H.
J.
KAPLAN
67
of love with the young Marquis, leaving the bourgeois gentilhomme
Montreuil, a wealthy magistrate, to pick up the pieces.
These people were indefatigable correspondents; and their letters
were kept. Together with the official records they describe the prolonged
downfall which was the rest of Sade's life-long periods of confinement
punctuated and occasioned by the bouts of bizarre and violent sexual
behavior which occurred whenever he was released. These were the
infamous "incidents" which not only made a legend of him, locked up,
as it were, by popular demand: they made him a writer as well.
In
prison
he continued to be treated as an aristocrat, liberally supplied by his
long-suffering wife with books, writing materials, and the dildos he used
to stimulate his erotic fantasies and achieve his laborious orgasms. This
persisted, we learn from his plethoric correspondence, until the first
week of the fateful month of July 1789, when he was hastily removed
from his apartment in the Bastille (for standing at the battlements and
haranguing the mobs which were gathering around the ancient fortress)
and transferred to an asylum for the mentally
ill
in Charenton. This was
excellent timing, of the kind Sade often produced in his novels, to make
a philosophical point or, as in this case, to explain some otherwise
incredible turn of events, such as Sade's survival during the Terror as a
victim of royal persecution. The Bastille, as every french schoolchild
knows, was stormed on the fourteenth, and the governor, guards, and
other personnel murdered or dispersed; and so the tocsin was sounded
for the Great Revolution in the aftermath of which France-and West–
ern civilization, indeed, the entire world-are living today.
For Sade, however, the destruction of the Bastille meant first of all the
loss of his personal effects, including his library, the voluminous text of
his manifesto-novel,
The
12 0
Days af Sadam,
and many other manu–
scripts as well. For this, as he told one of his correspondents, he wept
"tears of blood." And so, with his liberation from Charenton and his
emergence as Citizen Sade, began an extraordinary adventure during
which he lived frenetically and with a sort of burlesque panache on the
crest of the revolutionary wave, barely escaping the guillotine during the
last days of Robespierre. During Thermidor he worked feverishly to
establish himself as a playwright and novelist-only
to
find himself
back in confinement under the Directorate and Napoleon, once again by
popular demand. When he died, monstrously obese, at seventy-four, his
surviving son and the authorities at Charenton were much relieved to
see the last of him. During the last six years they had treated him
decently, on the whole, as an involuntary but paying guest; but he still
had a way of molesting small boys; and he had begun a final bizarre affair
