As a parting gesture, he produced a bottle of Sade red wine named after one of the marquis’ most famous heroines, Justine, who suffers bloodcurdling abuse as she travels the world. ”Īs we spoke, Hugues pulled down from his bookshelf an array of distinctive heirlooms passed down from the attic trove-the marquis’ church prayer book, original plays (with notes in the margins), his annotated copy of Petrarch (the 14th-century Italian poet’s great love, Laura, may have been a member of the ancient Sade clan)-as well as an enormous rare volume of erotic Salvador Dali drawings inspired by Sade’s novels. He is the subject of university theses, and is studied by high-school students in the baccalauréat. There are conferences about him at the Sorbonne. His works are published by the most prestigious publishing house in France, Gallimard. “And why not? Today, he is considered a great philosopher. “We’re proud of the marquis,” Hugues said. The family’s embrace of their ancestor is such that Hugues named his eldest son, now 39, Donatien, a first in generations.
Sade’s work became widely available in the rebellious ’60s, and the door opened for the once-disgraced marquis to become France’s most decadent cultural hero, a frenzied aristocratic libertine who is now hailed by some as a literary genius and martyr for freedom. “How he wrote touching love letters to his wife, his two sons, his daughter.”įrom that day on, the Sade family dedicated itself to vindicating the memory of its forgotten ancestor, mounting a crusade that coincided with the loosening of censorship in France in the 1950s.
“The letters showed Sade the man, how he was a decent human being,” Hugues said. When they broke through, they found a jumble of dusty valises filled with documents hidden some time earlier by ashamed family members-the Marquis de Sade’s letters, papers, even shopping lists scrawled on scraps of parchment. Intrigued by Lely’s tale, Hugues’ excited parents, then young newlyweds, began to explore the rambling Condé castle, and soon discovered that a wall had been bricked up in the attic. The marquis might still recognize the winding alleyways of the Right Bank. To channel the feeling of an ancien régime aristocrat, the author stayed in a hotel in the leafy Place des Vosges in the Marais neighborhood of Paris. “It was as if there was an omertà (conspiracy of silence) against him! The family no longer even used the title marquis.” “For five generations, the marquis’ name was taboo in our family,” Hugues marveled. Hugues’ parents had not even heard of him until the late 1940s, when the historian Gilbert Lely turned up on their doorstep at the Condé-en-Brie castle, in the Champagne region east of Paris, looking for documents relating to the author. In fact, according to Hugues, his ancestor’s very existence was erased from the Sade family memory. The lurid works of Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, who lived from 1740 to 1814 and died in a mental asylum, were banned in France until 1957, and the diabolical aura around his literary output has lifted only gradually. Such marketing would have been unimaginable even a few years ago. “We are in the early stages, but the signs are promising.” He adored fine wine, chocolate, quail, pâté, all the delicacies of Provence.” Hugues said he is now in discussions with Victoria’s Secret for a line of Sade lingerie. “The Marquis de Sade was a great gourmand. He also offers scented candles and soon plans to add tapenade and meats. He started with Sade wine, from the family’s ancestral region of Provence, with the signature of the marquis on the label. “ Au contraire, people are fascinated to learn that the Marquis de Sade was not a fictional figure.”Įnthusiasm in France for his notorious 18th-century ancestor is now such that the count has begun his own line of luxury goods, Maison de Sade. The count says he has never encountered any problems because of the once-reviled Sade name. His elegant wife, Chantal, plied me with coffee and cake, as the count settled on the snow-white sofa, next to a table set out with copies of his ancestor’s novels-including the scabrous 120 Days of Sodom, scribbled by the marquis when he was imprisoned in the Bastille before the revolution. de Sade,” I was greeted warmly at the door by Hugues himself, an avuncular 66-year-old with a coiffed shoulder-length mop of hair, wearing a florid Gallic ensemble of blue blazer, red-pinstriped shirt, yellow trousers and bright orange loafers. After pressing a buzzer neatly labeled “H. The Count de Sade, the modern descendant of the Marquis de Sade, whose rabid erotic works inspired the term sadism for sexual cruelty, resides in a sunny and strikingly decorated apartment on a quiet residential street on the Right Bank of Paris.
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