Word: sadeness
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...intellectuals have been sloshing through the sludge at the bottom of their own and other men's minds in search of some explanation. In this echoing and noisome place, time and again they have encountered the shadowy figure of the man known as the Marquis de Sade. Last week a Paris court debated a question: Was Sade an intrepid explorer and detached observer of the depths? Or was he there because he liked it? In a word, was Sade a pornographer whose works should be banned, or a serious contributor to the wisdom of mankind...
...question was just as puzzling to his contemporaries. Donatien-Alphonse-François, Comte de Sade, was born in a Paris palace in 1740. His father was military ruler of four French provinces and lord of vast estates. His mother was of royal Bourbon blood. He was a youthful companion of the young Prince Louis-Joseph, fought as a cavalry officer in the Seven Years' War. At 23, he docilely married the daughter of a rich, petty aristocrat in a ceremony attended by King Louis XV and his Queen. Five months later he was arrested in a local bordello...
Naturally Bad. For the remaining years of his life, Sade alternated between orgiastic freedom and protracted prison terms. He indulged in perversion, flagellation and more ingenious tortures, made such extraordinary demands on Paris' prostitutes that the police ordered procurers not to furnish him with girls. One woman complained that he had lured her to a villa outside Paris, stripped her naked and bound her to a bed, beat her with switches, slashed her with a knife, and poured wax in the wounds. Exiled to his estate in Provence, Sade organized a private harem of both sexes. In a foray...
...Gide. The demon that possessed Jacques and his girl came from drinking deeply of the heady, dark brews of French intellectualism, from the Marquis de Sade to Jean Paul Sartre. Denise was the ardent disciple of them all, a girl so enamored of the intellectual life and so prone to bedding with students that she soon found herself the mother of a bastard child. Her lover Jacques had already fathered two bastards by the time they met, and his approach to women was always patterned on that of his intellectual idols. "In the manner of Gide," he would tell...
...coincidence in this novel-the chicken turns out to be Claude, a long-lost childhood sweetheart. Francois first knew Claude Herber and her brother Jean Jacques when they were children and lived in the country together, roaming the woods like a junior fan club for the Marquis de Sade. They played flogging games with horsewhips. Lashing Claude and another playmate, Denise, had been the best fun of all-"so sweet." Claude murmured, fondling her wound, "that afterwards one would like to be whipped again...