Auntie Maim
Duncan Fallowell
The Marquis de Sade Donald Thomas (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £5.95) Here is the Divine Marquis cutting round for the umpteenth time and, as if aware that none of it is quite as interesting as once It seemed, he is here supported by a number of lascivious illustrations, the whole having been beautifully printed in the USA. This artwork is actually more engrossing than de Sade's own biography, since there is unlikely to be much incident in an adult life most of which was spent in prison. But Donald Thomas's story is considerably more intelligent than Norman Gear s The Divine Demon, the last version of de, Sade's strange non-life that I read. It is odd how little in de Sade's conduct justifies his monstrous reputation. There was much casual thwacking, some occasional sodomY and a season of orgies up at the ,chateau which took serious advantage of the peasant girls paid to attend them. in the way which noblemen had always taken serious advantage of such people. But de Sade never murdered anybody and in thal respect might almost be accounted virtuous, given the circumstances of the French Revolution. Far from being insane he showe,d great fortitude in the face of a lifetime.s persecution and the sequestration of his property by the new republic. The nicest picture of the Marquis is one of him hailing the mob through a Mega" phone from his window in the Bastille, urging them to storm it. Typically for hillm they did not do so until the following week' by which time de Sade had been transferred to a prison less public. Later he was to find himself with a cell window less than twentY feet from a guillotine. He claimed to nave seen 1,800 men and women decaPhate under his nose. The man's greatest crime against propriety was not in his conduct but in the care. with which he wrote out his extreme sex0a2 fantasies, thereby inscribing his own rnYn: —something a mere pornographer CO not have done. The revolution's abolition. 01 censorship permitted these free circulation,. although to the end of his long life de Sadeis
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cranky survival streak made him repeated Y deny being the author of Justine—and the manuscript of The 120 Days of Sodom dt!I not appear until the end of the nineteet11.11 century. It was first published in 1904 In Berlin where I bought my copy. As Per .. versions go, algolagnia is remarkably tire some and, like almost everything he wrote, The 120 Days is unreadable. However, banned for so long, it is de rigueur sophisticates to have read it. And decidenlY non-U to be caught doing so.
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