Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man is a dialogue written by the Marquis de Sade while incarcerated at the Château de Vincennes in 1782. It is one of the earliest known written works from de Sade to be dated with certainty, and was first published in 1926 together with an edition of Historiettes, Contes et Fabliaux. It was subsequently published in English in 1927 by Pascal Covici in a limited, hand-numbered edition of 650 copies.
Plot
The work expresses the author's atheism by having a dying man tell a priest about what he views as the mistakes of a pious life. According to John Phillips, Emeritus Professor of French Literature and Culture at London Metropolitan University:
Of all the direct expressions of atheism in Sade's work, the Dialogue... is probably the most incisive and, at the same time, the most artistically satisfying... The influence of Sade's Jesuit training in rhetorical debate is the mainspring of this brilliant dramatic essay, which, as the title suggests, is not so much theatre as philosophical dialogue. But what makes the work charming as well as persuasive is the impish humour that lies behind its characters and situation.
We can postulate one of two things: Sade was entirely pleased with this manuscript and saw no reason to make any changes to it or Sade completely gave up on the dialogue and had decided to abandon it. The reason for either of these hypotheses is that the manuscript itself contains almost no trace of Sade’s editing. It is up to the reader to divine whether the “Dialogue between the Priest and a Dying Man” is Sade’s position or not. Either way, it is worth reading even in the very unlikely event that it presents a position Sade would have repudiated.
Publication history
Sade completed the notebook which contains the Dialogue on 12 July 1782, while imprisoned at Château de Vincennes. He took the manuscript with him when he was transferred to the Bastille in 1784. Following the Storming of the Bastille on 14 July1789, Sade's prison writings disappeared, the manuscript of the Dialogue among them. However, it survived in private collections and was sold on at auction a number of times during the nineteenth century. On 6 November 1920 it was bought by Maurice Heine at an auction at the Hôtel Drouot, Paris, and he oversaw its publication in France for the first time in 1926 in a limited edition of 500 copies for which he wrote an introduction. The Dialogue has been republished in French several times since the 1950s, including in scholarly editions of the works of Sade edited by Gilbert Lely, Le Brun and Pauvert, and Michel Delon.
The first English translation was published in the United States by Pascal Covici in 1927, again in a limited edition of 650 numbered copies. The translator was Samuel Putnam. This edition was based on the first French edition and included a translation of Heine's introduction. In 1929, Haldeman-Julius published the Putnam translation as Little Blue Book #1405, under the title Dialogue between a priest and a dying atheist. A version of this edition was republished in 1997 by Chaz Bufe'sSee Sharp Press. Further original English translations have been produced by Leonard de Saint-Yves, Paul Dinnage, Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse, Paul J. Gillett, Nicolas Walter, Margaret Crosland, David Coward and Steven Barbone.
Legacy
The dialogue inspired a similar scene in Luis Buñuel's film Nazarín, wherein a dying woman wards off a priest while on her deathbed. Buñuel had previously adapted The 120 Days of Sodom into a scene in his earlier L'Age d'Or and would go on to feature the Marquis himself as a character in La Voie Lactée.
