The sixties were years of sexual revolution, but doesn’t “revolution” imply a rotation of three-hundred-and-sixty degrees? In other words, you’re back where you started?

As the decade progressed, second-wave feminists began to suspect they were agitating gender dynamics without actually changing them. Did the pill just enable men to have destructive fuck-and-chuck relationships? Would no-fault divorce be taken advantage of by all-fault men? Was pornography another avenue for the exploitation of women? Would all of this social turbulence settle with Tarzan still on top and Jane still at the bottom?

Consider Hugh Hefner, and consider Playboy. In the 50s and 60s, Hef cultivated an image as a progressive titan, publishing fearlessly about race and sex and drugs. His first interview was of Miles Davis. His lithographic abysses of skin were sold as a form of female sexual liberation.

Playboy Enterprises operated a line of gentleman’s clubs, which hired attractive female help known as “bunnies”. Advertisements were everywhere: as a bunny, you would travel the world, meet celebrities, and earn up to “$200-$300 a week”—a fantastic sum for a young woman with no qualifications in the sixties. Gloria Steinem (then a freelance writer) became curious about the reality of a bunny’s life, and applied for a job at one of Hef’s clubs.

Steinem’s adventures down the rabbit hole were published in the the May and June 1963 issues of Show. They are now regarded as early examples “New Journalism”, personal accounts where the reporter’s voice melds with (and becomes) the story. A Bunny’s Tale pre-dates Hunter S Thompson’s Hell’s Angels and Normal Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago by about five years, although obviously Sinclair, London, and Orwell published similar material in book form decades earlier.

Things start the way they continue: deceptively. Steinem fills in an application at the Club’s 59th Street office, giving her age as 24. The hiring manager cautions that this is awfully old to be a Playboy bunny but she might squeak in under the wire. Good news for Steinem, who was almost thirty at the time.

She gets the job, and then comes Bunny School: which is a crash-course in mixology, deportment, and how to perform the “bunny dip” without splitting your corset. Steinem was really annoying here, to be honest. She’s just smug as a peach, and the article has a tone of “Isn’t it funny that an overeducated Jewish gal like me is doing something like this?” We get contempt-dripping anecdotes about how dumb and shallow the other girls are. The applicants take an exam, and Steinem makes a point of mentioning that she got the highest score despite answering seven questions wrong on purpose. She may not think much of the girls, but the more experienced bunnies still have much to teach her.

There’s more to bunnying than stuffing your corset and hoping clients don’t pinch your tail: the job has multiple layers to it. Your technical job is to do typical “hired gun” type stuff like greeting customers, running the hat check desk, and waitressing the floor. Your theoretical job is to represent the Playboy brand. Your actual job is to inspire men to drink as much alcohol as is medically possible.

Steinem must navigate these conflicting requirements. Bunnies are forbidden from dating Club members—a private detective agency is shadowing them, making sure they don’t do this—but Steinem hears of a girl who was fired for not going out with a high-status Club keyholder. Sometimes you can refuse to tell a customer your last name, but other times, you can’t. Rules apply, until they don’t.

Years ago, Andrea Donderi wrote a now-legendary comment about “Ask Culture” vs “Guess Culture”. Essentially, in Ask Culture you are allowed to ask questions. In Guess Culture, however, you are supposed to intuit and “feel” your way around issues—you actually get penalized for asking questions, because they mark you as a social simpleton. “If you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it.”

The Playboy Club is Guess Culture: Hard Mode. Steinem has a Bunny Bible with all sorts of rules she’s meant to follow, but those aren’t the actual rules. The real rules are as invisible as phlogiston, and must never be spoken aloud. Girls are just supposed to know them.

One unspoken rule is “build a good rapport with the busboys”. Bunnies need tips. An efficient busboy will clean your table and make it look presentable for new customers. A faster turnover of customers means more money in your pocket. But if you get on a busboy’s bad side, he can find all sorts of ways to fuck with you—like pocketing your tips, and insisting that the customer stiffed you. You will have no way of proving otherwise.

Some other things Steinem noticed about bunnying.

• It’s physically exhausting. Hours range from “long” to “what the fuck”. She describes being on her feet from 7:30pm to 4:00am, and then having to go to a photoshoot at 11:00am. She loses five pounds. Her feet swell. Some of the other girls recommend rolling bottles under her feet, to relax the arches.
• Is she allowed to take a break? Again, that’s the “Guess Culture” thing I mentioned. You might be allowed or you might not be.
• It’s expensive. Bunnies get nickeled and dimed to death. Each girl has to kick in $2.50 a day to cover costume maintenance (a hard sneeze can break the zipper), and $5 a pair for nylons. The Playboy Club, of course, will not compensate anyone for anything, although there is a 25% bunny discount at a local beautician.
• Steinem does not earn the advertised $200-300 a week or anything close. Bunnies make a flat $50 a week (NYC’s minimum wage), plus maybe $30 a day in tips, of which the club takes 50%. Hat check bunnies have it the worst. They make no tips, and are paid $12 a night. Steinem doesn’t now how this is legal, and maybe it isn’t. Later, she encounters a girl who made $200 in one week. Steinem regards her as a freakish lottery winner.
• Bunnies are not above ripping off the Club. On her first night, she gets a dollar tip. Like a rube, she asks a fellow bunny who she should give it to. She’s told to store it in “the vault”—ie, stuff it down the front of her corset, out of sight.
• Bunnies trash-talk the clients constantly behind their backs. One of Steinem’s new friends refers to Club keyholders as “suckers”. Another indicates she preferred working at the Chicago club because the men there were stupider, and more inclined to think they’d gotten “in” with you.
• Bunnies break the “don’t date keyholders” rule constantly, particularly in the case of rich ones. There are ways to make money from men that technically aren’t prostitution. Maybe he will buy you an expensive fur coat, and you will be so smitten that you will ask for his apartment number.
• Bunnies will stuff the front of their corsets with socks, tissue paper, and spare bits of hose. Plastic garbage bags are frowned upon, because it won’t allow your skin to “breathe”, meaning you’ll sweat more and (it’s theorized) your boobs will shrink.

There is an atmosphere of suspicion hanging over the bunnies. They come and go, and are not to be trusted. In particular, Hefner is terrified that the bunnies will start “merchandizing” themselves and get his clubs busted for prostitution. Private detectives will occasionally approach off-duty bunnies and pose as johns, offering them hundreds of dollars for sex. Girls that accept are fired, and added to a company-wide blacklist. Yet at the same time, they are clearly supposed to use their physical appeal to get men to buy drinks. The subtext is clear: bunnies are supposed to appear available, but not actually be available. As Dworkin once said, the only fiction in pornography is the smile on the woman’s face.

As a bunny, you lie a lot, and are lied to in return. Steinem is told by a (male) doctor working for Playboy Enterprises that she must receive an internal examination before the Club can hire her as a waitress. This sounds so obviously suspicious that she calls the Health Board to check, and sure enough, New York has no such requirement.

Any nightclub of any size is a Darwinian jungle, with management as the apex predators. They survive by winnowing deserving and undeserving humans as ruthlessly as Dachau in 1933. Essentially, your position in the club (or even whether you’re allowed in the door) depends on where you stand in what I call the Nightclub Pyramid.

The top of the Pyramid? Rich men. Nightclubs love guys who drop a thousand dollars on bottle service, who tip $100 just so they’ll have an excuse to flash the gangsta roll in their pocket. They rely on rich men to survive.

(Also in this group are status-rich men—ie, club promoters, D-list celebrities, and the owner’s annoying twerp brother. These do not contribute to the club’s bottom line in the same way, but are nevertheless considered rich-man adjacent).

The next level? Beautiful women, who are necessarily to attract rich men. This can be problematic, because such women (or at least the subset that go nightclubbing) are capricious. If a club has bad vibes they just bounce: beautiful women are desired everywhere, and club doors fly open for them. Without beautiful women, you don’t have rich men, and then you don’t have shit.

Most nightclubs hack the system by hiring beautiful women. The Playboy bunnies occupy a confused social position: they are nominally high status, but work at the club’s mercy, and are vulnerable to economic exploitation.

(If you’re wondering about the rest of the Nighclub Pyramid, the third level is “plain women”, the fourth level is “whale shit”, and the fifth level is “poor men”.)

Steinem soon discerns that there is no career track for Bunnies, and no upward mobility. Despite the superficial glamor (and the fact that a PI agency is stalking you), it is a waitressing job with an uncomfortable uniform. Steinem soon quits because she has an article to write (and also, they’re beginning to ask questions about her failure to provide a social security number for her fake identity), but turnover is high in any event. A lot of girls seem to entertain dreams that they’ll meet some dashing and unattached movie star, but this is like Hefner’s “posing for Playboy helps your film career!” line—at a certain point, you’re a sucker if you believe that will happen.

Despite all of this, it does seem like an action-packed and distinctly unboring job. Probably a step up from working in a secretarial pool or selling Avon or whatever most women did in 1963. Even dissatisfied bunnies are dissuaded from unionizing by the fact that it’s an extremely attractive job. If bunnies enacted a strike, the club could fill their positions in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.

I often felt that Steinem was portraying it in the worst light possible. I did find an article by Chialing Young King (breezily referred to in A Bunny’s Tale as a “Chinese Bunny who stuffed her costume with gym socks”), who has markedly more positive memories. She says it was sometimes possible to make $500-1000 a week, and that Hef’s sleazy enterprise was actually the sexually and racially liberated paradise it pretended to be!

But Steinem’s message rings loudly and convincingly from the pages, particularly in a post-Manson, post-Altamont world: always question the counterculture. Don’t let people piss on you and call it rain. Guys are not reading Playboy for the articles, getting naked is not a cheat code for sexual empowerment, and the Easter bunny is not real.

“Put a pen in Satan’s claw […] and he could do no worse”—Louis-Sébastien Mercier, of Sade’s
Justine

Justine defies description. Not because it’s disgusting, but because it doesn’t exist. Or, at least, not in the same way that the 2016 Kia Cerato in my driveway exists.

Sade wrote three versions of the book. Each has a wildly different text, and a century-and-half of censorship has caused them to be fragmented, bowdlerized, bootlegged, mistitled, misattributed, etc. There effectively is no “Justine“. Instead, there’s a diffuse nebula of Justinelike texts that share a story (a saintly girl falls on hard times and is abused) but otherwise vary in nearly every detail.

The earliest Justine dates to 1787, and is a mere 50,000 words long. The Marquis was entombed in the Bastille’s Tour de la Liberté for buggery and torture, and wrote it in about two weeks. Titled The Misfortunes of Virtue, it’s uncharacteristically tame. Sex acts are mostly hinted at. Sade alludes to “lewd and exhausting labours”, “foul exercises”, or “the most considered excesses of brutality and lewdness” and lets your imagination fill in the blanks. Instead of a sodomy scene he’ll write “the hapless girl was ignominiously defiled while never ceasing to be a maid”. Ever the pioneer, he knew the “anal doesn’t count” rule long before Catholic schoolgirls got in on the game.

Was Sade censoring his work to appease the Bastille guards? No; he’d already written The 120 Days of Sodom in the same cell. Sade’s prison life, despite his whining to the contrary, was uncommonly comfortable. His social class (and the efforts of his longsuffering wife) meant he was allowed a massive wardrobe, paintings, perfumes, a bookshelf groaning with hundreds of classics, and even a collection of wooden dildos fashioned by a Parisian cabinetmaker. The guards weren’t reading his writing, or didn’t care. Instead, Sade toned down the rough stuff in the hopes that Justine would reach a wide audience. Fate, however, had different plans.

On the 2nd of July, 1789, the Marquis tried to incite a riot. As punishment he was transferred to an insane asylum, and had to leave his possessions behind (including his manuscripts, which his wife was unsuccessful in retrieving). When the Bastille was stormed on July 14, the contents of Sade’s cell (including the dildos, presumably) were “burned, pillaged, torn up and carried off”. Justine was lost, spun away into the winds of the 19th century. How it survived is unclear to me, but Guillame Apollinaire rediscovered the manuscript in a collection of papers at the National Library in 1909, and it was finally published in 1930.

Back to Sade: he was released from the asylum as a virtual pauper. His chateau had been seized, his wife had finally kicked him to the curb, and he was forced to work as a prompt in a Versailles theatre for 40 sous a month. In an attempt to make money, he rewrote the lost book as Justine, ou les Malheurs de la vertu (“The woes of virtue”), and in 1791 published it anonymously.

This new Justine was much longer (120,000 words), and more explicit. It was a bestseller by Sade’s standards: it saw five printings in the 18th century alone, and has been widely translated into other languages. If someone in the Anglophonic world references Justine, this is probably the one they’re thinking of.

The new Justine both gains and loses. Sade’s prose is sharper and the scenes hit harder. But where the 1787 manuscript moves through the story at a gallop, the 1791 gets bogged down in pornography and philosophy (for Sade, the two were largely interchangeable). It’s hard to read at times, like a Playboy where each page is made of iron and weighs five pounds.

Justine always had problems, and they’re harder to ignore when the book is a double feature starring itself. For one thing, it’s written in first person perspective. It doesn’t make sense that prudish Justine would describe her abuse in such obscene, titillating detail. And sometimes less is more—depravity has the curious property of seeming more awful when it’s not described on the page.

And because it’s Sade, the action is frequently interrupted so a villain can deliver a long speech denouncing morality and religion, and then Justine will respond with an equally long speech defending those things, and so on, back and forth for several pages. It’s like reading an insufferable debate on an internet forum (“BIBLE CONTRADICTIONS-MAGIC SKY FAIRY DEBUNKED!”), where everyone is an annoying seventeen-year-old with a good vocabulary.

Sade could be the most fascinating of men, but he could also be the most tedious. Justine captures his dual nature well. His mordant wit was always his best side, and this is foregrounded in the new edition. The original 1787 manuscript ends with Justine dying horribly—immediately after being rescued!—and a (sarcastic) moral lesson.

And now, reader, having read this tale, may you extract the same profit from it as this
reformed woman of the world. May you, like her, be persuaded that true happiness lies in virtue
alone and that, though God allows goodness to be persecuted on earth, it is with no other end in
view than to prepare for us a better reward in heaven.

The 1791 manuscript ends the same way…but more so.

O you who have wept tears upon hearing of Virtue’s miseries; you who have been moved to sympathy for the woe-ridden Justine; the while forgiving the perhaps too heavy brushstrokes we have found ourselves compelled to employ, may you at least extract from this story the same moral which determined Madame de Lorsange [Juliette]! May you be convinced, with her, that true happiness is to be found nowhere but in Virtue’s womb, and that if, in keeping with designs it is not for us to fathom, God permits that it be persecuted on Earth, it is so that Virtue may be compensated by Heaven’s most dazzling rewards. [emphasis mine]

If you don’t get the joke, Justine has been killed by a bolt of lightning.

In 1797 Sade was evidently still broke or still unhappy with Justine (or both), because he rewrote it a third time. Now it ballooned into a four volume, 290,000 word orgy of excess, complete with fascinating illustrations (whose artist is still unknown). It was published in a ten volume edition, with the other six volumes being a companion book Juliette.

This monstrosity remains untranslated to this day. As I don’t read French, I can’t comment on what he changed. Apparently the viewpoint shifts from first person to third, which is a good idea. Sade originally wanted Justine to be an epistolary novel similar to Rosseau’s Julie. This aside, there’s no reason we need to hear the story from her perspective, and it limits the possibilities.

The 1797 Justine/Juliette wombo-combo is famous for attracting the ire of Napoleon, who described it “the most abominable book ever engendered by the most depraved imagination” (lucky he never read Spare by Prince Harry) and ordered the anonymous author’s arrest.

Sade thought his identity was safe. As usual, he was his own worst enemy. He feuded with a prominent literary critic, who publically exposed him as Justine’s author. The Paris Gendarmarie raided his publisher’s office soon after, and caught Sade with a manuscript of Juliette in his hand. Sade boomerang’d back into prison, and his books were burned en-masse.

(Incidentally, I’ve read that the police found notes hinting that that Sade was attempting to write a fourth version of Justine. Why did he spend so much time on this one book? He never attempted to rewrite The 120 Days of Sodom or Philosophy in the Boudoir, to my knowledge. Did he consider Justine his masterwork?)

There’s a kind of irony to Justine’s history. The book that destroyed its author. Sade comes off as a Frankenstein-like figure, undone by his own creations. His scandalous defiances (of church, state, family, and the Revolution) plunged him into circumstances, that seem…well, Sadean.

On 8 December 1793, Sade was arrested for counter-revolutionary activities. […] Shuttled from prison to prison during the early months of 1794, Sade finally ended up at Picpus near Vincennes, a well-appointed former convent. It was here, from his cell window, that the devant or ‘former’ Marquis watched as many of his fellow aristocrats mounted the steps of the guillotine, which had been moved to the Picpus location from Place de la Révolution (the present-day Place de la Concorde) because of the stench of blood, their corpses piled into a mass grave that had been dug in the prison gardens. A large lead urn placed under the guillotine to collect the blood was emptied at Picpus every evening.

Sade, The Libertine Novels – John Phillips, Pluto Press

…as well as comical. Isn’t this literally a joke in Monty Python’s Life of Brian?

Sade himself escaped the guillotine thanks to bureaucratic confusion. In July 1794 his name appeared on a list of prisoners to be collected from Paris jails for judgement and execution that day, but as he failed to respond when his name was called, he was marked down as absent. Within a short time, the political climate had changed again with Robespierre’s own fall from grace and execution, and Sade was freed on 15 October 1794.

Ibid.

Justine offers itself as a case study in the futility of censorship. Napoleon tried to stamp it out. For a hundred and sixty years, you could get arrested for publishing Justine in France. But each chop of the axe that fell on Justine only succeeded in multiplying it. It’s probably the most widely translated and read of Sade’s work.

But it’s also not quite the book Napoleon—or Sade—believed it to be.

The standard line on Justine (which I believed myself before reading it properly) is that it’s a sarcastic, didactic anti-morality tale showing how “crime doesn’t pay” philosophy itself doesn’t pay, and it’s best to be evil. Justine’s goodness does her no good. Instead, we should be wicked, like her sister Juliette.

…But if you actually pay attention to the book, you’ll see that few (if any) of Justine’s problems are caused by her moral principles. She’s simply getting unlucky, over and over again. Juliette wouldn’t have fared much better in her shoes.

This is a scenario that repeats throughout the book: she accepts someone’s help because she has no choice, and it turns out that her savior is a villain. But that’s not a failing on her part. Alone and destitute, Justine stays with a group of monks. They turn out to be running a sex cult, imprisoning young women who (it’s implied) they murder once they’re too damaged to be of further use. How is Justine to blame for not knowing that? Or for the bolt of lightning that delivers her to her grave? Sade rails and vituperates against Rousseanian morality. But the only through-line you can take from Justine is “never let bad luck happen to you”.

And she’s strong. Her sister Juliette abandons her principles. Justine doesn’t. Her arguments are mostly intelligent and reasonable, and although Sade seems to think that the male libertines are demolishing her naive worldview with Facts and Logic, they aren’t. Once or twice, a libertine even admits that she makes a good point.

You can’t pervert morality without, on some level, accepting it as true. And although lots of writers regard Sade as the first truly modern writer (Barthes regards the lightning bolt as a symbolic “killing” of classical and romantic literature, as represented by Justine), a more complicated picture emerges from his books. Sade was artistically indebted to the same past whose values he rejected.

120 Days of Sodom is basically The Decameron—a census-like listing of earthly pleasures and pains at a remote villa. Likewise, Justine is quite Gothic in character. It’s a “damsel in distress” story that whisks the reader through a variety of settings (castles and dungeons and monasteries) that remind of The Castle of Otranto as much as anything. Sade was a modern man, but we got modernity directly from the past, and you can see old ideas (both literary and otherwise) sewn like whipstitches through his work.

A big part of Gothicism is the sense of rotting glory. And rotting religion. Even when Gothic mainstays like Lewis and Shelley aren’t explicitly blasphemous, they subtly communicate that religion’s certainties are becoming old and tattered. Does Frankenstein’s monster have a soul when he’s made of spare parts? Isn’t Dracula simply a perverse Christ (note that Bram Stoker capitalizes Dracula’s pronouns…), albeit one who seemingly gives his followers far more power than Christ gives the Christian?

Sade never went “full Goth”—he shunned the supernatural and employed romanticism only to mock it—but he never went full modernist, either. How could he? The past was too rich a source of absurdity and horror for him to ignore.

In the end, he’ll be remembered the way he wanted: as a provocateur. Like any troll, the point of Sade isn’t his writing, it’s our reaction. He lives in our outrage. Condemning him makes him stronger. He never met a fire that didn’t turn him into a phoenix. Sade himself called for his books to be burned!

An article of 27 September 1792 praises the author’s ‘rich and brilliant’ imagination, while exhorting young people to ‘avoid this dangerous book’ and advising ‘more mature’ men to read it ‘in order to see to what insanities human imagination can lead’, but then to ‘throw it in the fire’. In a letter to his lawyer, Reinaud, Sade himself conceded the immorality of his new novel: They are now printing a novel of mine, but one too immoral to send to a man as pious and as decent as you. I needed money, my publisher asked me for something quite spicy, and I made him [a book] capable of corrupting the devil. They are calling it Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu. Burn it and do not read it if by chance it falls into your hands: I renounce it.

The Marquis de Sade: A Very Short Introduction by J Phillips · 2005 Oxford Academic

We live in permissive times. You don’t go to prison for sodomy anymore. Authors still deal with outrage mobs, but usually it’s white women with weird hair explaining that YOU DID A RACISM and YOU DON’T EVEN UNDERSTAND THE INTERSECTIONAL NATURE OF THE MULTIPLICITY OF YOUR OFFENSES. While this is terrifying, it is very hard to get arrested for writing a book today.

This should have been the golden age of Sade. The moment where the world finally caught up with him.

Instead, his dark grandeur has completely collapsed. All that’s left is anticlimax and bathos. He’s now a literal cartoon character. His descendants have reclaimed the title of Marquis, and are now busy whoring out the family name to things like champagne and “sinfully rich” chocolates. Sade was valuable as forbidden fruit. Now that he’s legal…nobody wants him. Johnny Rotten was right. If you want to destroy the power of a swastika, wear one.

Sade often said that the more criminal his behavior was, the more it excited him. And us too, apparently. Ultimately, bland cultural amnesty was precisely the hell Sade did not believe in.

“O liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!”—former revolutionary Marie-Jeanne ‘Manon’ Roland de la Platière, as she was led to the scaffold

The Ancien Régime imprisoned people. The First Republic imprisoned other, different people. The Napoleonic Empire imprisoned still different people. Marquis de Sade achieved the singular feat of being imprisoned by all three.

The ancient alchemists theorized in the existence of ignis gehennae, or universal solvent. Sade was a universal convict. Anathema to all creeds, curse on all lips, breach of all laws written and unwritten; he increasingly seems made-up: a boogeyman for thought experiments.

“Oh, you think your hypothetical utopian society is hot shit? Well, suppose Sade comes along…”

His books are grotesque nightmares, and his real life frequently matched them. Even by the low standards of the 18th century French gentry, Sade was a depraved human being, wretched down to his bones. There are probably no good answers to “why did you torture that prostitute?” but “Which of several prostitutes are you referring to?” seems like a particularly bad one.

At least he had amibtion. I watched a TV documentary on Jared Fogle, and found it a dismaying exercise in Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil. He was dull and drab and spiritually small. A pallid white lump, his face perforated by a horrible toothy little smile, existing like a smear of phlegm that I couldn’t wipe off my screen. He seemed bled dry of anything hale and human; a monster made of skim milk and tofu. Can’t the twentyworst century produce better bad guys than fucking Fogle?

The Marquis dreamed big dreams. His crimes (both fictional and otherwise) have a bloody, artistic grandeur. He was a Matisse of Misery, a Picasso of Pain. I’d prefer it if neither Sade nor Fogle existed, but if I had to choose one or the other, hail Sade.

Juliette (1797) is a sister book (literally) of his earlier Justine (1987). They describe the adventures of two destitute young women who seek their fortunes in Paris, taking different paths, and experiencing different outcomes.

Justine is saintly and pure and devoted to virtue. She is repaid with beatings, rapes, and degradations. Nature abhors goodness, a subtext made crystal-clear in the book’s final scene. Justine is finally rescued from a life of torture by her sister…and then a bolt of lightning strikes her down.

Juliette, meanwhile, is a sociopathic harlot who sins her way upward into the highest echelons of society. What’s interesting is how her character changed with time. In Justine (which Sade wrote inside the Bastille), she’s an opportunistic chancer who commits crimes out of necessity, rather than choice. She might still be able to redeem herself, and at the book’s end she appears to do so by (humorously) becoming a nun.

Madame de Lorsange [Juliette’s title – ed] left the house at once, ordered a carriage to be made ready, took some small provision of her money with her, leaving the rest for Monsieur de Corville to whom she gave directions concerning pious bequests to be made, and drove in haste to Paris where she entered the Carmelite Convent there. Within the space of a few years, she had become its model and example, known not only for her deep piety but also for the serenity of her spirit and the unimpeachable propriety of her morals

But in Juliette (written when Sade was free), she’s portrayed as comically evil and disgusting. She murders a lot of people, participates in a plot to cause a famine in France, and has sex with about five to ten thousand men, including the pope. She’s Messalina, Lucrezia Borgia, and Jeffrey Dahmer rolled into one—a character so ridiculous that she’s kind of funny.

The Justine/Juliette diptych mixes styles and affects. First, it’s porn. Second, it’s parody, mainly of romance “manners” fiction and books like Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie. Third, it is an exposition of Sade’s worldview and philosophy: good is stupid, morality is stupid, and the purpose of life is to drench your hippocampus in pleasure, no matter who suffers for it.

“Before you were born, you were nothing more than an indistinguishable lump of unformed matter. After death, you simply will return to that nebulous state. You are going to become the raw material out of which new beings will be fashioned. Will there be pain in this natural process? No! Pleasure? No! Now, is there anything frightening in this? Certainly not! And yet, people sacrifice pleasure on earth in the hope that pain will be avoided in an after-life. The fools don’t realize that, after death, pain and pleasure cannot exist: there is only the sensationless state of cosmic anonymity: therefore, the rule of life should be … to enjoy oneself!”

Sade viewed pleasure like rays of sunlight gathered by a lens. The more rays are focused by the lens, the more it burns and destroys the ground beneath. If you want to know pleasure, you have to be prepared to know (and inflict) pain. Sade was a living Pyreliophorus, a colossal burning glass that incinerated everything it touched. Nobody (except maybe Ayn Rand) was ever such a dark, living embodiment of their own philosophy.

Juliette is a better book than Justine. The main character controls her fate, instead of being a punching bag. Sade has a troubled relationship with feminists (in the sense that fire has a troubled relationshp with TNT), so it’d be ironic if he created possibly the most agentic female character in all of 18th century literature. As surrealist writer Guillame Apollionaire once said:

“The Marquis de Sade, that freest of spirits to have lived so far, had ideas of his own on the subject of woman: he wanted her to be as free as man. Out of these ideas—they will come through some day—grew a dual novel, Justine and Juliette. It was not by accident the Marquis chose heroines and not heroes. Justine is woman as she has been hitherto, enslaved, miserable and less than human; her opposite, Juliette represents the woman whose advent he anticipated, a figure of whom minds have as yet no conception, who is arising out of mankind, who shall have wings, and who shall renew the world.”

And if you want nastiness, Justine‘s horrors are limited by the fact that the heroine must survive her abuses (although it’s still implausible that she doesn’t die at certain points), but because Juliette is the perpetuator, not the victim, and the gloves can come further off.

Juliette also shares many of Justine’s flaws. For one thing, it’s incredibly long—my English Austryn Wainhouse translation is about 450,000 words. There’s just too much book in this book.

For another, Juliette’s conflicting goals—satire, versus philosophical treatise—weaken each other. Often it’s not clear how serious he is. Are Sade’s endless rants (delivered through the mouth of some character or another) meant to be funny, or not?

“Before going farther, let us here observe that nothing is commoner than to make the grave mistake of identifying the real existence of bodies that are external to us with the objective existence of the perceptions that are inside our minds. Our very perceptions themselves are distinct from ourselves, and are also distinct from one another, if it be upon present objects they bear and upon their relations and the relations of these relations. They are thoughts when it is of absent things they afford us images; when they afford us images of objects which are within us, they are ideas. However, all these things are but our being’s modalities and ways of existing; and all these things are no more distinct from one another, or from ourselves, than the extension, mass, shape, color, and motion of a body are from that body. Subsequently, they necessarily…” [blah blah blah for another thousand words]

These ludicrous speeches are inserted in inappropriate places, frequently run for multiple pages, and stop the novel in its tracks like a bolt-gun to a calf’s brain. Eventually you just stop reading them—you see an ominous mass of text hanging on the page like a stormcloud, and skip it. They are pointless.

Is he convincing anyone? He could have written “feels good bro” and then found a more stimulating use for his wrist. The longer and louder you have to argue for something the less persuasive it seems. If libertinism is truly natural and right, he shouldn’t need to justify himself so much. He sounds like a lawyer bolstering a weak case. What would a psychiatrist make of Sade’s psyche? Did he know, deep down, that there was something pathological about him? In other words, who’s this justification for—us, or himself? “I’m normal! I’m normal!” is the battle cry of the person who’s absolutely not normal, and Sade’s appeals to universal human nature fall flat. His inhumanity was deeply unnatural.

(Incidentally, my favorite piece of Sade trivia is that they performed phrenology on him after he died. His skull was the perfect shape for a priest.)

Digressions aside, Juliette is an endless list of sins and outrages, mostly involving sex and blasphemy. It reminds me of those 90s porn videos series, where they go on and on, until you have Barnyard Sex Adventures #45 or something. It’s a long series of repetitive fantasies, unvarying in tone and content, delivered with the obsessive rhythm of an autistic child’s stimming.

Juliette’s endless escapades eventually provoke boredom, and then a coma. The book basically starts at self-parody and goes on from there. “Juliette gets buggered by a million trillion men while spitting on a cross while stepping on orphaned puppies”…much of the book is simply a permutation on that.

Yet Sade can actually write affectingly (and disturbingly) when he wants to. I enjoyed the moments where he transcends himself, and offers up something incalescently disgusting.

A dim, a lugubrious lamp hung in the middle of the room whose vaults were likewise covered with dismal appurtenances; various instruments of torture were scattered here and there, among other objects one saw a most unusual wheel. It revolved inside a drum, the inner surface of which was studded with steel spikes; the victim, bent in an arc upon the circumference of the wheel, would, as it turned, be rent everywhere by the fixed spikes; by means of a spring device the drum could be tightened, so that, as the spikes grated flesh away, they could be brought closer and contact with the diminished mass maintained. This torture was the more horrible in as much as it was exceedingly gradual, and the victim might well endure ten hours of slow and appalling agony before giving up the ghost. To accelerate or slow the procedure one had but to decrease or widen the distance between the wheel and the compassing drum

Sade had a gift for devising tortures. It’s lucky his relative poverty forced him to keep most of them on the page.

There’s also some parts where he anticipates the decadents, too, particularly a passage that will stay with me for a long time. It’s where Sade basically abandons any attempt at “manners” literature, and starts writing pure fantasy.

Juliette and a few consorts have journeyed deep into Russia. It’s portrayed as a blackened land of volcanoes that spit blue-white fire. Juliette throws a match onto a field. It erupts into flame.

In this improbable landscape, they encounter a literal fairytale giant. “Seven feet and three inches tall, with, behind huge moustaches, a face both swarthy and awful.”

This is Minski, a Russian lord who has established a fiefdom in this harsh land, mostly because it’s a place where the law does not exist.

The giant stoops and lifts a great stone slab no one else would have been able to budge; thus does he uncover a stairway; we precede him down the steps, he replaces the stone; at the farther end of that underground passage we ascend another stairway, guarded by another such stone as I have just spoken of, and emerge from dank darkness into a lowceilinged hall. It was decorated, littered with skeletons; there were benches fashioned of human bones and wherever one trod it was upon skulls; we fancied we heard moans coming from remote cellars; and we were shortly informed that the dungeons containing this monster’s victims were situated in the vaults underneath this hall.

Minski devours the dead bodies of children at his table, which is made from naked girls arranged and twisted together (the chairs and candelabra of his dining hall are likewise made of living nymphets.) Sade really delivers some perverted weirdness here. His descriptions of the giant’s appetites and behaviors are gruesomely earthy. It’s no less unrealistic than anything else in the book—just pure limbic system horror that engages the senses rather than the intellect.

Minski takes a shine to Juliette, and allows her to live and witness his lifestyle (most of her companions are…less fortunate). She soon participates in his barbaric sex-murders. Yet she senses that the giant’s favor will prove a fleeting thing, so she incapacitates him with a near-lethal dose of stramonium, and escapes. She doesn’t kill him, though. A man as evil as Minski doesn’t come along every day, and it’d be a shame to lose him.

So that’s Sade: he’s endless, repetitive, as sadistic to his readers as he is to his characters, and occasionally offers up brilliant visions. So what do we make of him?

A criminal, as I’ve said. Even death didn’t clear his name. His books were banned in France for over a hundred and sixty years. People were prosecuted for selling them in the nineteen-fifties. They were mass-burned in America. For a while, you could acquire yellowcake uranium more easily than one Sade’s books.

His extreme fantasies were clearly and disturbingly connected with real things. There is his real-life crimes to consider. Libertinism was no joke for Sade, no ironic pose. He tried to practice what he preached. Most “edgy” writers are smoke without fire. Marquis de Sade wasn’t just fire, he was thermonuclear plasma.

But even his writing, viewed in isolation, seems to hit a cultural nerve. Inside every priest is a hypocrite, and in every king a tyrant. Thrones are edifices raised atop conspiracy and filicide. “Self-made” men become rich by exploiting those under them. Goodness is a mask for sociopaths too clever to get caught. And the concept of virtue is worse than false: it is a psychosexual weapon wielded to make others (particularly women) easy to control. You should take pleasure wherever you find them. The only law is that there is none. And so on.

All of of this formed the bedrock of the Sadean worldview. Some find it true. Others find it revolting. Still others find it both things. Nobody finds it ignorable or trivial.

Sade’s words leave a shadow in the mind. His bizarre pornographic fantasies are littered with allusions to Hobbes, and Malthus. He presages Darwin, Haeckel, Lamarcke, Hitler. He was an atheist, yet revered nature’s impulses with fanatical zeal. Indeed, he thought they were the only real thing, and human institutions were just thin froth riding atop a dark and deep ocean.

Maybe we hated him because he told the truth? Sade was born in a palace and died in an insane asylum. Perhaps his main observation was that the two places are very much alike.

“Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change.”