The Sinner's Grand Tour

by Tony Perrottet

  A gaggle of French tourists looked at me with bemused smiles. I snarled back. Then I heard the nerve-shattering strains of an electric guitar coming from the quarry. Of course. The festival finale was tonight. I stomped across the rocky plateau toward the stage. Security guards dashed up to intercept me, but this time I confidently squirmed past, declaring that I had an appointment with Monsieur Cardin. He was sitting in the empty amphitheater in a Panama hat, alongside one of his stubble-chinned assistants.

  “Ah, Monsieur, I hope you remember, we had an appointment at five?”

  “There is a rehearsal in progress,” said Cardin, looking puzzled.

  “But … to inspect the château?”

  “Why don’t you sit down?” Cardin said. “It would be very interesting for you.”

  I looked at the stage forlornly. The show was a musical fantasia. Men in First World War uniforms were pirouetting through the trenches. Women dressed as sexy French housemaids spun around a young nun. Gendarmes leaped exuberantly into the air. It was like a cross between Saving Private Ryan and Cirque du Soleil.

  “French theater is very nonlinear,” said Cardin’s colleague, Nicolas, a young director who, I hoped, had not noticed my appalled expression. “This style would never translate to Broadway, for example.”

  Cardin shook his head at the literal-mindedness of American audiences. “I commissioned this piece especially for the festival. Tonight is the world premiere.”

  “I have a ticket,” I sighed, inwardly vowing to tear it up.

  On went the rehearsal, but I was wilting. Sade was really getting his pound of flesh from me. Suddenly, the music stopped and Cardin stood up.

  “It’s over?” I said, trying not to sound thrilled.

  There was one last glitch—Cardin couldn’t find his château keys—but then, finally, we were crossing the moat together. This time, tourists took our photographs. The outer fortress door opened onto a grassy courtyard, where the castle’s inner portal stood. Cardin led the way into a pitch-dark room. As my eyes adjusted, I made out a foyer crowded with theatrical props and boxes of empty champagne bottles. But then Nicolas opened the door to the eighteenth-century entrance hall, and we were all blinded by the afternoon sun as it flooded through tall windows onto the raw stone walls.

  I almost dropped to my knees with relief.

  We have a very good idea of the château’s interior decor in its Sadistic heyday, thanks to an inventory of its contents made in the mid-1770s. The reception halls were crowded with marble statues Sade had bought as souvenirs in Italy, including a copy of a Roman Hermaphrodite, and hung with a fashionable selection of paintings on uplifting historical themes—Socrates in Athens, the death of Alexander the Great—plus one risqué portrait of Mademoiselle de Charolais, a comely Parisian debauchee who posed half-clad as a Franciscan monk. The upstairs bedrooms were lavish. Madame Sade’s boudoir was wallpapered with scenes of her native rolling Normandy hills, and her four-poster bed was hung with gold-trimmed blue wool. Sade’s chamber included the obligatory secret cabinet for his erotica. And there were many, many toilets. Sade was a hygiene freak—especially by the standards of the day—so the castle was equipped with fifteen portable commodes, six bidets, and a large copper bathtub with a state-of-the-art water heater. To Costains, the contraption must have seemed like an object from the beyond.

  Today, the château feels more like a storage space than a residence. I cast my eye over a haphazard array of Renaissance chests, marble busts, lamps made from animal horns, and stacked modern canvases. A thin layer of dust covered every surface.

  Cardin waved at one heavy table. “I found that at a Paris flea market,” he said, in an offhand way.

  I had seen books of Cardin’s avant-garde interiors from the 1970s, where whole buildings were gutted and transformed into adventurous creations. Being unable to completely redesign the château had perhaps thwarted his artistic imagination.

  We moved into a salon that was clearly in more regular use, with liqueur bottles scattered on a card table. Sade had designated this as his reception chamber, to take advantage of its sunny, south-facing aspect, and Cardin uses it for the same purpose today. The walls were now painted peach. (An Architectural Digest feature on the castle described the effect as “intimations of innocence.”) In one corner, I saw a famous pencil sketch of the marquis in his early twenties—famous because it is the only known portrait of him—looking lean, aquiline, and surprisingly delicate in profile.

  Cardin sank into one of the silk lounge chairs and pointed at an antique wooden sideboard. “That belonged to the marquis. Open it. You will find it interesting.”

  Inside were piles of ancient parchments. The first wad seemed to be legal documents, page after page of them. Who knows what was in there? I didn’t have time to even scan. There were also random scraps of paper that looked to be in the marquis’ own scrawl. I feverishly made out the word framboises, “strawberries.” “Pâté de foie gras.” “Good sausages.” “Marzipan.” Were they the Sade family shopping lists?

  Cardin interrupted my reverie to suggest that Nicolas show me the rest of the castle. I eagerly agreed. As we wandered up and down various stone staircases and into chambers littered with dusty artworks, I kept an eye out for a door to “the subterranean level,” my primary goal. Only half of the castle’s original forty-two rooms survive, but it still felt huge. One room was a makeshift library with copies of Sade’s novels. In the guest room, the bed was covered in plastic, and an empty coat rack stood in a corner.

  “Does Monsieur Cardin actually live here?” I asked Nicolas.

  “Well, he owns a château for every day of the year.” He smiled. “This one he uses when the summer festival is on.”

  At last we passed a stone staircase spiraling down into darkness. A thick chain lay across it, with a yellow sign blaring ACCESS INTERDIT, “access forbidden.” Oh no, I thought, the subterranean level is dangerous! They’ll never let me down there.

  “Let’s go up to the rooftop,” Nicolas said. I tried to look enthusiastic as we surveyed the 360-degree view of the Luberón. This terrace was once the castle’s third story, with bedrooms for servants. Only one wall had been salvaged, with wooden frames rotting in their windows. Magnifique, I muttered distractedly. Like a dream.

  View from the roof of the Château Sade.

  “I understand there was once a basement …?” I suggested.

  “Oh, yes,” Nicolas smiled, still captivated by the view.

  “Can we go down?” Without having to bother Monsieur Cardin, I thought.

  Nicolas looked at me uncertainly. “Well, I think so.”

  He examined the ACCESS INTERDIT sign and hesitantly moved aside the chain. Foot-worn spiral stairs coiled into the murk. Above our heads, the cantilevered bricks did look as though they might come crashing down at any minute.

  “Did you ever play a game called Donjons et Dragons?” I asked Nicolas. He looked at me blankly. “We should have brought wooden crosses.”

  About twenty feet down, our way was blocked by a large wooden door, which was kept shut by a heavy metal stake wedged into the floor. Before Nicolas could change his mind, I heaved it aside. The door creaked open into pitch black. A breath of stale, icy air hit our nostrils, and we both hovered uncertainly, unwilling to be the first to enter.

  “There should be a light switch on one wall,” Nicolas said uncertainly.

  I remembered I had one of the keychain plastic torches that Sam had won at the village carnival. It had a two-watt bulb the size of a pimple, but it would have to do. I shone a feeble beam into the void.

  So this was it, I exulted. The dungeon Sade.

  It was like stepping into deep space. Creeping forward a few inches at a time, I had a terrible premonition of being trapped in the darkness like a character out of Poe. I could see the floor was smooth, but the walls looked roughly hewn from raw, damp rock. Above my head, arches sagged unevenly. About thirty feet into the vault, I detected the remains of two anci
ent chambers, now little more than outlines in the wall. In Sade’s time, these had delineated two underground rooms, one a wine cellar, the other the château’s prison, for which Sade had the only key. Then I saw something that made me freeze. It looked like a rectangular stone trough, with a lingam-like protrusion in the center and four gutters running to a drain. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought it designed for human sacrifices.

  In the icy blackness, my imagination boiled. It was here that key scenes of the charming Little Girls Incident had played out for six weeks in the winter of 1774–75. Because the event was so thoroughly hushed up, the precise details of what the five virginal girls and lone boy “secretary” endured have been the subject of scholarly debate ever since. One French historian suggested that every night was “a witch’s Sabbath,” wherein the nymphets “offered their flanks to … gashing” (whipping) while the boy “had to play the role of flutist” (to Sade’s engorged member). Even the most sober depiction, culled by du Plessix Gray from the surviving letters and legal documents, suggests a relentless menu of “whips and cat-o’-nine tails; a great deal of sodomy, both homo and hetero; plenty of daisy chains,” regular dollops of “psychic terrorism,” and inspirational readings of pornographic literature from Sade’s library. The servants joined in with gusto. Madame de Sade aided and abetted. For the entire time, she made the château’s domestic affairs run smoothly, seduced, as ever, by her husband’s magnetic charm. Perhaps she simply felt freed while the children were away in Paris.

  It’s even possible that the innocents played along. With Sade, nothing is ever black and white. After the scenario was discovered and most of the girls were smuggled from the castle, one of them decided to stay on at the château as a scullery maid.

  I finally spotted the light switch, and stumbled over to flick it on. A set of industrial lights exploded on the roof, flooding the chamber in sickly yellow. Now the grotto was decidedly less forbidding. In fact, I could see that the floor had been freshly concreted. But what was that sinister sacrificial trough …?

  “Oh, it was used for stomping grapes,” said Nicolas. Sade wasn’t much of a drinker, he added, but had a soft spot for fruit liqueurs.

  I took a deep breath. I could do with a glass myself.

  The Little Girls Incident was the turning point for the Marquis. He was at first bemused by the scandal he had caused in Provence. “I’m being taken for the werewolf in these parts,” he wrote to Gaufridy in mocking tones. “Those poor little chicks with their terrified comments.” But as outrage began to brew about his domestic hiring habits, Sade realized it might be wise to lie low, and he slipped off to Italy for a clandestine sightseeing tour. But from then on, he was increasingly a hunted man.

  The “subterranean level” of the Château Sade.

  Even the love affair between Sade and his faithful villagers began to sour. The Costains tired of their master’s antics. And while Sade remained passionate about his estate, he began to see the peasants as nothing but irritants. “I’ve come to the conclusion that all Costains are beggars fit for the wheel,” he wrote in a 1776 letter (sounding not unlike a certain Irish gardener I’d met), “and one day I’ll surely prove my contempt for them.… I assure you that if they were to be roasted one after another, I’d furnish the kindling without batting an eyelash.” This outburst came after the father of one of his alleged victims had burst into the château and tried to murder him by firing a pistol inches from his chest. The shot misfired, and the culprit wandered Lacoste for days, drunk on local wine. Rather than forming a lynch mob to punish him, the villagers reacted with indifference. The marquis was forced to bribe his stalker to depart.

  And so nobody warned Sade on the night of the August 26, 1777, when ten policemen staged a four a.m. raid on the château and carried him away in shackles. He would never return. Workers managed to keep up the estate for the next fifteen years, but in 1792, a revolutionary mob sacked the castle. It was led not by Costains but by radicals from the nearby town of Apt, who broke down the door, slashed the oil paintings, destroyed his precious library, and tossed the furniture from the windows. Still, once the damage was done, the pragmatic Costains became resigned to getting what they could from the site. The records name one Pierre Perrottet, who pillaged the castle for stone by demolishing the pigeon loft and later removed a trough, a dinner table, and two nice water casks.

  Sade was devastated when he learned of the destruction. “No more Lacoste for me!” he wrote. “What a loss! It is beyond words.… I am in despair!” Broke, he was forced to sell the château.

  Which makes the sprouting of today’s Sade-inspired tourist industry in Lacoste seem all the more ironic. It’s tempting to think that the marquis has come back to take revenge on the peasantry for betraying him so cruelly—in the form of a billionaire capitalist, slowly calcifying their village.

  I did attend the final performance that night, and I wasn’t even bothered by the bumblebee costumes or dancing gendarmes. It was a full moon, and Maxim champagne was flowing like water. I was in such high spirits, I crashed the after-party at the Café de Sade. Gérard raised his eyebrows when I walked in to the private feast, until Cardin came over to shake my hand. “An excellent end to the arts festival,” we agreed.

  This was the way I should have behaved all along, I decided. With an air of noblesse, the world simply falls into place.

  The next morning, I couldn’t resist a little gloating, so I went to the Café de Sade to casually mention to a few naysayers that I’d managed to penetrate the château.

  “Well, congratulations,” said Jasper the sculptor, through gritted teeth. “Mission accomplished.”

  A few minutes later, Cardin arrived with a few friends and waved me over.

  “This is the historian from New York!”

  I was introduced to Cardin’s guests: the governor of Thessalonika (“Greece’s second city!”), a trade envoy from Russia (“We are proud to be doing business with the Cardin empire!”), the owner of a Marseille shipping company, and three comely blonde women with lacquered nails, dripping gold earrings, and pearly white smiles, who adroitly translated among Greek, French, Russian, and English. Cardin was delighted to learn that I had actually been born in Australia. “This table is international,” he rejoiced. “All we need now is someone from Africa!”

  Toasts were raised. Gifts offered. The Greek mayor presented Cardin with a marble replica of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, which I could already see gathering dust in the Château Sade. Then we all stood up for endless photographs. As I stood with my arm around a bevy of blonde translators, I saw Les trudging uphill toward the café. She had spent all morning packing.

  “What are you going to do now?” she asked. “Run for mayor?”

  Chapter Four

  SEVEN-HUNDRED-YEAR ITCH

  The Love Lives of Medieval Peasants

  It’s no secret why, in the history of sexuality, the upper classes get all the attention, while the huddled masses are pushed into the shadows. The problem is simply the dearth of source material. The voices that survive from the distant past tend to be those who had the education, time, and funds to record their intimate lives. The result is a little skewed—imagine if future historians reconstructed twenty-first-century mores with only the Hamptons magazine social pages to go on—and matters only get murkier the further back in history you explore. By the Middle Ages, we have an approximate idea of the romantic dramas of poets, nobles, and clerics who put quill to vellum, but the lower orders might as well be small burrowing animals as far as their mating habits are concerned. This absence has allowed a fantastical view of the medieval era to fester, riddled with weird and savage sexual practices. Peasant life, it has been assumed, revolved around the bovine tilling of the fields, eating month-old gruel for supper, and being raped by the local lord, not to mention some serious hygiene issues. If nothing else, we assume they were too riddled with plague, pestilence, and weeping sores to think much about getting it on.

/>   But a peculiar twist of fate has shed a glimmer of light on daily life in one forgotten village in the Pyrenees mountains, named Montaillou. Historians have managed to piece together the sex lives of a whole string of colorful personalities there, dashing our dour preconceptions of the medieval era. Instead, peasant life comes off as a type of comic soap opera with as much bed-hopping as a Pedro Almodóvar film.

  Montaillou’s improbable path to fame began on September 8, 1308, when soldiers of the Inquisition surrounded the village and arrested all 250 adult citizens. The raid began a long series of investigations that would eventually expose the villagers’ most private secrets. This isolated hamlet in the mountains of Languedoc was the last bastion of the heresy known as Catharism, which had maintained a subversive resistance against the official Catholic Church of Rome for over a century. A century earlier, the Papacy had ordered a brutal crusade to wipe out the heretics, and one great castle after another fell to the sword. But the Cathars had survived in isolated Montaillou, with many of the holy men, called Perfects, holding underground meetings and hiding out in barns and attics. The Church investigation reached its most intense phase after 1318, when an up-and-coming bishop named Jacques Fournier took the reins. A heavy-drinking, corpulent cleric who would later become pope, Fournier mixed his heretic-hunting with an almost anthropological interest in Montaillou’s social customs. He summoned villagers to his courtroom in the town of Pamiers and extracted much more detailed information than usual about their personal lives. (Contrary to its grisly image, the Church-run Inquisition could not use torture in its proceedings, but was obliged to hand witnesses over to the state if they needed to be roughed up or executed. Later, the Spanish Inquisition, which was overseen by the Crown in Madrid for political ends, was far more brutal.) Court scribes transcribed the witnesses’ declarations. Although it was not word for word—the peasants spoke in their native Occitan, which was then translated into Latin with some paraphrasing—the 325 folios of testimony constitute a unique transmission from the past.