In the summer of 250 years ago he was beheaded: it was a staging, but his end began. He pursued all kinds of perversions, without limits. All this would have destroyed his life. But he was also a great storyteller and he never accepted that he could no longer write
The hot summer of 1772, exactly two hundred and fifty years ago, it was truly unforgettable for Donatien-Alphonse de Sade. Not so much for his head rolled under the guillotine. That was just staging. The rest, however, would weigh on him for life. Until his death in the asylum of Charenton-le-Pont, at the confluence of the Seine and the Marne where, invoking the end of the tortures covered the pit, the ground is sown with acorns so that the traces of my grave disappear from the surface of the earth as I hope my memory will disappear from the minds of men, we read in the will, taken up by Gilbert Lely), was subjected to the pi ferocious punishment that could hit him. The absolute prohibition of owning a pen, a little ink, a sheet of paper. A frightening torture.
It all began, we said, one evening towards the end of June 1772. When the Marquis, who was thirty-two, he was already married to the daughter of a rich exponent of the Parisian royal judiciary (Rene-Plagie de Montreuil: never seen before, it seems) and had already squandered much of what his father had left him, whose family was related to the legendary Laura del Petrarch and with the Bourbon branch linked to the princes of Cond, he decided to entrust a special mission to the faithful Armand, known as Latour, valet and accomplice in erotic games. To find in the brothels of Marseille, where they had gone down to the hotel des Treize Cantons, a quintet of girls available for a saraband of his.
A bold and daring choice. Already four months after the marriage agreed in May 1763 with the rich but never loved Rene (He would have preferred to have his sister as his wife, wrote Apollinaire, perhaps the first to recover Sade after a century of damnation of memoryexplaining that his beloved Anne-Prospre was locked up in a convent, and he felt so displeased that he indulged in a dissolute life) the Marquis had been imprisoned by the King in the dungeons of Vincennes for outrageous debauchery, blasphemy and desecration of the image of Christ. It wasn’t enough, in 1768, in Arcueil, had kidnapped a young widow who asked for charity, Rose Keller, leaving her in such a painful state after having raped, whipped, tortured her, that the same local authorities, despite the abyss of social status, had accepted the complaint and sentenced the Marquis to seven months in prison. Many, for those times when the noblemen, however depraved, were forgiven unthinkable turpitudes. Especially since the Marquis himself had admitted that he had whipped the woman because she was Easter and he wanted to celebrate the scourging of Christ and then confess her himself as a priest. A blasphemous idea that had thrown everyone’s disgust on him. Including those who participated in the little parties he organized.
Forced by his powerful mother-in-law to go to Provence in the family castle in Lacoste (with the same succubus wife and five maids enslaved, it seems) Donatien-Alphonse knew he was risking big, even Marseille. But that was it. Exager with the faithful valet and with the girls dragged into the bacchanal giving them Richelieu tablets, containing an aphrodisiac substance extracted from a sort of beetle. They made you lose your head, they reduced the defenses of those who refused certain forcings, they could create serious problems. Two women, forced to medical treatment, denounced him and re-emerged the violence of the past, including the accusations of sodomy with the footman punished by the stake. All this, Madame de Saint-Germain noted, to the horror of the people of the court. All true things? A little bit true and a little bit false? Well …
Seeing lost, the writer ran away. At the end of July he was in Venice, where he was joined by his seventeen-year-old sister-in-law Anne-Prospre, mad for love (as if the already looming troubles were not enough), destined for the convent but already bound by a letter of total devotion: I swear to the Marquis de Sade, my lover, to be only his, never to marry me or give myself to others …. It was too much for the mother of the two sisters corrupted by her depraved son-in-law. A hard woman and listened to at court, she was thus able to obtain against him a new lettre de cachet (a form of direct justice from the King) ordering her arrest. It took place in December in Savoy, where he ended up thinking that his fate did not matter to Carlo Emanuele. The execution of the death sentence inflicted on the Marquis and the footman, guillotined in the square but pretending to be, had little importance months before: two life-size mannequins immediately thrown into the flames so that there would be no trace of them.
It was a real prison, ever since, for the libertine writer. Real and heavy. From the age of 32, date of his first internment, up to that of 74, and of his death, Sade knew only twelve years of freedom, writes the historian Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret of the cole des Hautes tudes en sciences sociales, Sub any arbitrary form of repression, the “stamp letters”Of the Ancien Regime, the almost always fatal prisons of Terror, the despotic internments of the Consulate and the Empire. (…) Born for joy and success, his life passed in the hell of the basements and hospices. And asylums. Many. From that of Charenton to the castle of Bictre, from the Prison de Sainte-Plagie to still others out of a total of fourteen prisons (and care!) Listed among the places of detention.
Did he love even more violent and ferocious sex? S. And the only infamous episodes of Arcueil and Marseilles, beyond other similar orgies and the context of the dissolution of the Ancien Rgime before the storming of the Bastille (by the way: he was there too, with his books, until the week before of July 14), they deserved even more severe sentences than those suffered. But what did they have to do with the definition of incurable madman and life imprisonment even after his release due to the abolition of the lettres de cachet decided by the Revolution? If they asked, gradually, many. He himself, in a letter, shortly after the beginning of his ordeal, wrote: I could not last a month without going mad. Did it really become? Yes, prefect Louis Dubois wrote in a report to the infamous interior minister Joseph Fouch denouncing his perpetual libertine dementia. No, the psychiatrist Antoine Royer-Collard, director of the Charenton asylum wrote to Fouch himself: Unfortunately, daring immorality has made him too famous but Sade n’est point alien, not at all crazy: His only delusion is that of vice and this is not the (nursing) home devoted to the medical treatment of alienation where this kind of delirium can be repressed. An irremediable conflict between moral sentences and the demand for freedom pushed to excesses.
The fact is that the writer, wrote Ugo Volli years ago, was not only forbidden and censored but completely ignored by honest literature, so much so that he was not even cited to deny its value in the monumentalHistory of French literature
by Des Granges and Boudout. Total removal. Until being relegated to a special closed section, l’Enfer, della Bibliothque Nationale. Only in the middle of the twentieth century was finally admitted to the most sacred collection of French literature, the Pliade of Gallimard, where Plato, Goethe, Shakespeare and Montaigne live …
Round and round, there it ends: to what extent must he be taken literally in his most daring works himself, in I travel to italy, was he scandalized, for example, by the slums of Naples? In the evening the streets are full of unfortunate victims offered to the brutality of the first comer. I do not lie when I say that I have seen […] little girls of four or five offer to satisfy the most horrible cravings. […] A mother will offer you indifferently that of her children, the male or the female, which will most whet your inclinations. A sister will offer you the brother, a father the daughter, a husband the wife. It’s all about paying. Could it have been the same Marquis de Sade who imagined the most vile of the abyss? Well … Yes, I am a libertine, I admit, I have drawn everything that can be conceived in this genre; but I certainly did not do everything I drew and I certainly never will, he wrote. A libertine yes, but I am not a criminal or a murderer.
July 24, 2022 (change July 24, 2022 | 21:51)
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