Sade's second arrest in April of 1768, on charges of kidnapping and dreadfully abusing a thirty-six-year-old widow named Rose Keller, was a different story. Once the press got hold of it, the story became something of a showcase of the conflict then raging in France between the court system, which was controlled by the upwardly mobile middle class, and the old aristocracy. The facts are these: On Easter Sunday, 1768, Sade approached Keller outside the church of the Petits-Pères in Paris. According to him, she was soliciting (the church being a notorious gathering place for prostitutes); according to her, she was begging. Sade offered to bring Keller back to one of his rented houses, but, according to her police statement, she demurred, saying she was a beggar, not a whore. Sade replied that he only wished to employ her as his housekeeper, and she agreed to get into a coach with him. After an hour's journey, they arrived at a small house in a suburb north of Paris, where Sade locked Keller into an elegantly appointed second-floor bedroom. Some time later, after enjoying himself with two prostitutes on the ground floor, Sade returned for Keller, threatening to kill her and bury her body in the garden (or so she claimed) unless she accompanied him to a small, dark room, where he stripped her naked, threw her face-down on a bed and proceeded to flagellate her until he came to orgasm. (According to Keller, Sade also lacerated her back with a small knife and poured wax into the wounds, but a doctor was later able to find no evidence of this.) The deed done, Sade returned her to the upstairs room, served her some food, and promised to release her soon. However, as soon as she was alone, Keller knotted the bed sheets together and escaped from the window.
Sade's attitude toward Keller was typical of his class: He would never have whipped any of the actresses or courtesans he so ardently pursued, but common prostitutes, or, indeed, anyone of the lower classes, were fair game. Casanova had solved Tiresias' ancient dilemma by writing that his partner's pleasure was four-fifths of his own, but, for Sade, others existed solely for his own amusement. (Sade had curious ideas of boundaries, however: Unlike Casanova, he would never seduce another man's wife.) This attitude was not so different from that of his upper-class peers, but what Sade neglected was the axiom that power must always hide its workings. It was the marquis' misfortune that his treatment of Keller quickly became one of the infamous causes célebres thathelped to contribute to the downfall of the French monarchy — and, now that he had fallen into their hands, the morally conservative, upwardly mobile bourgeois who controlled the courts were only too eager to make Sade into the whipping boy of the aristocracy. It was only by the smallest of margins that Renée-Pélagie and her mother managed to save his skin.
It was not until her son-in-law's excesses became so outrageous as to threaten her family's upward social mobility that Madame de Montreuil began to look for ways to permanently eliminate him. In the winter of 1771, Sade, having wisely fled Paris for his domains in Provence, simultaneously occupied himself with staging a series of amateur theatrical performances between his estates at La Coste and Mazan and seducing his free-thinking sister-in-law, Anne-Prospére, who had come straight from the convent where she was being kept until marriage. Madame de Montreuil should have known better: Putting a beautiful, coquettish, twenty-year-old woman in a nun's habit — who, even better, was his relative — before Sade was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. Their dalliance did not reach the ears of his mother-in-law, however, until after Sade's famous misadventure in the port city of Marseilles in July of 1772, in which he once again came to the attention of the judicial system by accidentally poisoning four prostitutes with an overdose of candies containing Spanish fly, the rather toxic ground-up mortal remains of the cantharides beetle. (A supposed aphrodisiac, Spanish fly is actually highly caustic, and, when ingested, causes an extreme irritation of the gastrointestinal tract — which would have tickled the fancy of an avowed sodomite, though Sade might have been using it for a different purpose, since the cantharides candies were also coated in anise, which produces flatulence.)
As with the Keller scandal, the Marseilles affair quickly became front-page news, with one newspaper even printing that Sade had held a ball and poisoned the respectable guests' desserts with Spanish fly, with an orgy of such vigor ensuing that several people died. This time there was no escape from the vengeance of the courts, who, even though the prostitutes had all survived, condemned both Sade and his valet-cum-lover Latour to death for the crimes of poisoning and sodomy. (Part of the particulars of this affair was Sade's playing the role of the filling in a sodomy sandwich between a prostitute and his valet.) Unfortunately, the people of Marseilles could only burn Sade in effigy, since, still mystified over why anyone should care what happened to a few whores, the marquis had fled to Italy--bringing his sister-in-law with him, the one crime unforgivable to Madame de Montreuil, who was hoping to make a better match for her younger daughter than she had for Renée-Pélagie. Anne-Prospére returned of her own volition after three weeks, but Sade found himself indefinitely imprisoned, at his mother-in-law's behest, by Charles-Emmanuel III of Sardinia-Piedmont.
After about six months, Sade made a daring escape from the mountaintop fortress where he was being held, and lived the next several years as a fugitive from justice. Making his way back to his feudal estate at La Coste, he amused himself, with his wife's complicity, over the winter of 1774 by procuring five young female servants and a young male secretary, whom he could arrange, in the privacy of his own castle, into whatever floorshow suited his fantasies. The unconventional convention lasted some six weeks until the locals found out, and the servants had to be concealed until their scars healed. Much as in the Keller affair, most were bought off, but one, Nanon, claimed that she was pregnant by the marquis — leading to the Sade-Montreuil clan's having her imprisoned for three years. Nanon was not told until several months after the fact that her baby had died at the wet nurse's.
Unchastened by the experience, Sade attempted to build another seraglio at La Coste in the summer of 1776 — which led to his ultimate downfall. The following February, the father of one of the harem's inmates, a young girl named Catherine Trillet, whom Sade had nicknamed "Justine," tried to shoot him in the courtyard of La Coste. Fortunately for the marquis, Monsieur Trillet's pistol misfired, but the very fact that his stronghold had been violated unnerved Sade sufficiently that he immediately left for Paris in order to make peace with Madame de Montreuil.
Forgiveness proved elusive. Sade was immediately thrown in prison, where he remained, save for a brief escape while being transported in 1778, for the next thirteen years. His incarceration was cheered not only by his prodigious literary output (the 120 Days of Sodom, written on a forty-foot-long roll of paper, was discovered in the wall of Sade's cell in the Bastille by one of the mob who destroyed the fortress, and, passing hand to hand, was only published in 1904), but also by creature comforts obtained for him by the long-suffering Renée-Pélagie, such as preserved Provençal delicacies, a large library and dildos crafted to his meticulously specified standards. (Sade claimed to have used these devices some 6,536 times in the first two and a half years of his imprisonment.)
Strangely enough, when the Revolution released him in 1790, Sade — who, like many men with strong libidos, proved to be a political animal — quickly rose to a role of leadership in his section of Paris and found himself in the ironic position of holding the power of life and death over his former captors, Monsieur and Madame Montreuil. Less bloodthirsty in real life than in his writings, Sade chose not to send them to the guillotine, though he almost found himself shortened by a head as the nation descended into total anarchy and the regime decided to take exception to his vehemently anti-clerical speeches. (He was saved by the intervention of the faithful friend and companion of his later years, Constance Quesnet, as Renée-Pélagie had left him for the religious life as soon as he no longer needed her to martyr herself for his benefit.)
Freed once again, Sade tried to scrape by from 1794 to 1801 making a living by his writing, but when it became known that he was the author of Justine and other infamous works, Napoleon's administration had him committed to the sanitarium at Charenton for "libertine dementia." There, Sade amused himself by writing and mounting amateur theatricals, as well as paying the laundry woman to allow her daughter to sleep with him, until his death in 1814. The term "Sadisme" was added to the French dictionary in 1834, though the world would have to wait until the publication of Leopold Von Masoch's Venus in Furs in 1870 for "masochism" to join it (and nearly another century before the Velvet Underground recorded the song of the same title as Von Masoch's book).
Today, opinions on Sade's legacy are divided. While some, not without justification, see the marquis as nothing more than a callous, narcissistic, egomaniacal playboy, others consider him to have been a man ahead of his time, whose genius it was to apply the more pessimistic precepts of the Enlightenment to the bedroom. His philosophy is that of a world devoid of any sort of divine justice, populated solely by the strong and the weak, with the latter existing to serve the former, and characterized by a Hobbesian lack of belief in man's inherent goodness. In his writing, Sade seems to suggest that that there is no point to human existence beyond pleasure, and his ideas of the amorality of desire and the interrelation of sex and power, as expressed in such works as Philosophy in the Boudoir, have influenced thinkers from Nietzsche to Michel Foucault. Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue, for instance, is a tale of progressive debauchery typical of eighteenth-century pornographic works such as John Cleland's Fanny Hill — save that, whereas Fanny Hill's giving in to temptation results in a happy ending, poor, virtuous Justine is struck down by lightning. Contrary to Plato's legacy of eros-as-transcendence, to Sade, our sexual impulses are only the manifestation of our innermost darkness. n°