Though his name has also become part of our sexual vocabulary, the exploits of Donatien Alphonse François, the Marquis de Sade, were not the scandal of France because of their uniqueness. Other libertines also derived pleasure from inflicting pain, but their influence at court made them immune to prosecution. Other libertines likewise wrote florid letters pledging their love (such as it was) and fortunes to opera singers, ballet dancers and courtesans, but they did not always ruin themselves with debt, as Sade did. Other libertines, secretly yearning for their own debasement, likewise paid money to be whipped bloody by prostitutes (or to whip the prostitutes themselves), but they were clever enough not to be arrested for it. Rather, Sade is remembered today both because of his indiscretion, which, coupled with his lack of friends to help him cover his tracks, led from one legal disaster to another, and also for the particular flair for theater that he exhibited in his writings and in his life. Whereas Casanova may have seen himself as an actor in a play, Sade's self-image was that of the auteur. Constitutionally incapable of performing in any social situation where he was not the alpha male, the marquis preferred directing his family and servants in amateur theatricals to paying court to the king (who was, after all, the source from which all authority and reward in France flowed). To Sade, the appeal of theater was the possibility of all-encompassing power, which he carried to the extent of reviving obsolete feudal ceremonies when he inherited his Proven?al domains in 1767. Even his sexual fantasies, recorded for posterity in his writings, were as elaborately staged as grand operas.
Born in June of 1740 to an ancient Provençal family (Petrarch's beloved Laura was an ancestor), Sade was a spoiled only child who learned the ways of libertinism early in life.
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Like Casanova's, Sade's mother was cold and distant; his father, the Comte de Sade, once himself a notorious debaucher who had almost bankrupted the family with his excesses, was occupied in Paris unsuccessfully attempting to secure a future for his son. Therefore, from the ages of five to eleven, the young marquis lived with his uncle, the abbé de Sade, at the family estate at Saumane in the south of France. (It was common for younger sons to enter the Church, so as to leave no legitimate heirs to inherit and divide the family property. In the case of abbé de Sade, Saumane was to revert back to his brother's family after his death.) Like many well-born churchmen, the abbé did not let his ecclesiastical office keep him from worldly pleasures: He corresponded with his free-thinking friend Voltaire, made free use of his resident pair of mother-daughter mistresses and kept a library stocked with titles such as History of the Flagellants, Aretino's book of sexual positions, Venus in the Cloister, and The Brothel, or Every Man Debauched — all of which were, no doubt, closely studied by his bright young nephew. Sade, who remained close to his uncle until the latter's death in 1778, once pointed out in a letter to a pious aunt that, keeping a "bordello" like Saumane, the abbé was in no position to complain about his nephew's mores.
At the age of eleven, Sade went from his uncle's house to the Jesuit school of Louis le Grand in Paris, where he studied Latin, drama, sodomy and corporal punishment until the age of fourteen, when his father bought him a commission in the army. During the Seven Years War, Sade distinguished himself both by his bravery in battle and the dissolute life he led at
At the age of eleven, Sade went from his uncle's house to the Jesuit school of Louis le Grand in Paris, where he studied Latin, drama, sodomy and corporal punishment.
all other times. His bad reputation, in fact, made it difficult to find a good marriage for him, and it was not until 1763, when Sade was almost twenty-three, that his father finally managed to find a suitable candidate in Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil. What she lacked in looks, Renée-Pélagie made up for in money: The daughter of a judge from a recently ennobled bourgeois family, her dowry gave some much-needed liquidity to the down-at-the-heels Sade clan. However, the young marquis, still on the rebound from being rejected by a famous Provençal beauty who had both broken his heart and (according to his own account) given him a venereal disease, and furious at the father who had married him into what he considered a family of bankers, almost missed his own wedding. Considering its inauspicious beginning, therefore, it was a matter of some surprise to everyone involved that the marriage seemed to be a success. Sade charmed his in-laws and fell into the role of the perfect husband with ease, and the devout Renée-Pélagie quickly developed feelings of what in those days was called "devotion" but which we today term "codependence" — qualities she would manifest all through her husband's long spells in prison.
The first of Sade's run-ins with the law occurred a scant five months after his marriage. The details of the incident, which were only rediscovered in the 1960s, have since become well-known: On October 18, Sade brought a twenty-year-old part-time prostitute named Jeanne Testard to one of the numerous rented lodgings he maintained around Paris. Locking the door of the second-floor apartment, he asked her if she believed in the teachings of the Catholic Church. When she answered that she did, the marquis launched into a stream of profanities, cursing God, masturbating into a communion chalice and describing how he had desecrated two communion wafers by inserting them into a woman's vagina and then having sex with her. He then pushed Testard into another room, decorated with an odd mix of instruments of torture and religious trappings, where he had her whip him with a heated cat o' nine tails. After she declined to have the same done to her, Sade took two crucifixes from the wall, using one to anally masturbate himself while stomping on the other, and then, menacing Testard with his hand on the hilt of his sword, forced her speak blasphemies, as well. Sade then amused his guest for the rest of the evening by reading obscene poetry and proposing to sodomize her.
Sodomy, though officially punishable in France by death, was a common enough transgression that it was hardly ever prosecuted, and for Sade, who in his writings and his life was later a great advocate of both the active and passive positions in the act (so much so that it may have contributed to the hemorrhoids he suffered from later in life), to have merely proposed the deed to a prostitute was hardly cause for alarm. Nor were kidnapping and terrorizing a defenseless woman crimes for which an aristocrat would ordinarily be punished — a bribe here, a letter to a judge there, and it would all be swept under the rug. Rather, it was both Sade's blasphemy — an interesting fetish, considering he was an avowed atheist — as well as the fact that he indulged his peculiar tastes in a solitary fashion, that is, without the company of other men of his class, that were so shocking. Thankfully for the marquis, aristocrats were still (much like O.J. Simpson) innocent until proven bankrupt, and so his family was able to arrange for his release from Vincennes prison after only three weeks. However, Sade had acquired a permanent police tail, Commissioner Louis Marais, whose reports reached the ears of Louis XV and his official mistress, Madame de Pompadour — as well as those of Sade's mother-in-law, Marie-Madeline de Montreuil.
