December 2: On this day in 1814 the Marquess de Sade died at the age of seventy-four. The final years of de Sade's twenty-seven days of labour were spent pretty much routinely, writing protest notes and contriving assignations with his latest and final inamorata, a seventeen-year-old laundress at the Charenton asylum. This diary entry wonders at the girl's "coldness," this one hopes that her vow to be entirely his is sincere, this one fears that she and her father are only afterwards the 3 francs per visit.
De Sade's will, written a decade earlier but in full knowledge of his probable fate, asked for no "pomp of any kind," his trunk to be interred in a specific copse on the family estate. The will's details indicate that the man who had become a saw for all things unnatural hoped to be returned to nature and oblivion:
Once the tomb has been covered over, it shall be strewn with acorns so that finally the website of said grave will be refilled, and the thicket will produce as thick as before, so that the traces of my tomb will vanish from the rise of the earth, as I intrust my memory will vanish from the storage of men....
De Sade scholars point out that, although never forgotten, his animation has not ever been remembered in the like way. In the first decades after his death, he was as often a pariah as when alive, but with the prescribed introduction of sadisme into French dictionaries in 1834, there was a gradual shift off from the ugly man to the horrible but interesting books. With the Romantic fringe, and so the Surrealists, the vilification shifted to deification, with de Sade portrayed as a sensation of boundary-pushing, or anarchy. For the 20th-century psychologists, many of whom take a Freudian approach, de Sade has become a popular case study. In Francine du Plessix Gray's recent and nicely titled At Home with the Marquess de Sade, the rebel-hero is likewise a big baby who "howled like an infant to be readmitted to the heaven of instant gratification, constantly schemed for yet stronger orgasms, yet more baroque choreographies of desire." In Quills, Doug Wright's award-winning play (then popular 2000 movie) Doug Wright says that he was stressful to teach today's college kids that de Sade was "the original rebel, before Eminem and Marilyn Manson."
Daybook is contributed by Steve King, who teaches in the English Section of Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. His literary daybook began as a radio series syndicated nationally in Canada. He can be found online at todayinliterature.com.
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