Whipped-in
Derek Marlowe
De Sade: A Critical Biography Ronald Hayman (Constable £6.95) On 18 October 1763 a young French girl was offered forty-eight livres to put herself in the hands of a man whose name was to remain a secret. She accepted and was introduced to a short, twenty-two-year-old man who took her by carriage to a small house in Paris. They entered a room and the door was locked. The man then asked the girl, whose name was Jeanne Testard, if she believed in God. She replied that she did, upon which the man began to harangue her with a series of blasphemies, each more obscene than the last. He told her that there was no God, that he had proved it by masturbating into a chalice, and then had had sex with a girl after placing two communion hosts into her vagina, while uttering the words, 'If you are God, revenge yourself. This bizarre charade continued until Jeanne was finally allowed to leave, after promising that she would not tell a living soul what she had seen or heard. Jeanne Testard, however, was not a girl to keep her word, and ten days later the man was arrested by the police. He was identified as Donatien-Alphonse-Frangois, Marquis de Sade.
In the new biography of one of history's favourite libertines, De Sade, the author Ronald Hayman describes the encounter between Jeanne Testard and the young Marquis in great detail and justifiably so, since it reveals that, even at an early age, the three main characteristics that made up de Sade's nature had already been established: his fascination for theatrical tricks, his defiance of God, and his peculiar, but not uncommon, sexual habits. Having said this, one now seeks to know why these things were manifested so forcefully in a man who was to give sadism his good name, who would spend twenty-five years in prison for practising what he preached and preaching what he practised, and whose sexual imagi nation, as described in his own literature, is nothing less than astonishing.
Regrettably, Mr Hayman fails to give one a convincing answer for the cause of de Sade's lifelong passion — one might even describe it as a crusade — for flagellation, sodomy and a fanatical blasphemy that borders on a religion in itself. What makes a man enjoy, let alone be able to endure, being flogged a thousand times in one session by three girls and still cry for more? Certainly this penchant did not run in the family — his father was a run-of-the-mill bisexual like hundreds of others of his class; his brother became an Abbe. And although it is true that sadism (as it must now be called) was not uncommon in eighteenthcentury France, the extent to which de Sade pursued his sexual tastes, inexhaustible and insatiable, defying imprisonment and even the death sentence, surely was. What then was the cause of it?
Perhaps the answer is simply that history produces, from time to time, human beings who are supermen in their own particular sphere, and that de Sade was singled out to be the sexual fantasist's numero uno. If this be the case, Mr Hayman doesn't care for it. Floundering for an answer, he quotes Genet (in fact, he never stops quoting Genet when stuck for an opinion) in that 'the soil in which [de Sade's1 perversion grew was habitual solitude and constant frustration of the need to feel loved.' Well, that reads to me more like generalisation than Genet, since de Sade certainly is not the only poor child who felt lonely and unloved. Nor does Mr Hayman's later argument that constant imprisonment nurtured de Sade's excessive libido, since, as the Jeanne Testard incident proves, the nature of the man had already been formed before the Marquis even stepped inside a cell. What imprisonment produced was the literary product of de Sade's character — 120 Days of Sodom, Juliette, Justine were merely a public declaration of the established philosophy of de Sade, as was The Pilgrim's Progress that of another prisoner, John Bunyan.
Is it the Jesuits with their birch on young de Sade's covered bottom who are to take the blame as Mr Hayman suggests, then coyly retracts? Perhaps — if one needs to link de Sade's love of the whip with his hatred of God and all his symbols and servants. In our frustration, let the Marquis speak for himself: 'Yes, I am a libertine. . .I have imagined everything of that kind which can be imagined, but I certainly have not done all that I have imagined. . .I am a libertine, but I am neither a criminal nor a murderer.'
As for the life of de Sade itself, Mr Hayman is on surer ground. He recounts the adventures of this gentleman of pleasure with clarity and accuracy, resisting the pitfalls of some contemporary biographers who feel they have to tell you everything, including the state of the weather, in order to prove that they have done their homework. De Sade's life, however, despite its length, is a monotonous one. There are no peaks, no valleys in the libertine's daily
routine; merely interludes in prison between the sexual bon-bons where de Sade appears to have been treated with some favour, despite his whining.
But it is not only the law that pursues him, but also, as if performing in a macabre farce, his mother-in-law, Madame de Montreuil. Here Mr Hayman paints an intriguing picture of a woman bent on revenge against a man who not only seduced and married one of her daughters but also proceeded to seduce another (a nun, needless to say). One is left to imagine her satisfaction when de Sade is finally committed to an asylum after the fall of the Bastille, an asylum where he was to remain until his death. He was buried headless since his skull, as Mr Hayman remarks in a casual aside, was lost in America.
But such are minor irritations in a detumescent biography that seems to have no purpose to it other than to retell an old story in new wrappers. Perhaps the next time Mr Hayman writes a biography, he should remember these words: 'In essence I am asking only one thing of you: to hold the interest until the last page . . . You owe compensation to the reader when you force him away from what interests him. He will forgive you for interrupting him but not for boring him.'
They were written, of course, by none other than the subject of Mr Hayman's book: the Marquis de Sade.
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