by Steven Moore
Needing money, Sade began to create an enormous two-headed novel that was published in 1797 as La Nouvelle Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu, suive de l’histoire de Juliette, sa soeur (The New Justine, or The Disadvantages of Virtue, followed by The Story of Juliette, Her Sister). He expanded the 1791 Justine by nearly 500 pages, “largely by the inclusion of the adventures of two minor characters,” Gorer complains, voicing the critical consensus on the inferiority of this final version: “probability is destroyed, the natural development is lost, the story is drowned in a deluge of blood and semen” (75–76).241 Sade switched from the original’s first-person POV to third person, thereby stripping away the few threads of decency in which Justine had cloaked her tale and freeing himself to speak ever more bluntly. At the end of La Nouvelle Justine—one can’t help think of La Nouvelle Héloïse, with Rousseau’s benevolent Nature exposed as indifferent, if not malevolent—Justine escapes from her prison cell before being transported, runs in to her long-lost sister and is taken to her château, only to find herself duped and tupped once again, this time by two of Juliette’s libertine friends. Then, before Justine’s electrocution, Juliette tells her own story, which is where the published Juliette begins, ending nearly 1,200 perfervid pages later.
Unlike her stupidly idealistic sister, street-smart Juliette quickly learns that a life of vice, not virtue, is the key to personal fulfillment and financial success, even social prominence, a lesson drilled into her by a gallery of villainous enablers: first, Mme Delbène, the abbess of the convent at which young Juliette is educated, who includes her in her violent orgies and teaches her to follow her natural instincts for crime and sex. In all of his novels, Sade argues that Nature implants an instinct for good in some, evil in others, and that people should always go with their instincts; Nature in fact relies on such diversity for balance, even seems to approve of destructive people who emulate her ways—volcanic eruptions, floods, tornadoes, lethal lightning strikes, and other “acts of God”—though sometimes Sade’s spokespeople argue that Nature is no more concerned with how we act than with insects. Sade is all over the place on this topic, but consistently rejects the nurturing Mother Nature embraced by Rousseau and other treehuggers. Equipped with “a magnificent ass” and convinced “one swims with the current or drowns battling it” (155, 218), Juliette graduates from the convent to a high-class bordello run by Mme Duvergier, where she refines her skills in sex and crime—always linked in Sade’s novels—and then becomes the protégé of one of the most disgusting men in the annals of literature, Monsieur Noirceuil, who, as his name suggests (noir + seuil = black portal) encourages Juliette to join the dark side for the blackest, most violent crimes imaginable (imaginable by Sade, that is, not by normal people). He is matched in villainy only by Monsieur Saint-Fond (fond = bottom, where he likes to take it), a powerful government minister and another of Juliette’s customer/enablers. Anticipating Kipling’s observation that “the female of the species is more deadly than the male,” Sade gives his damsel of distress two female partners-in-crime: a rich widow named Mme de Clairwil and a poisoner/sorceress named Mme de Durand. (As noted earlier, Sade deplored supernatural effects in fiction, but he gives Durand a sylph to command and who has sex with Juliette, naturally, as does every other character in the book, including some animals.)
These figures represent the decadent deterioration of the libertine tradition. In Sade’s lexicon, the libertine is not a freethinking lover, as in 17th-century novels, but a perverted, nihilistic criminal. Durand defines libertinage as “a sensual aberrance which supposes the discarding of all restraints, the supremest disdain for all prejudices, the total rejection of all religious notions, the profoundest aversion to all ethical imperatives” (1115), a far cry from the enlightened individualism Hylas and his girlfriend exemplify in d’Urfé’s Astrea. In Sade’s novel, easy-going, free-loving libertines like Hylas and Stelle turn into Bonnie and Clyde, or the “natural born killers” of Oliver Stone’s 1994 movie.
The second half of Juliette’s story, set in the 1770s, takes her from France to Italy, where Juliette fucks and robs a number of historical figures, including Pope Pius VI. (A black mass on the high altar in Saint Peter’s Cathedral is merely one of Juliette’s tourist stops.) During this “extended promenade through the most noisome hogwallows of dissoluteness” (1126), Juliette becomes an acute political scientist as she debates theories of governance with others, and also becomes one of literature’s first drug addicts after discovering opium. (The novel’s geographic scope is further augmented by an interpolated novella [pp. 815–909] concerning Clairwil’s psychokiller brother and his crime spree through Holland, England, Sweden, Russia, and Turkey.) Amassing an incredible fortune—wealth and perversity is another recurring linkage in the novel—Juliette returns to France at age 30 to find Noirceuil more powerful than ever (he later kills Saint-Fond and assumes control of France under Louis XVI) and her daughter Marianne grown to age seven. In the throes of a violent orgy with Noirceuil, Juliette allows him to rape the child and throw her into a roaring fire; mommie dearest even helps: “I too pick up a poker and thwart the unhappy creature’s natural efforts at escape, for she thrashes convulsively in the flames: we drive her back, I say; we are being frigged, both of us, then we are being sodomized” (1186–87). In an outrageous parody of the happy ending of most romance novels, Juliette participates in a quadruple transvestite marriage: Noirceuil, dressed as a woman, marries one of his sons, then dressed as a man marries his other son dressed as a bride, while Juliette marries one lesbian dressed as a man, and then vice versa. The wedding party/honeymoon that follows is an unspeakably depraved orgy of incest and murder, crowned two weeks later by poisoning the town’s water supply, sickening and killing some 3,000 people. On the last page of the novel, Noirceuil receives “the reins of government” from the king, Juliette and her libertine friends are all promoted to positions of power and wealth, and Noirceuil concludes: “from all this I see nothing but happiness accruing to all save only virtue—but we would perhaps not dare say so were it a novel we were writing,” to which Sade’s “execrable” (his word) sock puppet replies, “ ‘Why dread publishing it,’ said Juliette, ‘when the truth itself, and the truth alone, lays bare the secrets of Nature, however mankind may tremble before those revelations. Philosophy must never shrink from speaking out’ ” (1193).
That is how Sade wanted others to regard his novel: not as porn for libertines, not as an excuse to splash around in the cesspool of his depraved imagination, but as a heroic attempt to speak truth to power, to lay bare the secrets of Nature: the instinct for vice, the erotic relationship between sex and crime, the symbolic relationship between the will to political power and an addiction to perversion, between financial acquisition and corruption, and—in a godless universe—Nature’s indifference, if not contempt, for humankind’s unnatural moral codes, codes completely at odds with the laws of nature. He also wanted to lay bare the not-so-secret methods that the powerful use to subjugate the powerless: snake-oil religion, repressive politics (Machiavelli is cited a dozen times in the novel), and self-defeating morality. As Noirceuil implies above, writers (especially novelists) shrink from speaking out, from telling the truth about the darker aspects of human nature: though named after him, sadism has always existed, needless to say, and takes many forms beyond the sexual. Throughout Juliette, Sade bangs away at this point, especially in his footnotes: he paraphrases rather than quotes from one of his historical sources—this is a very erudite novel, and many of the horrors he ascribes to real-life figures have been verified by historians—because “Brantôme merely sketched what we have thought desirable to paint in all its colors, and in all its truth” (288n8). He upbraids French philosophers for apprehending but not revealing nature’s approval of “the crime of destruction” (175 and n16), and dismisses earlier libertine novelists who seem “to have scented the truth but [were] afraid to tell it,” having no patience for those who hint at incest, for example, without dr
amatizing it (461–62, an interesting occasion for literary criticism as Juliette evaluates a monk’s stash of porn novels). If Saint-Frond had his way, he would
authorize the publication and sale of all libertine books and immoral works; for I esteem them most essential to human felicity and welfare, instrumental to the progress of philosophy, indispensable to the eradication of prejudices, and in every sense conducive to the increase of human knowledge and understanding. Any author courageous enough to tell the truth fearlessly shall have my patronage and support; I shall subsidize his ideas, I shall see to their dissemination; such men are rare, the State has great need of them, and their labors cannot be too heartily encouraged. (319)
The fact this is spoken by a fascist politician complicates matters—Sade inconsistently puts good sense and deranged nonsense into his characters’ mouths, challenging us to make the distinction—but Sade’s encouragement to writers to tell the truth is his most important legacy to the novel. Novels should always challenge power and prejudice, not collaborate with them. Those novelists like Restif de la Bretonne who thought Sade merely opened the sluice-gate for greater sexual realism and created a market for S&M porn missed the point entirely.
Sade made a mess of the new Justine, but in Juliette he seems to have determined to write his masterpiece. The philosophical discussions between orgies are longer, better argued, more varied, and are bolstered with Golden Bough-style anthropological data and historical examples from a wide range of sources. (Not to be missed is the lecture on the history of papal perversion that Juliette delivers to the pope [752–55]; His Holiness replies with a 33-page defense of murder [765–98].) Although he wrote it quickly and injudiciously—“the Marquis wrote with a hose, not a pen,” as William H. Gass quipped in his insightful review of the English translation—there are some striking images and rhetorical flights of fancy that exceed anything in his previous writings: when Abbess Delbène hears the name of the god she allegedly serves, “I seem to see all around me the palpitating shades of all those woebegone creatures this abominable opinion has slaughtered on the face of the earth. Those ghosts cry out beseechingly to me, they supplicate me to make use of all I have been endowed with of force and ingenuity to erase from the souls of my brethren the idea of the revolting chimera which has brought such rue into the world” (20)—which doubles as Sade’s mission statement. During a lull in one of her earliest orgies in the nunnery, the 15-year-old Juliette casts a coarse spell of erotic glamour:
All these scenes of fuckery were preceded by a moment of suspense, of calm; as though the participants wished in stillness and contemplation to savor voluptuousness in its entirety, as though they feared lest, by talking, they might let some of it escape. I was requested to be attentive, alert in my pleasure-taking; for later I should be expected to report on the experience. I swam in a wordless ecstasy; and, I confess, the incredible pleasures evoked by the strident and persisting activity of Télème’s prick in my ass, the lubricious agonies into which I was plunged by the Abbess’ tongue flitting over, needling my clitoris, the luxuriant scenes environing me, the combination of so many lascivious elements gripped my senses in a delirium and in that delirium I wanted to live an eternity. (57)
Later, as Justine seizes Noirceuil’s “iron-hard member,” Monsieur philosophizes on the terrible toll, both personal and political, taken by phallocentrism:
“What a tale of crimes that prick has cost me!” he cried, “what a host of execrable things I have done in order that it might surrender its sperm a slight shade more hotly. Upon this globe’s whole extent there is not a single object I’m not ready to sacrifice to its comfort: this tool is my god, let it be one unto thee, Juliette: extol it, worship it, this despotic engine, show it every reverence, it is a thing proud of its glory, insatiate, a tyrant; I’d fain make the earth bend its knee in universal homage to this prick, I’d like to see it guised in the shape of a terrific personage who would put to a death of awful torments every last living soul that thought to deny it the least of a thousand services.” (185)
Sade makes intelligent use of animal imagery—“emulate the spider,” Noirceuil advices Juliette, “spin your webs, and mercilessly devour everything that Nature’s wise and liberal hand casts into the meshes” (180)—and often compares his radical individualists to the predatory tiger. Literalizing this recurrent simile, Sade even has a vicious Italian dress in a tiger’s skin to perform in an orgy near the end (1104–6), though Juliette later boasts that “the most ferocious and the most savage beasts never attain such monstrosities” as she and her confederates do (1108). Sade takes the volcano as his “emblem of upheaval” (951); contemplating one at Pietra Mala in Italy, Juliette muses, “it is like my imagination igniting under the strokes of a lash applied to my ass” (575), and then insists on having sex on the edge of the volcano—as she does later at Vesuvius, where she murders her traveling companion.
There are times when Sade strains and pushes against the very limits of language, approaching verbal delirium as he tries to express “whimsies at once foul beyond words and beyond belief” (1128), which sometimes results in giddy imagery (“Moberti’s balls danced against my buttocks” [1100]) or surrealistic hilarity, especially when he’s describing acrobatic sex groupings—as when a hundred Italian women form a daisy chain of dildos, which reminds Camille Paglia of the “style of Busby Berkeley or the Radio City Rockettes.”242 In many mischievous footnotes Sade gooses his female readers to emulate his slutty heroine; Angela Carter praises him “for claiming rights of free sexuality for women” (36), though Juliette is more a parody of sexually voraciousness than a model for sexual liberation. She and the other characters are almost comically larger than life, none more so than Sade’s most amazing creation, a 7-foot-tall Russian cannibal with an 18-inch penis named Minski, who lives in a remote castle in Italy like something out of a medieval fable. The novel is all “delirium and extravagance” (539), ridiculously exaggerated, ludicrously over-the-top, which is part of its mordant appeal. “Scope and grandeur are sadly lacking in your conception of the thing,” Clairwil had complained of Juliette’s first mass-murder (416); Sade made sure no one could lodge the same complaint against Juliette.
Several critics have suggested that with Juliette Sade tried to salvage his lost 120 Days of Sodom. Like the earlier novel’s conteuses, Juliette deliberately arouses her male listeners (they interrupt her narrative occasionally to have sex), and as in Sodom the relationship between the powerful and the general populace is expressed in the grossest sexual terms.243 There is the same encyclopedic ambition, explicitly so in Juliette’s description of her memoirs as “this encyclopaedia of inhuman lewd practices” (1130);244 there is a Sodality of the Friends of Crime with bylaws as detailed as those by the syndicate in the earlier novel, and numerous isolated mansions, castles, and whorrorhouses where sex abuses worse than those in Sodom take place; there is the same desperate attempt to say everything, do everything, destroy everything. If so, Sade succeeded: Juliette is far better than a completed 120 Days of Sodom could ever have been.
Above all, Juliette is Sade’s dark tribute to the godlike powers of the imagination. His horny heroine is in awe of the new president of the Sodality of the Friends of Crime because “his exceedingly criminal imagination often led him to invent things that surpassed all I had heard of, or even dreamt of, hitherto.” Speaking via the president during one of the novel’s many metafictional moments, Sade raves about the joys of artistic creation and of the superiority of the imagination over reality, of art over real life:
“This imagination you laud in me, Juliette,” he said one day, “is precisely what in you seduced me; for lasciviousness, diversity, and energy I have seldom seen its equal; and you have surely remarked that my sweetest pleasures with you are those I taste when, the two of us giving free rein to fancy, we fabricate ideal lubricities whose existence, unfortunately, is impossible. Oh, Juliette, how delicious are the pleasures of the imagination, and how voluptuously one follow
s out the lines of its dazzling constructions! . . . Truly, Juliette, I sometimes think the reality possessed is not worth the images we chase thereof, and wonder whether the enjoyment of that which we have not, does not much exceed the enjoyment of that which is ours: lo, there is your ass, Juliette, there before my eyes, and beauteous it is to my contemplation; but my imagination, a more inspired architect than Nature, a more cunning artisan than she, creates other asses more beautiful still; and the pleasure I derive from this illusion, is it not preferable to the one which reality is about to have me enjoy? There is beauty in what you offer me there, but only beauty; what I invent is sublime; with you I am going to do nothing that anyone else may not do, whilst with this ass my imagination has wrought, I might do things which not even the gods themselves would invent.” (521–22)
You would think that after rebuilding Sodom and creating an even grander fictional world that Sade, like the god of the Jews, would have rested. But as insatiable as his perverted protagonist, he wanted more. After he was arrested in 1801 for writing Justine–Juliette and committed to the Charenton Asylum for the rest of his life, Sade began writing yet another massive novel entitled Days at Florbelle (Les Journées de Florbelle), which he finished in 1807, only to have it confiscated by the police that year and burned after his death at the request of his traitorous son Armand, who destroyed other papers and ignored his father’s will.245 Thirty pages of Sade’s notes for Florbelle survive—they are included in a volume of his Charenton journals called The Ghosts of Sodom—which suggest it plowed the same ground as his earlier novels, but with a more complicated plot and a greater diversity of forms. Set in the year 1739, preceded by the epigraph “It is by laying life bare/That one brings readers back to virtue,” Sade explained, “the totality of this work will be composed of eight dialogues, thirteen days, a treatise on morals, one on religion, one on the soul, one on God, one on the art of jouissance, the project of thirty-two brothels for men and women for Paris, a treatise on antiphysics, and two novels, Modose’s and Amelie’s, in all ten large notebooks that should fill at least twenty volumes in print” (84). Since the 2,000-page Justine–Juliette occupied 10 volumes, that means a novel of at least 4,000 pages! One of the many parties takes place in a make-believe “Temple of Bacchus where human sacrifices are carried out, a bull-fight featuring women, and different firework displays where children are carried off by bombs and rockets” (110). The mind reels, the stomach heaves, but what a shame it was burned. Its confiscation must have crushed Sade, for all he wrote after that are three short, conventional historical novels, which even Sade specialists yawn over.246