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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The writer's idyllic estate in Provence was where he created some of his most shocking work.
Dec 7, 2000 | The Marquis de Sade, who was born in 1740 and died in 1814, was a passionate gourmet, and especially loved baked apples and vanilla custards for dessert. He also fancied Provençal delicacies such as quail stuffed with grape leaves, very fresh cream of chard soups and chocolate cake. "I wish for a chocolate cake so dense," he once wrote his wife from one of his stints in jail, "that it is black, like the devil's ass is blackened by smoke."
Sade, one of the few men in history whose names have spawned adjectives, was just as finicky about his clothes, and also wrote his wife from jail that he wished for "a little prune-colored coat, with suede vest and trousers, something fresh and light but specifically not made of linen." He was equally particular about matters of personal hygiene and liked to bathe every day -- a habit totally foreign to his 18th century contemporaries, who might have bathed twice a month at the most. He loved dogs, he loved children as long as they abided by his orders and he delighted in family games such as blind man's buff and musical chairs.
But above all other material things, above all his many whimsies and caprices, the Marquis de Sade cherished a certain place in his native Provence, a little château in a small village called La Coste, which he had inherited from his father's family and on which he looked as his only home. La Coste was to Sade what Walden was to Henry David Thoreau, what Combray was to Marcel Proust, what Amherst was to Emily Dickinson -- the matrix of all inspiration and perhaps also of all delusions, the quintessential Site-as-Muse.
Sade's castle at La Coste, a pinnacle of pale gray fieldstone commanding breathtaking views over the valleys of the Vaucluse, sits on a flat, rocky two-acre plateau that surmounts its village like a hovering eagle. As we see it in our own century, it only retains its moat, parts of its walls and ramparts, and a few half-demolished rooms; and from a distance the building now evokes the toothless face of a ravaged giant. Yet this arid site, scorched by sun in summer, ravaged in winter by icy winds, in every way extreme, is still one of the most romantic sites in France, and as evocative a ruin as you will see in Europe. It conjures forth the bloodthirsty monks, the gruesomely debauched noblemen and the persecuted virgins who live in Sade's novels more flamboyantly than in any other French fiction of his century.
La Coste, which in Sade's time had some 350 inhabitants, is a 40-minute drive east of Avignon, and 10 minutes west of the beautiful medieval town of Apt. Like many dwellings throughout Provence, it dates back to before the 10th century, when it served as a refuge against Saracen invaders. After the Saracens had been driven out of France, the citadel of La Coste became the property of very powerful nobles, the Simianes, who owned dozens of other fortresses in the area.
In the 17th century, when the only male descendant of the Simiane family died without leaving any progeny, the castle was inherited by one of his nephews, Gaspard-François de Sade, the Marquis' grandfather. One particular feature differentiated La Coste from its neighboring communities, and was at the root of its perpetual poverty: Unlike most Provençal villages La Coste's population was, and still is, predominantly Protestant, having been converted in the 16th century, during the wars of religion. Throughout the following century this impelled the French Crown to carry out brutal campaigns against the village in which as many as three-quarters of the residents were killed.
As for the Marquis de Sade, whose full baptismal name was Donatien Alphonse François, he was born in 1740 into a family of extremely distinguished Provençal nobles who were natives of Avignon and claimed descent from Laure de Noves, the famous Laura of Petrarch's sonnets. Eighteenth century France, we all know, was as dissipated a society as the West has known since ancient Rome, but the young Marquis, as a child, was even more deprived of parental affection, and of role models, than most of his peers. His mother was a distant, glacially cold woman who so hated family life that she sought refuge in a convent soon after her son's birth. His merrily bisexual playboy father, an erstwhile diplomat, was one of the most notorious rakes of Louis XV's reign. His merrily libertine uncle, Abbé de Sade, a priest at whose Provençal estate the young Marquis spent much of his early youth, set the norm for the family by running a bordello in his house.
In 1755, at the age of 14, the Marquis was sent into the army for the entire duration of the Seven Years' War, and the raucous barracks life completed his moral education. By the time of his marriage, at the age of 23, to a very chaste, pious girl of the newly wealthy bourgeoisie, Pélagie de Montreuil -- a marriage arranged by his father for crass material reasons, to boost the Sades' pathetic finances -- young Sade seemed determined to outshine his father in debauch, and had already earned his reputation as a flagrant young debaucher.
It is just before his marriage that the Marquis first fell in love with La Coste. Upon revisiting Provence just before his marriage, the Marquis became deeply enamored with the property and the terrain that surrounded it. The romantic, feudal character of the site -- the conical hill surmounted, like some vision in a Hieronymus Bosch painting, by its phantasmagoric castle -- struck some central chord of Sade's imagination, and he cherished it for much of his life.
