The Marquis de Sade Tells His Version of the Aristocrats Joke
Published by Reblogs - Credits in Posts,
By Tom Bradley.
…relegated to the rich shore-shadows of Charenton’s deep waters. — Apollinaire, The Divine Marquis
We shall stage, without regard for text… a tale by the Marquis de Sade, in which the eroticism will be transposed, allegorically mounted and figured, to create a violent exteriorization of cruelty and a dissimulation of the remainder. — Antonin Artaud, Theatre of Cruelty (First Manifesto)
One is not a criminal if one paints the bizarre inclinations nature inspires. — Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, Histoire de Juliette, ou les prospérités du vice (epigraph attributed to Petronius Arbiter)
MONTH OF FRUMIDOR, SIXTH DAY, YEAR XIV
Abbé Coulmier, Director of the Charenton Lunatic Asylum, has been waylaid in a dark and airless corridor just off the catatonic ward. A strange scene is being set before his mind’s eye:
"The curtain rises on a prisoner’s cell. The marquis is on his knees. His loyal manservant is subjecting le maître to a crime which, as you’ll recall, under hobgoblin Robespierre’s Public Safety Committee, was punishable by a brisk beheading for nobles, and, for commoners, a diverting flambée at the stake."
Abbé Coulmier has found it useful to let this particular patient vent his delusions from time to time. Lung exercise discharges his excess nervous energy, the curse of the aristocratic constitution. Logorrhea distracts him from his mysterious bouts of melancholia, when he weeps what he calls tears of blood, over some enormous loss which nobody on the asylum staff has yet cajoled him into revealing.
"Thus opens my new one-act comedy, a dramatization of the storming of —"
"Yes, yes," says the Abbé, his voice laden with solicitude. "I see."
"Oh, you see, do you, Monsieur le directeur?"
The hauteur hissing from that rebuff is unaccompanied by a dismissive gesture, for the patient’s obesity has lately ballooned to such a morbid degree as to render his limbs nearly immobile. But from under a pair of heavy eyelids comes the condescending sort of gaze that only nobility can impose: in this case, the scion of Provence’s oldest family.
"You may be able to diagnose my mind, Coulmier, but I can read yours like a grammar school primer. Professional guilt makes you fear that, under your slipshod care, my grasp on reality has withered in inverse proportion to the burgeoning of my gut, even to the point of hallucinating myself in the thick of a riot from which I was historically absent."
"May I gently urge you to recall, citoyen Sade, that, before the people laid siege to that prison, you were transferred —"
"Spirited away, naked as a worm, in the wee hours, to forestall my rousing the rabble to do precisely what they did less than a week later."
"— to join us here and enjoy our salubrious hospitality."
"My powers of invention reverse time and violate space. I am, was, and always will be the key figure in that hateful pile’s dismantling. How else could I have achieved the verisimilitude of our grand climax, in which Monsieur de Launay, the commandant, is dragged out instead of me, and dismembered in the quaintly atmospheric Place de la Révolution? We’ll do it at a leisurely pace, with a humble tradesman’s rusty hand-saw, for the time won’t yet be ripe to administer a smoother shave with the national razor."
The Abbé replies, in a supportive tone, "Yes, your script sounds quite plausible. The guillotine was, indeed, deployed a year after the Bastille fell."
"So gratified you approve. I’d fall prostrate and nuzzle your insteps for a patronizing petting, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The curtain, as I say, is rising. It’s the calm before the storming, so to speak. While being passively victimized by my valet, I am actively imposing the same disservice upon a sweet prepubescent, one of the fair-haired spawn of the Comte de Solanges, my would-be rival in libertinage, who cowers in the dungeon three floors below. The innocent’s sex is a matter of indifference, as I’m not fastidious in that respect, so long as the anus wedged wide before me is pert and not over-lubricated."
The Abbé struggles to swallow a succession of gags. He decides that enough nervous energy has been discharged for one day, sufficient tears of blood stanched.
"Honestly? A child?"
"Don’t fret, Coulmier. Your resident quack has disallowed me access to proper brats. A midget will be recruited to stand in. And it doesn’t have to be a well-born midget — for that’s what actually troubles you, isn’t it? Hereabouts in the squalid suburbs, several cheap entertainment establishments maintain stables of congenital runts. One can abuse them without breaking any bourgeois hearts that might be bleeding in our loges.
"If we decide to cast a girl-child, we’ll swathe her in a crinoline petticoat of a dusky peach shade, crimped ribands tumbling teasefully from her hair, plus flowers of some indifferent species. If it’s the opposite category of pedophile bait, an apple-green coat will do, with six rolls of tight pin-curls ranged across his cranium, so as to make him appear tantalizing and juvenile. Oh, and speaking of razors, if not the national one, our midget’s nethers must be depilated after every third performance. Make a note of that."
A distraction from this sordid scene is indicated, if only for the sake of the Abbé’s stomach: "But how would such an extravaganza be financed? I’m told the Sade family fortunes aren’t lately at their most robust."
"You’ll have no problem packing the house. Only print up some bills and post them about town. Parisian eyes and ears are hankering to be edified by the sight and sound of your most illustrious guest. Behold! Playing himself in the leading role! Author of the novel whose scurrility stirred Napoleon to decree his confinement in this Purgatory! Have you read it yet?"
"Your literary efforts have occupied a privileged space on my nightstand since your arrival."
"As they should. Ticket sales will more than defray outlays for full orchestra, ballet, dumbshows, tableaux vivants, stage machinery, specially fitted prostheses, and so forth. All are necessary if the production is to live up to my previous siege drama, my triumph, as mounted in the Council Hall of the very fortress whose reduction to rubble we are commemorating and celebrating. The peals of standing applause lavished upon me will spill over and work miracles on my fellow lunatics’ self-esteem. Isn’t that what you professional caregivers call the moral complacency that earns madmen a parole? You are famous, aren’t you, Monsieur le directeur, for pioneering such advanced therapeutic techniques?"
"Perhaps not precisely famous," replies Coulmier — and somehow prevents himself from adding, More of a laughing stock nowadays, thanks to you.
Encouraged by exaggerated reports of The Siege of Beauvais’ success, the Abbé, to his everlasting chagrin, caused a theater, complete with opera boxes and orchestra pit, to be built on these premises, appointing Sade maître de déclamations, with all the best curative hopes in the world — only to see the folly decommissioned immediately at the insistence of the resident physician. Le docteur Esquirol, who prefers leeches, emetics and laxatives to the Melopmenean arts, deemed the marquis’ scripts not merely non-sanatative, but potentially injurious to the inmates’ health.
"We can’t be seen to exploit our charges’ misery as spectacles for the voyeurs who slink about the capital’s outskirts," he declared at the pertinent staff meeting. "Our remit is the treatment of invalids, with the most delicate moral monitoring. As for this so-called ‘dramatist,’ I recommend his banishment to a moated stronghold, somewhere deep in the Apennines, a donjon whose dissolution he can’t contrive by shrieking infantile obscenities out the windows."
"Monsieur le Marquis," says Abbé Coulmier, "while we’re on the subject of withered grasps on reality, may I remind you that the venue for your proposed performance was converted, more than six months ago, to a very different purpose?"
A nod of the Director’s head toward the blackness at the far end of the corridor is meant to indicate an indoor tennis court, already crumbled into desuetude after half a year. (The mental defectives found the sport absurd.) Sade chooses not to acknowledge that facility.
"When I’m finished gutting our pubeless princeling or princess, and my phallus decouples from the embrace of his or her tiny ring-shaped muscle, I fling him aside. Or her. The thumping of the miniature carcass on the boards cues the entrance of the Bastille’s most vicious corrections officers, four of them, played by their counterparts on your Charenton payroll. (No special recruitment measures will be required; your male nurses do anything in return for a perfunctory bit of fellatio in the hydrotherapy chamber.)
"The quartet of brutes charge in, stage right, and drag off the ‘child,’ stage left, each grasping one of his or her extremities, playing tug-o’-war, with culinary intentions. A pig bladder, impregnated with the mediocre raspberry compote my wife sends me when she gets around to it, will have been secreted about the darling’s thorax, to burst, spurt and splash, gore-wise, under the corrections officers’ fingernails and teeth — that is, if my fruit preserves have not been intercepted, confiscated and consumed by le médecin résident in the meantime. Such abuses of power, you must know, Coulmier, have long abounded in both Bastilles, the Big as well as the Little. That’s how everyone refers to your precious ‘moral sanatorium.’"
Sade casts an accusatory eye upon his interlocutor, who cannot help but make a conciliatory offer: "Perhaps I can persuade le docteur Esquirol to release Madame de Sade’s parcels henceforth."
"If you would be so kind. At this point, my valet — I call him La Jeunesse, a capital fellow, with a face like a scrub brush dipped in puréed bone marrow, topped with a wig woven of crotch bristles gleaned from bidets on the road to Courthezon — will shove me forward, displaying a level of impertinence shocking in a member of the servile class. I am now on all fours."
Deferentially as possible, Coulmier gazes at the Sadean physique below the many rolls of chin. It’s doubtful, in the position just specified, his hands could reach the floor, much less support the weight of his upper body.
"We’ll work something out," says the patient, unoffended by the Abbé’s scrutiny. "The magic of stagecraft, you know. Or stage machinery. At any rate, without withdrawing his tool from my shed, my manservant fastens a breakfast tray to my back, by means of velvet straps. Upon this flat surface he lays out quills and an ink pot. He stretches out his right hand to the wall, where, in a chink between two large and oozing stones, a tightly-wound scroll has been tucked, in order to keep it secure from lo —"
The marquis finds speech impossible for a brief, gasping moment. That last incompletely pronounced word, or the breath behind it, seems to have lacerated his lungs on its way to his mouth, bringing with it a quantity of redness — and not fruit preserves. Esquirol is of the opinion that such up-spittings of blood, rather than imaginary "tears" thereof, should be the asylum’s sole concern — as if the physician could muster a trace of that merciful quality for any "invalid," least of all this one.
"— secure from loss," says the patient, eventually. He raises a moiré handkerchief to dab at the symptom. "Yes, unpillaged, undamaged, the precious scroll will remain in its chink, no matter what chaos might descend upon this frangible fortress. Covered, front and back, with exquisitely minuscule calligraphy, nary a correction nor striking-out, it is the manuscript of my chef d’oeuvre: a hundred thousand words of the most impure tale ever told, stretching no fewer than eleven-point-nine of the ‘meters’ lately calculated by Messrs. Delambre and Méchain.
"You assume, Coulmier, that I refer to Justine, ou Les Malheurs de la Vertu, of which you and our mighty emperor possess inscribed copies. But that is a mere aftershock of Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome. If the Corsican Fiend had perused the latter volume instead of the former, my head would not be situated on these corpulent shoulders today, spinning with what you’ve diagnosed as ‘delusions,’ and Esquirol has dismissed as ‘neurasthenia.’
"Let us return to the drama, now in progress. La Jeunesse is partially unfurling the Journées scroll. Not neglecting to continue discharging his responsibilities in and about le maître’s lower alimentary tract, the versatile valet sets about simultaneously preparing a fair copy to be sent to the Hague, where it will be printed, uncensored, then clandestinely shipped back to the land of liberté-égalité-fraternité, to wreak its unwholesome havoc — or wholesome, depending on one’s tastes, or social mores, if any.
"Absorbed in double duty, my manservant does not notice, behind his back, a small troupe of mimes being silently lowered, deus ex machina-wise, by an ingenious block-and-tackle crane, especially designed by me after a careful perusal of Euripides. The mimes are made up to resemble those frowzy high-borns one used to see paraded down the Rue St-Honoré during the Terror, their faces nullified behind white lead, cognac-benumbed horror and clouds of weevil droppings mixed with corn starch, shed from periwigs impossible to maintain in dungeons exited for the last time.
"Gently alighting on the boards, our tongueless faux-nobles dispose themselves in and around a tumbrel, built slightly larger than scale, for dramatic effect, which our property master has unobtrusively rolled in and parked against the back wall. The mimes set about establishing the usual tableau vivant-cum-dumbshow, obligatory by this point in the history of French drama: ‘The Jolly Joy-Ride to the Place de la Révolution.’
"Meanwhile, in his melodious tenor, as he fair-copies, La Jeunesse recites the most innovative and courageous episodes of Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome. As his recitation proceeds, yet more teams of mimes are deposited by crane, to enact the episodes in dumbshows all around.
"Since my cell, while it stood, occupied the entire third floor of the ludicrously named Donjon de la liberté (Voltaire’s old home, if you please), and since that castle keep’s floor plan, prior to demolition, was octagonal, our scenographer can furnish us with more than one stage left, as it were, and an equal plurality of stages right — a revolutionary innovation! — in which to reproduce the transgressive behaviors that abound in Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome.
"The theatergoing public will be edified with the copro- and urophagia that enrich my novel, the incest in every combination and permutation, the flagellations, the sacrilege and blasphemy, the insertions of red-hot pokers, the disembowelments of enceintes and throttlings of same with said entrails, the inventive infanticides (pre- and postnatal), the gerontological cannibalism, the rapings-unto-death on beds of excrement-smeared nails, and so on, and so forth—all couched, of course, in the most glorious prose put to paper since Rousseau stopped showing his asshole to genteel ladies in alleys."
"In consideration of genteel ladies in the loges," says Coulmier, "you might tone down some of these dumbshows."
Le directeur is muzzled with another imperious gaze, a reminder that Sade claims among his paternal forebears none other than Laura de Noves, Petrarch’s divine muse, she whose glances the poet’s bosom froze.
The pitch continues with barely a pause. "All at once, the author begins to wobble, almost to collapse, as his breathing becomes labored.
"‘Oh, no!’ cry the mimes from the tumbrel, breaking their wonted silence in dismay. ‘What could be happening to our beloved maître de déclamations? Surely a man of his vast experience is not suffering an adverse reaction to the thrusts, valiantly vigorous, of his valet!’ (I’ll thin out the alliteration in subsequent drafts.)
"Further bladders, similar to the one that helped simulate the disarticulation of our ‘child’ at the correction officers’ hands, but smaller, plucked from lesser creatures, possibly ferrets, have been impregnated with my wife’s mediocre raspberry compote, and pre-positioned in my vest pockets for furtive insertion between my teeth, to be bitten down upon at stressful times like this—never in short supply at the Bastille — to simulate the expectoration of cruor, glistening and deep scarlet."
"If simulation is necessary," murmurs Coulmier.
"I now deliver my first major speech, projecting through the hemorrhage:
"‘Thus is immortalized, mesdames et messieurs, through art and artifice, citoyen Sade’s tragic respiratory affliction, necessitating daily visits to the Bastille’s high tower tops, where the atmosphere is as close to fresh as it can get in Paris (which is not very). Strolls among the stone turrets are my sole salvation, after so many decades of incarceration in airless, mephitic hell holes, where every step raises a cloud of rodent excrement, cockroach exoskeletons and sloughed plaster — not to mention veritable thunderheads of pulverized saltpetre. The commandant, Monsieur de Launay, causes that crystalline salt to be sprinkled everywhere, like immolation grain over a dead ox’s scrotum on Har HaBayit’s grease-clotted grill, for the sake of its ostensible anaphrodisiac effects — ineffective as it has proven on my psychophysiology, which, as you Parisiens have undoubtedly heard rumored in your tittering soirées, requires bi-hourly acts of sodomization by my trusty manservant, right here behind me, who only briefly and infrequently subsides into the sad state known as detumescence. Give him a hand!’
"Here I will allow a pause for cheers to be rendered unto La Jeunesse.
"The latter rogue has been known to fall into the scrivenisitc equivalent of that depleted condition, and so he does now — though he continues to recite my words, from memory (the invaluable valet!). His fair-copying quota filled for the day, without missing a stroke of his own inbuilt quill, my manservant re-secretes Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome in its chink among the oozing stones, where it will abide like You-Know-Who in the Arimathean’s grotto, and will be similarly resurrected in good time — though we are getting ahead of ourselves.
"As I observe that simple chore being performed (from over my shoulder, for even in near-mortal respiratory crisis, my lower-body continues serving the servant, Christ-wise), liquescent redness begins to erupt, not just from my mouth, but from underneath my lower eyelids. It’s not compote this time, but proper haemolacria. Yes, watching the scroll disappear into its tomb, the unjustly imprisoned marquis is experiencing premonitions of an historical outcome which he’s unable to wedge without trauma into his cerebellum, an insupportable lo —"
Again the evidence of a lung disorder, the momentary gasping aphasia, the interrupted substantive.
"— loss.
That terrible, simple monosyllable seems to conjure an apparition in the patient’s diseased mind. Staring with stained eyes into the darkness, he gives verbal shape to the bugaboo.
"And now, an entity appears in the wings, visible to La Jeunesse and me, but not yet to the audience. And we, in turn, can be seen by this being, which happens to be of the non-masculine sex. It’s unclear whether she’s titillated more by the intimacy my manservant and I are sharing (which, in her dull mind, she no doubt misinterprets as degradation), or by the coughs that erupt from my opposite end and decorate my lips and chin with the rose of mortality. Preparing to make her entrance, she is preceded by a pompous equestrian figure."
Without intending to, Abbé Coulmier shakes Sade out of this waking nightmare by citing a regulation — the sort of thing guaranteed to irk the ire of any self-respecting libertine: "I’m sorry, Monsieur le marquis, but considerations of health and safety —"
"— forbid deposits of livestock shit in your ever-so-sanitary corridors. Of course. Don’t worry. As with the ‘prepubescent’ upon whose colorectal initiation our curtain rose, the magic of makeup and stagecraft will solve this veterinary conundrum. You’ve seen that beefy imbecile hulking about the brain trauma ward, correct? Well, let him be wrangled and metamorphosed into a proper thoroughbred Arabian pony. I hear he’s a former layer of cobblestones, invalided from his crew when sideswiped by a carriage full of recklessly careening, and soon to be headless high-borns. As such, our superb imbecile is even more comfortable on hands and knees than I am, but for purposes other than making the beast with two backs.
"Upon his back, in a saddle gilt with show-tinsel, proudly rides a ghost, costumed in the full finery of a colonel in the pope’s light cavalry: faux-fox fur pelisse, shako embellished with a pomegranate-dyed pompom and an ormolu-hilted sabre. Lo and behold! It’s my father! In a voice destroyed with cognac, Freemasonry and atheism, Sade père is bellowing, as he perpetually bellowed in life, the most discouraging words at his son —
And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed
That rots itself in ease on Lethe wharf…
"And whom do you suppose I have selected for this role? Not my father himself, certainly, for, even if he wasn’t dead as a reeking rat for more than a third of a century, he’d be impossible to abide for more than a few minutes, and would have every inmate of your nymphomaniac ward raped in less time. No, to play the part of Sade père I’ve chosen the notorious Bastille commandant."
In a muddle of puzzlement, Coulmier murmurs, "Who?"
"You sound skeptical. Why not? It’s an inspired bit of casting, a powerful statement about the nefariously collaborative relationship between him and the horrendous female whose equestrian escort he’s playing. (In fact, I should probably have her riding him.)"
"But Monsieur de Launay enjoys no greater presence among the quick than your father."
The marquis is unembarrassed as only la crème de la crème can remain upon being caught out in a blunder. "Ah!" he chuckles, "my withered grasp on reality is showing, yes? No matter. Give it no second thought."
But the Abbé’s bureaucratic mind can’t leave the point unpursued: "Launay was immolated on the Place de la Révolution, historically. In your own comedy, mincemeat is made of him. By you, according to, er, you."
"Of course. And, therefore, Monsieur le directeur, might I, perhaps, persuade you to consent to take the part? Will you pretend to be the ghost who apes my deceased male parent? You have ample life experience at the helm of your own Little Bastille, and, while your presentation self is singularly unprepossessing, your voice might grow passable with a modicum of coaching. Please say yes. You can be the nice papa posing as the mean papa impersonating the genetic papa to whom nothing but indifference is owed. It will be a poignant expression of the paternal relationship of the jailer to his jailee."
This grotesquely fat maniac is attempting to appeal to sentiment. The effect is nauseating.
"Will I be sawn to bits?"
"Oh, don’t worry, it’s all mediocre compote and ferret bladders."
Somehow, that reassurance wields a certain power of suggestion. Without being able to imagine why, le directeur finds himself on the verge of acquiescence.
"As an added enticement, you’ll be issued a riding crop with an iron-barbed tip, to belabor sans merci the imbecile’s buttocks."
The Abbé astonishes himself by involuntarily nodding assent.
"Splendid, capital fellow! So, stage left, on you come, prancing and trotting, the grand horsey honor guard. And who, Monsieur le commandant, do you suppose considers herself important enough to rate such an entrance, no less imposing than unwelcome?"
Coulmier is stared at once more; but this time it’s a prompt to speak rather than a command to be silent.
"Well —"
"You know this woman (and I use the term advisedly). She has signed the Charenton visitors log more than once. I’ll give a hint: think of an obsessional maniac who would not be out of place as a permanent resident. And here’s a second hint: I shall eat my own soul sooner than forsake vengeance on this execrable beast vomited out of hell. I’d be overjoyed to wish upon her the chastisement of being flayed alive, dragged over thistles and tossed into a vat of vinegar—if something better hadn’t already been devised in faraway lands. An importation, as we’ll soon see."
"I’m afraid I haven’t got the slightest idea who —"
"It’s my mother-in-law, Madame de Montreuil, my stintless persecutor, my life’s tormentor, stalker of me as her personal prey, contriver of my capture and confinement, which she fancies herself to have encompassed in collusion with the Bastille’s odious commandant — also known, for the purposes of our production, as you.
"Madame de Montreuil has shown the gall to come gloat over my undoing. Her puckered carcass is draped in a pretentious gown for the purpose, with a lengthy train carried by an especially impudent corrections officer. (More of a turn-key, if the truth be told, or a screw; his speech is full of catachresis and abounds in pleonasms, and he deals with me in an anthropophagous manner; he needs to be strung up on a democratic gallows, and so he will be, before our comedy is done).
"Ma belle-mère crosses to stage right and strikes a pose intended to be reminiscent of the Callipygean Venus in Naples, of which her deflated, down-dragged buttocks make a nauseating burlesque. The salacious crone gazes on as I continue, with my own gravity-ravaged ass, to assist La Jeunesse’s memorized recitations. The gradually rising color in her jaded cheeks is feigned, for she has no shame. Her blush must be simulated by a morsel of her daughter’s compote, affixed to the inside of her Japanese fretwork fan — although even half a mediocre raspberry is wasted on such grotesque physiognomy.
"By this time the sights, sounds and smells of my valet and me have caused even such a swine as the impudent turn-key, or screw, to be overcome with nausea. He drops Madame de Montreuil’s train and withdraws, leaving our visitor on her own. She stands, repulsive, yet attractively vulnerable to someone who might enjoy doing her harm."
Abbé Coulmier is shocked to hear, emanating from the shadows of the corridor in which he is being waylaid, the sound of a woman. Astonishing in its authenticity, chilling in its maliciousness, the voice emanates from the marquis’ discolored mouth. He’s doing an impression of his mother-in-law, delivering the only line his script has deigned to vouchsafe to her "miasmatic lips":
"‘Mon beau-fils, I deny your talent, even as I live in fear of appearing in one of your plays.’
"To which I have a fine reply at the ready, a proper monologue —
"Oh, by the way, everyone’s lines must be well-projected, clear to the furthest reaches of the highest loges, in order to be heard above La Jeunesse’s melodious tenor, which has been declaiming without respite this entire time, and will continue to the end of the scene. This is why the enactments of his recitations must be in dumbshow. If the screams my novel calls for, the maniacal laughter and death rattles, were more than merely mouthed, none of the deathless syllables of Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome would be audible.
"Therefore, boomingly as my poor lacerated lungs can boom, I reply to my mother-in-law as follows:
"‘Unnatural monsters, Madame, serve for Shakespeare’s, not our French theater. So, when your body is being mistreated, as it shall be presently, we’ll mock you as la Calibanette. And that is how you will be presented in the program notes. But please don’t be offended. Rather, assimilate the nickname. The grubby Nazarene himself treasured the tiara of his taunting, till the thorns merged with his scalp and gave him a coxcomb. He knew his tacking-up would exert a fraction of the salvific force without the centurions’ mockery. Dignity is packed with more nerve-endings than any number of hands and feet. Speaking of which, enjoy the unmangled condition of yours while you can.’
"This speech of mine must be must be played, as one so vividly says, to the hilt (and I regret my current inability to gesticulate), in order to distract the audience’s attention long enough for our burly property master to hulk in, again. Unobtrusively as possible, he drags and deposits, upstage, a magnificent example of foreign ingenuity.
"It’s an invention which, wielded by a man both stout and strong, such as a former layer of cobblestones, is found useful in certain exotic countries, far to the east, for carrying out the ultimate legal sentence. Normally, I oppose capital punishment as an interruption of pleasure; but this method renders a disservice so profoundly beyond our naive European notions of cruelty that I cannot but endorse it on aesthetic grounds. Who else but the sultry, dusky Orientals could have contrived a means of bringing about the cessation of being so complete as to preclude any metempsychotic sequel?
"At the sight of this importation, my mother-in-law quakes, squawks and defecates in horror down the gaudy back of her gown. The resulting assault on three of mankind’s quintuplitude of senses will take a skittish effect upon pseudo-Papa Sade’s counterfeit steed. The brain-traumatized imbecile whinnies in horsey perturbation, rears up, and throws you, my dear doubly-imitative un-parent, from your tinselly saddle. You’ll roll into the wings, never again to come un-damned. (There’s a gymnast on the physical therapy staff who’ll teach you rudimentary tumbling, for you must spring to your feet quickly; an efficient change of costume is called for.)
"Most gratifyingly of all, the shying stallion bucks and kicks my wife’s parent square in the face, flattening her out on her back, still conscious, but with nose and teeth shattered, lower jaw grotesquely dislocated in a lopsided leer that betrays her true moral condition.
"The imbecile neighs, nickers, stands upright, shakes off his bridle and spits out his bit. A purple turban, unfurled, flutters down from the catwalk and onto his front hooves, now become hands. He swathes his elephant-sized head in a metamorphosis worthy of Ovid’s ivory stylus, becoming the Punjabi executioner of dim and fearful legend. He approaches the implement whose mere appearance has inspired lower-digestive panic in our victim.
"Now is the time for our splendid Herald to appear. His is an interesting role, as it demands a certain amount of mental clarity and eloquence. And here is the sole advantage of staging our production in your Little Bastille. The cast and crew can include a few inmates detained not for so-called ‘therapeutic’ reasons, but political, under letters de cachet. They retain at least a portion of their wits about them, and can be entrusted with sensical roles.
"One such valued asset is our Herald, who marches downstage, smites the apron thrice with his staff and proclaims, in the clear elocution, cadence and intonation of the functioning mind—
The spread-eagling of la Calibanette, mother-in-law
of Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade!
"The frowzy aristocrats from the tableau vivant animate themselves. Becoming useful for the first time in the history of their social stratum, they pile out of the tumbrel, detach a wheel therefrom, roll it downstage and perform the heralded procedure on the lady, stretching her out on the spokes and fastening her doomed extremities to the rim, à la the heady days of the Inquisition.
"The youngster I sodomized in our opening scene wriggles in on his/her midget belly like a caterpillar, and plants the ruined fundament of his/her limbless torso smack upon Madame de Montreuil’s fractured face, to muffle with brownish-red chunks and bubbles the howls which my script requires of the bitch for the remainder of the evening.
"You know what? I think I’ve decided to make our midget a girl, so we can retain the delicate crinoline petticoat of a dusky peach shade. Now the worse for wear, the garment is ragged and scabbed along the rips where her mutilation was effected."
"Scabbed?" says Coulmier. "What about compote and ferret —"
"The Herald drowns out those misgivings by choosing this moment (deliberately, and under his own direction) to smite thrice again and intone, like a prêtre at Midnight Mass—
The leisurely reduction of la Calibanette
to a thin red film of single atoms underfoot!
"The orientalized imbecile takes up the aforementioned maker of death, which happens to be a mammoth mallet, fashioned of lovely aromatic cedar imported from the Himalayas, among whose metaphysical foothills its use was conceived. And here his extraordinary strength comes into play. Sheer heft would encourage headlong swings, but he must administer exquisitely moderated, well-placed blows, while circumambulating the tumbrel wheel upon which Madame de Montreuil is strapped.
"Repeatedly, he stalks round and round, in a cruel burlesque of the Cycle of Necessity from which her invisible moiety is being teased, at a snail’s pace. Proceeding in accordance with Delambre and Méchain’s newfangled centimeters, the Hindu mallet atomizes a segment of her steadily liquefying body before progressing another smidgen’s worth, up one limb, then the next, spiraling inexorably toward the vital giblets of the trunk, triturating every potential seat of sin-encrusted sentience, so that, ever so eventually, her heretofore ‘immortal’ soul is squeezed out like a clot of sugar-infused lard from the nozzle of a pastry bag. Here it comes, spurt by squirt, rendered to infinitesimal granules, until, by the end of this scene, naught will be left to reincarnate, and the ostensibly ‘eternal’ spark that has, for sixty-eight years, verminously animated ma belle-mère will be snuffed on a permanent basis, the universe rid of her fetid stench once and for all.
"My wife’s maman is kept conscious for as long as possible during this hilariously protracted process, so she may ponder the bottomless notion of never coming back, not even as a crab-louse on a leper’s scabby perineum, so she may savor the awareness that she’s facing—"
Another attack of spasming, hemorrhaging aphasia interrupts this proposed dramatic production.
"— nothing."
The marquis shudders, nearly faints and grabs like a falling man at the worlds of fat that curdle upon his hips. With visible exertion of what must be a gargantuan will, he manages to recover composure, then continues his pitch.
"All the while the Mallet of Annihilation is making sounds that register somewhere between a splash and a thud, and pulsate in time with the orchestra, which has stricken up a rousing rendition of La Marseillaise. This is the cue for scoundrelly Monsieur de Launay, Commandant of the Bastille, to come marching briskly on, not as Sade, Sr., but as himself — which is, again, to say, you — all dressed up in his shabby little uniform: moth-eaten wool of an indeterminately brownish hue, ormolu buttons missing or hanging by single threads, frazzled lamé epaulets. It’s embarrassing, to be frank, and I apologize for the indignity.
"You arrive on the elbow of a certain male nurse employed here at Charenton — you know the chap, self-willed in a peculiarly random and unfocused way, a semi-lunatic himself. He has been disguised in the costume of a Bastille corrections officer — an actual historical rascal, who prodded me up into the turrets for my strolls, and back down again before my allotted time was up, a ramrod affixed to the muzzle of his musket, as if I’d tried to kidnap and face-rape Louis XVI, himself.
"Now is your shining moment, your big speech. Do your best to look gouty and smell like parfum bon marché. And try to seem put off, but not terribly so, by the buggersome circumstances under which your embassy is being received.
"‘Monsieur le marquis,’ you announce, ever so importantly —
"Oh, by the way, speak up, to be heard over La Jeunesse’s melodious tenor; but please don’t bellow so loudly that you miss any rectal blood-bubbling syllables of incitement from my vindictive mother-in-law. So long as she remains not quite completely murdered, la Calibanette will nag and prod you, Monsieur le commandant, her collaborator in my undoing, for she hasn’t lost hope for the success of your project, even though it’s not going so well at this time. At key points in this excellent monologue of yours, she will somehow manage to wedge a viciously encouraging phrase edgewise between the midget’s undersized hemorrhoids, interspersed among expressions of the agony we impose upon her by means of our Punjabi pulverizer.
"‘Monsieur le marquis,’ you say, ‘I’ve perused your many ardent petitions for an increase in the frequency and duration of your exercise periods. Unfortunately, not only is an increase impossible, but a curtailment is necessary. Your strolls among the high turrets are no longer permitted, because the fortifications have been stacked with barrels of gunpowder and fitted with batteries of cannons, as security against the increasingly restive populace below. We have even been compelled to take down the lightning rod on the topmost tower, as installed during the last year of the ancien régime by the geriatric American satyriac in the fur cap pilfered from Voltaire.’
"In a rage at having my sole means of postponing death denied me, I begin to expostulate loudly, uttering some phrases to be improvised on the spot. (I find vulgarisms more effective when not pondered beforehand.) Over my shrieked cock-suckers and cunt-lickers, you try to make your unctuous words heard:
"‘For salubriousness’ sake, dear Sade, the better to discharge excess nervous energy —’ (I’m putting your words in your mouth, Coulmier, and misattributing them retroactively, with your permission, of course.) ‘—perhaps it’s advisable for you be transferred to the famous institution directed so ably by that brilliant pioneer in the therapeutic sciences, Abbé Coulmier. His Charenton Asylum has lovely gardens in which sanatative constitutionals may be taken in the cool suburban eventide.’ (No harm in a little false self-advertizing, eh, Monsieur le directeur?)
"Such is the heavy-handed ruse that your co-conspirator, ma belle-mère, and you (or, rather, the scoundrel whose role you have so sportingly taken on) are attempting to impose on me. By contriving my early absence from the Bastille, you hope to bring about the insupportable loss which this comedy has been written to remedy, ecstatically, in a few moments, if you’ll continue listening to my pitch.
"Oh, but wait. Did I forget to mention that I happen to be clutching one of the tin funnels which come standard issue for us inmates, to facilitate a certain unsavory but biologically unavoidable purpose? You must imagine, Coulmier, throughout all the preceding, while delivering my impassioned soliloquies and having my cloacal vent voluptuously seen to, that I’ve been gesticulating with this funnel, flexing only my right wrist. For a reason to be made apparent shortly, the property master has fashioned me an extra-long version of this metallic attribute, an extension of my sebaceously mummified forelimb, featuring an ingenious telescoping function of my own design, so that it can reach the window without me abandoning my position of lower-digestive gratification on the cell floor.
"I now insert this funnel between the triple bars, just as it’s intended to be inserted, but not for sluicing sewage into a ditch three stories below, as prescribed. It’s rather been converted, by my innovative genius, into a megaphone. Instead of dung and urine, the contrivance dispenses revolutionary ardor into the ears of the masses who mull restlessly, way down there on the Rue Saint Antoine, who seethe on the ditch’s brim, and are poised to leap across and assail this hulking symbol of oppression.
"‘Turn-keys and screws are killing everybody in here!’ I scream. ‘Political prisoners are being butchered by the baker’s dozen! Help, valeureux Parisiens, help!’ And I supplement those heartfelt pleas with handwritten notes to similar effect, folded like birds and sailed across my cell and out the window. The peoples’ enraged hoots in response can be simulated by the usual background racket of this asylum.
"Now comes your cue, Coulmier, under the guise of Monsieur le commandant, to raise the alarm, at Madame de Montreuil’s polyp-gagged instigation. Your aim is to see me dragged prematurely out, to forestall my rousing the rabble — pardon me, les citoyens.
"You issue orders to that effect—but it’s too late! This is the moment of revolutionary history which our comedy has been composed to revise. Now space is violated, time reversed.
"Your randomly self-willed male nurse either hasn’t heard, or has chosen to ignore your directive. He makes himself useful for once. Instead of descending upon me, he turns his back, wanders offstage and stumbles down several dark and airless corridors, unlocking the gates of the most dangerous wards. (In subsequent drafts, I’ll try to come up with a nominal motivation for him. Randomly self-willed is a little weak.)
"The lunatics flow out of their cells like a stream of mucus from a kicked cuspidor. They’ve somehow been coaxed out of their nightgowns and into malodorous working-class street rags, idiotic Phrygian caps wedged on their phrenologically questionable noggins, for they are to play the roused rabble. Taking advantage of our wonderful octagonal multiplicity of stages right and left, they seethe from every direction, slipping and sliding in the film of red grease to which Madame de Montreuil is being reduced. They reenact the orgiastic storming, and improvise at liberty all manner of approximately siege-like behaviors. And, being mental defectives, they add variations of their own, which look more like sport or spasm than political action. (Strange to say, among their brickbats, broken wine bottles, up-wrenched cobblestones and other improvised weaponry, are several items that resemble tennis rackets.) Hurons and Hottentots in nasty grass shacks would flinch from contemplating such atrocities as are being perpetrated on the stage that you, my dear Coulmier-cum-Launay, caused to be built.
"Since numerous of my fellow invalids have been previously engaged as mimes and are cast in the dumbshows swirling around the periphery, the troops of liberators must be reinforced with indigents, enticed with wine from the alleyways hereabouts. The common folk join in, acting out the innovative and courageous passages from Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome, as recited by my humble, haughty manservant, who has remained steadfast this whole time, ever erect in both spine and phallus. Now the full voice of le prolétariat is given to the wretches mistreated in my novel: the howling neonates, the maniacally cackling enceintes, the death-rattling dodderers, et al.
"At this juncture, I’m afraid that you, mon ami, must exit, to keep your appointment with the humble tradesman’s rusty hand-saw in the Place de la Révolution. The quartet of corrections officers reappears, their jaws and hands gilded with prepubescent gore, their loyalty to le commandant eroded by the enthusiasm of the epoch, and they frog-march you away, stage left. Allow me to extend my condolences. Au revoir.
"Meanwhile, major structural damage is being wreaked, to the rhythm of our Himalayan hammer. Thus is re-fulfilled, for our modern times, in a gentile context, the prophecy of the grubby Nazarene, who famously whined, There shall not be left one stone upon another. We won’t spare the oozing pair of boulders that, between them, formed the chink in which Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome has been re-secreted. (This might require recruiting some teamsters from the surrounding slums, to help with the heavy lifting.)
"Savage illiterate ruffians lay unwashed mitts upon my sublime chef d’oeuvre. They unfurl it like a party streamer and drape it about my crumbling cell. Will it be used as asswipe? Who, historically, can say? At this moment (odd to relate), my manuscript resembles an untethered tennis net more than a personal hygiene aid.
"Et voilà, Monsieur le directeur! Here is revealed the insupportable loss that has reduced me to aphasia more than once throughout our interview this afternoon. Behold the mystery which you and your staffers have been trying to solve."
Abbé Coulmier, through his confusion, nausea and fatigue, is dimly aware that he should be pleased, as a caregiver. The patient is putting his depredation into words, thus relieving himself of the paradoxical burden of absence. What follows must theoretically be an access of near-celestial bliss, perhaps already written into the script: an opportunity for the author to supply the void.
The Marquis de Sade’s voice becomes hushed.
"Suddenly, somehow, the quiet creak of my patented Euripidean crane is heard over the fracas. This is the cue for everyone to cease all nihilistic behaviors and freeze: the mimes; the lunatics; the frowzy tumbrel joy-riders; the workers from the gutters; the imbecilic quasi-Punjabi executioner and his victim (who still possesses just enough animation and structural integrity to writhe in agony—a deal of self-discipline will be required of her, for a few more minutes, at any rate); and, more than a little unhappily, my valet, in particular his pelvis. There is a silence, unprecedented in the Bastille no less than in this madhouse, as the entire cast forms one great tableau vivant and gazes straight up into the catwalks. Who, or what impends overhead?"
The Sadean visage, under its multiple rolls of incarnadined pudge, now becomes illuminated from within. He looks like a medieval saint in the throes of a beatific vision.
"Cue someone angelic gently to be lowered into our midst, and to float a couple meters off the floor. Her blond tresses are curling and waving over the fathomless blackness of the crepe in which her perfect form is swathed. Who can she be?
"Why, it’s none other than the object of Petrarch’s obsessional stalking. It’s my illustrious ancestress, with whom I have always been infatuated, no less than a babe with its milk-geysering maman. Just as her inverse shadow, Madame de Montreuil, was conjured by my morbidity and mortification, so Laura de Noves manifests at my apotheosis. She hovers near her descendant, reaches out to dab away his haemolacria, and chants her perfect contralto straight into the side of his head:
Let the beautiful laurel grow so, on the green bank,
and let him who planted it, in the sweet shade,
write lofty and joyful thoughts, to the sound of water.
"Gently my Laura wafts about the stage, deus ex machina-wise, above the dumbshow of disembowelment, the motionless mêlée of mayhem. Tranquil as a fructifying zephyr of springtime, she untangles and untucks my hundred thousand words from among the spider webs in the rafters and flutters them down into my grateful hands."
With more mobility than he has displayed since arriving at the asylum, the obesity-straitjacketed marquis manages to raise his arms, almost above his bloated head.
"Through the intercession of Laura’s lovely fingers, my chef d’oeuvre has been retrieved before it can disappear forever in the rout. Hence, and ever after, when Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome cinches tight around my skull, it won’t wield sufficient torque to wring tears of blood from my eye sockets.
"Our revels now are pretty nearly ended. The Holy Apostle of Absolute Freedom decouples from his manservant’s ever-engorged member, shrugs the breakfast tray, ink pot and quills from his back and pulls up his breeches, which must be made of the finest silk, azure in hue, to bring out the salacious redness that emblematizes the immediate aftermath of a certain colorectal behaviors. To achieve that coloration, another ferret bladder, also impregnated with Madame de Sade’s mediocre raspberry compote, has been pre-burst and tucked dead-center in the seat of my garment.
"My nether region thus modestly covered, I stride, not waddle, downstage, to the very brim of the apron. I shed my yoke of gristle and wave my mighty paper revelation in victory, like the drapeaux tricolores that so gaily festooned our national razor throughout the Terror."
A haze seems to have gathered within Coulmier’s eyeballs over the course of this strange conversation; but he thinks he might be able to make out the lost volume, wrapped around the patient’s shoulders like a fichu from Jacquard’s innovative loom—or maybe it’s just another stage property.
"With a gesture of both miraculously mobile hands, I hush my standing ovation, and deliver a speech of reconciliation and atonement, as follows:
"‘Mesdames et messieurs, particularly you genteel ladies in the loges, you know me. I stand before you, none the worse for wear, after thirty years as an apolitical prisoner under l’ancien régime, la République, la Terreur, le Consulat, and now le glorieux Empire. I never emigrated, even in the most rumbustious moments of Robespierre’s tantrum. I never acted posh. I supported the Revolution of 1789, to the extent my innate apoliticality permitted. The work of my pen, both in and out of the Bastille, and here in Charenton, has compensated for my birth and, perhaps, a few excesses of my unjustifiably privileged youth, and—’
"My closing self-benediction is interrupted by an inhuman, even inanimate squeak. It issues from underneath the Punjabi’s mighty mallet, and is followed by a damp hiss, as the last spurt of my mother-in-law’s spirit is extruded, crushed and extinguished once and for all. Delightful as it is, my moment of triumph is enhanced immeasurably by the final giving-up of Madame de Montreuil’s ghost. Accomplished libertines never flinch from the awareness that cold-blooded homicide elevates the senses, and voluptuously exacerbates a discharge.
"And make no mistake, Coulmier, our entire production has been one extended discharge. This dramaturgical débauche I am pitching at you is a crescendo, a mystic perturbation of the spiritus animalis residing in the erectile tissues, producing what is known among connoisseurs as asomatous lubriciousness.
"This has been an opportunity for our audience to observe the idiosyncratically protracted process which the leading man must complete, in order to achieve the ejaculation that has become legend throughout the public brothels of Paris. His already overburdened heart threatening to implode, the Marquis de Sade undergoes deep swoons, right there on the lip of the stage, and horrendous vapors, ending with a seizure that, if Esquirol is unwilling to diagnose it a proper epileptic fit, certainly qualifies as epileptoid. It can be heard as far as Montmartre.
"I take my triumphal bow, which is nothing less than a collapse into the orchestra pit. I crash among the basset horns."
Close to collapse himself, physically and emotionally spent, Coulmier is unable to keep from gasping down gouts of the mephitic atmosphere that never stirs in this sordid institution he pretends to administer. All illusions of himself as a healer have been blasted away in a hurricane of words.
"Citoyen, forgive me," he whispers, for the lack of anything better to say, "but could you repeat the name of your act? I didn’t quite catch —"
Sade’s eyes widen in surprise that anyone would need to be informed of the answer to such an obvious question.
"Try to cock an ear up, between the triple bars of the loophole high in the wall that circumscribes our shared Purgatory. Hear, with more than a soupçon of transtemporal and -spatial imagination, a dialogue that wafts on a smoky breeze, from ten kilometers away and as many years ago. While you listen to the chit-chat between Joseph-Ignace Guillotin’s busy daughter and her adoring public on the Place de la Révolution, I’ll cast a benevolent Laura-like gaze upon you and try to elicit the title you seek.
"But first, your self-willed male nurse, still dressed like a Bastille corrections officer, must wander back from the dangerous wards, his master key transmuted to an altogether different implement, rusty. He takes your elbow and starts to escort you down the dark corridor, in the direction of the derelict tennis court. Before you go, I’ll toss you a hint.
"Our comedy is named after a particular social stratum — moist, gorgeous, gnashing, horrendous, latterly so under-appreciated — whose excess nervous energy has always enabled and necessitated the cyclical upheaval, the undulant fever, that is our spasming paramecium of a civilization."
As le directeur vanishes into shadows, he murmurs, with reluctance, over his shoulder —
"…les Aristocrates?"
*
This is an extract from The Aristocrats Joke Anthology (Potter’s Grove Press, 2023). Read the introduction in 3:AM here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Tom Bradley is the author of numerous novels, essays, and short stories.
https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-marquis-de-sade-tells-his-version-of-the-aristocrats-joke/