SOURCE: “Black Sheep of the Family,” in Women's Review of Books, Vol. 16, No. 9, June, 1999, pp. 17–18.

Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade was a man monstrously alone. His aloneness is famously a matter of the years he spent behind bars—thirteen of them in prison without trial in mid-life, and another thirteen in a madhouse at the end. But when a free man he was as alone as in a cell—perhaps more so, since in his 74 years of life Sade made few friends, and kept none. Men of his own class seem always to have disliked and avoided him; any male companions he had were servants who shared his sexual interests but still had to be paid. Courtesans, to his rage, inevitably preferred richer men. Women prostitutes were appalled by his taste for defiling religious symbols, for sodomy and flagellation. From his early twenties, Sade was tracked by the equivalent of the vice squad, men who were hard to shock but found him aberrant. Anxious to protect its name and property, his family decided to put him behind bars and keep him there. Society at large regarded him as a monster of depravity.

In short, Sade's prisons were not just a symbol but the direct result of his radical disconnection from the human race. Of this disconnection he was aware, even proud, tracing it back to his earliest youth, judging it an unalterable and inalienable part of his being, making it into the foundation of his personal philosophy. Walled up inside the Bastille of his own egotism as much as within the actual walls of that famous prison, Sade was reduced to counting his masturbations and, not incidentally, to constructing a fictional universe he would call The 120 Days of Sodom.

He imagined Silling castle, a medieval fortress along the lines of La Coste, his favorite ancestral seat in Provence. Here a group of well-educated aristocrats, supplied, unlike himself, with infinite financial resources, enjoy unlimited opportunities to satisfy their unflagging desire. Inventively, systematically, by the numbers, they set about securing, raping, torturing and finally killing an assortment of victims. For the rest of his life, Sade worked to expand and refine this basic fantasy in a series of lengthy fictions culminating in L'Histoire de Juliette, the work often described by admirers as his masterpiece. A short excerpt gives a sense of the Sadeian world:

He puts on a shoe studded with iron spikes, leans on two men, and, with all the strength of his back, launches a kick right into the belly of the young woman who, bursting open, torn, bloody, sags under her bonds and lays before us her unworthy fruit, which the ruffian immediately waters with his seed. … The last two girls are seized; they are tied up on two iron slabs, placed one on top of the other, in such a way that the bellies of the two women fit together perpendicularly. … The two slabs, one rising, one falling, smash together with such force that the two creatures crush each other and both they and the fruit of their wombs are ground into powder in a moment.¹

The authors of these two new books both approach Sade as biographers rather than literary critics, remembering perhaps that France has often been synonymous with sex in the Anglo-Saxon world and that the American public is more interested in French lives than French literature. Francine du Plessix Gray and Laurence L. Bongie are both expert biculturalists, and they serve as translators and cultural interpreters for the extensive and sophisticated work on Sade that has hitherto appeared mainly in French or in specialist academic publications. Both are thus part of the process that is turning Sade into an accepted part of the cultural landscape here in the United States as well as in Europe; but their attitudes to him could hardly be more different.

Du Plessix Gray is an accomplished storyteller who avoids any deep engagement in Sade's fictional universe and makes no personal judgments about it or him [in At Home with the Marquis de Sade]. From the outset, she simply assures her reader that the fascinating Sade is now part of the literary canon, and thus a legitimate object of our interest. Laurence L. Bongie, on the other hand, while agreeing that a cult of Sade has grown up in the twentieth century, anathematizes both the man and his work:

I have found little evidence to support the claims, frequently advanced since the time of Apollinaire and the surrealists, that the marquis de Sade deserves to be honored as the archetypal freedom fighter, a martyr of conscience and “the freest spirit that ever lived,” a culture hero who sacrificed his personal liberty to the unrelenting critique of all social constraints that diminish the irrepressible human element, restoring thereby to civilized man the strength and health of his primitive instincts … His self-awareness and lucidity, his constant claims to moral authenticity, did not … prevent him from also being one of the most obnoxiously adolescent, opportunistic, tantrum-prone, egotistical, self-absorbed, puffed-up hollow men of his age, the very epitome of bad faith, and, as if that were not enough, the author too of the most monotonously egregious, long-winded pornographic novels imaginable, all richly interlarded with a preachy, secondhand ideology that he frequently pilfered from thinkers far more original and coherent than he.

(pp. x–xi)

Francine du Plessix Gray is an experienced writer who has published some eight books, and knows the literary market well. In At Home with the Marquis de Sade her target reader seems to be the sexually liberated woman, someone who perhaps reads Genêt or Foucault, who enjoys racy movies and stylish French pornography, and tends to see sadomasochism as an interesting sexual variation practiced by consenting adults. (The extract from the book that appeared in The New Yorker last year ties in well with a photographically illustrated piece published some months before in the same periodical, in which Paul Theroux interviewed an American dominatrix and her clients.) Du Plessix Gray does no original research, and aims to present a reasonably short biography based on the extensive published sources now available in French.

Sade's life has, in fact, already been told very completely and very well, most recently in the brilliant biography by Maurice Lever (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993). Reading Gray in parallel with Lever, I found that she had cut and diluted but added little of substance, producing a kind of Sade lite. The arch sentimentality of her title sets the tone, since, as Gray herself shows, if there was ever a person who was rarely “at home,” in any sense of that term, it was Donatien de Sade.

Du Plessix Gray tries to focus and distinguish her book by turning our attention to the women in Sade's life. She writes in her Foreword:

Yet when I steeped myself in the scandalous marquis's correspondence, I became entranced by the more modest, familial motifs of his saga. I soon realized that few writers' destinies have been so powerfully shaped by women, that few lives provide a more eloquent allegory on women's ability to tame men's nomadic sexual energies, to enforce civilization and its attendant discontents.

(p. 11)

Nothing in the book in fact confirms this opening claim.

Sade's admirers and detractors would agree that the man was irremediably unshapable. His relationship with his wife Renée-Pélagie, which Gray describes in detail, is a case in point. When Sade was first detained in prison, the deeply religious Renée-Pélagie alone of his family fought loyally to secure his release. During his long captivity, she kept him supplied with luxuries at the expense of her own comfort, put up with his vicious tantrums and even ordered his carefully specified “prestiges”—wooden boxes which both she and the snickering craftsmen knew to be dildos. To my mind, none of this marks Renée-Pélagie as a “shaping force” in Sade's life. Du Plessix Gray seems to expect us to respect or even admire Renée-Pélagie for her wifely loyalty and self-sacrifice. I found her updated version of the Patient Griselda story as abhorrent as the old. To advance the notion of “modest, familial motifs” in Sade's “saga” strikes me as a kind of cruel parody of feminist criticism.

Laurence L. Bongie an emeritus professor of French at the University of British Columbia, is a specialist in eighteenth-century French literature who has watched as the study of Sade, and of pornography in general, has become increasingly fashionable as a research topic among his colleagues and showed up in the curriculum. On the principle, perhaps, that you should join them if you can't beat them, and that only the fully informed reader can judge accurately, Bongie seeks to make a small but original contribution to the research whose proliferation he deplores. He focuses on Sade's early years and contests some of the received visdom on Sade's relations with his parents, taking issue specifically with those psychoanalytically-inclined critics who have traced Sade's sexual aberrancy to an oedipal conflict with a supposedly cold and absent mother.

Bongie emphasizes the importance of some recently uncovered letters written by Sade's mother, which, together with her husband's letters and official papers, indicate that she was far from indifferent to her only son, and that his separation from her as a small child was her husband's decision, taken against her will and her interests. As Bongie describes them on the basis of scrupulous analysis of archival evidence, both of Sade's parents were execrable people whose social, psychological, financial and sexual legacy to their son was grim indeed.

To say that Sade was unfortunate in his parents and family tradition is an understatement. Bongie paints a good portrait of Jean-Baptiste-François-Joseph, Comte de Sade, as a worthless libertine with equal tastes for high-class mistresses and lower-class boys, whose ambition to sleep his way to fortune was equaled only by his dishonesty in money matters and his administrative incompetence. Marie-Eléonore de Maillé de Carman, Comtesse de Sade, emerges as a woman whose legacy to her son was a character of rare intransigence (“She is a dreadful woman, and her son will be like her,” wrote her enraged husband) and an inalienable sense of aristocratic entitlement. Bongie seeks to understand and explain Sade, but he insists that to understand is not to forgive, and that Sade's grossly dysfunctional family cannot be held responsible for his acts as a young adult or his mature writings.

I believe that Bongie is essentially right in his strongly negative evaluation of Sade, and I respect his scholarship. However, he seems to have stretched his material to make it into a book, he repeats and he pads and, worst of all, he does not tell a story. He has a message he feels the general educated public should hear, but like many academic writers he assumes his reader already knows the basic facts and debates, which can thus be introduced tangentially and at leisure, perhaps around page 250. Where the accomplished Du Plessix Gray will find her audience, I suspect Bongie will not. This is a pity, as he raises from the outset a question vital to the whole pornography debate to which Sade is central—the “sexual abuse of unconsenting victims.”

This issue is at the heart of the so-called “Little Girls Episode” which finally led Sade's family to have him incarcerated. In December 1774, when Sade was an outlaw actively hunted by the police for earlier sexual adventures, his wife hired a new set of domestic servants, including a fifteen-year-old male secretary and five teenage girls. There seems no doubt that Renée-Pélagie was fully aware that her husband had an elaborate and lengthy orgy planned and that she wanted it to occur within her own home, with domestics she could control. Whatever Sade actually did to and with what Gray calls this “nubile group” behind the newly reinforced walls of La Coste, it seems indisputable that that event was the foundation for the innumerable sadistic fantasies he subsequently elaborated in his fictions.

One of the things I find inexplicable about Bongie's book is that he never discusses the “little girls.” It is true that, as we learn from Du Plessix Gray's account, all we know about this event is what Sade wrote to his lawyer, and what his mother-in-law and uncle wrote to each other as they frantically conspired to clear up all the physical evidence and prevent the girls from taking their stories to the police. Had Bongie been more of a story-teller and less of a literary critic he could have made it plain that the very paucity of documentation shows how well the family cover-up succeeded.

Perhaps even more shocking than Sade's own acts is the degree to which his attitudes matched those of his caste. The members of the whole Sade-Montreuil clan believed they had the right to beat, lock up and even kill a servant if they wanted. To Sade's abiding rage and incomprehension, prostitutes enjoyed better legal protection against sexual abuse than the domestic servants of powerful families.

Both Du Plessix Gray and Bongie insist that Sade is now an inescapable part of our cultural landscape, and they are surely right. His work will never again be locked up in the “enfer” at the Bibliothèque Nationale. Anyone can order a set of the complete works in English or French over the Internet and have it delivered to the door in a nice brown box. Simone de Beauvoir, Angela Carter, Jane Gallop and Camille Paglia have all insisted that if women wish to understand the real world, however ugly, they must read Sade. Women critics have examined and women novelists have exploited the revolutionary potential of what Carter named “the Sadeian Woman,” a character like Juliette's copine, Clairwil, who plans, organizes, participates in and, for a while at least, survives the orgies.

Sade's most famous and successful character is probably Juliette, whose amorality and sexual energy rival both the fictional male monsters in his work and the male monsters of history. Juliette was something new in literature and unparalleled in history, a truly revolutionary heroine. That Sade should have imagined a woman character who not only tells the tale of the orgy but lives to enjoy its fruits shocked and terrified the male reader during his lifetime and, if only for that reason, has exhilarated some women readers today.

But even as we look with fascination at the Sadeian woman, let us not forget the small boys, the young girls and pregnant women who furnish the anonymous, silent, doomed fodder for the Sadeian mill. Let us remember that the female, and especially the maternal, body is the preferred site of desecration, dismemberment and death in Sade's work. One advantage of the biographical approach to Sade taken by Du Plessix Gray and Bongie is perhaps that we can start to recognize this victim. We can imagine, perhaps, what it was like to be the fifteen-year-old Madeleine Leclerc. Leclerc was probably the last woman to see Sade alive in the Charenton asylum. Gray tells us that Sade's last days were brightened by this girl, that he “fell in love.” She reports without comment the entries from Sade's diary which note that “Mdl” was moody, uncooperative, eager to leave. She never seems to wonder what it might have been like to be a girl procured by her own mother to a grossly obese septuagenarian, reputed to be the most monstrous man of his age.

What was it like over the years to be sent into that cell with the Marquis de Sade, under instructions from your mother to be cooperative? Only when we put ourselves in the place of the real and fictional Madeleine Leclercs as well as the fictional Juliette can we take the measure of Sade.

Note

1. Sade, Marquis de, L'Histoire de Juliette, Oeuvres du marquis de Sade (Paris: Au Cercle du Livre Précieux, 1962–64), vol. 9, pp. 409–410. Translated by Gillian Gill.