Scandalized by the neglect into which [the Marquis de Sade] has fallen, yet repudiating the obvious topsy-turvy whereby he has been deified, [Mme de Beauvoir asks in her The Marquis de Sade] that he be regarded as a man and a writer. Yet it is not as author nor as sexual pervert that he interests her, but by his efforts to justify his perversions, to 'erect his tastes into principles'. 'He dreamed of an ideal society from which his special tastes would not exclude him.'…

Mme de Beauvoir tells us that 'eroticism appears in Sade as a mode of communication, the only valid one' between persons. Since she then admits that 'every time we side with a child whose throat has been slit by a sex-maniac, we take a stand against him', it is possible that she is using the word 'communication' in some highly paradoxical sense reserved to philosophically-trained intellectuals. For the rest of us, Sade's message on this point might seem to come to, F … you, Jack (or Jill), I'm all right….

For Mme de Beauvoir, Sade's value, his contemporary importance, lies in the fact that 'he chose cruelty rather than indifference'. His sincerity encourages her to hail him as 'a great moralist'. The aptest comment is M. de Bressac's casual remark to his servant, which I quote from memory: 'Now, Joseph, you b … Justine, and then we shall feed her to the dogs.' Mme de Beauvoir shares one of her protégé's characteristics: humourlessness….

'Must we burn Sade?' asks Mme de Beauvoir. Now that you mention it, why not? He teaches us little about human nature which we couldn't gather from a few minutes of honest introspection. But maybe we can learn something more useful from Mme de Beauvoir's solemn excogitations, something about our scornful reluctance to face the realities of our selves and of others' selves, and our preferred contemplation of modish dummies, those highbrow status symbols, ourselves as heroic monsters or grand victims, our inflation or reduction of ourselves and others to ingeniously explicated strip-cartoons, as unreal as the wicked Juliette and as empty of life as the virtuous Justine.