Fatal Attraction

“We sometimes learn more from the sight of evil than from the example of the good.”

--PASCAL [from “Pensees”]

*

A few decades ago, more than one edition of Webster’s dictionary carried a concise entry: “Sade, Marquis de (1780-1814). French soldier and pervert.” It’s a hard line to beat. No leers. No drum rolls. Four words to fit the man into the niche he deserves. Baudelaire, Flaubert, Swinburne and Sainte-Beuve had taken him out for a closer look. They either shuddered or heard distant thunder or burst into mocking guffaws at Sade’s excesses. Then they put him back where they found him and went on.

Since the beginning of our century, however, Webster and others notwithstanding, strong impulses toward liberation in the arts and in the culture generally have led to the rehabilitation of Sade as writer, thinker, libertarian hero and commercial property. His works have been republished in French many times over and extensively in English. Four major biographies have appeared in French and two lesser treatments (by Geoffrey Gorer and Donald Hayman) in English. Maurice Lever’s 600-page vindication was translated in 1993. A small group of critics with strong convictions has worked hard to convert the social pariah and ultimate pornographer of sex as cruelty into a presentable and even admirable author of dark yet magnificent philosophical novels. Does this rehabilitation demonstrate that we are coming to our senses finally as a tolerant society? Or that we are losing our way in a darkness of our own making?

Now we have two new books on the Marquis: a full-blown biography for the general reader by an experienced nonfiction writer and a more specialized “biographical essay” by a scholar of the 18th century. Both books deal with Sade’s voluminous writings not as literature primarily but as they affected and illuminate his life. And both reveal a strong sympathy toward the women in the story. Considering the wave of recent publications on Sade, one hopes that these two books will provide new information or an astute perspective rather than merely feed an active market in titillation.

Francine du Plessix Gray’s “At Home With the Marquis de Sade” narrates almost merrily the four stages of his alternating career. The cocky young aristocrat in the King’s cavalry lived so violently debauched and spendthrift a life that five successive brushes with the police finally landed him in prison. From age 37 to 50, he remained locked up for his excesses until the Revolution freed him in 1790. Masquerading as an enthusiastic revolutionary, he remained free (except for a few months in prison and a close call during the Terror) until 1801. Then Napoleon incarcerated him, this time not for personal excesses but because of the extreme licentiousness and blasphemy of his writings. Through family influence and payments, he spent his last years as a privileged inmate in an insane asylum, with a private apartment and a theater to direct, until he died in 1814.

Gray skillfully weaves into these scenes the varied historical background--royal, revolutionary and Napoleonic. She has read widely and does not claim to bring major new documentation to her lively account. We hear the details of his predatory conduct toward prostitutes and toward little girls and boys hired as servants, but Gray resorts frequently to conjecture to fill in the many gaps in the story. Such conjecture nourishes Gray’s fascination with Sade’s marriage to a plain nonaristocratic woman with a large dowry named Pelagie de Montreuil. Gray writes of their early years together: “She seems to have felt that if Sade became a monster of immorality, she must all the more become a monster of devotion . . . . So Pelagie’s love was a kind of sublime folly.” This is novel writing, not responsible biography. Such heated imaginings do not illuminate Sade’s real power over some women--a mixture of aristocratic privilege, wit and charm as needed and an enticing reputation for debauchery and violence. Pelagie remained loyal through the first long imprisonment and then abruptly separated from him when he was freed.

The most surprising aspect of Gray’s biography is its title. One supposes it is intended to allay our fears about so scabrous a subject. The opening acknowledgments support that impression by listing all the “wonderful” Sade descendants and scholars in France and the United States who welcomed Gray to the family of admirers and received her in their homes. This disarming folksiness leads to a paragraph in the foreword serving to soften the shocking nature of the subject:

“Yet when I steeped myself in the scandalous Marquis’ correspondence, I became entranced by the more modest, familial motifs of his saga. I soon realized that few writers have been so powerfully shaped by women; that few lives provide a more eloquent allegory on women’s ability to tame men’s nomadic sexual energies, to enforce civilization and its attendant discontents.”

When you reach the end of Gray’s biography, you understand that she is referring here to Pelagie, Sade’s victimized wife, and to his mother-in-law, la Presidente, whose firmness and resourcefulness matched her son-in-law’s and who obtained for him first special treatment by keeping him out of prison and, afterward, imprisonment. How did these two women “enforce civilization” on this unstoppable predator? Gray’s answer, written about Pelagie, applies in reality to both women:

“Her marriage had been her work of art: For good or for worse, it was solely through Pelagie’s love and dedication that the Marquis de Sade’s talents were able to flower and become part of the Western heritage. There lies the principal legacy of this potentially intrepid soul, whose saga leads us once more to marvel at (or to deplore) the phenomenon of female malleability.”

Without these two women, then, we might never have had his reputedly glorious writings. He might have remained “a tedious debauchee,” Gray writes without irony. Some informed readers, however, might see substantial gain in the latter course.

Gray’s estimate of Sade the man needs some comment. She astutely links Sade’s lifelong devotion to the theater to his “carefully programmed assault on the national sensibility” through scandalous behavior, to his need for power and control and to fear of being ignored. She portrays him as the ultimate exhibitionist, who must be always on stage. At the same time, a series of references suggests the degree to which she sees Sade as a victim--victim of his irrepressible temperament, of his vengeful mother-in-law and of a relentless police force. On the other hand, Gray’s candid accounts of his behavior emphasize his systematic egoism, the hypocrisy of his revolutionary sentiments and the depravity of his sexual behavior.

The list of charges Gray makes is formidable. But when all the minus signs are added up, the result carries a plus sign. She cannot bring herself to condemn this marvelous monster. In the epilogue we learn how 20th century scholars and critics have willingly welcomed Sade among the great French writers. His great-grandson recently reassumed the title of the Marquis de Sade as an expression of pride in his lineage. (“What really matters to me is that I’m descended from very ancient aristocracy, that I’m descended from King St. Louis.”) And Sade’s ancestral village of La Coste has become a profitable tourist center and site of an active theater with a capacity of 1,600. All indications show a favorable outcome for an abject life story.

Gray advances the presumably clinching argument of her book on the last two pages. She invokes the Fontaine de Vaucluse, an immense natural spring near La Coste, as the emblem and lesson of Sade’s career. Just as the uncontrollable energy of the spring is finally tamed into channels irrigating thousands of acres of orchards and vineyards, so Sade’s imperious debaucheries and psychoses were tamed by imprisonment to reveal his “visionary gifts” as a writer: “It is his crude insistence on expressing humankind’s most bestial urges, on speaking out what most of us barely dare to admit--on mirroring the primal impulse we’ve all had, at some point, to claw at the taboos of our own caged lives--that makes him an occasionally fascinating and very modern writer.”

This sentence and the book’s strong concluding argument in favor of Sade’s accomplishments make two dubious assumptions. The first is that we all lead caged lives and must therefore claw at taboos and admire any writer who transgresses them in cruel and violent writings. The second dubious assumption is that Sade’s unashamedly evangelistic style seeking to convert his readers to sexual aggressiveness and mayhem against the human race will trickle down as refreshing irrigation among the orchards and vineyards we call our culture. Gray’s arguments are affirmed, not demonstrated. She fails to distinguish between irrigation and pollution.

Laurence Bongie enters the Sade arena as a scholar who has done archival research and discovered a few new sources. He proposes not to domesticate Sade but to take him down a few pegs. The preface states flatly that “much of his life . . . was lived as a lie.” Sade’s parents and early life concern Bongie most. He devotes an entire chapter to exploding one widely cited interpretation of Sade’s life. Sade, the story goes, by loving his self-indulgent father and hating his cold, remote mother, developed a negative Oedipus complex--the presumed cause of his psychotic behavior. Bongie produces evidence to complicate and qualify the theory. But in doing so he engages in so many pages of hypothesis about Sade’s possible actions and motives that we lose sight of Bongie’s scholarly competence. He even tries to imagine what the reaction might have been if Sade’s mother had ever been able to read her son’s most excessive writings. In this biographical essay, the scholarly biographer, the polemicist and the digressive gossip get in each other’s way.

Still, a reader already familiar with the terrain will learn a number of worthwhile things from Bongie’s book. Contrary to recent accounts, Sade did not, at 16, lead a cavalry charge, take an enemy redoubt and become a national hero as several biographers have claimed. That was someone else with the Sade name. Sade’s lifelong enemy, Sartine, head of the police, was not a monster but a just and intelligent government servant admired by Voltaire and Diderot. Bongie establishes that Sade had written and been paid for pornographic writings before serving any prison time. Then Bongie really hits his stride in the last three chapters to cut through several layers of the Sade myth. The truly heroic writer of the French revolution, he argues accurately, was not the toadying aristocrat, Sade, but the spirited romantic poet Andre Chenier, who attacked the tyranny of Robespierre and Marat and died bravely by the guillotine. The concluding chapter draws our attention to Sade’s defense of his conduct in satisfying his lusts with “little girls, 4 or 5 years old” in Naples: They were just prostitutes. Bongie does not shrink from depicting Sade as essentially a rapist for whom the “consent of his victim spoils the fun.” Yet, a few pages earlier, himself awed by this monster, Bongie lets slip the paradoxical phrase “like the true force of nature that he was.” Where Gray portrays a raging torrent tamed into beneficent rivulets flowing through fertile gardens, Bongie reveals the man’s utter deceit and ferocity. Yet he cannot hide a muffled admiration for Sade’s behavior by linking it to nature. A 20-page appendix on the history of Sadean criticism over 200 years provides a useful and revealing account of how successive generations of critics have to a surprising degree succeeded in transforming Sade the outcast into Sade the hero.

How is it that an unrepentant aristocrat exploiting feudal privileges to selfish ends can cast his spell over later generations? Sade is defended by his admirers on three basic grounds. He was “the freest man who ever lived” as the poet Apollinaire phrased it. He became a martyr in defending personal freedom and freedom of expression. And he had a profound understanding of human sexuality. Yet even Gray’s and Bongie’s imperfect books provide enough evidence to allow a dispassionate reader to see through these three claims. Sade was from beginning to end a slave to his unconstrained and perverted appetites, and he used his wealth and privileged status to deprive those around him of their freedom. No martyr to any cause or idea greater than his own desires, Sade abjectly praised Marat in order to save his own skin and, unlike Chenier, feared to sign his name to books that represented his deepest convictions. On the third count, Sade displayed his understanding of human sexuality by working unswervingly to dissociate sex from tenderness, love, reproduction and family and to attach it instead to aggression, cruelty, domination, violence including murder and hatred of mothers and children.

Another factor contributes, I believe, to the spell that Sade casts over at least some contemporary readers. Sade was no Gilles de Rais or Bluebeard. His voracious exploitation and rape of sexual victims did not extend to murder. But the explicit accounts he imagined in his writings of violence, torture and murder as means of obtaining sexual pleasure, and his long philosophical defenses of such behavior as legitimate break all existing records for unfeeling bestiality.

We have apparently reached the point at which some of us admire as human greatness actions that transgress even the most fundamental limits. The fully rounded humanity of the Portuguese sea captain who saves Gulliver in his madness and of Maggie in George Eliot’s “The Mill on the Floss” do not impress us. We respond to the extravagant behavior of Faust in his disastrous descent into the world of ordinary people and of Ahab drawing a whole crew into his personal struggle with the white whale. It is as if the inhumanity of the great heroes leaves the deepest mark on us. Long excluded even from this set of heroes because of his depravities, Sade has now claimed a place next to Faust and Ahab. Should we welcome this record-breaker without regard for the field of his excesses?

It is here that my epigraph from Pascal may help us. For this pensee to apply, however, we must be able to distinguish evil from good and to call evil by its name when we are confronted by it. Then we may learn from it by understanding it as a negative object lesson. “At Home With the Marquis de Sade” is unwilling to make this clear distinction. Sade did some unspeakable things, Gray grants, but he is by no means beyond our sympathy and admiration.

On the last page she writes: “He became a borderline psychotic because he refused the Great Neurotic Compromise most of us accept,” a compromise that, as we learn earlier in the chapter, consists in the constraints on sexuality and aggression that Freud, among many others, identified as essential for civilized life. His refusal earns him praise as “one of the first great rebels of modern times.” Gray describes a despicable, if sometimes charming, man without ridding herself of the sentimental illusion of greatness in his sheer excess. She implies that she, like Pelagie, is ready to live “at home” with a man of such proudly unconstrained destructiveness. Like many Sadeans, she has, I believe, deluded herself about both the man and his writings. Bongie has fewer illusions and delusions. But his exhaustive scholarship at times makes him myopic and prevents him from presenting a full-length portrait of an evil man.

These two books do not contribute either significant new information about Sade or a clearer understanding of his case. Bongie assembles telling evidence of Sade’s depravity, yet leaves the reader with the impression of some ulterior mystery that justifies an interest in his life and writings. In engaging and readable chapters, Gray perpetuates the myths of greatness in evil and of “novel” and “bold” ideas in Sade’s writings. It will be a long time before we fit this French soldier and pervert back into his proper niche.