The Curse of the Marquis de Sade by Joel Warner

Author:Joel Warner [Warner, Joel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2023-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

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Sade submitted numerous requests to be released, all of which the administrators ignored. Meanwhile, the police constantly searched his quarters, tried to prevent him from interacting with the outside world, and attempted to transfer him to a more restrictive prison. Even as his detention at Charenton stretched into its second decade, the authorities never stopped regarding him as a threat. While Coulmier managed to rebuff most of the state’s attempts to subdue Sade, officials eventually grew weary of his revelries. In May 1813, the French minister of the interior ordered an end to Charenton’s performances and parties.

A year later, France found itself beset by new political upheaval. With his army decimated and his European empire shattered by a coalition of foreign powers, Napoleon stepped down as emperor in April 1814. The following month the French populace, caught up in renewed royalist fervor, welcomed the return of Louis XVIII, the long-exiled brother of the last monarch of France, and crowned him king of a new constitutional monarchy. But while Sade’s Napoleonic tormentors were swept from office, his own situation took a turn for the worse. The new government removed Coulmier from his post as director of Charenton, likely because of his past revolutionary activities. The well-connected lawyer who replaced him did not share his predecessor’s fondness for the hospital’s famed libertine. In the fall of 1814, the new director’s reports on Sade led administrators to ask police officials to “examine ways of removing M. de Sade as promptly as possible from Charenton and sending him to a place where he can no longer do harm to society.” Again, Sade was branded an enemy of the state. Despite their vast differences, each of the political regimes that had cycled through France over the previous quarter century had all agreed on one thing: Sade should be forever locked away.

Sade could expect little help or sympathy from what remained of his family. His ex-wife, Renée-Pélagie, had died in 1810 at age sixty-nine, having never reunited or made peace with her former husband. His youngest child, Madeleine-Laure, never married and, according to Sade, spent her life “pickled in stupidity and piety,” with little interaction with her father. For a while, Sade enjoyed a closer bond with his oldest child, Louis-Marie. Like his father, Louis-Marie harbored literary aspirations, embarking on an ambitious written history of France, and developed a reputation as a libertine. While father and son both had volatile tempers that at times soured their relationship, Louis-Marie often visited Sade at Charenton and attended many of his plays. But in 1809, Louis-Marie was ambushed in Italy while serving in Napoleon’s army, the forty-one-year-old’s third stint in the military after living the capricious life of a bachelor. He didn’t survive the attack.

That left Sade’s middle child, Donatien-Claude-Armand, who went by Armand. Taking after his grandparents the Montreuils, Armand was more interested in wealth and standing than his fanciful older brother had been. He proved to be a reluctant caretaker of his namesake, since he

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