There are two kinds of people interested in sadism: those who want to see it under a microscope, and those who want to view it from space. Readers who dare to open The Curse of the Marquis de Sade: A Notorious Scoundrel, a Mythical Manuscript, and the Biggest Scandal in Literary History will find something for everyone. Inventively assembled by Joel Warner, the book’s time-jumping chapters offer a gentleman’s guide to ungentlemanly behavior. Sure, the hero once ordered a sex partner to defecate on a cross. But she didn’t, and his insistence cost him.
In the 18th century, that hero, a twisted French nobleman, composed a scroll of 157,000 vile words on a 40-foot scroll in 37 days while imprisoned in the Bastille. He wrote 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinage, in which four noblemen abuse hundreds of captives, many unwilling and under-age. It doesn’t end well for anyone—there is disemboweling, dismemberment, disgrace. Some deeds he did; others are merely weird wishes. And though the Marquis de Sade is dead, the scroll still unravels.
In Warner’s book, new generations of voyeurs and opportunists examine the scroll’s mysteries, at their peril. With his word tentacles, the dead snob ensnares those who peek into his dungeon.
That’s if you believe in curses. The author chooses the widest possible lens for his subjects, spanning continents and centuries, so readers get a global view of this relic of raunch. To someone expecting a horror show of page after page of entrapment, slap, and tickle, go right to the marquis’s original words. Therein is injury to every and any part of the body, with Communion wafers inserted into surprising places, and new meanings for the term “party pooper.”
The book is studious and (relatively) chaste. But those who turn its pages will see themselves in civilized characters who get lured into the demimonde, through the antiquarian-book trade and other draws. Warner finds real-life boulevardiers who buy and resell the Sade texts, like pursuers of an Unholy Grail, such as our era’s Gérard Lhéritier, the Parisian rare-book entrepreneur who owned the scroll and other manuscripts, sold shares of them, and was eventually accused of inflating their value beyond reason. The courts considered whether he had a Ponzi scheme or just a nose for scandal. None, however, are as gripping as the marquee marquis.
The book’s time-jumping chapters offer a gentleman’s guide to ungentlemanly behavior.
If the Marquis de Sade exists in most minds as a slashing, dashing Zorro-like legend, the book clarifies who he was. Did he go by another name? Yes: Donatien Alphonse François. Was he hot? Short, courtly, wiggy—it was a thing back then. Was he the ultimate toxic straight male? Patrick Bateman could only dream of this level of depravity. Plus, he scored with men and women alike, and went so far as to confide, in an ode, “Like a resident of Sodom, I play the woman with a man.”
Who messed him up? A teacher at boarding school. Was he capable of love? Yes, he fell hard … for his sister-in-law. She loved him back. He cheated on her. She scolded him. He attempted suicide. He survived. He soothed his hurt by throwing himself, passionately, into the hurt of others. Some were willing. Some were not. Had they invented “safe words” back then, one might have suggested “mon Dieu.”
God is, in fact, in the details of the book, given how many scolds and arbiters insist it is his will to chase Sade into prison or exile or the gallows, or even just to burn him in effigy. Why did good people care what the bad guy did?
I did sympathize with the German dermatologist Iwan Bloch, who worried about cases of sexually transmitted diseases he treated in the early 20th century. Into the forbidden scroll he delves, doing early and earnest work as a sexologist. Assuredly, he concludes that kink is nothing to cure, and then his scholarship becomes a culture-war fodder in the years before World War I. Long before the atomic bomb, the scroll seemed radioactive. And all these years later, kink has evolved into acts in which the submissive party is truly grateful for the pleasures of degradation. Progress!
Prudes and ninnies straaaaain to explain why they want to shut down the whole shebang, and my favorite cohort—the Every Sperm Is Sacred school—insists that sodomites and deviants must stop their panty-dropping pursuits because we should all be on a hump-by-hump mission to improve the human race. But all these whistleblowers in the Devil’s playground protest too much. When life is no longer a cabaret and the Nazis are burning Sade’s books, the moralists prove more savage than the heretics.
Did the Marquis de Sade go by another name? Yes: Donatien Alphonse François. Was he hot? Short, courtly, wiggy—it was a thing back then.
The enemies of Sade seem only to make him stronger, kind of like the way Harvey Levin and the TMZ mouth breathers chase Ye with phone cams. And, similarly, those who wail about where people are touching each other often spike the interest in whips and chains. Underground dirty books get written and bought with new fervor. In the mêlée, men who have sex with men decide they need a unifying, galvanizing term, and become “homosexuals” for the first time, a couple hundred years ago. Next, homosexuality grows more pervasive and persuasive, setting new fashions and décor trends in regal courts—proving that, like anal sex itself, it only hurts if you fight it.
For all the author’s zoom cuts to other times and places, the book reaches a conclusion that my grandmother would call “’Twas ever thus,” though she never spoke of any of this. In our era of Harvey Weinstein’s convictions and Kevin Spacey’s victories over accusers, one unanswerable question that will come to readers’ minds: Is Sade motivated by getting off, or getting away with it?
After a romp in a brothel, Sade plunges into self-despair, asking his uncle in a soul-scouring letter: “Does one ever really enjoy a happiness one buys?” Let Warner tell you what you already suspect: “By the next morning, without fail, he’d awaken with his conscience clear and hungry for new pleasures.”
Ned Martel is a writer and producer in Hollywood. He was a journalist for 25 years
