Gothic Tales

Introduction
Over the centuries the titles of some books have become house- hold words, but only a very few authors have given their names to nouns, adjectives and adverbs in several languages, terms for which there is no simple equivalent or alternative. The Marquis de Sade, who lived from 1740 to 1814 was one such writer. He became Comte on the death of his father in 1767 but has always been known in his native France and beyond by his earlier title. His major works were written, and some of them published, between the 1780s and 1800 while many others, including his letters, did not reach the public until after his death, in some cases having been discovered only in the twentieth century. The group of words to which he gave his name has needed explanations which go beyond etymology. ‘Infamous for his crimes and the character of his writings’, says the Shorter Oxford Dictionary (1973), adding that the word ‘sadism’ was first used in 1888 and means ‘a form of sexual perversion marked by a love of cruelty’. Chambers 20th Century Dictionary (1983) records that Sade died insane, a fact disputed by scholars and biographers, even if, after many years in prison, he spent his last eleven years in the madhouse of Charenton, a few miles outside Paris.
During the nineteenth century Sade, if read, or indeed if
known at all, was regarded as no more than a sexual pervert, unmentionable in civilized society, a writer of obscenities which exceeded even those fashionable in his day. His work was useful to a few unscrupulous publishers and booksellers who were delighted to make money by selling his ‘forbidden’ books in secret. When, in the early twentieth century, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire also tried to earn money by writing erotic novels,* he studied Sade and wrote about him, rescuing him from a shadowy life as a mere pornographer. Apollinaire has remained one of his most perceptive interpreters. As he looked beyond the catalogues of perversions and crimes in Sade’s most outspoken books the poet realized that here was one of the most misunderstood writers of the eighteenth century, condemned by critics who had failed to see him in a social, psychological and political context. Later, in Britain, Aldous Huxley noted that the works of the Marquis contained ‘more philosophy than pornography’. Readers who first come to Sade in search of sexual excitement soon realize that he was not writing only for that purpose. He did not compose lengthy descriptions of unthinkable cruelties merely to titillate or corrupt his readers: he was anxious to attract their attention because he wanted to communicate, with a kind of desperate intensity, all that he felt about human behaviour, about morality, about individual and social problems. He wanted to write about the unlimited potential of human beings, but he was writing long before anyone had established a scientific system for doing so. He was often limited to using physiology, not psychology, as his starting point, for he knew no other way of analysing behaviour or expressing his findings.
Sade’s range was much wider than is usually thought. In addi- tion to his major works, Justine, Juliette, La Philosophie dans le Boudoir, Les 120 Journées de Sodome, to name his most famous or infamous titles, he wrote historical novels, plays, an anti-Bonaparte satire,





*  e.g., Les Onze Mille Verges (Peter Owen, 1976)


Zoloé (although some dispute his authorship), and the vast fiction Aline et Valcour, a roman à tiroirs which includes shorter novels within the main novel. For the late twentieth-century reader his most accessible fiction can be found in the stories entitled Les Crimes de l’Amour (1800 and later), which were prefaced by an essay on the novel. Some of these stories were published during Sade’s lifetime, some as late as 1927. There were fifty in all, the full title of the collection being Historiettes, contes et fabliaux d’un troubadour du XVIIIe siècle. Some are comic anecdotes, some are examples of eighteenth century galanterie and occasionally illustrate Sade’s taste for irony. The longer ones, like Eugénie de Franval and Florville et Courval, are best described as Gothic, written possibly under the influence of English writers such as Horace Walpole, whose The Castle of Otranto was translated in 1767.
The ‘Gothic’ stories have a quality of suspense, for the reader does not know what will happen to the incestuous Franval and his daughter. It is equally hard to guess why Florville does not want to marry Courval – and who was the unknown murderess in the auberge at Nancy? If Franval’s defence of incest seems to be related in tone to some of the more outrageous speeches in La Philosophie dans le Boudoir, vice is punished and, in the end, virtue triumphs.
In many of Sade’s serious tales women, such as the wretched Justine, are the principal victims. If they attempt to take control of their own lives they are usually defeated by men. Sade himself treated most women badly, but unexpectedly this forward-looking writer had some notion of their potential. In Aline et Valcour he described an ideal country, Tamoé, where women would enjoy equality with men; this was part of his grandiose plan for indi- vidual liberty. If, thought Sade, so many women were forced into a life of deceit and treachery before they could earn any minor personal success, whose fault was that? In the story Le Cocu de lui-même (The Self-Made Cuckold), the author attempted to explain: men treated women so badly that they had only themselves to blame for the behaviour of their wives and mistresses.
Apollinaire suggested that Sade chose heroines rather than heroes for his two major novels because he considered women to be superior to men. Nearly two centuries after his death Sade continues to produce surprises, even for the feminists. The leading French feminist of the twentieth century, Simone de Beauvoir, wrote her challenging study Must We Burn de Sade? in 1952 and three years later it was published with two other essays in a volume aptly entitled Privilèges. In eighteenth-century France few people enjoyed greater privileges than Sade, for as a member of an old-established aristocratic family he was free to behave more or less as he wished; but when he eloped with his wife’s sister he had forgotten one thing: his wife’s mother, the Marquise de Montreuil, was just as privileged as he was, and richer. If Sade spent so much time in prison or on the run it was not so much because he was a law-breaker, it was because he had infuriated a middle-aged woman. If he had not behaved so unconvention- ally, even in eighteenth-century terms, the Marquise could not have forced his imprisonment without trial under the autocratic system of the lettre de cachet. And the imprisoned Marquis would probably not have written all he did in the way he did.
The Gothic framework which Sade used in his longer stories,
and the horseplay he included in his anecdotal fiction, allowed him to entertain his contemporaries and half-concealed his main purpose: he was a moralist. In 1909 Apollinaire prophesied that Sade might well dominate the twentieth century and in some ways he was proved right: scientific and technological progress has not been matched by any reduction in cruel, ‘sadistic’ behaviour on an individual or national scale. Incest and child abuse may even be on the increase, marriages crumble, women still have no equality with men. Sade anticipated the extremes of human behaviour which are now exposed, but rarely mitigated, every day throughout the world. He made a concentrated effort to describe them. He even attempted, remembering his own problems, to give latter-day readers some advice, usually ironic, on the perennial problems of marital behaviour. Simone de Beauvoir was surely right when she said of Sade in 1952, ‘The supreme value of his testimony is that it disturbs us.’
M.C.