Who was the Marquis de Sade?
Was he a sadist, a lecher, a madman, or what? In Quills, directed by Philip Kaufman as an adaptation of Doug Wrights stage play, we encounter the Marquis (played by Geoffrey Rush), whose actual name was Comte Donatien Alphonse Franois de Sade, in Charenton Asylum, compulsively writing ribald stories. (Although originally imprisoned for sodomy and kidnapping, he was among those released from the Bastille by the masses of the French Revolution in 1789, but then returned to confinement in 1804, his family preferring an insane asylum to prison for him.) While incarcerated, his stories were smuggled out with the assistance of a laundress named Madeleine (played by Kate Winslet), who in turn was in love with him, albeit platonically. The stories were, of course, unacceptable to the ruling authorities, based on Christian morality, so he was progressively punished more and more. The first sanction was to remove his writing instruments, the quills. Next, after he used chicken bones with wine to
The Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) was a French aristocrat, writer, and historian.He suffered from a mental disorder which led him to deliberately inflict pain on his servants; many of his written works detail bizarre sexual fantasies along these lines.Consequently, he spent long periods of time in various asylums. The word ‘sadism’ – the enjoyment of inflicting physical pain and suffering on people for the pleasure it gives the perpetrator – is derived from his name.
Why did his name give us the word ‘sadism’? The Marquis de Sade was a naughty aristocrat and libertine who got up to all sorts of weird sexual practices. In the 1770s he lived at Lacoste castle and enjoyed mass orgies, also finding time to have an affair with his wife’s sister while she was staying here. But he was also a notable writer, of both pornographic and philosophical works. Sade was an extreme free spirit, who saw the pursuit of pleasure as the highest calling, regardless of morality or laws. This ensured long periods of incarceration for him. When he wasn’t locked up or on the run he was here in Lacoste, the Marquis de Sade’s extreme lifestyle dominating the village, just as his castle does today.
