often demanded
it of their husbands as a part of their conjugal duties, without the sense
that there was anything unnatural about it. Krafft-Ebing discusses this
in Section Two, under “Physiological Facts,” rather than in the first sec-
tion on psychology. There is no moral stigma involved since arousal is
a purely autonomous response. Flagellants’ societies and bordellos
were common in the eighteenth century, as we know, in both England
and France, and had a ready-made clientele inured to the pleasures of
the whip from an early age. Sade was an adept. In school, in the mili-
tary, at home: there was plenty of opportunity for the sort of initiation
and addiction to the pleasure that Rousseau enjoyed and described in
his Confessions. Krafft-Ebing writes: “This should be remembered by
those who have the care of children” (28).
Sade had books on the matter. His 1776 library, for example, con-
tained a copy of Jacques Boileau’s 1700 Histoire des Flagellans in
which the physicalist explanation of whipping is again implicit in the020 ff29-3 (13-26) 12/9/04 5:16 PM Page 23
Donoghue: Sade, Vanille et Manille / 23
scientific attempt Boileau makes to distinguish between the proper and
improper uses of flagellation. A treatise in Sade’s collection called,
“Aphrodisiaque externe,” written in 1788, takes the same scientific
approach.10 Boileau believed that whipping on the shoulders caused
damage to the eyes (303), and cites the Capucins’ decision to change
from the shoulders to the buttocks as a definitive moment in the his-
tory of the practice. “Mais il faut prendre garde,” Boileau writes lacon-
ically, “que pour fuir un mal, ils ne courent imprudemment vers celui
qui est oppose” (306). In medical terms Boileau, a doctor, describes
what happens when one is whipped on the buttocks:
. . . les esprits animaux soient repoussés avec violence vers l’os pubis, et qu’ils
excitent des mouvemens impudiques à cause de la proximité des parties genitales;
ces impressions passent d’abord au cerveau, et y peignent de vives images des
plaisirs défendus, qui fascinent l’esprit par leurs charmes trompeurs, et reduisent
la chasteté aux derniers abois. (307)
He goes on to cite some cases of “ces criminelles délices” (308) that
resemble Krafft-Ebing’s, telling us, for example, that Coelius Rhodig-
inus in 1560 recounts the story of a man who had the “criminal delight”
“enracinée dans son coeur des l’enfance.” The materialist approach
continues as Boileau lists two other instances: one mentioned in an
entry in the Onomasticon de Medicine of Othon Brunsfled under the
heading of “coitus” where a man is mentioned who could not carry out
his conjugal duties unless whipped; and another from Jean Henri Mei-
bomius, Bishop of Lubeck, who mentions in his Christien Cassius a
butter and cheese merchant afflicted in the same way, as well as a mer-
chant caught with “une femmelete qu’il entretenoit” who testified that
her lover had to be whipped to be sexually aroused (312). There is no
indication that Boileau saw these cases as examples of psychological
“perversity.”11
Sade also had Tissot’s 1766 De la santé des gens de lettres in his
library, which might have sounded promising as a place to learn what the
matter was with him. He would have been disappointed, although Tissot
does claim that sitting for long periods of time, as Sade certainly did in
prison, harms the circulation in the lower part of the male body. Being
bent at the waist, late hours, bad air and reading after meals are among
the factors Tissot cites, a combination of which can produce in men poor
digestion, hemorrhoids and stone. Sade’s mechanist philosophy was020 ff29-3 (13-26) 12/9/04 5:16 PM Page 24
24 / French Forum/Fall 2004/Vol. 29, No. 3
shared by Tissot, who discusses the body strictly as a machine. A dis-
turbance in one part is transferred through nerve impulsions to other
locations. Stone most commonly developed in the kidneys, bladder and
urethra, but Tissot says it can also occur in the seminal canal, a com-
ment that might have caught Sade’s attention. What Tissot calls “la
liqueur seminale” in the male is negatively affected by the same bad
habits he mentions (20–21; 25; 70–107). But there is nothing in Tissot
that exactly corresponds to the symptoms Sade describes in the Vanille
et Manille letter.12
The distinction between physiology and psychology that Krafft-
Ebing insisted on is repeated by Gilles Deleuze in the Avant-Propos to
his book on Sacher-Masoch where he reminds us of the difference
between symptoms and syndromes: “les symptômes sont des signes
spécifiques d’une maladie, mais les syndromes sont des unités de ren-
contre ou de croisement, qui renvoient à des lignées causales très dif-
férentes.” Sado-masochism, Deleuze insists, is more of a syndrome
than a medical condition, and he suggests that if we want a more clin-
ical understanding of the meaning of each term we should turn, respec-
tively, to the writings of the two men, since “les spécificités cliniques
du sadisme et du masochisme ne sont pas séparables des valeurs lit-
téraires propres à Sade et à Masoch” (11). This interrelation of medi-
cine and criticism—what Deleuze terms a new collaboration between
“la critique (au sens littéraire) et la clinique (au sens médical)”—is
just what is needed, I would argue, to help us better understand the
articulation of Sade’s body and its pain within his texts. “La symptomat-
ologie,” Deleuze writes, “est toujours affaire d’art”; and more signifi-
cantly for what I have been suggesting here, réciproquement.
Emerson College
Notes
1
Francine du Plessix Gray asserts that Sade suffered from “a benign, undiagnosed case of
venereal disease rather than from some ‘structural flaw’” (238). Jean-Jacques Pauvert held a sim-
ilar view, calling Sade’s illness the holdover “d’une maladie vénérienne mal soignée, quoique
bénigne” (438). In the letter of 1784 Sade refers to “convulsions, et des spasmes et des douleurs.”
The illness is not new: sixteen years earlier Rose Keller had reported that Sade’s orgasm, after020 ff29-3 (13-26) 12/9/04 5:16 PM Page 25
Donoghue: Sade, Vanille et Manille / 25
whipping her, was accompanied by “des cris ‘très hauts et très effrayants’” (Œuvres 1, 173). And
Sade writes to his wife: “tu en a[s] vu des echantillons a la Coste;” although the problem, he says,
has gotten twice as bad since he has been in prison. He asks her to go to a doctor, describe his
symptoms and find out what the problem is; and he says that as soon as he gets out he is going to
do that himself, “car il est tres sur quil faut que j’aie un defaut de conformation que n’ont cer-
tainement point les autres hommes.” Sade thinks this congenital defect may worsen as he gets
older: “cette idée,” he writes, “me desespere” (Œuvres 12, 450–51, Lettre CLXXXII).
2
Gilbert Lely first published and decoded the Letter in 1950, and although he mentions that
the problem dates back to the Rose Keller episode of 1768, he does not discuss it as a medical
condition (Œuvres 2, 171–72); Maurice Lever only notes the “Etuis et Flacons” episode in pass-
ing (357); Schaeffer echoes Sade’s suspicion that the problem is “congenital”—or perhaps, he
writes, a “psychical obstruction” (131); Laurence L. Bongie, in his recent biography, does not
mention it. Among contemporary critics only Richard Seaver states the case plainly: “It is entirely
possible that [Sade’s] wild sexual fantasies are directly related to this dysfunction” (368n).
3
The prison writings include Eugénie de Franval, Aline et Valcour, Les Cent Vingt Journées de
Sodome, and Les Infortunes de la Vertu. And although Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu and the
Histoire de Juliette were published after Sade was released from prison, they may well have been
written there first, making up part of what Sade claimed he lost when the Bastille burned: “quinze
volumes a faire imprimer” (Œuvres 12, 471). Sade’s illness, therefore, is central to his œuvre.
4
Carter (83) calls them places of “imaginary liberty.” In Juliette, Delbène says: “Si nous nous
engloutissons au fond de la région des morts, c’est pour être le plus loin possible des vivants.
Quand on est aussi libertins, aussi dépravés, aussi scélérats, on voudrait être dans les entrailles
de la terre, afin de mieux fuir les hommes et leurs absurdes lois” (Œuvres 8, 63).
5
Cf. Vila, who calls Sade’s condition a “jointly medical and philosophical one” (288).
6
For a reading of Sade’s view of Nature as an inversion of Rousseau’s, see Philippe Roger,
“Rousseau selon Sade ou Jean-Jacques travesti,” in Dix-Huitième Siècle 23 (1991): 383–405.
7
Howe notes curiously that it is appropriate there should be a connection between sexual
excess and epilepsy (which he takes to be a disorder of the brain), since the testicle in fact resem-
bles the brain: it too has a three-part structure, with three coverings, a serous, fibrous and vascu-
lar coat.
8
Noted also by Schaeffer (130–31).
9
Gilles de Rais fought alongside Joan of Arc at Orléans and Paris in 1429. Benedetti notes
that the court indictment in 1440 put the number of his child victims at 140, but admits that no
definitive number exists (180).
10
See Alice Laborde, La bibliothèque du marquis de Sade au château de la Coste (en 1776)
(Geneva: Slatkine, 1991).
11
Since public flagellation seemed to authorize “delight” it was condemned in France by both
the Church and the University of Paris and banned by Parliament in 1601.
12
Krafft-Ebing also considered “a sedentary life” to be a cause of sexual dysfunction in the
male. He writes that poor posture is the principal cause since the nerve tract from the genitals to
the brain travels along the spine. Observations of hanged men, for example, show that the spine
rather than the brain is the physical center for erections, while the ejaculatory center, he claims,
is located in the fourth lumbar vertebra of the back (25, 33). We do not know if Sade ever suf-
fered a back injury as a young man, but if so it might also have played a role in his illness.020 ff29-3 (13-26) 12/9/04 5:16 PM Page 26
26 / French Forum/Fall 2004/Vol. 29, No. 3
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