Fear of De Sade

The situation was incomprehensible. Since they had woken him in the château – a ruin in point of fact, the only property left to him from all those taken by the Revolution and not returned under the Empire – until they had taken him to that dark cell, the baron not only didn’t know the victim’s identity and the details of the crime he was suspected of, but was ignorant of what people were saying around him. He didn’t understand anything. They persisted in calling him by a name that wasn’t his, although he never failed to point out that he had a noble title: ‘Pierre de LaChafoi, baron’. This, in spite of the years passed under the Terror, when, under questioning from all kinds of authorities, he learned to renege all his aristocratic attributes, and collaborated willingly, thanks to the advice of his cousin, the Count of Suz, with everything the Revolution had demanded of him. Now, since he was really under suspicion, when he was woken by the guards he acted as if, after the years of the Terror, he had recovered his pride in his aristocratic origins – which would have been seen as suicidal fifteen years ago – and corrected them every time they addressed him in that strange language; just as later he had to correct the man in white who had taken him to the cell that to the touch seemed made of stone. After uselessly groping round it to find a way out, he must have fallen into a deep, despondent sleep, because when he opened his eyes again in the darkness in which he could see nothing, and said to himself, in yet another of his tautological reasonings, and trying to remember how he had got there, that this must be quite usual, since there was no light anywhere, a high-pitched voice welcomed him with a gloomy: ‘At last!’

He wanted to believe that his eyes were still closed, and tried to open them again. As if they weren’t properly open, he opened them wider, as wide as he could. He still couldn’t see further than his nose. ‘Who’s there?’ he exclaimed, backing against the wall from fear. But the voice only replied: ‘If I were to tell you my name, you might not be able to bear the darkness, or my presence.’

BARON: Who are you?

VOICE: I prefer to spare you that.

BARON: What is this place?

VOICE: You must be joking.

BARON: No. Of course this isn’t a prison, though it seems just like one to me. I should be free by now. They didn’t prove anything. Where am I?

VOICE: There are other ways of punishing apart from prisons. Have you never heard of . . .

BARON: No! Not that! They’ve sent me to Charenton! How could they? Just because they had no proof. Is that the reason? Is that what they call a reason? The asylum was one of the possibilities put forward by the tribunal, but I told them I wasn’t mad! I’m not mad!

VOICE: That’s what they all say.