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2 7 R J U S T I N E B A R B A R A J . O R T O N Poor girl, she never meant to be funny, but here she is, in the wrong kind of story: the little flowers of ingratitude spring up wherever she sets her feet. She’s always saving the lives of desperate men, and it never strikes her as a bad idea. The monastery door slams behind her; the robbers circle like wolves. ‘‘No, dear, there’s no escape. Don’t insult me by pretending I’m susceptible to mercy. Your pleas for clemency will only inflame me’’ – and what does she do? She falls at his feet! If it were you or me, we’d learn the rules, get ourselves a patron, as men in prison barter themselves for protection or hungry children barter themselves for pay. But Sade’s heroine hasn’t read Sade. She’s read the Bible, and sentimental novels. She wears her purity like a glass slipper that keeps breaking and piercing her foot. • The Marquis knew prisons, less dreadful and less lively than his heroine’s. 2 8 Y He had a writing desk, a cushioned chair. He even bribed a little laundress to visit him in his cell. She was twelve, she needed the money. If I go through as much linen as I do, he wrote to his wife, blame it on the laundress who every day either loses or tears to shreds everything of mine that she can get her hands on. He made a mark in his diary for each act of sodomy: a line with a slash across it, like a null symbol, a void. The girl’s name was Madeleine. He taught her to read and write. She was seventeen when he died. The italicized lines in Barbara J. Orton’s poem are from a 1783 letter by the Marquis de Sade to Madame de Sade, included in Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, compiled and translated by Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press, 1965). ...

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