Lever hasn’t found a “hidden” Sade–the Marquis didn’t hide much–but he brings the man closer to us than ever before, and sharpens our sense of his divided nature. The young Sade, born in l740, was raised in a castle complete with dungeons, his mother was mostly absent, his father and uncle were rakes, a playmate’s guardian was a de bauched murderer, and Jesuit schoolmasters may have initiated him into flagellation and sodomy. The boy’s imperiousness and fits of rage also anticipate what we know is to come–yet so does the affection and solicitude this future legendary woman-hater inspired in women. “I cleaned him up with almond oil because I like him to look good,” his father’s mistress wrote to his father when Sade was 13. “He will be as courageous as he is witty. Take good care of him.” Sade’s wife was his partner in crime even after he apparently seduced her sister; his last mistress stayed loyally with him for more than 20 years, even in his last home, the lunatic asylum at Charenton.
This down-at-the-heels aristocrat and bungling libertine made himself one of the most troubling figures in literary intellectual history by sheer quixotic persistence in exposing his brutal, excremental private fantasies to public view. “All creatures are born isolated and with no need of one another,” he wrote–and believed. What kept him from being a monster is that he needed us to know.
