by admin » Wed Oct 09, 2013 8:35 am
Ethnological and Historical Examples
Marquis de Sade was a keen observer. He had besides become very well acquainted with contemporary literature during his stay in prison. It is therefore no wonder that we find the signs of both properties in his work. What seems to us most characteristic is the great rôle that ethnology plays with de Sade. That was no accident. The first pretences to folklore started in France. Lafitau wrote the first important work of this kind in 1724 on the American savages. The great interest in the wild races was increased by the number of expeditions of French savants in the eighteenth century. We name only such well known figures as Bouguer, La Condamine, Bougainville, La Pérouse, Marchand, d'Auteroche, Duhalde, Charlevoix, Savary, Le Vaillant, Volney, Dumont. In a tentative fashion comparative analyses of morals and customs of primitive races and the development of humanity were essayed. The glorification of European civilization thus started from these early ideas of ethnology. Lafitau says: "I have read with great irritation the usual works on savage races; they are described to us as people who have no religious instincts, no knowledge of a God, no personality, neither laws, justice nor organization; men who have only the form in common with us. They indeed differ but little from animals." This conception of savage races is also found in de Sade.
He justified all the vice and cruelty found in the savage races. James Cook found pederasty rampant in the South Seas. Therefore it was good (Philosophy in the Boudoir I, 201). The cruelty of women was the same all over the world. Zingua, Queen of Angola (often mentioned by de Sade), the "most cruel of all women" sacrificed her lover after her pleasure, had battles fought for her and gave herself to the victor and had all pregnant women under thirty years of age stamped to death in a huge mortar. (Philosophy in the Boudoir, 1856.) Zoë, the wife of the Chinese Emperor, found the greatest pleasure in having criminals executed before her very eyes, and had all slaves sacrificed in the bed chamber where she was engaged with her husband. The greater the cruelty, the greater the pleasure. She found her greatest enjoyment in watching men roasted alive! Theodora amused herself by castrating men (ib., p. 157). De Sade also told the well known story of Amerigo Vespucci, that the women of Florida had their men place small poisonous insects in their members which swelled up tremendously at the contact and caused an insatiable libido accompanied by dreadful pain and ulcers (Philosophy in the Boudoir I, 157). De Sade had ethnological examples in plenty for poisoning, prostitution, anthropophagy, sexual degeneration, Malthusianism, atheism, etc. The Bible, for one, gave him a number of examples. Then the Africans, Asiatics, Turks, Chinese, etc., etc. De Sade had all the facts. He had all the available material and quoted that in Lapland, Tartary and America it was "an honor to prostitute one's wife," that the Illyrians celebrated remarkable mass orgies, that adultery flourished among the Greeks, that the Romans borrowed one another's wives, that his beloved Zingua had made a law that proscribed vulgivaguibilité of the women. Sparta, Formosa, Otaheiti, Cambodia, China, Japan, Peru, Cucuana, Riogabor, Scotland, etc., afforded him a mass of convincing examples on the justification of his theories.
All bizarre ideas, all remarkable cases of notorious erotic monsters were made use of by de Sade. Noirceuil declared that he would marry twice in one day and indeed at ten o'clock dressed as a woman he married a man; a twelve o'clock, dressed as a man, he married a boy who was married as a woman. Juliette also wanted to marry in the same church and at the same time, two tribades, one dressed as a woman and another dressed as a man. This, of course, was an imitation of the double union of Nero who married Tigellinus as a woman and Sporus as a man (Juliette VI, 319). Juliette, who did not want to fall behind Noirceuil in imitative talent, took an example from the Empress Theodora. She sprinkled barley in her most secret part and had the geese peck there, thus affording her continued pleasure (Juliette IV, 341).
De Sade made continual mention of Marshal Gilles Laval de Rais throughout Justine, Juliette and the Philosophy in the Boudoir. This "bluebeard" was a man of elegant appearance and great learning. At the age of 27 he left the court and army, cast off his wife and child, disappeared to his lonely castle, delved in mystical studies, alchemy, devil-craft and similar pursuits, finally gave himself up to sexual debaucheries and became a pederast, kidnapper, murderer, sadist, coprophiliac, etc., etc. This monster systematically murdered over 140 children in his castle. The victim was thrown on the floor, his throat cut deep and Gilles de Rais drank in his pleasures in watching the convulsive movements of the body. Then the extremities were cut off, breast and stomach opened and the entrails ripped out. At times he sat on the body of the victim to feel the death struggles. He also beheaded the corpse, took the head in his hands, looked at it closely and kissed it passionately. He often said to his accomplices: "No one in the world understands or can understand what I have done in my life. There is no other person who could have enacted my deeds." The heroes of de Sade spoke with similar pride of their crimes.
But the very age of Marquis de Sade was full of similar figures! "How many secret privileged criminals were there," asked Michelet, "who were not prosecuted? How many murders were set down as simple disappearances?"
De Sade also mentioned very often Count Charolais (1700-1760) who "committed murder for pleasure." This Count combined a raging cynicism with an unbelievable boldness. He loved to see blood flowing at his orgies and executed the courtesans who were brought to him in a dreadful fashion. "In the middle of his debaucheries with his mistress he would suddenly shoot a roof-thatcher. The rolling of the body from the roof afforded him infinite satisfaction." Abbé de Beauffremont is also said to have shot down people on the roofs. De Sade indeed placed this monomania in his register of sexual perversions. Juliette shot her father, while satisfying herself sexually with another man, in order to increase the pleasure (Juliette III, 115).
According to Michelet, Charolais loved the fair sex only "in bloody condition.” His father, Prince Condé, had derived his pleasure from poisoning people as, for example, the poet Santeul, and had willed to his sons, the Duke of Bourgogne and Prince Charolais, these perverse inclinations. Both served as accomplices at the orgies of Madam de Prie. One day, there appeared a Madame de Sart S… who when undressed by the princes was lightly browned in a servette. In spite of this experience the victim again came to the house of de Prie and this time was "roasted like a bud." Michelet expressly mentioned that the Duke of Bourgogne had this horrible idea. This monster was described in Juliette as Duke Dendemar, who poured burning oil on the naked bodies of four prostitutes (Juliette I, 352).
The notorious anthropophagist, Blaize Ferrage, called Seyé, seemed to have served the Marquis as a model. This man terrorized the Pyrenees, killed men, women and especially young children; he ate men only when hungry; he used the women sexually before he murdered them; it was reported that he especially satisfied his passion in the most brutal manner on children. On December 12, 1782, he was condemned to death by the whel; on the following day, only 25 years old, he was executed. De Sade described such an anthropophagist in Minski, the "Hermit of the Apennines" (Juliette III, 313).
Brunet mentioned additional sadistic types of the eighteenth century. A respectable Pole, author of many historical works, Count von Potocki, committed crimes "of the kind of Marquis de Sade." In Lyons the morals before the Revolution were so degenerate that "a number of sadistic outrages took place within a short time." Michelet rightly said in his History of the French Revolution that "not without justice did a notorious writer find a number of his episodes in his horrible novels in Lyons."
Jean Paul Marat, undoubtedly the most bloodthirsty person among the great Revolutionaries, gave the Marquis many ideas that are to be found in his novels. "He behaved like a drunkard who had washed himself in blood and was greedy for the flow of more blood." He advised mass murders in his Friend of the People and returned again and again to this favorite topic of his. We will encounter this idea of mass murders more than once in de Sade's novels.