H.
J.
KAPLAN
Reflections on Sade
H
ABENT SUA FATA LlBELLI,
said the mysterious Terence, meaning
that books have a destiny (or as we would say a history) of
their own. Witness the sulfurous opus of the Marquis de Sade,
once barely mentionable in polite society, now the subject of a huge
body of exegesis and biographical studies-the latest of which in Eng–
lish are Neil Schaeffer's
Marquis de Sade
(Knopf,
$35.00)
and Francine
du Plessix Gray's
At Home With the Marquis de Sade
(Simon
&
Schus–
ter,
$27.50).
Both are well-conceived, readable, and provocative-for
this reader at least, who is safely beyond the age when one reads erot–
ica with bated breath, or, as an aristocratic French lady once memorably
put it, "with one hand." Schaeffer and Gray use the same subtitle, "A
Life," and they cover much the same ground as Maurice Lever's monu–
mental biography (an English version of which was published by Farrar,
Straus
&
Giroux in
1993),
but they do so usefully and agreeably, hav–
ing pruned away much of the repetitive detail and rhetoric which Lever
and his predecessors felt obliged to include in the record; and yet they
still leave us with radically different assessments of the value and
import-and above all the future-of Sade's life and work.
Born in
1740
under Louis XV, imprisoned for his pornographic writ–
ings and licentious behavior for half of his adult life, a total of almost
thirty years, Donatien Alphonse Fran<;ois, the Marquis de Sade, finally
gave up the ghost in Charenton, an asylum for the insane, in
1814,
the
year of Waterloo. Little was known of his work at that time, and what
was "known" of his life was often untrue, but a great deal was bruited
about and texts were available
sous Ie manteau;
and eventually a place
was found for the latter in what was called the "hell" of the French
National Library, the section reserved for books one needed a special
dispensation to read. Nevertheless, a fair sampling of Sade's work cir–
culated like a low-grade fever throughout the nineteenth century. He
was savored by Baudelaire and appreciated by Flaubert, to mention only
these two; and like the unfortunate Sacher-Masoch his name was
immortalized by the lexicographers, for whom
sadism
became a com–
mon noun. This, more or less, is where most members of my generation
came in; but the story had only just begun.
