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The
Marquis de Sade
A Life
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"...Mr. Schaeffer's book
is a welcome addition to the literature. It is both sophisticated and hardheaded
about Sade; it has a definitive
quality to it."
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--The New York Times
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| What's New:
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Sade adopts positions in
the extreme. He intends to shock, but there was a gentle and idealistic
side to him. You see where you stand when you read Sade. He puts the
bottom to literature, the worst that could be written, the worst that
could be imagined. It's good to know the enemy; knowing the bottom line
of human nature is a very good sign of health at the end of this
violent century.
--Sade biographer Neil Schaeffer,
in an interview with the NY Times
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| About
the
Marquis
de
Sade,
everyone
knows
too
much,
and
too
little.
Even
during
his
own
time,
the
myth
of
Sade
was growing, taking on a shape of
its own, larger than his own life, so that he came to live not just
behind the stone walls of the Bastille, but behind the equally
impenetrable mask of false ideas other people put on him. In the end,
he became a being not entirely of himself, but rather a kind of
collaborative construction, a being of myth, a force in the
consciousness of humanity, known by only one name: "Sade." |
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| The Life and Times |
Even stripped of exaggerations, Sade's real life was as
dramatic and as tragic as a cautionary tale. Born to an ancient and
noble house, he was married (against his wishes) to a middle-class
heiress for money, caused scandals with prostitutes and with his
sister-in-law, thus enraging his mother-in-law, who had him imprisoned
under a lettre de cachet for 14 years until the Revolution
freed him. Amphibian, protean, charming, the ex-marquis became a
Revolutionary, miraculously escaping the guillotine during the Terror,
only to be arrested later for publishing his erotic novels. He spent
his final 12 years in the insane asylum at Charenton, where he caused
another scandal by directing plays using inmates and professional
actors. He died there in 1814, virtually in the arms of his teenage
mistress.
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| The
Prison
Letters |
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"Either kill me or take me as
I
am, because I'll be damned
if I ever change..."
Sade,
from a letter to his wife, written in
prison, November 1783
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| Sade was incarcerated for 14 years
without trial before being freed by the French Revolution. In that time
he wrote hundreds of letters to his wife. In researching The
Marquis de Sade: A Life, Neil Schaeffer translated hundreds of
letters, many of which have never before appeared in English. Read them here, or receive a brand new
translation by email each week. |
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The Works
"He explored the bottom line of human nature, the worst imaginable; he
is modern because any writer who explores the depths of human nature is
modern. He has Norman Mailer's best attack style, so excessive and
extreme, and Mailer is the best satirist since Twain. Sade adopts
positions in the extreme. He intends to shock, but there was a gentle
and idealistic side to him. You see where you stand when you read Sade." |
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--Sade biographer Neil
Schaeffer,
in an interview with the NY Times
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Home | Life & Times | Prison Letters | Bibliography | About Neil Schaeffer
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