Word: sade
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...PERSECUTION AND ASSASSINATION OF MARAT AS PERFORMED BY THE INMATES OF THE ASYLUM OF CHARENTON UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE is a shot of dramatic adrenaline. People who demand theatrical tranquilizers had better stay away...
MARQUIS DE SADE, SELECTED LETTERS, edited by Gilbert Lély. From Vincennes prison and the lunatic asylum at Charenton, the Marquis de Sade wrote to his mother-in-law, his wife and his valet hoping that someone would understand him. He remains an enigma whose habit of acting out monstrous fantasies made his name an eponym for the pain that, to some, gives pleasure...
...this is literary poppycock. It may be true that De Sade is a fascinating figure; Edmund Wilson and Simone de Beauvoir have written studies on him, and the London-Broadway hit Marat/ Sade, as well as a new paperback edition of his writings, testifies to renewed public interest. But it is also true that he is the compulsive addict of every conceivable extremity within the technical possibilities of the human sexual apparatus. What he could not do he dreamed, and what he dreamed, he wrote. His letters can be analyzed in seven deeply felt but wonderfully inconsistent categories...
Whiplash. Still, De Sade's letters are interesting not only for his status as a metaphysical monster but for his human inconsistencies. Sometimes he addressed his wife as "my lollote" "celestial pussycat," "joy of Mahomet" and "whiplash of my nerves"; at other times he complained that she had visited him in immodest clothes, told her he would rather see her in a whorehouse than with her mother, and lectured her sternly about his superior philosophical systems ("Mine," he wrote, "are based on reason, and yours are merely the fruit of stupidity"). He was more jovial with his valet Carteron...
...letter from prison, De Sade wrote: "Imaginative about morality in a way more disorderly than the world has ever known, atheist to the point of fanaticism, in fact, that is what I am like, and once again, kill me or take me as I am, for I shall not change." Rejection of God seems to have exhausted his powers of skepticism. In his lonely circular cell he became a devout numerologist, and solemnly counted the words or lines in letters he received as a basis for abstruse and totally nutty calculations that would provide, he believed, the exact date...