Incest
Marquis de Sade
Translated by Andrew Brown
AL MA CL AS S I CS
alma classics Ltd
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Incest first published in French in 1799
This translation first published by Hesperus Press Ltd in 2003
This edition first published by Alma Classics Ltd in 2013
Translation and Introduction © Andrew Brown, 2003, 2013
Cover image © Francesco Pelosi
Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
isbn: 978-1-84749-297-5
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Contents
Introductionv
Incest1
Note on the Text 108
Introduction
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.”
“You will always be my favourite, Eugénie; you will be the
angel and the light of my life, the fire of my soul, my reason
for living.”
The first is Humbert Humbert’s description of his
nymphet stepdaughter. The second is Franval’s address to
his real daughter: not yet fourteen but soon to be “sacri-
ficed” – apparently willingly – to his desires.
Both Nabokov, in Lolita, and de Sade, in Incest (whose
French title, less tendentiously, is simply Eugénie de Franval),
are – as the ardent language of their protagonists shows –
narrating love stories. Both are focusing on what we know
to be the hellish world of child abuse. And both under-
gird their stories with more or less fraught and inchoate
apologias for sexually transgressive behaviour – aesthetic
transfiguration in Humbert’s case; a radical critique of
social conventions in that of Franval. Both their narratives
are “composed” in prison (de Sade actually wrote Incest
in the Bastille, where he had been incarcerated for sexual
malpractice, while Nabokov’s protagonist Humbert is await-
ing trial for the murder of Lolita’s ex-lover Quilty), and in
v
incest
both stories there is a critical subtext arguing that social
norms can themselves be a form of symbolic incarceration.
However monstrously self-serving Humbert’s language
may be, and however much he comes – belatedly and with
considerable crocodilian sentimentality – to see that he has
robbed Lolita of her childhood, he seems at times an out-
sider; to have more moral insight into the strange mixture
of innocence and corruption that is American society, with
its fetishistic cult of youth and its denial of the paedophilia
that sometimes lurks within this, than most of the people
around him.
In de Sade, if you want an example of a sexually exploita-
tive, “unnatural” practice in thrall to male power, where the
fate of young women is decided for them, you need look
no further than marriage. For if there is an emancipatory
moment in de Sade’s story, it lies in the fact that Eugénie
defiantly refuses the suitors arranged for her by her mother.
Admittedly this is because of her own incestuous love for
her father – while the extent to which Eugénie has been
programmed into incest by that father is an open question.
By isolating Eugénie from her mother and ensuring that
he will be the only adult who really counts for her, Franval
has nonetheless ensured that she is given an unusually all-
round education; he has told her of the prevalent social
norms that condemn incest and encouraged her to reject
his advances if there is someone she prefers to him. Her
relative isolation makes her something of an enfant sauvage,
vi
introduction
albeit an unusually civilized one, and of course it is unlikely
that Franval will paint the conventions of his society in a
particularly appealing light. But Franval at least waits until
his daughter is an adolescent before, in one of de Sade’s
theatrical and ritualistic set pieces, deflowering her. Not all
child abusers show such restraint. In any case, in de Sade’s
society, young women were married off early: Madame de
Farneille is seventeen when she gives birth to her daughter,
and Franval’s wife is, in turn, only sixteen and a half when
she presents her husband with a daughter, Eugénie.
In fact, it is not clear that either Nabokov or de Sade are
all that interested in incest as such. For Humbert, certainly,
Lolita is important more as a nymphet than a stepdaughter.
As for de Sade, he adumbrates the concept that incest is
merely one more example of the urge to transgress that is the
dominant impulse of the Sadeian world. A more important
theme might well be the murder of the mother, for in both
stories, one very real victim is indeed the daughter’s mother.
In Lolita, Charlotte Haze is treated as a banal, clinging,
vaguely pathetic figure by the narrator. In Incest, Mme de
Franval is forced to endure both mental and physical cruelty.
We tend to think, in patriarchy, of the father embodying
the authority of law, and the mother as a more “natural”
figure, but here the father is the transgressor and the voice
of a putatively repressed nature. The mother becomes the
symbol of the law which both Humbert and Franval flout
– the usual division of labour between nature and culture is
vii
incest
disturbed – and in Incest, at least, it is notable that Franval
repents more for his offence against his wife than for that
against his daughter.
Franval’s sequestering of Eugénie mirrors Enlightenment
experiments designed to determine where nature ends and
culture begins. He wants to find out whether his daughter
will feel a natural aversion to incest with him, or whether
such aversion is “merely” the product of the prejudices of
a particular society. The text repeatedly applies the words
“philosophical” and “system” to Franval: these were, in
the eighteenth century, code words for the unorthodox
speculations of the philosophes critical of the Church and
the ancien régime, and eager to “change the common way
of thinking”, as Diderot said of the Encyclopédie. The
word “libertine” meant both a freethinker and a dissolute
character: it was assumed that anyone who disbelieved in
the threats and promises of the Gospel would have no fear
of retribution and would inevitably yield to every conceiv-
able temptation. De Sade’s protagonists, including Franval,
go one further, and set out systematically to transgress all
the moral injunctions of Christianity, and then all moral
injunctions tout court. Sometimes in de Sade this leads to
transgression itself imploding: since transgression requires a
law to transgress, it is thus dependent on that law, and once
the injunction to transgress becomes so urgent, transgres-
sion itself becomes a new law. In any case, transgression
in de Sade is not always merely negative: it can be a way
viii
introduction
of obeying a law higher than that of human conventions,
namely nature.
In so far as Incest is a conte philosophique, its heart is
the dialogue between Franval and the priest Clervil. The
priest has to face several arguments set out by Franval in
his defence of incest. First, there is nothing good or bad
but thinking makes it so: nature is neutral and only human
beings attribute value to it (by decreeing, for instance,
that one conjugation of sexual organs is licit and another
abhorrent). Second, all human actions are determined by
a power which may be good or bad, but to which we have
to submit, since in this submission alone resides our hap-
piness – a version of one stoic argument, which tends to
promote the virtue of ataraxia or indifference (why make
such a fuss about a trivial little thing like incest?). Third,
all happiness is relative: the priest is happy being a priest;
Franval is happy living incestuously with his daughter; who
is to decide between them?
At this point the priest counters with the “voice of
conscience”: Franval must surely suffer qualms because
of his wrongdoing. A more decided Sadeian hero would
retort that his greatest pleasure lay precisely in deliber-
ately disobeying the “tyrannical” and “arbitrary” voice
of conscience; Franval’s response is less forthright, and
consists in once more adducing the notion of ethical rela-
tivity. If conscience were a sure guide, it would say the
same thing in all times and all places. This is manifestly
ix
incest
not so, he claims: what is done with impunity in France
is punishable in Japan.
The priest’s counter-argument runs like this: it may be
that human beings in different cultures have different laws;
it may even be that the taboo on incest is not universal (he
suggests that father-daughter marriages are permitted “on
the banks of the Ganges”). But all cultures have laws, and
the human beings who belong to that culture must obey its
legal code even if they are aware that another culture thinks
differently. This argument squares the circle as between rela-
tivism (laws are particular to cultures and have no necessary
validity outside them) and universalism (there is one human
nature and there should ultimately be one set of laws for
the entire human race).
Clervil’s compromise solution is capable of more sophis-
ticated formulations, but even as it stands it melds together
law, with its universalizing momentum, and custom, with
its particularism; it takes adequate account of our sense
that human cultures are startlingly diverse, while refusing
to collapse into mere ethical relativism. But it is an uneasy
compromise, an unstable synthesis of law and custom. Our
inability to decide how to distinguish between these – how to
attribute to law a dignity superior to that of “mere” custom
if it is not granted that law can be transcendentally founded
(as in a revealed religion) nor deduced on grounds of pure
rationality (since it seems that reason too has a history and
a geography) – render all of Clervil’s arguments vulnerable.
x
introduction
Once Humbert Humbert has murdered his rival Quilty, he
decides that “since I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I
might as well disregard the rules of traffic”; he drives away
from the scene of his crime on the wrong side of the road,
and passes through all the red lights until the police cars
finally catch up. We want to say that Humbert’s exploitation
of Lolita and his murder of Quilty are on a different level
from his infractions of the Highway Code, just as we want to
say that Clervil’s example of the Parisian boulevards ignores
our very real sense that some crimes are more serious than
others. De Sade too sometimes experiments with an antino-
mianism that seems like an act of exasperated resentment
against the moral perfectionism expressed in the Epistle of
James (“For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet
offend in one point, he is guilty of all”); the “slippery slope”
argument voiced by Clervil to enforce total submission to all
society’s laws is ironically endorsed in Incest, where sexual
transgression leads to murder, uxoricide and matricide. We
also want to say that there is at least a relative universality,
a rationale, behind the varying customs of different socie-
ties: drive on the wrong side of the road and you risk killing
someone. Likewise, de Sade sometimes appeals to nature as
that which transcends cultural difference. Franval and his
daughter have already rejected the claims of custom (whose
other name is “prejudice”): rather than seeing the relative
rationality of different customs, Franval rejects the claims
of custom, as such, in the name of a nature that lies beyond.
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incest
But “nature” is one of the most complex words in de
Sade. Nature is “what happens”; blind and mechanical;
humans should learn to live with its cold, impersonal gran-
deur. Nature is benevolent, the source of all life and all the
pleasures associated with it, specifically sex; humans should
enjoy these pleasures while they can. (It is religion which,
by regulating sexuality, is unnatural – much more unnatural
than incest.) Nature is malevolent: as eruptive as a volcano,
as cruel as the tiger when it tears its prey to pieces. Humans
should mimic its destructive power.
Though neither Clervil nor Franval are nominalist enough
to say so, “nature” is in any case a culturally conditioned
construction: it is posited as what must be beyond all cus-
toms, and only a realization of the variety of those customs
allows us to separate custom from law, or culture from
nature, in the first place. In its scientific sense, nature must
be universal (the laws of gravity, if not marriage arrange-
ments, must be the same on the banks of the Ganges as
they are by the Seine), and yet that universality is precarious
and revisable: Newton is corrected by Einstein, “scientific”
theories (Darwinism, Freudianism) may over time reveal
more about the people and the societies that produced and
consumed them than about nature as such.
The arguments put forward by Franval to justify incest fail
in two main ways, and they both involve the fragile notions
of autonomy and universality. Franval’s incest is ultimately an
act of self-assertion: its subtext is “my desires will brook no
xii
introduction
restraint”. Only when the self-assertion of others intrudes on
his own (when he is robbed of his money and left to wander
half-naked through the forest) is he forced to review the values
by which he has lived his life, to realize that autonomy is
necessarily limited. And his philosophizing, which glorifies
self-assertion by an appeal to the authority of nature – the
subtext here being “I serve nature alone, and like all natural
beings I seek solely my own power and pleasure” – denies his
heteronomous dependence on others: on the submissiveness
of Eugénie, first and foremost; and on the fact that it is only
because of others – because the customs of the Hottentots
and the Japanese are different from those of the French – that
he can have any inkling of the nature he claims to serve. He
cannot know this nature unaided, or by mere introspection;
nature as self-assertive desire is his own interpretation, not
fact. And this is ultimately where the positions of Clervil and
Franval turn into mirror images of each other: they universal-
ize and eternalize what is limited in time and space.
Even Clervil, well aware of the cultural variability of
custom, fails to realize that the human mind cannot rest in
mere pluralistic acquiescence: in comparing what is done on
the banks of the Seine with what is done on the banks of the
Ganges, we necessarily evaluate the two sets of practices;
this is why customs change. What was a capital offence in
de Sade’s society is so no longer (indeed, it is only because
laws change, perhaps partly thanks to de Sade, that we can
now read de Sade).
xiii
incest
Clervil is right to see that a culture is a complex network of
rights and obligations in which any one transgression risks
unravelling the whole skein, but he is wrong in deducing the
theocratic totalitarianist position that all laws are therefore
set in stone. He is ultimately a monist, worshipping the way
things are (though his acceptance of the penitent Franval
makes him a more sympathetic figure and suggests a more
subtle and adaptable position). So is Franval, though he
views the way things are differently from Franval: he wishes
to conform not to law but to nature. They both deny that
human beings are essentially counter-factual creatures,
always able to transcend the way things are, by whatever
name we call that “given”. If there is a given we are never
obliged to accept it. We can imagine things being different;
we can invent stories: such as Incest, which is, after all, a
story as well as a debate.
It is true that it is a rather dry story at times, though it
does at least end in satisfyingly Gothic gloom – dungeons
and castles, thunder and lightning, robbers galloping away,
improbable coincidences and belated repentances, a torch-lit
funeral – all very operatic (you can almost hear the music:
by Verdi). But it also ends on the outskirts of that Sadeian
location par excellence, the Black Forest. It is in the Black
Forest that de Sade sets the capital of his dark empire, the
isolated castle of Silling, where the debauchees of the 120
Days of Sodom indulge in the torture of their victims, far
from the restraints of culture and, so they claim, in the
xiv
name of the way things are (here: sexual desire, in all its
ramifications).
Why not yield, opportunistically (sadistically, perhaps),
to the opportunism of geographical accident and recall
that it was in the Black Forest, from his mountain hut at
Todtnauberg (its very name makes it sound like a Golgotha of
the spirit), that the German philosopher Martin Heidegger,
from beginning to end of the Nazi regime, issued the fate-
ful directives of fundamental ontology. The monstrosities
complicitously catalogued by de Sade in the 120 Days of
Sodom, and adumbrated in Incest, share at least one deep
tendency with the philosophy of Heidegger: on the one hand
we have the denigration of “culture”, that delicate symbolic
network of human relations that human beings are always
free to revise and correct, and on the other the exaltation of
“the way things are”. Called, by the one, “Nature”, in all its
amoral (and thus immoral) power; and by the other, “Being”.
– Andrew Brown
xv
Incest
To educate man and to improve his morals: that is the sole
objective of this anecdote. The reader should be imbued with
a sense of the great peril that perpetually dogs the footsteps
of those who permit themselves everything when satisfying
their desires. May they come to realize that a good upbring-
ing, wealth, talent and the gifts bestowed by Nature only
serve to lead one astray – if these qualities are not borne
up and made worthy by restraint, good behaviour, wisdom
and modesty – these are the very truths which we are here
going to prove. May we be forgiven the monstrous details
of the dreadful crime we are obliged to recount: is it pos-
sible to arouse a detestation of such aberrations when one
is not brave enough to depict them in all their nakedness?
It is rare that everything should be so harmoniously
organized in one person as to bring him to prosperity. Is
he favoured by Nature? If so, Fortune refuses her gifts.
Does Fortune shower her favours on him? Then Nature
is bound to have maltreated him. It seems that the hand
of Heaven has decided to demonstrate, in each individual
as in its most sublime operations, that the laws of equi-
librium are the foremost laws of the universe – the laws
which simultaneously govern all events, and all vegetable
and animal life.
3
marquis de sade
Franval, who lived in Paris, where he was born, possessed
not only an income of four hundred thousand livres but also
the most handsome figure, the most agreeable features and
the most varied talents. But beneath this outwardly seductive
surface all the vices were concealed, sadly including those
which, once adopted and made habitual, lead rapidly to
crime. An imagination disordered to a degree impossible to
describe was Franval’s main failing – one that can never be
overcome, since a diminution of its power simply increases
the strength of its effects; the less they are capable of, the
more they try to do; the less they act, the more they have
recourse to invention; each age brings new ideas, and satiety,
far from cooling their ardour, merely leads to more deadly
refinements.
As we have said, the charms of youth and all the talents
that enhance it were possessed in profusion by Franval, but
given that he held moral and religious duties in the deepest
contempt, it proved impossible for his teachers to make him
adopt any of them.
In a century when the most dangerous books come into
the hands of children as easily as into those of their fathers
and their guardians, when reckless systematizing can pass
itself off as philosophy, unbelief as strength of mind and
libertinage for imagination, the wit shown by young Franval
merely aroused laughter; one minute he was being scolded
for it, and the next praised. Franval’s father, who favoured
modish sophisms, was the first to encourage his son to
4
incest
think sensibly about all these things; he himself lent him
the works which could corrupt him most quickly; what
tutor would have dared, after that, to inculcate principles
different from those of the house in which he was obliged
to please his masters?
In any case, Franval lost his parents when he was still very
young, and at the age of nineteen, an old uncle, who himself
died shortly afterwards, made over to him, as soon as he
was to be married, all the possessions that were destined
one day to belong to him.
M. de Franval, with such a fortune, was bound to find it
easy to get married. Countless possible candidates presented
themselves, but as he had begged his uncle to give him a girl
younger than himself – one bringing as few companions as
possible – his old kinsman, aiming to satisfy his nephew,
let his choice fall on a certain Mademoiselle de Farneille,
daughter of a financier, now with only her mother left
alive; still young, it was true, but with an income of sixty
thousand solid livres; fifteen years old, and with the most
delightful features in the whole of Paris at that time… She
had one of those virginal faces in which sincerity and affa-
bility are both clearly visible through the delicate features
of Love and all the Graces… lovely blond hair rippling
down to her waist, big blue eyes suffused with tenderness
and modesty, a slender, supple and delicate figure, skin like
a lily and as fresh as a rose, possessing many talents and
a vivid but somewhat wistful imagination, with some of
5
marquis de sade
that gentle melancholy which leads one to love books and
solitude – all attributes which Nature seems to grant only
to the individuals for whom it is keeping unhappiness in
store, as if to make that happiness seem less bitter when they
encounter it, imbuing them at such times with a sombre and
affecting voluptuousness and making them prefer tears to the
frivolous joys of happiness, which are much less powerful
and much less intense.
Mme de Farneille, thirty-two years old at the time of her
daughter’s marriage, was also a woman of intelligence and
charm, but inclined perhaps a little too much to strictness
and reserve. Desirous of the happiness of her only child,
she had consulted the whole of Paris on this marriage, and
as she no longer had any relatives and, if she needed advice,
only a few of those cold-hearted friends to whom every-
thing is a matter of indifference, she was persuaded that
the young man who was being proposed for her daughter
was, without a doubt, the best person she could possibly
find in Paris, and that she would commit an unforgivable
folly if she failed to take advantage of this opportunity. So
the marriage took place, and the young couple, wealthy
enough to move into their own house, settled into it in the
days following their wedding.
None of those vices of fickleness, disorderly conduct or
empty-headedness which prevent a man from being fully
grown by the time he is thirty had entered young Franval’s
heart; on the best of terms with himself, a devotee of order
6
incest
and well versed in the arts of managing a house, Franval had,
as far as this aspect of life’s happiness was concerned, all the
necessary qualities. His vices, of an entirely different kind,
were much more the failings of maturity than the products
of scatterbrained youth: artfulness, intrigue… malevolence,
a black heart, egotism, a great deal of cunning and deceit
and, to cast a veil over all this, not only the grace and talents
we have mentioned, but eloquence, a sharp mind and the
most seductive outward manners one could imagine. This
was the man we have to depict.
Mlle de Farneille, who, as was customary, had known her
husband for at most a month before tying her destiny to his,
was deceived by this false glitter and became its dupe. The
days were not long enough for her to indulge in the pleasure
of gazing at him; she idolized him, and things had gone so
far that people might have feared the worst for this young
woman if any obstacles had come to disturb the sweet and
even course of a marriage in which she found, she said, the
only happiness of her life.
As for Franval, philosophical when it came to women
as indeed about everything else in life, he considered this
charming person with a fine show of indifference.
“The woman who belongs to us,” he would say, “is a
kind of individual whom usage enslaves to us; she has to
be yielding, submissive… perfectly sensible: not that I take
much account of the prejudices of dishonour that a wife
can bring on us when she imitates our misbehaviour – it is
7
marquis de sade
merely that it is not pleasant when someone else takes it
into her head to steal our privileges; all the rest is perfectly
unimportant, and adds nothing to our happiness.”
With a husband who feels that way, it is easy to foresee
that the unfortunate woman who is to be bound to him in
matrimony cannot expect her path to be strewn with roses.
Decent, sensitive, well-brought-up and impelled by love to
anticipate all the desires of the only man in the world who
occupied her thoughts, Mme de Franval carried her chains
through the first few years without even suspecting the extent
of her enslavement; it was obvious enough to her that she
was merely gleaning in the fields of marriage, but she was
still made happy enough by what was left to her, and all her
zeal and her greatest attention were devoted to ensuring, in
these short moments granted to her affection, that Franval
would find at the least everything she thought necessary for
the happiness of her darling husband.
The most conclusive of all the proofs that Franval did not
always stray from his duty, however, was the fact that in the
very first year of his marriage, his wife, now sixteen and a
half, gave birth to a daughter even more beautiful than her
mother, whom the father immediately called Eugénie…
Eugénie, at once the horror and the miracle of nature.
M. de Franval, who, the minute this child saw the light
of day, no doubt conceived the most detestable designs on
her, straight away separated her from her mother. Until
the age of seven, Eugénie was looked after by women who
8
incest
Franval could be sure of, and who, limiting themselves to
encouraging the development of a pleasant temperament
and to teaching her how to read, deliberately refrained
from giving her any knowledge of the religious or moral
principles about which a girl of that age is commonly sup-
posed to be instructed.
Mme de Farneille and her daughter, deeply shocked by this
behaviour, complained to M. de Franval, who replied with
indifference that his plan was to make his daughter happy,
and so he did not wish to inculcate chimerical notions into
her, as their sole effect is to frighten people without ever
being of any use to them; it was best if such a daughter,
whose only need was to learn how to please others, remained
ignorant of such silly nonsense, the fantastical existence
of which would trouble her peace of mind without adding
either a single extra truth to her moral being or a single
extra grace to her physical appearance. Such comments
met with the loftiest disapproval of Mme de Farneille, who
was drawing nearer to thoughts of heaven the further she
drew away from the pleasures of this world: devoutness is
a weakness that affects particular ages and particular states
of health. Amid the tumult of the passions, a future which
seems far away rarely causes much anxiety, but when those
passions cease to speak so loud… when we draw near life’s
end… when everything, finally, abandons us, we throw
ourselves back onto the mercy of the God we heard about
in childhood, and if, from a philosophical point of view,
9
marquis de sade
these second illusions are just as fantastical as the others,
they are, at least, not so dangerous.
Franval’s mother-in-law had no relatives, little credit of
her own to draw upon, and at the most, as we have said,
just a few of those fair-weather friends who soon melt away
if we need their help. Finding herself struggling against an
amiable, young, well-placed son-in-law, she decided sensibly
enough that it would be simpler to content herself with a
few mild reprimands, rather than having recourse to more
vigorous measures against a man who would ruin the mother
and have the daughter locked up if anyone dared to cross
swords with him: for this reason, she merely hazarded a few
critical remarks, and left it at that as soon as she saw that
it was all leading nowhere.
Franval, sure of his superiority, and realizing that they
were afraid of him, soon lost all restraint in every area of
life whatsoever and, barely even troubling to draw a veil
over his actions so as to conceal them from the public, he
marched straight to his horrible goal.
As soon as Eugénie reached the age of seven, Franval took
her to see his wife, and this loving mother – who had not seen
her child since giving birth to her – caressed her insatiably,
held her pressed tight to her breast for two hours, covered
her with kisses and drenched her with her tears. She wanted
to know all about her childish talents, but Eugénie had
only learnt to read fluently, to enjoy the most robust health
and to be as beautiful as the angels. Mme de Franval felt a
10
incest
new despair when she realized that her daughter was truly
unaware of even the most elementary principles of religion.
“But Monsieur!” she said to her husband. “Are you giving
her an upbringing that is fit merely for this world? Will you
not deign to reflect that she is to live in it for a mere instant,
like us, before plunging into a dire eternity if you deprive
her of what will enable her to enjoy a happier destiny at the
feet of the Being from whom she received life?”
“If Eugénie knows nothing, Madame,” replied Franval,
“if these maxims are carefully hidden from her, she cannot
possibly be unhappy; for, if they are true, the Supreme Being
is too just to punish her for her ignorance, and if they are
false, what need is there to tell her about them? As for the
other aspects of her education that need to be taken care
of, please trust me: from today I will be her tutor, and I will
answer for it that in a few years, your daughter will surpass
all the other children of her age.”
Mme de Franval persisted. Drawing on the eloquence of
her heart to assist that of reason, she shed a few tears: but
Franval was quite unmoved by them, and indeed did not seem
even to notice them. He had Eugénie taken away, telling his
wife that if she took it into her head to put any obstacles,
of whatever kind, in the way of the education he intended
to give his daughter, or if she tried to suggest principles
different from those he planned to instil in her, she would
deprive herself of the pleasure of seeing her altogether,
and he would send his daughter to one of his chateaux,
11
marquis de sade
from which she would never emerge. Mme de Franval, ever
submissive, was quiet for a moment; then she begged her
husband never to separate her from such a dear possession,
and promised, weeping, that she would in no way hinder
the education being prepared for her.
From that moment, Mlle de Franval was placed in a very
fine apartment, next to that of her father, with a governess
of great intelligence, an under-governess, a chambermaid
and two little girls of her own age, for her sole amusement.
She was given tutors in writing, drawing, poetry, natural
history, oratory, geography, astronomy, anatomy, Greek,
English, German, Italian, fencing, dancing, riding and music.
Eugénie got up every day at seven o’clock, whatever the
season; she ran off to the garden where she breakfasted on
a thick hunk of rye bread; she came back at eight, spent a
few moments in her father’s apartment, where he romped
and played with her or taught her little society games; until
nine she prepared her homework; then the first tutor arrived;
five came in all, until two o’clock. She was served her meal
separately, with her two girlfriends and her chief governess;
lunch consisted of vegetables, fish, pastries and fruit; there
was never any meat, soup, wine, liqueurs or coffee. From
three until four Eugénie returned to play in the garden for
an hour with her little companions; they practised tennis,
ball, skittles, badminton or running races; they wore com-
fortable clothing, depending on the different seasons; noth-
ing constricted their waists: they were never strapped into
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incest
those ridiculous whalebone corsets, equally dangerous for
stomach and chest, which impede a young girl’s breathing
and inevitably attack her lungs. From four until six, Mlle
de Franval was visited by new tutors, and as not all of them
could appear on the same day, the others would come the
day after. Three times a week, Eugénie went to see a play
with her father, in little private theatre boxes with gratings
hired for her use on an annual basis. At nine, she returned
home for supper; she was served only vegetables and fruit.
From ten to eleven, four times a week, Eugénie played with
her servants, read various novels and then went to bed. On
the other three days, the ones on which Franval did not
dine out, she would spend her time alone in her father’s
apartment, and this period was taken up with what Franval
called his “lectures”. In these, he inculcated in his daughter
his maxims on morality and religion; he presented to her,
on the one hand, what certain men thought on these issues,
and on the other he set out what he himself thought.
With her high intelligence, extensive knowledge, alert
mind and the passions that were already starting to smoul-
der within her, it is easy to imagine the progress that such
systems made in Eugénie’s soul, but as the unworthy Franval
was not intent on making her self-assured in mind alone, his
lectures rarely ended without inflaming her heart, and this
dreadful man had so successfully found the way to please
his daughter, he suborned her so artfully, he made himself
so useful in her education and her pleasures, he anticipated
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