Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (45 page)

One of Morande’s most successful ventures was a scandalous biography of Madame du Barry, titled
Secret Memoirs of a Public Woman from Her Cradle to the Bed of Honour
, which he threatened to publish unless he was paid a handsome sum. The French royal court tried several times to have him eliminated, yet he was not to be intimidated. At one point, he incited a London mob against two of du Barry’s thugs, forcing them to flee for their lives. Finally, when the
Secret Memoirs
was printed and ready for shipment, the great dramatist Pierre-Augustin Caron Beaumarchais was sent to negotiate with Morande. The
libelliste
agreed to give up the entire print run of the book in return for payment of all of his debts, plus a lifetime annuity.

Morande also agreed to stop libeling French ministers and monarchs, but that promise soon evaporated. Louis XV died a few weeks after the contract was signed, and before long Morande was scribbling a new pamphlet claiming that the new king, Louis XVI, was impotent and that his Austrian queen Marie Antoinette was taking lovers to produce an heir. Beaumarchais was dispatched again to bribe Morande, which he did—but evidence suggests that he may have actually plotted with Morande to produce the work in order to share the payoff. Later, it was rumored, Morande was paid by Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI themselves to libel the Duke of Chartres.

The royal couple may have made their peace with Morande, but they had no such luck with other
libellistes
, who produced a nonstop flow of scabrous books about them. So harsh, so dirty, and so plentiful were the attacks on the king and queen that they seriously undermined the monarchy and played an important role in moving the French Revolution forward. The attacks on Marie Antoinette were the worst, and the most widely distributed. By the time they reached their peak in the early 1790s, she had been branded a lesbian, prostitute, sodomite, nymphomaniac, and even a lover of incest. With such a queen, popular disgust for Louis XVI as a hapless impotent grew steadily worse. Marie Antoinette was, according to the
libellistes
, poisoning the royal line (and thus France itself) with the stray seed she gathered at her orgies. Whereas Louis XV had been criticized as being unable to control his libido, Louis XVI was worse: He could not even manage his wife. As the calumnies piled up, it became easier to imagine obliterating the monarchy and, eventually, executing the king and queen.

The
libelles
against Marie Antoinette were like nothing ever seen before in France. With names such as
The Austrian Woman on the Rampage, or the Royal Orgy
(1789);
The Royal Bordello
(1789); and
The Vaginal Fury of Marie Antoinette, Wife of Louis XVI
(1791), the queen was transformed into a source of national infection, a channel for foul rumors to flow directly into the heart of the Bourbon household. In the chaos following the start of the Revolution in 1789, some
libelles
were printed in France, but London was still the safest place for their authors to operate, especially when they were already in trouble with the law at home.
²⁰

One of the first
libellistes
against Marie Antoinette was the “Comtesse” de la Motte, a part-time prostitute and former fringe character at Versailles. La Motte, born in 1756 as Jeanne de Valois Saint-Rémy, had started life on the streets of Paris as a beggar. Her situation changed when a hint of nobility was discovered in her lineage; she was later adopted by a marquise. Finishing school smoothed over her rough edges, but did nothing to change her character. By the age of twenty-three she was married to an impoverished noble and well into a life of crime. Always living one step ahead of the police and creditors, in 1785 the la Mottes pulled off one of the greatest confidence schemes in French history—and one that would further tarnish the reputation of the queen.

The la Mottes lived for a time at Versailles, where they submerged themselves in the dull intrigues of court life. The Comtesse de la Motte may have met Marie Antoinette, but never knew her well enough to make a successful living selling royal influence. What she lacked in connections, however, she made up in ambition. She devised a complex plan by which she and her husband conned a jeweler out of a fabulous diamond necklace, and a cardinal out of his honor. She told Louis René Édouard, the Cardinal de Rohan, that the queen wanted him to procure a certain necklace—but secretly, for fear of having her extravagance exposed. Relations between de Rohan and the queen had soured of late, and while the cardinal wanted to regain her goodwill, he needed to be sure that it was in fact Marie Antoinette who was making the request. With the help of a forger, the comtesse concocted a series of fake letters from the queen to de Rohan, as well as a contract supposedly bearing Marie Antoinette’s signature. The la Mottes also arranged a secret nighttime meeting in the palace gardens between the queen and the cardinal—though it was not Marie Antoinette whom de Rohan met, but a prostitute the comtesse had chosen because she resembled the queen. The ruse worked; the cardinal obtained the necklace and delivered it to the la Mottes, who promptly took it apart and sold the stones around Europe.

The scheme unraveled when the jeweler who sold the necklace demanded payment from Marie Antoinette. Rumors circulated that the queen was secretly squandering the state’s money on elaborate baubles. To clear his wife’s name, Louis XVI demanded a trial, but that spectacle only served to degrade her further. The cardinal eventually admitted that her signature on the contract had been forged, but argued that it was reasonable for him to have believed she would acquire jewels in a backhanded way. He was acquitted as an innocent dupe, but the king banished him anyway. Although Marie Antoinette was not found guilty of anything, the cardinal’s acquittal implied that she was up to no good. The Comtesse de la Motte was whipped, branded, and jailed for life, but she eventually escaped to London, where she set to work on a
libelles
justifying her actions and slamming the queen.

The first of la Motte’s
libelles
was a set of memoirs in which she portrayed herself as an innocent in the diamond-necklace scandal and described her purported lesbian love affair with Marie Antoinette and their “moments of delirium together.” A later version of the memoirs provides the details:

[The Queen] deigned to embolden me by non-equivocal caresses and by the sweetest words . . . Soon, the ingenious libertine ran her devouring eyes over what she called my charms; her enflamed mouth, pasted kisses of fire everywhere, and I blush to admit that I was sated.

Allegedly helpless before the scheming queen, la Motte claimed that she was used as a royal tool to acquire the necklace.

La Motte’s material was outdone by the
libelles
that turned up once the Revolution started in 1789. Right under the windows of the Tuileries Palace, where the king and queen lived, it was possible to buy materials that depicted Marie Antoinette as a sexual monster. Just behind the windows of the palace, according to one of the
libelles
, she lay on her bed, masturbating and waiting for all comers:

Sometimes dying of boredom in the midst of a lovely day,
She writhed all alone on her bed,
Her palpitating tits, her beauteous eyes and her mouth
Gently panting, half opened,
Appeared to invite the challenge of a proud shagger.

The queen was branded as a living example of royal decay. In one poem,
Le Godemiché royal
(
The Royal Dildo
), Marie Antoinette demands that a bishop “baptise my cunt” with holy water to wipe out original sin. In another
libelle
, she speaks of the “lascivious twitching in my randy cunt” while she waits for sexual fulfillment to come. “Fuck virtue,” she hisses, “that’s merely a chimera; A really amorous cunt can fuck its own father.” And what, according to the poet, was her husband doing while she amused herself with others? Not enough. His “matchstick” was “no fatter than a straw” and far less sturdy. The king was impotent and useless.

By the time Marie Antoinette stood trial herself, the royal couple’s reputation had been damaged beyond repair, and the social order turned upside down—spurred in large part, said the
libelles
, by the breakdown in
sexual
order at the top of society. Marie Antoinette was fair game for any kind of accusation. She was charged with committing incest with her son, the young Louis XVII, and causing him to commit the filthy sin of masturbation. According to the reports of her prosecutors, the child “learned [masturbation] from his mother and his aunt (Marie’s sister), who often put him to bed between them, and there the most unbridled debaucheries were committed.” The result, it was understood, was that the boy’s physical constitution—and by extension France itself—was growing weaker by the day. Marie Antoinette was beheaded for treason on October 16, 1793, soon after the trial.

When she was asked why she had, at first, refused to reply to the incest accusation, Marie Antoinette retorted that the charge was too awful to dignify with an answer. “I appeal to all those mothers who might be here today,” she said in court, expecting everyone to agree that no mother could do such a thing to her son. This appeal did not save her, but it did affirm the presence of sexual boundaries. Even a woman as “evil” as the queen would not admit to crossing them.
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HAD THE MARQUIS de Sade been asked about “excessive” carnal behavior, he would have laughed. To Sade, the very notion of sexual limits was foolish. Pleasure defined morality. The craving for orgasmic sensation is natural, Sade argued, and as such it is right and good regardless how one satisfies it:

Will it never be understood that there is no variety of taste, however bizarre, however outlandish, however criminal it may be supposed, which does not derive directly from and depend upon the kind of organisation which we have individually received from Nature? . . . Even were one to desire to change those tastes, could one do so? Have we the power to remake ourselves? Can we become other than what we are?

In short, pleasure was worth the price. Coming from one who spent twenty-seven years of his life behind bars, mostly for his own sexual misconduct, we can at least admire Sade for having the courage of his convictions. When he celebrated sex with babies or the dead, or dismemberment, or prodigious anal abuses, he wasn’t kidding. Sade didn’t come close to doing everything he described in his writings, but his life gives the impression that this may have been because he didn’t have the time or the opportunity.

Despite the volcanic nature of Sade’s books—they are far better read about than read, because they are truly disgusting—most of his legal troubles were not caused by his writings.
Philosophy in the Bedroom
,
The 120 Days of Sodom
, and his other major works were written while he was already in prison. To the limited extent his erotica was published during his lifetime, it came out anonymously, and when his work became the target of obscenity proceedings, he tried to protect his own safety by denying authorship. Sade was a pervert’s pervert with an imagination as sprawling as his libido, but he was also a man of his times. No civil society could tolerate someone who would not think twice of using hot iron or molten lead as a sexual aid.

Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, was born in 1740 to a minor aristocratic family from Provence. After becoming too intimate with his female caretakers, he was sent, at ten years old, to the Lycée Louis
-
le-Grand in Paris, where he presumably learned the fine points of flogging. Sade’s taste for sexual violence bloomed while he was in the army, where he distinguished himself in the Seven Years’ War with England and rose to the rank of captain. His arranged marriage in 1763 did nothing to quell his quirks. Five months after his nuptials he was briefly imprisoned for mistreating a young prostitute. He got into much worse trouble five years later, when he picked up a thirty-six-year-old widow and brought her home on Easter Sunday under false pretenses. The poor woman was tied to a bed and whipped with a birch switch. Sade then cut her flesh with a small knife and poured hot wax into the incisions. Even worse, he offered to hear her Easter confession, a blasphemy that seemed to help him achieve orgasm. This frolic brought him a seven-month prison stint. It also led police to caution brothels not to supply him with girls.

That warning was not heeded. In 1772, after a multiday debauch with his manservant and four prostitutes in Marseilles, he faced charges of poisoning and sodomy. He spent four months in prison and then fled to Italy with his sister-in-law (whom he always preferred to his wife). The case led to the issuance of a death sentence against him, which was carried out in absentia while he acquired further sexual experience in Florence and Naples. He slipped back into France and took up residence at his châ-teau at La Coste, where more excessive orgies took place. Somehow, he remained at large for four years until he was plucked out of a Paris hotel and put in jail again—this time for thirteen years—thanks to the efforts of his outraged mother-in-law, Marie de Montreuil. As a result of her boundless hatred and that of other members of his family, he would spend most of the rest of his life incarcerated in prison and mental hospitals.

It was in the Bastille in 1785 that Sade wrote the seminal
120 Days of Sodom
, with the goal of cataloguing six hundred separate perversions. The work was composed on small bits of paper that he stuck together into a forty-foot-long roll. That is a lot of misbehavior, but nowhere near enough to meet his objective. Sade never finished the book, and left his most hideous ideas in note form only. The manuscript was presumed lost after he was moved out of the Bastille in 1789. The work was later rediscovered, but a French version would not be published until 1931. Sade’s work was censored well into the twentieth century. At late as 1956, the French publisher Jacques Pauvert was convicted on a charge of “outrage to public morals” for his publication of the novel
Juliette
.
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