The Sinner's Grand Tour

by Tony Perrottet

  Even stranger, I discovered, a certain André Perrottet had risen to prominence in Lacoste in the late 1700s—as an employee of the Marquis de Sade himself.

  Now, I’ve never been one for roots tours, but the idea that my forebears had hobnobbed with the divine marquis put a whole new spin on things. It seemed that this ancestor of mine was a personal assistant of some sort, arranging Sade’s wide range of needs. Zut alors, I was Costain (a native of Lacoste) myself, give or take two centuries. If that didn’t give me license to talk to Cardin and demand entry into the château, I don’t know what did.

  While we were in Paris, I made an appointment at the Bibliothèque Nationale to read the correspondence between the marquis and Monsieur André Perrottet. In the imposing old building on Rue Richelieu, I followed a red carpet up the marble staircase—past the former Enfer, or Hell, the room for banned books—and into a magnificent, walnut-paneled reading room, where the windows were flung open to let in the warm summer breeze. I was surprised to find that, once I had a reader’s card, the librarians were happy to hand over Sade’s original handwritten letters. They hadn’t even been scanned or microfilmed. I was presented with a volume so unwieldy it had to be propped on an easel to peruse. Bound together inside were hundreds of pages scribbled in the marquis’ spidery hand; many were on small shreds of paper, like small napkins, to save on expensive writing materials. I ran my finger over the Sade wax seal and the marquis’ florid signature, which must be worth thousands at auction today. Finally, although the scrawl was often barely legible, I managed to piece together the ancestral saga.

  Sade correspondence in the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris.

  Young André Perrottet was first singled out by the marquis in 1767, when he organized a successful memorial service for Sade’s father. From then on, he was hired as an all-around fixer for the seigneur. André helped oversee renovations to the château. He stage-managed rites of feudal homage by the villagers. (Sade sat in an armchair lapping up the adulation, while officials swore fealty on bended knee—a tradition that had been abandoned in the rest of France for centuries.) Perrottet became a trusted courier, carrying sensitive letters to lawyers in Marseilles, three days away by coach. And he kept an eye on unruly castle staff. In 1776, André reported to Sade that the shapely maid, Gothon, had become lost in the countryside one rainy night, apparently because she had been drinking, but André found her the next morning in the forest, cold but unharmed.

  I flipped through the pages greedily. The references to Sade’s delicate legal problems (“the parents from Grenoble are taking action”) were interspersed with casual domestic orders for new bedroom curtains or types of wallpaper. My ancestor’s name popped up at regular intervals. When Sade was hiding out in Italy in 1775, he sent a letter to his lawyer, Gaspard Gaufridy, wishing he was back at home in Lacoste, enjoying un dindon (little turkey) and gay banter with his “loyal and frank friend, Perrottet.…”

  So my ancestor was the Marquis de Sade’s toady. Excellent. But he was also, I learned, something of a survivor. He managed to escape the plunder of the château during the 1789 Revolution and the ensuing Terror. And there is a reference to him in 1806, under the rule of Napoléon, when André had became mayor of Lacoste himself.

  I took photographs of the correspondence, and had them printed up into a dossier. These were my Gallic credentials—one of the Perrottets, Monsieur Cardin, was the Marquis’ right-hand man!—I was ready to take on the village. All that was left was the trifling matter of finding accommodation in Provence in high summer.

  The Marquis’ signature on his correspondence.

  “So how small is this garret?” Les grilled me, as we drove the twenty-five miles from Avignon in a sky-blue Citroën, a model they called the Picasso. I had snapped up the only lodging still available within Lacoste itself. Sure, there were all sorts of fabulous villas and gentrified farmhouses dotting the countryside, but being in the heart of things was key to my meeting Cardin. I had to admit that space was going to be tight even by East Village standards. “The boys have got beds, right?” Les asked. “Right?”

  “We could pretend we’re in a reality TV show,” I suggested, “where we have to recreate the living conditions of eighteenth-century peasants!”

  A serious heat wave had settled over southern France. Many of the forests were tinder-dry. But Lacoste still managed to look verdant and dramatic, the château looming on its lush crag like something out of a 1930s horror movie. We maneuvered cautiously up the winding road to the base of the village, wondering where on earth to park the Picasso. Lacoste is miniscule, with a network of cobbled lanes, two cafés, and a single boulangerie of erratic hours. Of course, there are Cardin’s new galleries and boutiques, but no supermarket, no bank, no ATM, no public transport, no bicycle hire, no escape other than by walking.

  I hoped everyone liked it: We were going to be there for two weeks.

  The Château Sade looming over Lacoste today.

  Madame Colette, the shrewd, white-haired cleaning lady, handed me a fistful of iron keys, then slammed her door. After trudging up the steep cobblestones of the Rue du Four, I cranked open a huge wooden door and ascended a cold stone staircase. This was it. Our eyes adjusted to the darkness of a tiny room with bare stone walls and two narrow pallets, underneath which were two thin mattresses for the boys. The mod-cons included a rusty sink, a gas burner, and a bar refrigerator. Things were looking grim as we spun about in the darkness, but when I pushed open two shuttered doors, Les’s bleak expression dissolved. It seemed our garret also came with a small balcony, which had views that would make an Impressionist drool. Lacoste, we now discovered, floats above the region called the Luberón like a hot-air balloon, with sweeping vistas across vineyards and cherry orchards. In the distance loomed Mount Ventoux, which appears snow-capped but is actually covered in chalk. I breathed a sigh of relief. This was the mythic Provence of Peter Mayle novels, beloved by British retirees and anyone with a passion for cheese, flea markets, and renovated barns.

  We could thrive here. Les could sketch on the balcony for weeks. Even the toy kitchenette had a view over the rooftops. Hanging out the window, Henry spotted one of the village cats on the neighbor’s roof, a snow-white apparition, nimbly negotiating the terracotta tiles like a snow leopard. From then on, the boys made it their mission to track him down and befriend him. Rather like me and Pierre Cardin.

  The Marquis de Sade was by all accounts a devoted father, I mused to myself as I set out for the château. On summer evenings, he would frolic with his three young children—two sons, Louis-Marie and Armand, and a baby daughter, Madelaine—in the garden estate, displaying a fondness for play-acting, hide-and-seek, and musical chairs. The dashing aristocrat also doted on his wife, Pélagie, and lovingly addressed her as “celestial kitten,” “fresh pork of my thoughts” and “star of Venus,” and had quite a green thumb, planting many of the quince trees that still blossom throughout Lacoste.

  A steep trail above the village led me into the castle’s former moat, now dry and littered with weeds and loose chunks of masonry. The Château Sade still managed to look forbidding. French preservation laws made it illegal for Cardin to alter the exterior structure, which is essentially a ruined veil of fortress walls; the only embellishments on the blank facade are a few high windows now fitted with one-way glass. The decaying remains of the top floor give the castle a sinister appearance, like a set of rotten fangs—still the ideal refuge, you might say, for a deranged priest or bestial nobleman from one of Sade’s own porn classics, like 120 Days of Sodom. At the very least, a Dungeons and Dragons computer game designer. Au contraire. French magazines reported that its medieval interior is now renovated into a chic abode suitable for the global fashion icon. Of course, Lacoste is only one of Cardin’s international addresses. Having made billions from an epic career that included prêt-à-porter suits, space-age dresses, and avant-garde furniture, Cardin flits between dozens of other luxury abodes. But every July, he potters about
in Lacoste, working to put it on the European cultural map. Needless to say, Cardin is remarkably spry at eighty-eight years of age, his only caution being to avoid the afternoon sun. Was he inside now, I wondered, having his afternoon siesta?

  His château also appears impenetrable. Apart from a sleek new metal walkway that traverses the moat to a wooden portal, which is fitted with a state-of-the-art security system, the only way inside would be to scale the ramparts with a giant ladder. The French police had done precisely that one midnight in 1774, bursting in on a terrified Madame Sade with swords and pistols, only to find that their quarry, the marquis, had fled. The villagers had tipped Sade off about the raid. The next year, officers again stormed through the château, but failed to find Sade hiding under the eaves of the roof.

  The most striking addition is Cardin’s shiny bronze sculpture of the marquis, perched on a precipice with commanding views of the valley. It displays Sade’s bewigged head surrounded by a metal cage: Sade the perpetual prisoner. In 1777, the Marquis’ own primitive security system—basically, peasant lookouts in barns around the valley—failed him, and he was seized here in the château. He spent most of the rest of his life incarcerated, thirteen years in the Bastille and eleven in Charenton Asylum. Both attempts to censor his literary outpourings proved futile. In fact, since he was allowed furniture, a library, and gourmet food in his cells, the confinement actually served to focus his literary inspiration, as if prison were an eccentric writers’ colony. His lurid novels generated an underground cult following, which only grew after his death in 1814.

  Within a generation, the besotted poet Baudelaire wrote that if a statue of Sade were ever erected, thousands would one day come to lay flowers at his feet. Well, it may have taken a few decades longer than expected, but there is no question that the divine marquis can bring in the fans today. Tourists arrived in a steady stream to wander the estate and take snaps of the gleaming statue. And back down in the village, all Cardin’s commercial ventures seemed to be cashing in on the Sade name brand.

  When I saw that his boutique gift store was even named after the marquis, my imagination ran riot. Would it be a high-end sex shop for the dominatrix and fetishist? Would it stock Sade’s favorite accessories, like the hand-carved prestiges, or dildos, he favored for his autoerotic rites or like his beloved enema syringes, which bore tasteful engravings of men kneeling in worship before plump buttocks? At least it could offer some books from the Marquis’ own library, I thought, classics like The Fornications of Priests and Nuns, illustrated editions of his own phantasmagoric works, or maybe a vial of Spanish fly. (This supposed aphrodisiac derived from insects was popular in the eighteenth century, even though it was mildly toxic: Sade had slipped a quantity to prostitutes in Marseilles with disastrous results and was accused of attempted murder.)

  Statue of the Marquis de Sade at his château, now owned by Pierre Cardin.

  No such luck. Instead, when I entered the cool stone cavern of Le Moulin de Sade, I was confronted with an array of local gourmet foods: foie gras, jams, pâtés, and honeys. When I quizzed the elderly shopkeeper about Sadist souvenirs, she gave me a bookmark with his profile and a bottle of Marquis de Sade wine.

  The truth is, Sade would probably have been delighted. He was a fervent gourmand, who loved Provençal delicacies such as quail stuffed with grape leaves, cream of chard soup, and local jams. He once demanded that his wife send him a chocolate cake that was black “as the devil’s ass is blackened by smoke.” Fine food appears in all his writings about orgies, inspiring the participants to fits of lust. As one character notes: “Our cocks are never so stiff as when we’ve just completed a sumptuous feast.” An early version, perhaps, of the saying that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.

  THE TORTURES OF PARADISE

  When the heat finally ebbed in the late afternoon, the village began to ring with activity. Construction workers were scurrying like ants along the Rue Basse, Low Road, where Cardin had purchased a dozen buildings and was speedily gutting them. On the work permits, someone had crossed out Cardin’s name by hand, and scribbled in slogans like Sauvez Votre Village, Save Your Village. Long before Cardin’s arrival, Lacoste had been violently independent. For centuries, it was a Protestant island in a sea of Catholics, and more recently, it was run by a Communist mayor for fifty years. Now the villagers, les Costains, were rebelling against what they regarded as a hostile capitalist takeover. They accuse Cardin of leeching the traditional life from their village and denounce him as an arrogant aristocrat trying to turn the clock back to the prerevolutionary days of Sade.

  Still, not everyone in Lacoste was ready to light torches and storm the château. A small but vocal minority view Cardin as saving the village from provincial stagnation.

  As it happened, I got the latter view first when I met Finn Mac Eion, a wild-haired poet and landscape gardener who was known to be the most committed Sade specialist in Lacoste. I found him watering a row of shrubberies. Tall and gangly, wearing cut-off shorts and a khaki T-shirt as if he’d just stumbled back from the battle of Tobruk, Finn was also a one-man PR team for the new regime.

  “I’m pro-Cardin and I’m pro the Marquis de Sade,” he immediately declared, before denouncing the conspiracy of idle Socialists who were trying to block Cardin’s noble plans for the village. Tossing aside his watering can, Finn took me on a proud tour of the twenty-five buildings that Cardin now owned. Suddenly carried away with the grand ambition of it all, he stopped to orate a celebratory poem.

  “I call this one ‘Resurrection,’ ” Finn said, striking a mock-heroic pose like a Shakespearean actor on the tiles. “It’s dedicated to Monsieur Cardin.”

  Raising one hand, a knee up on a stone wall, Finn swept back his curly hair and pronounced in his rolling Irish brogue:

  Up from ancient ruins in Phoenix flight,

  Domaine de Sade Pierre’d before my very eyes—

  Stone by stone this titan feat rose and rose beyond a dream

  Where lark and passing cloud can meet—

  He pointed with a flourish to the village of Bonnieux in the distance, for centuries Lacoste’s bitter Catholic enemy and far more prosperous.

  Now, a beacon on this once Lacoste’d hill has

  Far-off Bonnieux put to shame. And soon the moon it will.

  “Cardin’s got that poem up on his wall in the château,” Finn exulted. “Right next to the Marquis de Sade’s portrait.”

  A villager stuck his head out of the window to see what all the noise was about, but seeing it was Finn, snorted in disgust and pulled his head back in.

  “Ah, they hate me here,” Finn chortled. “They fucking hate me! I don’t care. Friends make you weak. Enemies make you strong! I’ll make ’em hate me more.”

  Finn invited me back to the safety of his house to discuss the Sade connection. Since moving to Lacoste a decade ago, he said, he had become obsessed with the divine marquis. He was planning to write a “creative biography” of Sade, and he had traveled to Vincennes prison and managed to prise a chunk of stone from the walls of Sade’s very cell as a souvenir. I had to admire his dedication. “I want to do everything Sade did. I want to understand him. I’ve been everywhere he went. I’ve been to the prison cells he was stuck in, and the ones he escaped from—been out the same window he went out.”

  “You want to do everything?” I asked.

  “Everything!”

  Most impressive of all, Finn said that he had read every word that Sade had ever written. Even many leading academic biographers admit they have never been able to slog through the deadening litany of carnal horrors that is 120 days of Sodom, or the twin volumes Justine and Juliette, each of which clock in at about 1,200 pages, with an inventive new outrage on almost every one. Personally, I agreed with the nineteenth-century English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, who after hearing so much about the forbidden marquis, was dismayed to discover that his actual words, when he finally found a copy, were not particularly erotic or ev
en shocking—just wildly absurd. Some scholars have argued that Sade’s books were intended as parables rather than porn, closer in spirit to eighteenth-century philosophical fictions like Candide and designed to show that virtue is never rewarded and vice never punished. The final effect, Swinburne decided, was outrageous black comedy. He and his reprobate Victorian friends, like Henry Spencer Ashbee, took to reading Sade with gales of uproarious laughter. What else can one make, for example, of the scene where the ever innocent Justine discovers a mad surgeon who is dissecting one daughter while ravishing the other. “Oh, monsieur,” she gasps. “Look what you have done!” No wonder the surrealists were inspired.

  “But you’ve got to read the man’s letters from prison,” Finn said. “That’s where you get the real Sade. They’re beautifully written. They’ll make you fucking weep.”

  Finn was out to vindicate Sade’s memory. The Marquis was never given a trial, he raged, but locked up by royal decree and dictatorial edicts from Napoléon. His grand plan was to one day create a mock trial of Sade at Lacoste in order to educate visitors.

  “People don’t know shit about the Marquis de Sade,” he said. “They come here to Lacoste and they tell me, oh, do you know he killed his wife and cut out her heart? Such crap! So much misinformation. He loved his wife! She was like Florence fucking Nightingale to him. But you get that from people. Everyone wants to see blood.”

  Certainly, there are subtleties to Sade’s life that get lost in all the hype clinging to his name. As the biographer Plessix Gray points out, he should perhaps be termed “a nonviolent sadist.” He never drew blood in his rituals, preferring to use psychological torture. He denounced the death penalty during the Revolution at considerable personal risk. And unlike other aristocrats, he was never in a duel or even went hunting. The very word “sadism” was not coined until 1886, seven decades after Sade’s death, by the German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing. (His groundbreaking Psychopathia Sexualis was the first “scientific” categorization of “sexual perversions,” including fetishism, exhibitionism, pederasty, bestiality, nymphomania, flagellation, necrophilia, incest, homosexuality, lesbianism, and so on.) Surprisingly, Sade himself fits more into the masochist slot: He liked to be whipped, often demanding hundreds of lashes to achieve an erection. But as to his being violent, it’s the old story of how we confuse writers with their writings. Sade’s real life story was blurred with his exaggerated creations and their demented acts of cruelty.