Friday, Jul 25, 2008
Molly Weatherfield reviews 'At Home with the Marquis de Sade' by Francine du Plessix Gray.
Nov 19, 1998 | entering her middle years, Madame de Pompadour confided to King Louis XV of France that she'd never actually enjoyed sex that much. The king deferred to her wishes: Pompadour retained the title of official mistress, but instead of sex, the couple shared the reports compiled by the Paris vice squad. The Paris police were skilled in surveillance, and some years later one of their highest ranking officers was specially assigned to the Marquis de Sade. Before Sade ever became a pornographer, then, he was an unwitting pornographic content provider for the king of France.
Power, publicity and pornography were as intimately linked in Sade's times as they are in our own -- but even within this context, Sade (1740-1814) was scary and special. It's not that he was more violent than other libertine aristocrats, for flagellation and sodomy were common tastes. As for his most sinister episode -- hiring some half dozen adolescent servants and forcing them to participate in a series of orgies -- well, this was an era when the comte de Charolais used to shoot common people for sport and was repeatedly pardoned for it by the king.
But Sade had the kind of bad attitude that always gets attention. He was strange, cold, deliberate: One prostitute reported to the police that he'd forced her to stay up all night listening to anti-religious poetry. While most libertines indulged themselves at wild parties or used the services of procurers, Sade and his valet cruised the streets, assembling casts of prostitutes to drill through tightly scripted, episodic scenarios. He liked sex toys, costumes and props, especially religious items -- he'd masturbate with crucifixes, shit into chalices. Shocking himself by exploiting powerful symbols, he also shocked much of France and became, himself, a symbol. All in all, he would be incarcerated for more than 27 of his 74 years (half of these at the end of his life, under Napoleon).
The years of incarceration -- combined with the bad attitude writ huge in his pornography -- have contributed to Sade's reputation as ultimate rebel and martyr to sexual and intellectual freedom, particularly among the writers of poetic manifestos. But those who admire him as a rebel miss some pretty obvious points: that he rebelled against the limits of his already extensive class privilege, and that his lack of concern for the prostitutes and other lower-class people he forced to act out his fantasies can't be interpreted as a blow for anybody's freedom. On the other hand, his detractors (who see him as a monster best locked up) don't seem to care that he caused no serious physical injury -- and they may well celebrate the fact that he was incarcerated for the last 13 years of his life solely for writing pornography. Better to turn, then, from the self-serving abstractions of the manifestos to the extravagant and compelling facts of the life -- Sade "at home," as Francine du Plessix Gray presents him in her consistently entertaining biography.
Donatien Alphonse Frangois de Sade was related to the Bourbons on his mother's side and descended from ancient Provengal nobility on his father's. The Sades were arrogant about their lineage. An ancestor, Laure de Noves, may have been the Laura to whom Petrarch dedicated his famous sonnets; with rather less evidence to go on, the family also claimed descent from the Magi. But by the second half of the 18th century they were bankrupt, Sade's father having squandered their fortune and reputation through a set of extravagant dalliances and diplomatic misadventures. As gifted as his father at making powerful enemies, Sade was exiled from court at the age of 4 for hitting a young Bourbon prince who'd taken one of his toys. By his 20s, he had a bad reputation as a rake, and probably more seriously, no friends in court circles -- when invited to hunt with the king, he took pride in not showing up.
So, when Sade began being arrested for mistreatment of prostitutes -- and appearing in the king's dossiers -- he had nobody to get him out of trouble except his wife's family. Only recently ennobled, the prudent, upright Montreuils had been the best connection the financially strapped Sades could come up with on the marriage market. Monsieur de Montreuil's father had amassed considerable wealth as treasurer of a few prosperous northern towns; Monsieur de Montreuil himself was chief judge of an important Parisian court. Typifying bourgeois stability, competence and energy, and busily marrying into the aristocracy, they were a family on the way up (while the Sades were on the way down). "I pity them," Sade's father wrote to one of his sisters before the wedding, "for making such a bad purchase."
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