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:
“The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one’s own growing inner self.... The mind’s dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one’s confrontation with one’s own mortality.”
—Harold Bloom (b. 1930)
“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 million years of sensitive men dying for their dreams. For what? So you can swim and dance and play.”
—David Duncan (b.1913)
“The heart of the wise man lies quiet like limpid water.”
—Cameroonian proverb.