Odd this day
In France, a 44-year-old man was transferred from one prison to another. This would be unremarkable were it not for the facts of his name, Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, and what he did when he got there…
The Marquis de Sade had been in and out of prison for about 16 years by this time, always for sexual scandals (sodomy, torturing prostitutes), and often at the instigation of his mother-in-law. On this occasion, he was moved from the fortress at Vincennes (which still stands, and is now a tourist attraction where you can visit the cell he was kept in) to the Bastille in Paris. His (remarkably loyal) wife smuggled books in for him, and he read voraciously. Then — and this is the crucial bit — he embarked on his first novel.
There had been travel writing (about trips he had mostly made to escape the country and avoid prison), but this was to be a departure from what he, or indeed anyone else, had penned before. To put it mildly.
Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome (The 120 Days of Sodom) is the story of four war profiteers — a judge, a bishop, a lord, and a banker — who take 42 companions of various ages (16 are children) to a remote castle and, in the words of The Literary Encyclopedia, “indulge in four months of extreme sex and violence; at the end of this period they leave, thirty of those present having been killed”.
It is, in other words, a tale of what people with absolute power will do to other people, and is — another understatement — not a light read. (And, even though it’s over 150,000 words long, it’s around a quarter of its intended length.) He wrote for 37 days in very small handwriting on sheets of paper 12cm wide. Enough of these glued together became a scroll 12 metres long, which he rolled up and hid in the wall of his cell. But he put it aside to write other things, and it wasn’t finished four years later when he was transferred to an asylum at Charenton.
Apparently, he’d been shouting out of the window, trying to rouse the mob to revolution. When they did revolt, and the Bastille was stormed, he thought “the most immoral tale that has ever been created” (his words) was lost for ever.
It was — but only to him. A man about whom history knows only his name, Arnoux de Saint-Maximin, found it — hidden, according to one source, not in the wall, but inside a hollow dildo. (That would certainly be on brand, but perhaps that’s why we should be suspicious of this particular detail.) Anyway, the manuscript then went on its own picaresque adventure — of which there are several accounts, including this one:
…and this one:
There is some particularly good detail in this one in Esquire about the legal… ‘difficulties’ of Gérard Lhéritier, manuscript dealer and apparent “expert in balloon mail” (where you send post attached to a helium balloon, with no idea where it will end up. How you become an expert in that, fuck knows.)
The short version is that it was in private hands for centuries, and then published in a limited edition in 1904 (by ‘sexologist’ Iwan Bloch, who claimed to be acting in the interests of science), then in another (more accurate) limited edition in about 1929. Then the scroll was nicked, and sold to a man who owned both department stores and one of the largest collections of ‘erotica’ in the world. He refused to give it back, and after he died it found its way to Lhéritier.
When Lhéritier was arrested in 2014 on suspicion of running a pyramid scheme, the French government nabbed the scroll, declared it a national treasure, eventually paid for it, and stuck it in the Bibliothèque nationale.
The Marquis de Sade had, by this time, passed into legend, his reputation… well, it was what someone who had actually acted out some of the things he wrote about probably rather deserved. Generations of his family denied all knowledge of him. In recent years, though, they have begun to embrace him as “a great philosopher”. The current Count Hugues de Sade has a son called ‘Donatien’.
Is 120 Days philosophy? Is it just a catalogue of abuse? Only you can decide what you think. I can tell you that it both has insights into the nature of psychopathy and absolute power, and is also extremely nasty.
