H.
J.
KAPLAN
63
that the
divine
Marquis, for so long a skeleton in the family closet, had
a pedigree far more important than his standing as a writer: he was a
descendant of Saint Louis, an early Bourbon king of France.
This part of the story, involving the origins and early avatars of
"Sadology," is recounted in a curiously deadpan manner in Francine
Gray's epilogue. The tone is bemused, restrained, only mildly regretful,
as Gray contemplates a cascade in Sade's native country, the Vaucluse,
and reflects that his project as a man and a thinker was-let's face it–
inordinate, not to say preposterous, "because he never grasped the fun–
damentals of civilized life: which have to do with accepting, with a
measure of serenity, the ultimate necessity of compromise." The result
was catastrophic, Gray tells us, but not entirely unadmirable, after all.
"For until his thirty-sixth year, Sade had inundated all that surrounded
him with the rage of his desires, mastered the women he coveted as
readily as the torrent sculpts its rocky beds... until the day when his
society, at the behest of one powerful woman, imprisoned him, and he
soon began filling tens of thousands of pages with the most audacious
texts ever to flow out of any author's pen."
These comments provide a surprising coda to Gray's narrative which,
until these final paragraphs, had kept its cool, in the manner of a
New
Yorker
profile, avoiding anything so crass as literary and/or moral judg–
ment. Sadology normally assumes the greatness of its subject, but
Gray-hitherto at least-had seemed to be an exception to the rule.
Not so-resuming my own narrative-the literary intellectuals, crit–
ics, and publishers who had set out to rehabilitate the divine Marquis
during the decades preceding World War II. These were enthusiasts, and
once the hiatus of the occupation and the Vichy regime was over they
resumed their campaign in thc libcrtarian postwar "existentialist"
atmosphere of Saint-Germain-des-Pres. Around
T950
Pierre Klossowski,
brother of the painter Balthus, published an enigmatic study called
Sade,
My
Fellow Man,
a prestigious but little-read book (still available, appar–
ently, in a
1967
edition published by Scuil) which gave rise to a good deal
of chatter in the press; and a year or so later we had Simone de Beau–
voir's long, earnest, and inconclusive essay, "Should Sade Be Burned?"
The author of
The Second Sex
could hardly be comfortable with a
man who took such delight in the torture and murder of women, even
if he really preferred boys; and besides, she was not enthralled with
Sade's prose. But as a revolutionary, resolutely opposed to the bourgeois
moral order, the Marquis could not be all bad, so de Beauvoir's essay
was helpful to the cause, on the whole; and it was soon followed by
Albert Camus's
The Rebel,
the book which became the occasion for his
