Beschreibung:

SADE, DONATIEN ALPHONSE FRANÇOIS Marquis de (1740-1814). Autograph letter signed ("de Sade") to Antoine-Raimond de Sartine, Lieutenant Général de Police, [no place, but Vincennes Fortress], 29 October 1763. 2 pages, 4to . THE YOUNG REPROBATE BEGS FOR PARDON Five months after his marriage to Renée Pélagie de Montreuil, the 23-year de Sade was arrested and imprisoned for excesses committed in a brothel. Written on the day of his arrest, the hastily scrawled letter betrays the young Marquis's panic at the prospect of irreparable disgrace. He desperately begs the Chief of Police to pardon him "the horrors of which he has been accused." Should the scandal break out, "my parents, on whom my fortune entirely depends, would deprive me of that which I can hope for. They have sent me to Paris for several days in order to go to Fontainebleau to solicit the Duc de Choiseul [Etienne-François, Minister of Foreign Affairs], who had given me some hopes - I will be lost for life with no resources if the punishment is heard about and I will never again be able to enter the service as I had expected to after my visit to Fontainebleau... I am lost for life if ever the affair comes out. I beg your pardon a thousand times and I beseech you, Monsieur de Sartines, to punish me doubly at the first little offence that I should be accused of, of whatever nature it be." The Marquis's request was granted: de Sade was released after fifteen days, and his perverse behavior did not become public knowledge until 1768. Saved from imprisonment through his family's influence, he was re-arrested in 1772 but escaped from the prison in Aix-en-Provence and remained at liberty until 1778, when his overtaxed family abstained from contesting a lettre de cachet and let him be locked up in the prison of Vincennes. He was later transferred to the Bastille, where he began to write. Letters written by de Sade in his youth are very rare. Provenance : Sold at Sotheby's, London, 8 November 1977, lot 224.