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 Château de Vincennes in 1782, expressing his atheism by having a dying man (a libertine) tell a priest about what he views as the mistakes of a pious life. 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.
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 has 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).
Famous quotes containing the words dialogue, priest, dying and/or man:
“Ultimately, it is the receiving of the child and hearing what he or she has to say that develops the child’s mind and personhood.... Parents who enter into a dialogue with their children, who draw out and respect their opinions, are more likely to have children whose intellectual and ethical development proceeds rapidly and surely.”
—Mary Field Belenky (20th century)
“This is the priest all shaven and shorn
That married the man all tattered and torn”
—Mother Goose (fl. 17th–18th century. The House That Jack Built (l. 37–38)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“At a tavern hereabouts the hostler greeted our horse as an old acquaintance, though he did not remember the driver.... Every man to his trade. I am not acquainted with a single horse in the world, not even the one that kicked me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)