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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
So here we are in the early 1760s: Sade is in Paris, newly wed and living the life of a perfectly average 18th century roué -- partying with innumerable prostitutes, courtesans and opera girls. But there is one totally unexpected feature to this marriage. Within a few months of their wedding the young Sades have become very fond of each other, and developed close, affectionate bonds that are highly unusual in the context of the 18th century's prearranged unions.
The quiet, straitlaced Marquise, who would bear Sade three children, is passionately in love with her husband, as she will remain for the following 25 years. She is calmly accepting of his innumerable sexual exploits, which have already earned him a few short jail terms, and have included such unsavory offenses as whipping women with knotted cords and committing apostasy with icons of the Roman Catholic Church. As our current lingo would have it, the Marquise de Sade is the most "enabling" of wives: She hides Sade's traces from the police throughout his more outrageous escapades, and eventually she will witness, if not participate in, some of his orgies.
As for Sade, his numerous letters to his wife show that he remains childishly dependent on her, and is perpetually terrified of losing her esteem. Upon falling into any scrape, his first plea to authorities is "Don't let my wife know." In one particularly affectionate letter to Pélagie he addresses her cajolingly as "seventeenth planet of space," "shimmering enamel of my eyes," "my Poopsie," "Olympian Ambrosia," "star of Venus," "my doggie," "my baby," "Mohammed's bliss," "violet of the garden of Eden," "celestial kitten." As for the hundreds of passionate letters Mme. Sade will write to her husband, she most often addresses him as "my good little boy."
And so this is the very odd couple we see arriving from Paris in 1771 to settle full-time in Provence. The Sades have been motivated to move there because of the Marquis' intense love for his estate, and also by his need to escape the ghastly reputation incurred in Paris by his sexual transgressions. The Sades are in the company of their three children: Louis-Marie, 4; Claude-Armand, 2; Madeleine-Laure, 5 months -- and a retinue of governesses and domestics.
This was the first time the Marquise de Sade was seeing La Coste, but in fact the Marquis had already traveled there several times since his marriage. Shortly before moving there full time with his family, he had completed a grand program of renovations -- paid for by his wealthy, decorous in-laws -- which his own depraved and profligate family had never been able to afford.
Like everything Sade undertook, including his orgies, his remodeling program was lavish and fastidious. He spent large sums redecorating the castle's 42-room interior. Amateur theatricals were the rage in 18th century France, and he installed a private theater that could seat an audience of 80. He was a passionate landscape gardener, and at the northern end of the estate, which overlooks the hills of the Ventoux, he fashioned a labyrinth of evergreens copied from the black-and-white motif of the floor in the cathedral of Chartres. On the western end of the plateau he planted groves of fruit trees -- quince, cherry, almond, pear - that he particularly cherished, and, later, would continually worry about in his letters from jail ("How is my poor cherry orchard?" such a query would go. "See to it that the park be well tended ... tell them to replace that little hedge of hazel-nut trees.")
Sade also fixed up private apartments for himself and his wife, and we must imagine La Coste as it was in its few years of glory under the Marquis. His own quarters, situated in the southernmost and warmest wing of the château, overlooked the village of Bonnieux. The Marquise's adjoining quarters included a winter bedroom hung with gold-trimmed blue moire and a boudoir hung with a gray and green "toile de Jouy" design representing Normandy landscapes.
Sade did not stint on any hygienic luxuries his era offered. By the early 1770s, when the first inventory of La Coste was made, the château commanded 15 portable toilets and six bidets. The Marquise's bathroom was equipped with a bathtub and a copper water heater, a considerable rarity in French rural dwellings, many of which don't command them to this day.
Like most French noblemen of his time, Sade installed a so-called secret apartment at La Coste, which contained vaguely pornographic curiosities, including a large collection of enema syringes, decorated with drawings of people kneeling before naked behinds and saluting them.
There's a potential danger to this kind of domestic approach to the Marquis de Sade. Such domestic ironies, such pleasant trivia of Sade's life as his love of baked apples might defang him, and turn this borderline psychopath and woman-batterer into a pleasant fellow. It should not be forgotten that one of the most terrifying features of Sade's persona, as with many batterers of women, is the vast range of his behavior -- his occasional capacity for great tenderness and integrity, his considerably more frequent manipulativeness and brazen authoritarianism. Sade was a power freak if there ever was one. His tyrannical streak, in fact, is very tied in to his cult of La Coste, and there is a link between his passion for this feudal village and his political ideology.
