Then, in the entrance hall, I glimpsed a Dalí-esque painting of a figure in a powdered wig hovering in a starlit sky. Here was my opening.
“Ah, the marquis!”
I casually mentioned how I was researching Sade’s life in Lacoste.
“Yes, I’ve studied Sade a great deal,” Cardin said. “Naturally, I am very interested in his theatrical works.”
“You know, my ancestors used to live here,” I said. “A certain André Perrottet, he actually worked for Sade in the 1770s …”
But my words were suddenly drowned out by shouts and grunts. Two workmen were lugging a monstrous scarlet lounge the shape of a potato chip up the stairs. Cardin suddenly had his hand out to me. And before I knew it, he had disappeared up the stairs, directing the workers around a tight corner.
I stood there dumbfounded. I wanted to wail, “Show me the damn dungeon!” but thought better of it. Contact had been made.
THE TOUR DE SADE
“Thank God!” Les said, when I told her of my breakthrough. “Now let’s go for a drive in the countryside!”
“Well, we don’t want to get carried away …”
“But look at it out there!” she said desperately, pointing at the ravishing view and waving a guidebook to Provence I’d foolishly left lying around. Apparently there were antique markets all over the place, not to mention restaurants, wineries, waterfalls, truffle museums, and much, much more. “Can’t we do something different today?”
Admittedly, Lacoste was becoming a tad claustrophobic. We had trudged the same four cobbled lanes about a thousand times between the same two cafés, running into the same handful of villagers. The boys were now tearing around the village like their feline friends. Trying to include them at refined artistic functions had not been a success. One night, we’d gone to a reception at Lacoste’s last independent gallery when Sam’s piercing shrieks interrupted the party. He ran into the crowd with blood spurting down his nose in a scarlet river, the result of ninja fighting in the lane outside. As I whisked my howling offspring from the immaculate space, I noticed a wave of relief emanating from the other guests. I could hardly blame them. But I was beginning to feel as if there was a cosmic conspiracy against my mission, with my family as the agents of sabotage.
While I floundered about like a lost butterfly in the village, Les pointed out that there were some basic logistics to consider—including the teensy problem that there were no actual groceries available in Lacoste, apart from croissants and jam. Eating out was stressful. Every dinner was spent trying to stop the boys from disturbing the other, childless diners, who sat in silence, contemplating the view through their cigarette smoke and shooting us disdainful looks. Worse, the heat wave in Provence had become unbearable. Lacoste is also one of the only villages in southern France that lacks a public pool, and none of the genteel expats we’d met had offered to share their villa piscine.
So as the mercury broke 100 degrees, we began a Kafkaesque routine of driving for miles to find municipal pools, only to be denied access because of our American-style swim-wear. Board shorts had just been declared unhygienic by the French authorities; only Lycra briefs would be tolerated for males of any age. Every time we tried to slip past the ticket office window, we were caught and had to open our bags.
“Forbidden!” the crones would snap.
“But why are board shorts unhygienic?” I pleaded.
“Loose hairs,” they retorted. “One needs to be contained.”
We peered into the pool enclosure, where scrawny French boys were frolicking in tiny stretch underpants and purple swim-caps, like Tintin en Vacances. Henry blanched at the sight. “I’m not wearing those things!” he railed. “Let’s get out of here!”
I tried to see these jaunts as part of my research. After all, Sade had managed to drag his thirty-two-person theatrical troupe all over this part of Provence in the summer of 1772. Biographers have marveled at the manic energy needed for this touring enterprise, as the Marquis trundled over mountain roads and Roman bridges with carts full of scenery and a support team of valets, cooks, and disgruntled thespians. I could sympathize. Every time I mobilized my own crew to hit the road, it was like Napoléon’s army breaking camp.
After these forays, I would return to Lacoste with heightened anxiety, wondering what I had missed. I was like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now—every day I was away from the jungle I felt myself getting weaker and the enemy stronger. I had to remain in the village, stay focused, avoid distractions, if Cardin was going to be ensnared.
The low point came when Lesley announced one morning that she had been concealing a painful rash on her neck that she could no longer tolerate. I groaned inwardly. This meant we had to spend yet another day driving to another infuriatingly pretty hill town in order to find a doctor.
The French physician was so young, tall, and statuesque, he looked as if he’d stepped out of a Gallic TV soap—Hôpital General, perhaps.
He took one look at Les’s back and solemnly pronounced, “Le pox.”
“Le pox?” Les gulped. This was getting a little too eighteenth-century.
The doctor kept going on about le pox this and le pox that. I started to think he just liked saying le pox. Was this bubonic plague or syphilis? I wondered. We had drawn up a list of French words before the visit to describe her symptoms—useful technical terms like agonizing and blistering—but that one hadn’t come up.
“Monsieur,” I interrupted, “qu’est-ce que c’est, le pox?”
We all hunched over a computer to find an online medical dictionary.
“Oh, shingles!” Les said. She knew it was stress-related.
The next morning, I ran into Jasper in the Rue Basse. Jasper was a grizzled local sculptor I’d met in the gallery where Sam had disgraced himself.
“You should have been at the party last night,” he grinned, a little too cheerily it seemed to me. “Cardin was there!”
“What?” I was stunned. “What party?”
“Oh, the American school has a little art gallery at the top of the village. Cardin always turns up at their receptions. He was in great form! I chatted to him for ages.”
Jasper shook his head in consolation. “What a pity you didn’t know about it. It was quite an event. Why, you could have asked him about visiting the château.”
Oh, yes. Sade himself was on my trail, twisting the knife.
Now I put a ban on unnecessary excursions. Why be tourists when we could be locals? I reasoned. It was true we had finally become fixtures in Lacoste, thanks to our own eccentric rituals. Every morning, the boys would crawl out of bed and go on “Cat Watch.” Les would sketch on the balcony and make trips to the well for drinking water. I would stake out a corner in the Café de Sade and idly chat with Gérard about Carla Bruni, soccer, or the Tour de France, which was passing nearby. By now, everyone in the village knew I wanted to visit the château, from the mayor, the charmingly named Madame Louche, down to the café’s dishwashers. I ran into Cardin on three more occasions, but always in the company of his coiffed entourage. I dropped heavy hints about my interest in the dungeon. He never took the bait. His minders would suddenly start flapping and shuffling him along to the next appointment.
“You don’t get a lot of time with Cardin,” one villager said, when I explained the problem. “He leads the conversation, and he moves fast.”
I tried to remain calm, but time was running out. Every time I returned to our hovel, Les’s eyes would dart up at me inquiringly, then look away with a mixture of fear and pity. There was less and less to say. Even Sam was getting suspicious.
“Where’s Daddy going?” he started asking whenever I slipped out.
“Oh, he’s got work to do,” Les would mutter dryly, pushing my copy of Juliette under the bed with her foot. The cover displayed the heroine with a strap-on dildo brutalizing a gagged shepherdess.
Contrary to my previous image of Provence, Lacoste was never dull. Strolling down the Rue Basse one morning, I was c
aught in a scene of mortal combat. Our cleaning lady, the sweet, white-haired Madame Colette, was leaning out of her front window, whacking the windshield of a car with her kitchen broom as it tried to maneuver down the lane. The driver and his wife were cowering in fear as Madame screamed insults like a longshoreman. Many locals believed that the narrow medieval streets should be taboo for all cars—except their own—but some tourists just wanted to drive everywhere. Suddenly, the wild-haired figure of Finn Mac Eion sprang from the bushes, and started yelling at Madame Colette in defense of the tourists’ civil rights.
When I returned fifteen minutes later, the argument was still raging, with Colette’s husband now involved. The tourists had long since driven off in terror.
It hadn’t taken me long to realize that Finn was ubiquitous in Lacoste, and an invaluable resource for gossip. At least twice a day he would pop up with his watering can from a secret garden or hail me from his balcony as I walked by, to update me on the latest skirmishes between the peasants and the seigneur, Cardin. By now, I’d also heard much of Finn’s colorful life story. I knew about his former drug addictions. About his AA meetings in Aix. About his youthful flirtations with the IRA, his prison terms and his escapes. (“Prison is a very interesting place, everyone should go there once!”) About his vendetta against Peter Mayle, who had apparently reneged on a promise to let Finn quote him in his gardening advertising (“I’m Irish, and the Irish never forget!”). About his meetings with celebrity visitors like Tom Stoppard and John Malkovich, and his friendship with the daughter of Albert Camus. The great French existentialist had lived in Loumarain and is now buried there in a quiet, flower-filled cemetery. In Finn’s study, I saw Camus’ battered old bicycle hanging on the wall, a gift from the daughter.
“I’m like the Marquis de Sade, I am,” Finn said. “Always in trouble. I wake up in war, I go to sleep in war. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I see injustice, I have to throw myself into the middle. I can’t help it. I wish I could, but I can’t.”
His pro-Cardin-Sade stance has made him a pariah in the village, he continued. His gardening van is broken into almost daily. His tools are stolen. The windows in his house had all been shattered by enemies. Finn even blamed the villagers for the recent drowning death of his dog, Bono Bono, in a local pond. “The poor creature was murdered,” he says. “No doubt about it.” Admittedly, Finn has a special talent for exasperating the locals. He printed a T-shirt with a photo of Cardin and a quote from Albert Einstein: GREAT FLIGHTS OF GENIUS WILL ALWAYS BE BATTLED BY MEDIOCRE MINDS. “Villagers come up to me in the street and ask, ‘Are you saying we’ve got mediocre minds?’ ” he roared with laughter. “Yes, I tell ’em. That’s exactly what I’m fucking saying!” He self-published a book about Lacoste, portraying the villagers as indolent provincial parasites. Now he had written a play, called Camel-lot, which seemed designed to provoke his neighbors to violence. In it, Pierre Cardin dies just as Lacoste is taken over by an influx of Arab immigrants. The newcomers fill the parking lot with camels, elect the village’s Algerian-born homeless man as mayor, and shatter the decades of Socialist control. The play ends as an Irish flag is raised over the Château Sade. It turns out that Cardin has bequeathed the castle to his most ardent supporter.
“So you get on well with Cardin?” I asked.
“Oh, he loves me,” Finn said. “He thinks I’m fucking brilliant.”
When I delicately inquired if he might get me a private audience, Finn grew more protective. “Everyone is after Cardin for something,” he apologized. “Some favor. Summer isn’t a good time. He’s surrounded by all his people. You’ll never get near him. Come back in the autumn! Things are quieter. You’ll have your chance then.”
I slunk out of Finn’s house, hoping nobody would rush up and denounce me. Staying neutral in Lacoste was a difficult business. Every time you stopped to chat in the street, someone was watching. Every time you chose one of the cafés, you were making a political statement. Like my ancestor André, I wanted to stay on good terms with the revolutionaries. It was hard not to admire the villagers’ stubborn resistance to change. It reminded me of the Groucho Marx song: “Whatever it is, I’m against it!” It felt doomed, but oddly heroic. Well, almost heroic. One artist I met, who had grown up in the village, declared that she was just waiting for the day the haute couturier keels over and croaks.
“I’ve bought a nice bottle of champagne to open when I get the news,” she declared. “Cardin’s in his eighties. He’ll die before I do. I’m waiting for the day!”
Things have clearly gone downhill for a feudal overlord, I reflected.
At first, the Marquis de Sade could do no wrong in Lacoste. When he’d arrived on his first official visit, the Costain yokels had danced and sung for the lovely woman on his arm: “Oh, the happy news … Our Marquis has married a young beauty. There she is! There she is!” The beauty turned out to be one of the most noted prostitutes in Paris, but the Costains took no offense. In fact, as the years passed, even the darkest rumors about Sade’s behavior could not dull the villagers’ admiration; such antics were expected of any red-blooded nobleman. Sade took care to procure his playmates from faraway towns, a gesture of consideration to the locals. The villagers, in return, warned him about police raids and assisted his white-knuckle escapes. But the idyll couldn’t last forever.
THE ZEN OF DUNGEONS
As for me, time was running out.
After another troubled sleep, I woke up cursing the marquis’ blighted village. Our two weeks there had almost slipped away. Cardin’s glam festival was ending soon, and after the last performance, Gérard confided, the seigneur would leave for his Cannes villa. Now, I asked myself, what on earth had I been doing all this time? Why hadn’t we just spent our days gamboling in the lavender fields of Provence like normal folk? Instead, I’d been lingering in Lacoste like a ghost, tormenting my family day in, day out.
When I opened the shutters, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Dark blue thunderclouds crackled over the Luberón. The heat wave was over.
“Come on,” I said to Les, “let’s go get a slap-up breakfast.”
We staggered through the downpour to the Café de Sade. Since the place was deserted, Gérard allowed us to sit in the VIP antechamber, a chic update of Louis XIV style. It was usually reserved for Cardin himself, but Gérard figured that he would also be sleeping in today. The menu was as expensive as the Ritz in Paris, but for the first time we ordered with wild-eyed abandon, demanding fresh-pressed juices, double espressos, pyramids of brioche, and every fruit compote known to man. After two weeks in the village, we were finally showing a proprietary air, relaxing in Cardin’s sumptuous mahogany armchairs like aristocrats on a sugar binge.
As the rain hammered down outside, Henry and Sam became strangely calm. They pulled out their art books and began drawing with a studious concentration. It might have been the barometric pressure, but we all breathed a sigh of relief.
Suddenly, Les was elbowing me in the ribs. Cardin had wandered into the café with his usual entourage. As they all shook the rain off, their eyes settled on us, in prime position. I almost choked on my apricot jam. Our table looked like a bomb had gone off.
“Uh-oh, he’s coming over,” Les whispered. “I guess we’d better clean up.” But there was no time.
I stood up to shake Cardin’s hand and introduce him to Les, stammering something apologetic for having taken over half his establishment.
“Not at all,” Cardin said approvingly as he surveyed the debris. “It is important to introduce the next generation to café life. Especially young artistes.”
He towered over Henry, and said, “Bonjour.”
“Hey,” Henry said, waving casually.
“Do you mind if I see your work?”
Henry shrugged and handed over his creation, a series of robots shooting lasers in intricate geometric patterns. Not quite da Vinci, but not bad, either.
“I like the use of black here …”
Pl
ease, guys, I thought, don’t say, “black like the devil’s bottom is black.”
“Wow,” Les exhaled, after Cardin had shuffled off. “So that’s the big man.”
It may have been my imagination, but it seemed that Cardin saw me a little differently now. I wasn’t just some lone nut stalking the village. I had progeny here—evoking a quiver of sympathy, perhaps. After all, Cardin had several nephews, now middle-aged, who occasionally swept through town in their sports cars.
About half an hour later, we saw Cardin in the street below. It had stopped raining for a moment, and he seemed to be waiting for something. For the first time, his entourage was nowhere to be seen. He was all alone.
“Now!” Les said. “You’ve got to go down there! I’ll take the boys.”
I jumped up, clutching my wad of historical documents. When I approached, he turned to me with eyebrows raised, and I blurted out my story—all about my ancestor who used to work for the Marquis and carry his letters and …
Cardin interrupted gently. “What would you like to do?”
I took a deep breath. “I want to see inside the château.”
He nodded thoughtfully and said, “Yes. It would be very interesting for you. Are you free at five p.m.?”
“Five? Today? What should I do?”
“Just knock on the door.”
THE DEN OF SIN
And so at five p.m. precisely, I crossed that forbidden metal walkway over the moat and pressed the buzzer. No response. I banged the iron door-knocker. A sepulchral silence. After ten more buzzes and bangs of increasing urgency, I looked around in exasperation. Was this some sort of practical joke?
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