Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man

Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man (original French: Dialogue entre un prêtre et un moribond) 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 (written originally in 1788). 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 (a libertine) tell a priest about what he views as the mistakes of a pious life.

Legacy

The dialogue inspired a similar scene in Luis Buñuel's film Nazarín (1959), 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 (1930) and would go on to feature the Marquis himself as a character in La Voie Lactée (1969).

External links

• Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man (Full text)
• (French) Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man, audio version