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Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue

Frontispiece by Philippe Chéry and title page of the first edition
Author	The Marquis de Sade
Original title	Les Infortunes de la Vertu
Translator	Pieralessandro Casavini
Country	France
Language	French
Genre	Libertine, erotic, gothic
Publisher	J. V. Girouard
Publication date	1791
Followed by	Juliette

Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue (French: Justine, ou Les Malheurs de la Vertu) is a 1791 novel by Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, better known as the Marquis de Sade. Justine is set just before the French Revolution in France and tells the story of a young girl who goes under the name of Thérèse. Her story is recounted to Madame de Lorsagne while defending herself for her crimes, en route to punishment and death. She explains the series of misfortunes that led to her present situation.

History of the work

Justine (original French title: Les infortunes de la vertu) was an early work by the Marquis de Sade, written in two weeks in 1787 while imprisoned in the Bastille. It is a novella (187 pages) with relatively little of the obscenity that characterized his later writing, as it was written in the classical style (which was fashionable at the time), with much verbose and metaphorical description.

A much extended and more graphic version, entitled Justine ou Les Malheurs de la vertu (1791) (English title: Justine, or The Misfortunes of the Virtue or simply Justine), was the first of de Sade's books published.

A further extended version, La Nouvelle Justine ou Les Malheurs de la vertu (The New Justine), was published in the Netherlands in 1797. This final version, La Nouvelle Justine, departed from the first-person narrative of the previous two versions, and included around 100 engravings. It was accompanied by a continuation, Juliette, about Justine's sister. The two together formed 10 volumes of nearly 4000 pages in total; publication was completed in 1801.

Napoleon Bonaparte ordered the arrest of the anonymous author of Justine and Juliette, and as a result de Sade was incarcerated for the last 13 years of his life. The book's destruction was ordered by the Cour Royale de Paris on May 19, 1815.

Modern publication

There is standard edition of this text in hardcover, having passed into the public domain. The text itself is often incorporated into collections of de Sade's work.

A censored English translation of Justine was issued in the US by the Risus Press in the early 1930s, and went through many reprintings. The first unexpurgated English translation of Justine (by 'Pieralessandro Casavini', a pseudonym for Austryn Wainhouse) was published by the Olympia Press in 1953. Wainhouse later revised this translation for publication in the United States by Grove Press (1965). Another modern translated version still in print is the 1999 Words­worth edition — a translation of the original version in which Justine calls herself Sophie and not Thérèse.

The final 1797 version La Nouvelle Justine has never been published in English translation, although it was published in French in the permissive conditions of the late 1960s, as part of two rival limited-editions of the definitive collected works of de Sade: Jean-Jacques Pauvert's Oeuvres completes de Sade (1968, 30 volumes) and Cercle du Livre Precieux's Oeuvres completes du Marquis de Sade: editions definitive (1967, 16 volumes).

Plot

Summary

"The very masterpiece of philosophy would be to develop the means Providence employs to arrive at the ends she designs for man, and from this construction to deduce some rules of conduct acquainting this wretched two-footed individual with the manner wherein he must proceed along life’s thorny way …"

A devout, virtuous young woman maintains her faith in the goodness of God and the ultimate truth of the Catholic religion despite having endured years of rape, torture, betrayal and the insistence of several of her abusers that God is an illusion and that atheism is the only true path. She is rescued from her life of misfortune only to be killed in a freak accident while in her twenties.

Detailed

The Comtesse de Lorsange and Monsieur de Corville, an aristocratic couple traveling in pre-Revolutionary France, encounter a young woman in irons being transported to Paris to have her sentence for murder, theft and arson confirmed, and then be returned to Lyon to be executed. Curious about the woman's story, they prevail upon her to describe the events that led to her current predicament.

The narrator, called Thérèse (Sophie in the first version of the novel), was raised along with her older sister in a convent. Following the bankruptcy and death of their parents, they were expelled when Thérèse was 12. The sister, Juliette, whose story Sade tells in another book, chose to follow a career of whoredom and vice. She married a count when she was 20 and killed him in such a way that the crime went undetected. With her inheritance, she lived as she pleased and proceeded to ruin several prominent men, dispatching two of them. She also underwent three or four abortions so as not to spoil her figure. She then began courting a wealthy and connected man of fifty.

Young Thérèse, on the other hand, was shocked by her sister's resolve to follow that path and determined that she herself would live a life of virtue. At the behest of her landlady, she went to see an aging rich man named Dubourg. He warned Thérèse that virtue was useless in this world and that if she wanted to survive she must lose her scruples. Shocked, she ran from his house. The landlady, enraged at the girl's naïvete, talked Dubourg into give her another chance. Thérèse returned and Dubourg informed her that if her attitude had not improved, she would be kidnapped and never seen again. Thérèse was repelled but surrendered to the inevitable and submitted herself to Dubourg's perverse attentions.

"The trial of an unfortunate creature who has neither influence nor protection is conducted with dispatch in a land where virtue is thought incompatible with misery, where poverty is enough to convict the accused…"

In a series of incidents, Thérèse's commitment to virtue was sorely tested.

• She became the household slave of the famous Parisian usurer Harpin, who, when she refused to steal an item of his neighbor's that he coveted, framed her for theft and had her arrested.

• Awaiting her fate in the Conciergerie, Thérèse was befriended by an infamous woman named Dubois, whose accomplices set fire to the building. Twenty-one people died in the fire, but Dubois' band got away. Her four companions sexually abused Thérèse but left her virginity intact. The group waylaid a passerby and robbed him; Thérèse successfully begged for his life.

• That night she and the man whose life she had saved, the wealthy merchant Saint-Florent, slipped away. He knocked her unconscious with his cane and sodomized her.

"Is there any [doctrine] more odious?…the great God, creator of all we behold, is going to abase himself to the point of descending ten or twelve million times every morning in a morsel of wheat paste; this the faithful devour and assimilate, and God almighty is lugged to the bottom of their intestines where he is speedily transmuted into the vilest excrements, and all that for the satisfaction of the tender son…"

• The young Comte de Bressac, a homosexual and deep misogynist by nature, kidnapped Thérèse, extolled to her the delights of receiving anal intercourse (a potential capital offense at the time) and, being a committed atheist, fulminated against Christianity at length. He insisted that she poison his good-natured aunt so that he could receive his inheritance. She agreed to the plan but revealed it to the aunt. Upon discovering the betrayal, the Count and a companion took Thérèse to the wood where he had found her, tied her naked to a tree, tortured and sexually abused her, then let her know that the aunt was going to die anyway and that she would be framed for the murder.

• Thérèse dragged herself to the nearest village where a surgeon named Rodin healed her wounds and allowed her to convalesce. Rodin whipped and sexually abused the children who attended his school. Among those so abused was Rosalie, Rodin's sweet and vivacious 14-year-old daughter. The two girls attempted an escape, but were caught by Rodin and the other surgeon in town, who burned Thérèse with the brand of a thief and deposited her in the forest, leaving her with the certain knowledge that they were going back to kill Rosalie.

"…what is to become of your laws, your ethics, your religion, your gallows, your Gods and your Heavens and your Hell when it shall be proven that such a flow of liquids, this variety of fibers, that degree of pungency in the blood or in the animal spirits are sufficient to make a man the object of your givings and your takings away?

• Thérèse consoled herself that she was after all still a virgin, having only been taken once, and that anally. She reminded herself that "Never, not in a single one of my life's circumstances, had the sentiments of Religion deserted me." She wandered until she came across the Benedictine monastery of Saint-Mary-in-the-Wood and thought she had at last found her salvation, only to find that the four supposedly pious monks at this establishment were the most ruthless libertines. Sade has here recreated the Chateau of Silling, scene of the action in his lost manuscript for The 120 Days of Sodom, right down to the number of libertines, the extreme isolation and the rigid rules, what one Sade biographer calls "a burlesque of formal education." As Thérèse laments her fate, the reader is reminded of the central philosophical theme of the book, made clear by the subtitle: it's not just that the heroine suffers, she is actively punished for being virtuous. One of her ordeals was being required to produce excrement for one of the monks to engage in coprophagy. Another of the monks regaled her with an extreme form of philosophical materialism, shattering the notion of free will, so important to her Catholic faith. She managed to escape after six months and discovered the putrefying corpses of all the girls who had been expelled from the monastery earlier.

• While Thérèse was resting after her escape from the monastery, two men threw a bag over her head and carried her to the remote château of Monsieur de Gernande, whose passion was, every four days, to watch his wife (his fourth) bleed almost to death while he was fellating, and being fellated by, teenage boys. This operation only took place after Gernande had consumed an inconceivably huge meal, with bottles of wine, liqueurs and coffee. Thérèse was assigned to be the wife's maid, and was put through the treatment once to understand what it felt like. The Count assailed Thérèse with arguments as to the natural inferiority of her sex, women being mere vexsome playthings for the superior sex.

• After a year at Gernande's château, Thérèse escaped and made her way to Lyon to rest up before striking out for Grenoble where she intended to expose the men who had ill-used her. She saw a gazette mentioning that the loathsome Rodin had been named First Surgeon to the Empress of Russia; once again, villainy was rewarded. Before leaving for Grenoble, she encountered Saint-Florent, the man who betrayed her after she had saved him from Dubois' band of thieves. He proposed that Thérèse take over the job of procuress for him. She declined and he peremptorily ordered her out of his house, refusing to return the money he stole from her when he raped her in the forest. On her way out of Lyon, she was immediately robbed. After being victimized again and again, she was on the verge of renouncing virtue and joining the brigands, but she held firm.

counterfeiting

• Thérèse helped a man being trampled by two men on horseback in a field. He introduced himself as Roland and asked her to come to his remote château and serve as maid to his beloved sister. They proceeded into the remotest part of the mountains, leaving the road far behind. After arduous travel on muleback they arrived at a forbidding castle, seemingly inaccessible. Once across the drawbridge she was manacled with four other naked women to a wheel to be kept turning ten hours a day while being fed a single meal of black beans and bread. Roland regularly mutilated his slaves with a bull's pizzle. After her first day of labor, he took Thérèse to a remote and terrifying dungeon where he ravaged her with a whip and his enormous member. He rubbed alcohol on her pubic hair and set it alight. After two years, having made a fortune at counterfeiting (a capital offense at the time), he set off for Venice and established himself there as a man of means, utterly untouchable. His less ruthless assistant took over the counterfeiting operation and was unprepared when the Grenoble constabulary assaulted the fortress and marched the inhabitants off to the city for execution. One of the magistrates believed Thérèse's story and defended her; she was cleared of all charges.

• Unfortunately, the infamous Dubois, having by now made her fortune and being well-dressed, struck up a conversation with Thérèse and enlisted her aid in one last crime. Thérèse tried to foil the plan but she could not possibly outwit Dubois, who poisoned a young man, stole his fortune and had Thérèse spirited away to a château where she was given over to a Monseigneur whose passion was decapitation. When Dubois and the clergyman drank themselves into a stupor, Thérèse was able to escape. She and companion went to another town but the inn where they stayed burned to the ground. It turned out to be the work of Dubois, who had Thérèse snatched from the flames and transported back to the decapitating Monseigneur’s house where the enraged prelate was preparing special tortures for her. Along the way, six constables stopped the carriage and took Thérèse into custody. Dubois, as an obvious woman of means, was able to accuse her with impunity. The irons were clapped on the luckless creature and she was off to jail.

• Thérèse wrote to Saint-Florent, driven to such an extreme measure by the certainty of her fate, accused as she was, with ample evidence, of arson, theft and child-murder. He agreed to have her brought to his house to meet with Cardoville, the magistrate who would try her case, giving her the chance to convince him of her innocence. Once she arrived, it was obvious they had only the most libertine intentions. They displayee their bare buttocks to her, having an inordinate pride in that part of themselves. After submitting her to the most cruel tortures, they sent her back to her cell. Cardoville came to her the next day and interrogated her as if nothing had happened. He found ample evidence of her guilt and she was condemned. She was on her way to Paris to have her sentence affirmed when she was discovered at an inn by Madame de Lorsange and Monsieur de Corville and prevailed upon to tell her tale.

Having heard this story of endless tribulation, Madame de Lorsange reveals herself to be the criminal Juliette, and throws herself into the arms of her long-lost little sister Justine, Thérèse being an alias. Corville gives his word of honor to the guards and has her released to his custody. He writes to his friends in power and all charges against her are dropped. Justine lives with them in comfort and splendor but begins to show signs of depression. Nothing can revive her spirits: she is sure that, living as she is in luxury, she is certainly bound for extreme misfortune soon. Sure enough, her torso is ripped open by a lightning bolt as she stands in a doorway of the château. Juliette renounces crime and moves to Paris to take the veil as a Carmelite. Corville devotes his life and fortune to good works.

Scholarship

Simone de Beauvoir called Justine "la bêlante Justine". One scholar commented:

The libertines derive as much satisfaction from defeating their opponents intellectually as they do from subduing and abusing them physically, while the victims themselves (and Justine offers the best example of this) rise admirably to the challenge with equally forceful and reasoned replies.

James Fowler writes that "her piety offers her the most intense pleasure she can experience in life" and describes her responses to the libertine Marquis de Bressac as "pious hedonism".

Legacy

In 1798, the rival writer Rétif de la Bretonne published his Anti-Justine.

In Lars von Trier's 2011 film Melancholia, the main character, played by Kirsten Dunst, is named after de Sade's Justine.

A retelling in contemporary terms is The Turkish Bath, a 1969 novel published by Olympia Press, allegedly by Justine and Juliette Lemercier in an autobiographical format.

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

The story has been adapted for film several times, most notably in a 1969 international co-production directed by Jesús Franco and starring Jack Palance, Romina Power, and Klaus Kinski as the Marquis, titled Marquis de Sade: Justine. There has also been a graphic novel version by Guido Crepax. In 1972, French director Claude Pierson filmed a very faithful adaptation of Sade's work entitled Justine de Sade, with French Alice Arno in the title role. In 1973, the Japanese director Tatsumi Kumashiro filmed an adaptation of Justine as part of Nikkatsu's Roman Porno series. The film was titled Woman Hell: Woods are Wet (女地獄　森は濡れた, Onna Jigoku: Mori wa Nureta).

In 1977, a film version of the novel, entitled Cruel Passion, was released.

Justine was also featured in the 2000 film Quills based on the life of the Marquis de Sade.

Julia Ducournau, director of the film Raw, said in an interview with Variety that she named the protagonist after Sade's Justine.

Bibliography

• de Sade, D.A.F. (1968) [1791]. Juliette. Translated by Wainhouse, Austryn. Grove Press. ISBN 976556170. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: length (help)

See also

• Gothic novel
• Justine Paris

External links

• Justine (fr)
• Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu, vol. 1, vol. 2, en Hollande, chez les Libraires Associés, 1791.
• (in French) La nouvelle Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu, suivie de l'Histoire de Juliette, sa soeur, vol. 1, vol. 2, vol. 3, vol. 4, en Hollande, 1797.