The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- Cochons, Defloration-Mania, and the City of Light -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 15)

Ironically, despite the current bondage boom, S&M clubs are virtually nonexistent in the land of the Marquis.

So I've decided to go to Paris in search of a latter-day Sade—or at least a real, live, squealing cochon (slang for 'pervert').

The City of Light sealed its illicit reputation in the century after the Marquis' death, when pornography became mass market and consumerism fueled the notion that both people and goods could be disposable.

The English had popularized the term 'shopping' during the Marquis' lifetime, while 'defloration-mania'—the sale of virgins—became the rage on both sides of the Channel.

In 1855, a French playwright came up with a new term for the decadent 'half world' that thrived beyond the bounds of prudish 'respectable' society.

Fast-forward to the present, though, and le demimonde could easily describe tout le monde.

In keeping with stereotypes, sex and swinging clubs are as common as poodle muck in Paris, but surprisingly there's only one venue devoted to BDSM.

Cris et Chuchotements—'Cries and Whispers'—is tucked away where the red-light spillover from the Pigalle meets the chi-chi respectability of the seventeenth arrondissement.

Don't believe the hype:
They wish they were this sexy

In fact, the S&M site sits right behind the local town hall and just down the street from a police station and an elementary school.

The kids' laughter is echoing down the street as I approach the dungeonesque door, marked with a flickering candle encased in a glass. It seems fitting that the nearest Metro stop is Rome.

Inside, the entrance is predictably dark, contrasting with the flash of white flesh that greets me.

A chubby blonde is peeling off the last of her street clothes to squeeze into something a little less comfortable, and from what I've seen (without wanting to), I reckon she's at that age just before the physical slide turns into an avalanche.

The guy who takes my coat, on the other hand, is a buff gym bunny who I've been assured is a serious S&M player, despite the friendly lettering on his T-shirt—Philippe—and his codename—Le Marquis Noir—which probably sounds more menacing if you twirl a fake moustache and pronounce it with a villainous stage cackle:

The Marquis Nwah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- The Real-Life Exploitation of 'Emmanuelle' -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 14)

Interestingly, Emmanuelle's liberating degradation—or degrading liberation—parallels that of the film's button-nosed star, who was actually Dutch.

Like most female porn pioneers, Silvia Kristel wound up a casualty of the industry, thanks to drink, drugs and bad decisions.

In her autobiography, she writes that she wanted 'a seminal film'—she certainly got that—'a springboard that would fling wide the door to the movies and the life of my dreams.'

And X has never been the same since...

Her first inkling that it wasn't going to turn out that way came when she was about to fake-fellate an actor and forgot her lines.

'Say whatever you like,' the director told her. 'You'll be dubbed anyway.'

Kristel also clashed with Just Jaeckin on the rape scene that's part of Emmanuelle's 'education;' she says she insisted on pulling faces to make it look unpleasant rather than erotic.

'But it was very hard to explain that to a male director. It was a very humiliating scene, and very difficult to me.'

Mind you, she may have got off lightly.

Jaeckin had lobbied hard to cast the skinny actress in the first place. 'I have a hunch,' he told Yves. 'She's so pure. Pure like her name—Kristel. You could rub shit on her face and she'd look clean.'

But why on earth would you want to? 

To this day, Rousset-Rouard defends Emmanuelle as an example of female lib, arguing that the source novel was reputedly penned by a woman.

At the same time, he somewhat paradoxically appears bemused by the cinema that films like Emmanuelle helped beget.

'I never produced pornographic movies, and I never produced violent movies. Today there are too many violent pictures, and it's difficult to do a movie without a rape scene or something like that. It's awful. But curiously, in the imagination of the people, Emmanuelle is probably much more important than a lot of pictures today, and probably more… pornographic.'

While Yves went on to produce Emmanuelles II and III, Jaeckin directed The Story of O, based on the 1950s novel about a woman who willingly becomes an S&M slave.

The author later admitted that she wrote it to please her Sade-obsessed man.

'I was not interested at all in that,' Yves sniffs. 'Because Emmanuelle is the freedom of a woman. The Story of O is completely the contrary. L'histoire de O is a story of slavery. Emmanuelle is a story of freedom—of liberty of a woman!'

'So you've never been tempted to film the story of the Marquis de Sade?'

He looks appalled.

'No!'

* * *

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- Emmanuelle and a Most Awkward Threesome -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 13)

Funnily enough, Biblical themes are one of the few titular permutations the franchise hasn't exploited, even after seven films, countless ripoffs and an ever-copulating number of pay-TV spin-offs.

For if Debbie mainly did Dallas, Emmanuelle has done the world and then some (viz: Emmanuelle in Space, Emmanuelle vs. Dracula and Emmanuelle Goes to Hell).

In case you're not one of the 300 million or so who've seen the 1974 original (circa 650 million, counting videos and DVDs), Emmanuelle is the story of an ingénue's induction into the decadent world of French expats in Bangkok.

At the time, the movie was billed as a tale of a young wife's sexual liberation, though that claim seems disingenuous in extremis when you watch it now.

If anything, the film is just a groovy Seventies spin on a theme that was hoary even back in Sade's day: the joy of corrupting innocence, particularly if it leaves the corrupted gagging for more.

SUPER MARIO

In the movie, Emmanuelle is initially repulsed by the predatory men and women around her, but she eventually succumbs to her peers, has a lesbian fling and—at her husband's urging—puts herself in the hands of the local sexpert, a super-experienced roué called Mario (played by the washed-up matinee idol, Alain Cuny, who grimaces throughout as if he's perfected the art of holding his nose without actually touching it).

As he smokes in the shadows and spouts platitudes, Mario offers his protégée up to be fondled by a drunk soldier, raped in an opium den and shagged from behind by a Thai kickboxer—all in the same night.

Upon awakening, Emmanuelle declares in a ludicrously girlish voice: 'You know how I feel? Like when I became a grown woman at the age of twelve. Only I'm a real woman now. I spit on those others—those who think sex is a dirty word! Yes, now I am a woman!'

At which point, Super Mario sweeps her into his arms, takes her back to his place, gets her tarted up, and—with the help of his houseboy—has the most awkward threesome ever committed to celluloid.

Roll credits.

Roger Ebert -- what were you thinking?

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- 'Emmanuelle: God Is With Me' -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 12)

'I produced many other very important pictures in France—cult pictures,' he continues. 'Emmanuelle is over. That does not interest me anymore.'

At first, I wonder if his reluctance doesn't have to do with his new career: he's now a politician, and a conservative one at that.

Currently the mayor of Menerbes, the village that Peter Mayle made famous, he was previously a member of Parliament.

Anywhere else, of course, having a skin-flick on your resume—as well as a cult film called Santa Claus Is a Shit (Le pere noel est une ordure)—might present something of a problem for a politico.

But in France, there's no shame in having created one of the most famous erotic films in history.

In fact, Rousset-Rouard reckons his box office success helped him at the ballot box.

One time, on a visit to Japan with Chirac, he told the former president: 'You know, Jacques, I've won more voters with Emmanuelle than you have.'

The mayor's office is festooned with photos of him and dignitaries from around the world, including the Emperor and Empress of Japan, and Chirac and his successor, Sarkozy.

Despite their political differences, Yves claims he's good friends with both, and I don't doubt it.

With his long nose and crafty eyes, there's something vulpine about Yves; he could flatter the red off a rose. 

With some blandishments of my own, though, I manage to get the old fox talking about Emmanuelle, and it turns out he is indeed proud of having produced one of the most successful French films of all time.

It happened like this: Yves was casting around in the Seventies for a project that would enable him to leap from advertising to feature films.

While flying to New York, he got talking to a guy who said: 'You must do Emmanuelle.'

'I had never read the book,' he admits.

When he got back to France, he met with the publisher, who tried to discourage him, telling him the film rights to the 1959 novel were renewed every year by a big production firm.

Yves asked the man to check just in case, and the publisher was shocked to find that the option had actually lapsed fifteen days earlier—'when I was on the flight,' Yves beams triumphantly.

'At that moment, I said, Emmanuelle: God is With Me.'

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- The Man Who Made Emmanuelle -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 11)

That said, reading Sade for the philosophy is like watching porn flicks for insights into life in modern California.

The Marquis owes his reputation as a philosophe mainly to the fact that his work was banned for decades and rediscovered just as sexology was taking off.

For years, the manuscript of 120 Days of Sodom and Gomorrah was thought to have been lost during the Storming of the Bastille in July 1789.

It wasn't until over a century later that one of the pioneers of sex studies, Dr. Iwan Bloch, managed to track it down and publish the first limited edition of the book—in German—in 1904.

And now a transplanted Irishman is hoping to do his own bit for the Marquis' myth here in his terre native.

Finn wants to open a shop that would highlight Sade's work and philosophy.

'But I want to do it non-profit-making. I want to do it for de Sade. I know sex sells and all that, but I don't want to get into this fetish-sadomasochism stuff because that shows a bad side to him. I think there's a whole other side to de Sade.'

* * *

Ever since the troubadours, the nobles of Provence have had a reputation for churning out porn, and one notable absence at the premiere of Sade is a former pornographer himself.

Of course, Yves Rousset-Rouard balks at this description, but as the producer of Emmanuelle (plus two sequels) and the founder of the world's first Corkscrew Museum, you can't help but suspect he's obsessed with screwing.

Inevitably, the collection of tire-bouchons on his vineyard five miles from Lacoste includes some naughty bits, such as a range of nineteenth-century 'erotic' corkscrews endowed with spread-eagle handles and male and female genitalia.

Nevertheless, Rousset-Rouard is reluctant to talk about his more famous world first: the softcore crossover that made erotica mainstream.

'I produced 35 movies in my life, and just three Emmanuelles,' he protests.

In case you're counting, that's three more than Spielberg, the Weinstein brothers, or Yves' friend, Ridley Scott.

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- Sadism: The Most 'Natural' Way to Live -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 10)

When the parents of four of the girls claimed that their children had been abducted, the Marquis' wife spirited them away to hide the signs of her husband's abuse.

One of the girls chose to continue serving the Sades, but three others were packed off to convents (the Marquis' wife told the nuns not to believe their confessions), and the most traumatized teenager was sent to be guarded by the Marquis' uncle.

Seeing that he was a priest, the raving girl tried to confide in him; little did she know that the Abbé de Sade—an expert on the troubadours—was almost as bad as his nephew: rumor had it he'd also recently kidnapped a girl from her parents.

But the cover-up didn't end there.

AN ABUSIVE FAMILY TREE?

In the spring of 1775, Sade's chambermaid, Nanon, had a child and claimed he was the father (which may very well have been a lie).

Just in case, to prevent her from joining forces with the parents of the abused girls, the Marquis' wife framed her for stealing some silver and succeeded in getting her locked up.

Nanon didn't find out until months later that her newborn had died while she was in prison.

Which makes me wonder: just as the Marquis' descendants are still kicking around—his great-great grandson lives in the Loire Valley—it's feasible that the victims of his victims might have survived down the ages, forming a kind of abusive family tree.

If it's true that many pedophiles have been victims themselves, and some of Sade's victims went on to abuse more than one child each, and their victims did the same, then even allowing for war, disease and margin of error, it's possible that someone somewhere is being abused now because of what took place in Lacoste less than eight generations ago.

Maybe that's why Sade gets so little publicity here.

Not surprisingly, Finn doesn't like to talk much about his hero's sex crimes, preferring to paint him as an important figure in the history of thought.

And to a certain extent, he's got a point.

For example, Sade mocked Rousseau and other Enlightenment thinkers for idealizing Nature.

Decades before Darwin, the Marquis preached that Nature was cruel, not kind; in his brutally reductive view, the most 'natural' way to live was to revel in Nature's cruelty.

A sculpture on the grounds of the Marquis de Sade's castle,
part of Pierre Cardin's Festival de Lacoste
(with a not-so-ghostly specter in the foreground)

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- The Marquis de Sade and 'The Little Girls' Episode' -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 9)

Once he finally started writing porn in prison (having failed as a playwright), the Marquis' work was as extreme as it was prolific.

To this day, Sade's writings are unsurpassed in their configurations of cruelty.

Here's a sample passage from Justine, an underground bestseller that Sade publicly disowned in his craving for respectability:

'The Count sits down again, and, turning his attention to (two young boys), he now obliges them to suck each other, and now he arranges them in such a way that while he sucks one, the other sucks him, and now again the one he sucked first brings round his mouth to render the same service to him by whom he was sucked.'

The only thing that might be more outrageous today would be pedo-fiction written by a convicted child molester.

As it happens, Finn assures me, the Marquis loved children.

He guides me along the terrace and points to some stone buildings knotted around a farmhouse down in the valley.

'That was the old stables of the Marquis de Sade. There's a little headstone down there, and the rumor was that the Marquis killed somebody,' Finn says.

'But the true story is that the Marquis had an affair with one of his chambermaids, and she got pregnant. So the Marquis' wife shipped her down there, and the baby was stillborn and buried. So it's very easy to twist something.'

 That story rings a bell.

'Is that part of the "Little Girls' Episode"?' I ask.

'It could've been.' He eyes me warily, as if to say, You know about that?

Unfortunately, I do.

By now you'll have gathered that I'm not the Marquis' biggest fan, mainly because of the twisted incident his apologists refer to as 'The Little Girls' Episode.'

In the interlude before he was captured, the Marquis hid out at Lacoste while his wife procured a houseful of teenaged servants for his amusement.

With the help of their chambermaid, the Sades hired one boy and five girls, all around fifteen years old and from far enough away to prevent them running back to their parents.

No one knows exactly what happened during those six weeks starting in December 1774, but based on Sade's previous abuses, it's not hard to imagine.

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- The Marquis de Sade and Intensified Farts -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 8)

However, Sade's third outrage earned him a death sentence.

In the summer of 1772, the thirty-two-year-old set off from Lacoste for Marseille with his valet and a crystal box of candies made from Spanish fly.

After finding four willing young women for both him and his servant to enjoy, the Marquis ordered the girls to eat the aphrodisiacs.

Much beating, whipping, wanking, shagging and buggery ensued.

At the high (or low) point of the session, the Marquis sodomized the youngest girl while being simultaneously buggered by his valet and ordering one of the other women to watch.

Long story short, some of the girls got sick from the candies—Spanish fly is toxic in large amounts—and accused the Marquis of poisoning them.

 In his defense, he claimed he simply wanted to intensify their farts.

One of the whores testified that he'd 'stuck his nose between her buttocks so as to inhale her wind.'

As you do.

Even weirder, there are not one but two words for the fetish:
flatuphilia and eproctophilia

Still, Sade's defenders reckon his worst excesses were exaggerated.

'He's been wronged by history,' Finn maintains, wearing the violence-shy expression of a man who wouldn't hurt a fly, let alone make a woman eat one.

Faced with the death penalty, Sade went on the run, fleeing to Venice (Titian was one of his favorite painters) and later Naples and Rome, where he got in touch with a debauched cardinal who was a friend of Casanova's.

Sade's companion for part of the journey was his sister-in-law, a convent girl who he'd also seduced.

A VERY MODERN SEXUAL PREDATOR

Meanwhile, a provincial court in France sentenced him to be executed not once but twice—decapitated for poisoning and burned for sodomy.

Sade was eventually caught but never killed for his crimes, thanks to his pedigree.

Instead, he was locked up for most of the rest of his life, rejected even by veteran debauchees like his father—not so much for what he'd done as how he'd done it, making him a very modern sexual predator.

In our secular age, for instance, it may be hard to fully comprehend the psychological torment that Sade would have inflicted by forcing his victims to blaspheme.

Even for Catholic prostitutes today, selling your body to survive is a forgivable transgression; desecrating the sacrament would seem an unpardonable sin.

Likewise, in Sade's day, it wasn't unusual for well-heeled men to get carried away with their sexual hijinks.

When they did, though, they usually relied on their fellow aristocrats to prevent them from going too far—or help cover up the evidence if it was too late. That's why they partied in groups.

What made the friendless Marquis different was the cold, calculating way in which he carried out his sexual fantasies; even worse, he executed them alone (the whores and servants on hand didn't count).

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- A Poor Little Aristocrat -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 7)

However, Finn's relativism echoes that of Sade's defenders.

His most acclaimed biographer, Francine du Plessix Gray, spends the first sixty pages of At Home with the Marquis de Sade creating a sympathetic portrait of her subject: a poor little aristocrat with a rich pedigree (one ancestor was Petrarch's muse)… neglected by his frigid mother and bisexual father (they didn't even attend his baptism)… fobbed off on his uncle, a womanizing priest in Provence (who loved the troubadours)… spoiled rotten by his relatives… a brave but laddish officer… and finally married off to a plain wife for money... comme ci, comme ça—pretty much the routine for an eighteenth-century aristo.

Next thing you know, though, little Donatien-Alphonse-Francoise de Sade is tormenting a pregnant prostitute in a rented house outside Paris, boasting about cramming communion wafers up a woman's holiest of holies and wanking into a chalice while blaspheming the Virgin as a 'bugger,' God the Father as a 'motherfucker' and shouting 'If thou art God, avenge thyself!'

That bit of funmaking earned Sade three weeks in the clink in 1763.

Five years later, after much infidelity interspersed with marital bliss (including a few children), Sade was back in Paris, this time picking up a part-timer and taking her to a little house where he proceeded to masturbate while flogging her with a bundle of cane and a cat-o-nine tails; if she refused, he told her, he'd kill her and bury her in the garden.

During a break, the prostitute tied the bedsheets together and escaped out the window to report him to the police.

Glamorized misogyny:
sexing up Sade's crimes

The crime scandalized the nation, not least because he'd done all this on Easter Sunday, seemingly mocking the flagellation of Christ.

Without any aristocratic friends to protect him, Sade's whipping of the prostitute turned him into a whipping boy for the bourgeoisie.

Even so, he spent only seven months in jail.

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- 'The Last Slave of the Marquis de Sade' -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 6)

Like most of its neighbors in this fractious territory, Lacoste is built on a hill for self-defense and hewn from a tawny stone that glows in the sunshine, its dwellings protected from the elements by tile roofs and timber shutters.

Mysteriously, though, it's escaped the gentrification that's transformed its immediate rivals.

Whereas Bonnieux and Menerbes boast upmarket shops and restaurants, barely 200 souls live in Lacoste—nearly half of them outsiders—and its few streets are little more than petrified pathways winding down the hillside.

Even with the festival under way, Lacoste seems all but deserted.

As for Sadeian touches, there is a gay restaurant called 'Loofoc,' but that refers to a 'seal' rather than cottaging, and the inevitable Café de Sade is just a drab café-cum-newsagents.

'Am I missing something?' I ask Finn.

He assures me there are no secret S&M rings in the village; they don't even get many BDSM pilgrims here. 'Sade's not marketed at all.'

As a pacifist vegetarian and recovering alcoholic, he's probably the least likely defender of sadism you could find.

However, just as Sade's wife stuck by him for years, aiding and abetting him, you can't help but wonder if the Marquis appeals to his admirers' inner masochist.

The local schoolteacher who first started restoring the chateau—his widow passed it on to Cardin—used to claim he was 'the last slave of the Marquis de Sade.'

Now that dubious honor seems to have been passed to an Irish gardener whose scraggly cap of black curls makes him look like a friendly labradoodle.

Or maybe I've got Finn all wrong.

'A few of the things that brought Sade down was that he went into a church and took a Eucharist and a chalice,' he explains nonchalantly.

'And he put the Eucharist in a woman's vagina and had sex with her and challenged God. He also masturbated into the chalice. But so what? Big deal. Nowadays, people are going into churches all over the world and stealing stuff and breaking them.'

Somehow that doesn't seem like the same thing at all.

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- So Who's This Jesus Geezer? -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 4)

Facetiousness aside, the fact that a former prima ballerina of the Paris Opera Ballet can mount a choreographed bondage-fest out in the sticks—with the blessing of a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts—shows just how far BDSM culture has penetrated the mainstream.

The perversions of yore have become commonplace: for all I know, half the provincials in this Provençal audience are wearing nipple rings.

Artistically, though, there's nothing exciting about Sade, the dance version.

At one point, a witless murder inspires the inmates to hang the long-haired deceased a la Crucifixion (minus the traditional loincloth)—a scene that would be a lot more shocking if Europe weren't a couple of generations away from schoolchildren asking in art history: 'So who's this Jesus geezer, then?'

It's all a bit passé.

Like most modern takes on Sade the Legend, though, the ballet doesn't reflect the deeply repugnant reality that was Sade the Man.

Standing only five-foot-two, the real-life aristo was pint-sized even by the vertically challenged standards of his day.

And although handsome in his youth, by the time he turned to porn in his late forties he was so fat from guzzling wine and sweets in jail that he could hardly dress himself, let alone walk.

Though no portraits of the Marquis survive from his porn years,
Man Ray was probably right in imagining him like this...

...rather than this (a portrait of Sade in his twenties,
before he turned to writing porn)

Still, that didn't stop him from trying to keep up appearances.

Having already impoverished his wife, he continued to demand silk hair ribbons, face powder by the pound and custom-made dildos so he could sodomize himself—as well as plenty of ointment to soothe his hemorrhoids.

No wonder the legendary Marquis actually had to pay most of the people he ever slept with.

Somehow, though, the cynical, one-handed musings of this gluttonous powder puff not only presaged modern views on sexuality but also shaped them, reinforcing France as the ne plus ultra of all things sexy.

* * *

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- Pierre Cardin: The New Master of the Marquis' Domain -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 3)

Ensconced in their Saturday-night best, the members of the mostly middle-aged audience watch it all stern-faced and stoically, taking their high culture like other people take medicine, convinced it must be good for them because it's been sanctioned from on high—in this case, literally: rumor has it that the new master of the Marquis' domain helicopters in from the capital.

Now well into his eighties, Cardin seems to have reached the stage in life where he doesn't care about keeping up appearances.

Naturally, he still sports his black glasses and navy-blue blazers, and his sneakers are Umbro this year rather than Nike, but what's left of his hair has been clipped short—not long and wavy—and he hasn't bothered shaving.

In other words, the fashion billionaire looks like an old man who's lived long enough to be at ease with himself, pushing a large belly in front of him like a wheelbarrow.

When I met him, Pierre Cardin looked more like this

than this:

In fact, Lena and I bumped into him yesterday without recognizing him, and I spoke with him earlier this evening at a soiree hosted by SCAD, the American art college.

On a garden terrace overlooking the Luberon valley, he admitted he'd never imagined owning the Marquis de Sade's castle—or Casanova's old haunt in Venice, for that matter.

'It's very funny that I live in Casanova's villa and the Marquis de Sade's,' he mused. 'I'm Italian, you know—'

—actually, I didn't—

'I'm Venetian, and I know Florence, and for me this area of France has the same atmosphere as Florence.'

After restoring the chateau's main tower, the new lord of Lacoste turned the adjoining quarry into a magnificent amphitheatre to host his month-long Festival de Lacoste.

'Last year I said to Pietra: "Why don't you imagine what happened to the Marquis de Sade when he was in the hospital with crazy people?"' he recalled, adding that he was more than happy with the result.

'It's extraordinary. Very fantastic—you'll enjoy it.'

Well, call me a philistine, but after the initial buzz of being in situ wears off, the only coherent theme I can discern from the overly long show is that crazy people are—wait for it—crazy. (If surprisingly sexy.)

By the end, the comely ensemble of three men and four women have stripped off to dance semi if not fully naked.

Who knew lunatics could be so hot?

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- Now That's What I Call Culture -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 2)

But of course they're au fait with sadism.

For if the Spanish Inquisition proved there was nothing new about fetishizing cruelty, it took a French aristocrat to give it a good name.

The term sadisme swaggered into Western civilization around 1834, twenty years after the death of its namesake, a pornographer with literary pretensions who was reviled in his own time but later venerated as 'the Divine Marquis.'

From the age of twenty-three, the French government locked the Marquis de Sade up for most of his adult life, inadvertently gifting him the time and boredom to crank out such masturbatory epics as 120 Days of Sodom and Gomorrah (penned in the Bastille just before the Revolution).

True to cliché, there's plenty of sex in Sade the ballet.

TITILLATING THE 21ST CENTURY

Like practically every other take on the man who married Madame Slap with Monsieur Tickle, the dance version is based on the porno-philosopher's last years, locked up in a mental hospital on the orders of Napoleon.

To satisfy his theatrical urges, Sade was allowed to produce plays starring himself and his fellow inmates—a case of a 'madman' running an asylum.

And at first, The Theatre of Fools is interesting enough, not least because it features one of France's most beautiful ballerinas, Marie-Claude Pietragalla.

Her small troupe from Paris starts out in tight-fitting asylum-wear—imagine if Danskin did straitjackets—performing poignantly disjointed pas de deux.

This being art, though—specifically, French art of the titillated 21st century—it's only a matter of minutes before the first dildo rears its ugly—well, you know—and the dancers start getting their breasts out.

Now that's what I call culture.

Over the next two hours (sadistically sans intermission), most of the major perversions get a look in, along with a few minor ones: there's lots of bondage gear, riding crops, chains and black leather, some cross-dressing, simulated group sex, rape and sodomy with a smattering of cannibalism and even a bit of ponyboy training, all amid much angsty yammering and stagey madness.

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- From Le Marquis to Le Drilldo -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 1)

Chapter Seven
FROM LE MARQUIS TO LE DRILLDO
Porn and Perversion in Paris and Provence

'How delicious to corrupt, to stifle all semblances of virtue and religion in that young heart!'

--The Marquis de Sade, on deflowering a fifteen-year-old, 

in Philosophy in the Bedroom, 1795

The prima ballerina has her breasts out, a topless girl's writhing in a cage, a gimp is crawling around on all fours, and a man in a skirt is marching back and forth with a bucket on his head—while another dancer lies naked in a tin bathtub and fake blood drips down the back wall of the stage.

Bienvenue to the world premiere of Sade: The Theatre of Fools or, as I like to think of it, Everybody Spank Now!—billed as the first attempt to tell the story of the infamous marquis through the medium of dance.

But what makes this twist on the myth unique is its setting.

Rather than the jaded confines of a Parisian theatre, we're in a state-of-the-art amphitheatre out in the clear country air of Provence, on the very grounds of the castle where the ignobleman staged his own theatrical extravaganzas—and committed his most unpardonable crimes.

Poster for Sade
with the Marquis' castle in the background

As if that weren't remarkable enough, our host for this evening is Pierre Cardin, the flesh-and-blood brand name who bought the Marquis de Sade's chateau and now owns much of the surrounding hilltop village of Lacoste.

Bizarrely, the rest of the hamlet is roughly divided between natives—some families date back to Sade's time—and New Worlders.

Of all the places in Europe, America's biggest art college (the Savannah College of Art and Design), based in good-ole-boy Georgia, sends its students here for, um, inspiration.

According to one SCAD professor, not all of them know what they're getting into.

'Some of the students don't even know who the Marquis de Sade is when they come here.'