Crimes of Passion

By Marquis De Sade

Originally published in 1800, Crimes of Passion contained eleven stories and an essay on the novel. The present book contains three abridged tales. In “Florville and Courval” we find not only a reinterpretation and elaboration of the Oedipus myth, but an unforgettable illustration of Donatien Alphonse François de Sade’s artistic creed. He was not simply an eccentric aristocrat with artistic pretensions, but a pathological rebel against the Age of Enlightenment, and a prisoner of the Prince of Darkness. The historical tale of “Juliette and Raunai” is sentimental and melodramatic. In it, virtue triumphs, but not before the lovers have run the gamut of human suffering. “Miss Henriette Stralson” has a contemporary setting and ranks above his historical tales. In it, virtue wins only a pyrrhic victory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Philosophical Library Open Road
• Release date: Jun 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9781504055055

Marquis De Sade

The Marquis de Sade was a French aristocrat, revolutionary and writer of violent pornography. Incarcerated for 32 years of his life (in prisons and asylums), the majority of his output was written from behind bars. Famed for his graphic depiction of cruelty within classic titles such as ‘Crimes of Love’ and ‘One Hundred Days of Sodom’, de Sade's name was adopted as a clinical term for the sexual fetish known as ‘Sadism’.

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INTRODUCTION

Sadism is defined as the seeking of sexual gratification through torture, or as love of cruelty, conceived as a manifestation of desire. The term derives, of course, from the name of Count Donatien Alphonse François Sade, better known to posterity as the Marquis de Sade. Born in Paris on June 2, 1740, he began his military service at the age of fourteen. After he returned to Paris twelve years later, his vicious practices brought him notoriety and imprisonment. Charged with committing an unnatural act, he was sentenced to die at Aix in 1772. He managed to escape to Italy but was re-arrested upon his return to Paris five years later. Transferred to Aix for trial, he was found guilty and sent to prison in 1777. He escaped the following year but was captured and placed in the Bastille, where he remained until 1789, when he was transferred to the Charenton lunatic asylum. Discharged in 1790, he was recommitted in 1803. It was there that he died on December 2, 1814. Altogether, his aberrant behavior caused him to spend twenty-seven years behind bars. His personal predicament is reflected in his writings, which date from his confinement in the Bastille one year before it was stormed by the revolutionaries.

Crimes of Passion, as it was originally published in 1800, contained eleven stories and an essay on the novel. The work did not go unnoticed, for Sade had already achieved fame as the author of Aline and Valcourt (1793). In addition, he had written other novels, short stories, and dramas. These are the major works on which his fame still rests: Justine (1791), Philosophy of the Boudoir (1795), and Juliette (1797). Villeterque, writing in the Journal des Arts, des Sciences et de Littérature (October 22, 1800), called the new work an odious book by a man suspected of even more odious crimes. Describing it as a tissue of horrors, he censured the author for recounting one crime after another, without justification, and for allowing vice to triumph over virtue. He complained about the prevalence of shocking scenes, saying that such scenes stimulate unhealthy inclinations in wicked men and draw from virtuous men shouts of indignation if they are strong and tears of discouragement if they are weak. A kinder but anonymous critic, writing in the Journal de Paris (October 28, 1800), called attention to the author’s fertile imagination and justified his predilection for macabre scenes by citing their appropriateness in an era when actual events continue to surpass anything that fiction can offer.

The standard French histories of literature neglect Sade or relegate his contribution to world literature to a footnote. During the past century, however, and particularly since the emergence of Surrealism and Existentialism, there has been a revival of interest in his life and work. Reappraisals of his influence on the intellectual history of Europe suggest that his works will continue to intrigue those who study the conflicting elements that underlie man’s search for integrity. Simone de Beauvoir’s brilliant writings are not without precedents. C. P. Dawe’s The Marquis de Sade (1927), long the standard work in English, has been superseded by G. Gorer’s The Life and Ideas of the Marquis de Sade. Invaluable also are the studies of his life and works published by Mario Praz and by E. Heine. The revival of interest—sparked, perhaps, by the writings of such admirers as Charles Baudelaire, whose Flowers of Evil appealed to many poets, including the Surrealists—led to the publication of critical editions of most of his works.

Though many of the myths concerning his shocking intrigues have been exploded, one fact stands out: He was not simply an eccentric aristocrat with artistic pretensions but a pathological rebel against the Age of Enlightenment, a prisoner of the Prince of Darkness. He perverted the principle of liberty extolled by his contemporaries and scoffed at the notion that man can achieve self-knowledge and mold a world of his choosing. His penchant for the pursuit of evil, which made the Surrealists look upon him as the prototype of the poète maudit, is reflected in his writing. Virtue and vice are locked in an unending struggle in which victory can be won only at the price of total annihilation. Here as in his own life Sade seems to be motivated by the awareness of his paradoxical nature, aptly stated centuries earlier by Ovid: Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor (I see and sanction what is good, but I continue to pursue evil).

Crimes of Passion provides an adequate basis for the assessment of Sade’s talent as a writer and of his originality in the use of psychopathological elements in fictional works. Though his talent as a writer must be qualified somewhat charitably as less than first-rate, his exploration of the subconscious and its conflicting tendencies ranks him among the most eminent of Freud’s predecessors. Most illuminating on this point is the first tale in the present collection. Florville and Courval, presented here in its entirety, is his masterpiece. It brilliantly illustrates the ideas on the novel discussed by Sade in his aforementioned essay: men are at the mercy of fate and are forever victims of the effervescence of the heart known as love; virtue is but one element of the human heart; the writer must reveal both the dangers and the sufferings associated with love; only a writer who has suffered can depict suffering; man has two weaknesses—he "must love and pray"; readers are not interested in seeing virtue triumph but their souls quake when they see virtue crushed by vice, and nothing else can stimulate enough interest to assure the writer of fame. Thus in Florville and Courval we find not only a reinterpretation and elaboration of the Oedipus myth but an unforgettable illustration of Sade’s artistic creed.

The two other tales presented here, both in drastically abridged form, are inferior to Sade’s gruesome masterpiece. The first of these, Juliette and Raunai, has a historical setting. Like his other historical tales, it is repetitious (in the original version), sentimental, and melodramatic. In it virtue does triumph, after the lovers have run the gamut of human suffering, but the ending seems even more contrived than the setting. The third tale has a contemporary setting and ranks above his historical tales. Its flashes of originality are not entirely obscured by stilted language and contrived circumstances. Not surprisingly, in Miss Henriette Stralson virtue wins only a pyrrhic victory.

Wade Baskin

FLORVILLE AND COURVAL or FATE

Courval had just turned fifty. Healthy and energetic, he could count on another twenty years of life. He had had nothing but trouble with his first wife, who had forsaken him many years earlier for a life of debauchery. Assuming that unimpeachable witnesses were correct in stating that this creature was in her grave, he toyed with the notion of forming an alliance a second time with a level-headed person who, by virtue of her excellent morals and gentle character, might actually make him forget his earlier misfortunes.

His children had brought him as much unhappiness as had his wife. He had only two, a girl whom he had lost when she was quite young and a boy who had forsaken him at the age of fifteen to follow in the footsteps of