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.
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| 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.
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