Perhaps he realised it was unpublishable – a conclusion that censors and courts around the world would repeatedly endorse over the course of the 20th century. Though he had ample opportunity over the next four years, Sade never completed his first – and most extreme – novelistic enterprise.
The remainder are very detailed summaries but no more.
The novel is not complete, however, as only the introduction and the first of its four parts are written in full. Sade began drafting his novel in earnest on 22 October 1785, working from seven to 10 each evening over 37 consecutive days. He was arrested in February 1777 and remained in prison for the next 13 years. After years of covering up her son-in-law’s behaviour, Madame de Montreuil had finally had enough: she had the king sign a lettre de cachet, a royal warrant that meant Sade could be incarcerated indefinitely.
The last days of sodom and gomorrah movie online series#
His 20s and 30s had been marked by a series of public scandals: a sexual assault on a young woman named Rose Keller an orgy in Marseille which led to four prostitutes falling ill after consuming chocolate-coated Spanish fly (an aphrodisiac) and, most disturbingly, a winter spent in his chateau with his wife and several freshly recruited servants aged around 15 – the so-called “little girls affair”. He was a notorious libertine even by the standards of his age. Though the Surrealists would eventually cast him as a martyr to freedom, Sade was in prison not for his words but for his deeds. He had also been shot at, burnt in effigy and forced to live on the run – on one occasion escaping to Italy with his sister-in-law, and lover, Anne-Prospère. By the time Sade wrote The 120 Days he had spent eight years in prison, first in Vincennes then the Bastille. The story of the scroll, complete with Provençal noblemen, prison-breaks, and shadowy booksellers, reads rather like the life of the man who created it. The Marquis De Sade spent 32 years in prison or in mental hospitals. The scroll, which started its life in prison, is thus under lock and key once again, waiting for the courts to decide its future. The exhibition was cut short when the director of the foundation was charged with fraud. Decades of legal wrangling ensued between the Nouailles and the Nordmanns, only resolved in 2014 when a private foundation acquired the scroll for €7m and placed it on display in Paris. But he smuggled it over the border to Switzerland, and sold it to a leading collector of erotica, Gérard Nordmann. Sade’s descendants, the Nouailles family, bought the scroll back in 1929 and kept it until 1982, when they entrusted the publisher, Jean Grouet, with its valuation. His family held on to it for more than a 100 years before eventually selling it to a German collector, who allowed the pioneering sexologist Iwan Bloch to publish the novel for the first time in 1904. Somehow it escaped the storming of the Bastille in the hands of a young man called Arnoux de Saint-Maximin, who then sold it to a Provençal aristocrat, the Marquis de Villeneuve-Trans. Though Sade never saw his scroll again, its story was far from over. Inside the cylinder was a scroll, 12m long and 11cm wide, covered in minute handwriting: the manuscript of an unfinished novel called The 120 Days of Sodom, or The School of Libertinage. Sade wept “tears of blood” over the loss. When his wife set off for the Bastille to fetch his belongings on 14 July, it was already too late: the Revolution had beaten her to it, and she had to turn back empty-handed. He was transferred to an asylum outside Paris, and forced to leave many of his most precious possessions behind, including a copper cylinder kept hidden in a crevice in the wall. Earlier that day he had been caught shouting to the crowd gathered outside the prison walls that the inmates’ throats were being cut. O n 3 July 1789, in the middle of the night, the Marquis de Sade was dragged from his cell in the ironically named Liberty tower of the Bastille.