The cell’s occupant was one of the most notorious criminals in eighteenth-century France. He had spent the bulk of his forty-five years reveling in depravity: engaging in blasphemous acts with a prostitute, torturing a beggar, poisoning whores, hiding in Italy in the romantic company of his sister-in-law, locking away girls and boys in his château for his own sexual designs, and narrowly surviving a bullet fired at his chest. For years, he had evaded the law — breaking out of an Alpine prison, dodging a military raid on his home, absconding from the clutches of a police squadron, and eluding his own public execution. His name was Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, but most people knew him as the Marquis de Sade.
I went into The Curse of the Marquis de Sade knowing very little about its eponymous subject — I read Justine when I was twenty or so (and remember nothing of it), and I saw my daughter perform in a university production of Marat/Sade (so I knew something of his time in the Charenton Asylum) — and knew nothing at all about the novel, The 120 Days of Sodom, described here — about four libertines who enslave a group of mostly children and sexually torture them for a month — so I found the twin stories that Joel Warner relates about the life of Sade and the history of this manuscript to be entirely shocking, fascinating, and stranger than fiction. Deeply researched and engagingly related, Warner uses the life of the Marquis de Sade — and the bibliophiles who would eventually stop at nothing to acquire his handwritten manuscript — to explore questions about art and freedom and obsession, and I loved the whole thing. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Was Sade a revolutionary, working to expose the rotten core of the aristocracy to which he had been born? Was he a radical philosopher, aiming to lay bare humanity’s most cruel and twisted desires? Or was he simply an unrepentant criminal, chronicling his own atrocities, committed or simply dreamed of? There is also the puzzle of the manuscript itself. Sade worked on the text from seven to ten o’clock each evening, since its content was far too scandalous for him to be caught composing it during the day. When he reached the end of a sheet of paper, he pasted another below it, creating an ever-lengthening roll. After twenty-two nights, he flipped the document over and continued to write. The result, after thirty-seven days of work, was a scroll formed from thirty-three sheets of paper fastened end to end, measuring just over four inches wide and stretching nearly forty feet. Both sides were covered with words — 157,000 in total — the text so tiny it was nearly illegible without a magnifying glass.
It definitely takes an entire book to relate all the twists in the life of the Marquis de Sade — he wrote The 120 Days of Sodom in the Bastille, but was transferred to another prison just before it was stormed; he narrowly escaped an appointment with the guillotine during the Reign of Terror; and not only did he spend his later years homeless or in filthy prison cells and mental wards, but after death, his skull was “borrowed” (and lost) by a German phrenologist — but what I learned for certain: it wasn’t only Sade’s erotic writings that ran him afoul of the morality police; he actually did kidnap, poison, and torture youths and sex workers, so he’s not exactly the poster child for free expression; his life wasn’t driven by kink, but psychopathy. And it made for compelling reading.
And as for The 120 Days of Sodom: Its contents are of debatable literary and artistic value — early sex researchers valued it as a catalogue of taboo fantasies and the Surrealists resurrected it as a stream of unfiltered subconsciousness — but the uniquely-made manuscript itself was always highly prized, and Warner traces its fascinating path through the hands of thieves and heirs and millionaire erotica collectors; from the mason who first found it hidden in Sade’s cell at the Bastille, to the rare book collector who repatriated it to France, only to watch his empire crumble mere months later. And it is this last bit that the entire book is working toward: When Gérard Lhéritier came up with the novel business plan to allow investors to own fractional shares in rare manuscripts — with the option to sell them back to his company, Aristophil, five years later at their then current value — was he inventing a unique investment instrument, or running a Ponzi scheme? Both Lhéritier and Sade seem to share a callous disregard for the wellbeing of others, but what constitutes overreach in the government’s efforts to control someone like that? Is it a coincidence that the French government didn’t take much notice of Lhéritier’s business dealings until he was able to acquire a manuscript that they then declared a piece of national patrimony, or is Lhéritier just the latest victim of the curse of the Marquis de Sade?
Lhéritier insisted that he wasn’t France’s Bernie Madoff. Madoff’s Wall Street firm hadn’t been selling anything tangible; Aristophil, meanwhile, had traded in real manuscripts with real value. The truth, declared Lhéritier, would emerge when he finally had his day in court. When asked how many years in prison he thought he’d receive, he flashed his roguish smile and made a circle with his fingers: zero.
From the No. 1 Compagnie des Aérostatiers (hot air balloonists who ferried the mail out of France during the Prussian siege of 1780) to Sade’s elderly great-great-great-granddaughter trying to join the student protests of 1968 outside Théâtre de l’Odéon (which had been built on the site of the Marquis de Sade’s birthplace, likely without her knowing that fact) to a bizarrely coincidental EuroMillions lottery win and Pierre Cardin's restoration of the crumbling Sade castle, there are so many interesting facts and coincidences in The Curse of the Marquis de Sade, that as straight history, this is a satisfying read. But by counterplaying the two stories of the life of Sade with the life of his most notorious manuscript — and culminating with perhaps the biggest investment con in France’s history — Warner elevates the material to ask compelling and relevant questions about what it means to be a decent person; what do we owe to ourselves and others in the face of our own desires? Excellent read.
