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:
“You hear a lot of dialogue on the death of the American family. Families aren’t dying. They’re merging into big conglomerates.”
—Erma Bombeck (b. 1927)
“Oh we drunk his “Hale” in the good red wine
When we last made company,
No capon priest was the Goodly Fere
But a man o’ men was he.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“the only truth is face to face, the poem whose words become your
mouth
and dying in black and white we fight for what we love, not are”
—Frank O’Hara (1926–1966)
“There is hardly a man on earth who will take advice unless he is certain that it is positively bad.”
—Edward Dahlberg (1900–1977)