Literary Rogues Read online

  At their rented third-floor apartment, the duo (Latour using the name “Monsieur le Marquis,” Sade calling himself “Lafleur”) whipped the women and then put on a show for them, taking turns sodomizing each other. The women were horrified. Only two of them were brave enough to eat the marquis’s candies, which, unbeknown to them, contained the aphrodisiac Spanish fly. Sade hoped the drug would get the women in the mood for more amorous activity. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

  The women ingested too many of the candies and got sick; one woman began throwing up blood and had to be hospitalized. Sade, believing in error that she had died in the hospital, fled to Italy with Latour and his sister-in-law, Anne-Prospère. La Présidente refused to help him get out of his latest mess.

  Madame de Sade bribed the prostitutes to drop their charges, but authorities were unwilling to let the fugitive off the hook so easily. Even though Sade and his band of merry misfits were still on the run, the prosecutor convicted them of sodomy, a crime punishable by death. The judge ordered them to make public confessions, after which Sade was to be decapitated and Latour hanged. Their bodies would then be burned. To add insult to injury, they were also fined forty livres (a pittance). Since they were not on hand to receive their sentences, effigies of the two men were burned in the town square.

  In December, Sade was captured in Savoy, at the time a sovereign region situated between Italy and France. (Anne-Prospère had long since returned to France.) At the behest of la Présidente, Sade was held captive at the imposing Fortress Miolans, a tenth-century castle known as the “Bastille of Savoy.” La Présidente feared the chaos that would erupt if her son-in-law ever returned to France, and holding him prisoner in Savoy was the only way she could see to keep the marquis out of further trouble.

  His imprisonment would last less than five months. In April, while Sade and Latour were eating in the main dining room, they escaped through a window in the latrine—a wide-open window, without bars. This clearly led to a review of security measures at the prison.

  Latour remained in exile, while Sade made his way back to France. To avoid being recognized, the marquis dressed in a priest’s frock. At one point, on a ferry that appeared in danger of sinking, other travelers threw themselves at Sade’s feet to make their last confessions.

  Upon his return to France, Sade hid in plain sight at his Lacoste estate. The marquis kept a relatively low profile, which for him meant months-long orgies—often involving underage girls and boys, hired as maids and cooks. One girl ended up pregnant; another died following a short illness. At one point, an angry father showed up to liberate his daughter and fired a pistol point-blank at Sade’s chest. The gun misfired, and the marquis lived to sodomize another day. “I pass for the werewolf of these parts!” he wrote with delight in a letter. “Poor little chicks!”

  In 1777, his mother-in-law lured him into Paris under the pretense that his mother was on her deathbed. (She had, in fact, already passed away.) La Présidente alerted authorities that Sade was back within city limits, and they arrested him on the outstanding charges of poisoning and sodomy. La Présidente again argued with her daughter that what she was doing was in Sade’s best interests: it was the only way Sade could appeal his previous conviction and clear his name, thus restoring respectability to their family.

  Authorities staged a new trial. Sade’s death sentence was reduced to a warning and a fine. Life could return to normal.

  Alas, Sade’s freedom was short-lived. A police inspector woke him in his prison cell on the day he was to be released and informed him the Parisian authorities didn’t have the jurisdiction to dismiss the old charges, which had been reconfirmed by a royal order from the king—a move orchestrated by none other than la Présidente. She knew that the only way to keep her son-in-law out of trouble was to keep him locked up in perpetuity.

  There was to be no escape or last-minute salvation this time. A new verdict was handed down: life in prison. The term would begin immediately.

  With the years stretching out infinitely before him, Sade picked up a pen. If he could not act out his fantasies any longer, he would write them down. A prison doctor recommended that he avoid reading and writing to lessen the strain on his eyes, which were in very poor shape. He suggested Sade take up knitting instead. Based on the voluminous output of novels, short stories, and plays he wrote in prison, we can safely assume he had little time for knitting.

  The marquis wrote many novels during his imprisonment, including Justine, or Good Conduct Well Chastised; The 120 Days of Sodom; and Philosophy in the Bedroom. While he may have written fiction before this date, he never made any mention of it. Authorship was considered an ignoble profession for a gentleman of the Marquis de Sade’s standing (ironic, considering his other passions). It was only when he was stripped of his nobility and freedom that he became the man of letters we know him as today. Sade “went into prison a man; he came out a writer,” French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote.

  Renée-Pélagie, whom he called “the fresh pork of my thoughts” (no offense intended, since pork was one of his favorite meals), continued to support her husband while raising their children alone. She took him at his word when he told her, “Imperious, angry, furious, extreme in all things, with a disturbance in the moral imagination unlike any the world has ever known—there you have me in a nutshell: and one more thing, kill me or take me as I am, because I will not change.” She went so far as to sell her own silver shoe buckles to keep the marquis well dressed and in supply of the gigantic wooden dildos he used to satisfy himself in prison.

  Improbably, a political sea change in France led to the release of prisoners held under royal decrees. On Good Friday in 1790, after twelve years behind bars, Sade was set free.

  Following his release, he attempted to bury the aristocratic playboy image by rebranding himself as a playwright. Unfortunately, he had little success staging his own plays. He had more luck with his novels—France was in the midst of la foutromanie (“fuckomania”), a time when erotic works were in great demand, and many of his books went through multiple editions.

  Sade’s erotic books (published anonymously) were violent, subversive, and almost unusable as “one-handed reads.” As could be expected based on his past behavior, no subject was off limits in Sade’s work: sexual violence, suffering, torture, rape, sodomy, incest, pedophilia, necrophilia, bestiality, and cannibalism were among the topics he explored. Sade’s wish for The 120 Days of Sodom, for example, was to pen “the most impure tale that has ever been written since the world exists.”

  Although he had committed a great number of atrocities, Sade’s fantasies were just that: fantasies. “I have imagined everything conceivable, but I certainly have not done all that I have imagined, and I certainly never shall,” he wrote to his wife. He reserved his most outrageous acts for his novels. “Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction,” he once said.

  Although his books sold well, Sade was not a critical darling. Petites-Affiches, in 1791, advised young people to avoid Justine. “Mature men, read it to see how far one can go in derangement of the human imagination,” the journal wrote. “But throw it into the fire immediately thereafter. This is advice you will give yourself if you have the strength to read it in its entirety.”

  In 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte assumed leadership of France. He was determined to clean up the country, starting with the plague of immorality that besieged it. In 1801, government officials ordered the arrest of the author of the “pornographic” novel Juliette. Sade, who was at his publisher’s office making corrections to the manuscript when the police arrived, was easily identified as the author. The publisher was let go after twenty-four hours when he turned over the location of the warehouse where the books were stored. Authorities destroyed every copy of the book they could get their hands on.

  The imprisoned marquis pleaded for a swift trial. “Either I am or I am not the author of the book that is imputed to me. If I am convicted, I wish to endure my puni
shment. But if not, I want to be free,” he wrote to the Minister of Justice. Authorities, wishing to avoid a public scandal, simply jailed the Marquis de Sade permanently. No trial would be forthcoming.

  After two years spent in a succession of prisons, Sade was declared ill with “sexual obsession” and transferred to Charenton, an asylum for the insane. After he was safely set up at Charenton, his wife legally separated from him. She had, at long last, finally reached her breaking point.

  The asylum’s unconventional director, the Abbé de Coulmier, allowed Sade to write. Sade even staged plays at Charenton, using inmates as actors. The public was invited to the performances, and for a time it became fashionable in Parisian circles to attend. Coulmier’s approach to rehabilitation and therapy was controversial to say the least, and French police eventually put an end to the plays. And, if he had once thought marriage was a fate worse than death, Sade was about to face a nightmare many times worse: police ordered him to be stripped of his quills and paper and placed into solitary confinement. Although he eventually recovered them, he lived in constant fear that his equipment and work could be confiscated at any moment.

  In 1814, the marquis died in prison of natural causes. His family burned all of his unpublished manuscripts. If they wished to prevent the Marquis de Sade from further tarnishing the family name, they were unsuccessful: the word sadisme, meaning “to derive pleasure, especially sexual gratification, from inflicting pain, suffering, and humiliation on others,” entered the French language, and later begat the English word “sadism” and its many derivatives. As Sade once wrote to his son, “Do not be sorry to see your name live on in immortality. My works are bringing it about, and your virtues, though preferable to my works, would never do that.”

  2

  The Opium Addict

  “By a most unhappy quackery and through that most pernicious form of ignorance, medical half-knowledge, I was seduced into the use of narcotics.”

  —SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

  During the early nineteenth century, opium’s potential for abuse and addiction was either not widely known or, more likely, ignored. Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) wrote in 1808 that druggists in the towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire sold pounds of opium daily to the laboring classes. Surely, he argued, “this demands legislative interference.” Opium use could only hinder England’s industrialization by promoting indolence among its workers. Like that of the best moral crusaders, Coleridge’s pulpit pounding was underscored by hypocrisy. He was hopelessly addicted to opium.

  Coleridge was the youngest of ten children. His older brothers endlessly tormented him, and he sought solace in the comforting arms of his only friends: books. After the death of his father in 1781, Coleridge was dispatched to a London boarding school for the remainder of his childhood. He proved to be a brilliant student and was awarded multiple scholarships to Jesus College, Cambridge, upon graduation. In 1791, he entered college for the fall semester. It was an enormous opportunity for the lower-class nineteen-year-old, and it was one that he would initially squander: he steadily lost his head in a blur of alcohol and gambling troubles and dropped out after two years at Cambridge.

  Then he simply disappeared.

  It took his family four months to find him. Coleridge had enlisted in the military under the alias “Silas Tomkyn Comberbache.” Although he was an absurdly terrible soldier—the bumbling “Silas” couldn’t even ride a horse—he made friends with his fellow soldiers by ghostwriting love letters for their girlfriends and wives. It was his first taste of literary celebrity, but it bought him only a limited amount of exemption from the demands of military life. Sooner or later, he would have to learn to ride a horse. Thankfully, his brothers rounded up enough money to relieve him from his military obligation, and the military discharged him on grounds of insanity.

  Back in school, Coleridge experienced a revelation after reading Descriptive Sketches, a book of poetry by William Wordsworth. Suddenly, the directionless Coleridge had a goal that didn’t require him to learn horseback riding: he would become a poet! This didn’t solve his need to make a living, a need intensified by his marriage in 1795. Furthermore, he dropped out of school for a second time. To make ends meet, he worked as a journalist and sold a volume of poetry to a bookseller—his first real publication. The time was right: whereas authors had once depended upon the support of wealthy patrons, government assistance, and religious institutions, changing copyright laws in Great Britain in the eighteenth century now allowed authors and printers to assert ownership over their work and earn income from it.

  In 1797, after exchanging letters with Wordsworth, Coleridge walked forty miles to his idol’s home. When he neared the poet’s property in Dorset, Coleridge hurdled over a gate and broke into a sprint in the direction of the poet. Instead of running for his life, Wordsworth opened his arms to embrace Coleridge. They became instant friends. Within a few years, Coleridge, along with his wife and son, moved close to Wordsworth so that the two poets could be in daily contact.

  In 1798, two wealthy literary patrons familiar with Coleridge’s work offered him a sum of 150 pounds per year to write—for the rest of his life. This was the kind of windfall lower- and middle-class writers dreamed of. It was more than enough to support his family on.

  Unfortunately, the patronage also gave Coleridge plenty of time to lounge around the house, high on opium, without any worry of producing publishable material.

  Opium, likely the first drug ever used by the human race, was a common painkiller in the nineteenth century. Not only was it used to relieve all manner of adult aches and pains (physical and mental), it also found its way into children’s medicines, such as Mother Bailey’s Quieting Syrup. Opium was freely available over the counter in the form of pills and as laudanum, a liquid solution of opium and alcohol that was administered with an eyedropper.

  Coleridge originally turned to laudanum for relief from indigestion. He did not understand what he had gotten himself into at first, “and saw not the truth, till my body had contracted a habit.” It’s unknown when he first used laudanum, but he was using it regularly soon after he moved to Dorset.

  Not everyone believed Coleridge’s sob story. “Every person who has witnessed his habits, knows that, for infinitely the greater part, inclination and indulgence are its motives,” remarked the poet Robert Southey, a close friend and his wife’s brother-in-law.

  Southey may have been right: Coleridge and his friends, including Wordsworth and the poet Charles Lamb, had long been fascinated with the effects intoxication could have on their creative endeavors. They looked up to the Scottish poet Robert Burns, an acute alcoholic who died at age thirty-seven of rheumatoid endocarditis. It was widely believed, even by Burns’s own mother, that the poet’s drunkenness was the match that lit his muse. Coleridge contributed a poem to a volume sold to raise money for Burns’s widow and six children. The tragic end to Burns’s career only made his whiskey-and-sex-filled poetry all the more alluring for Coleridge and other European poets, who made pilgrimages to Burns’s grave to pay their respects.

  Coleridge’s own medicated state resulted in his famous poem, “Kubla Khan,” in 1797. One afternoon, after dozing off for three hours at his desk, he woke up with the poem fully formed in his head. He began to write down his vision but was interrupted by a knocking at the door. After he spent about an hour entertaining his visitor, he returned to the poem but found that, “with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast.” Frustrated, he shelved the fragment.

  “Kubla Khan” might have been lost forever had Coleridge not recited the partial poem to Lord Byron in 1816. Leigh Hunt, another poet who happened to be in another room with them, recalled that Byron was “highly struck with his poem, and saying how wonderfully he talked.” Byron convinced his publisher, John Murray, to print “Kubla Khan” with an introduction explaining the circumstanc
es surrounding the narcotic vision; the poem is now among the most widely read and anthologized pieces of romantic literature.

  Despite the inspiration Coleridge derived from his drug use, his predilection for walking while stoned nearly cost him his life on several occasions. He once walked for eight straight days before sobering up—and found himself some 250 miles away from his house. During another one of his disappearances, police found a man’s lifeless body in a park with Coleridge’s name printed inside his collar. Before long, Coleridge turned up alive—and missing his clothing, which had been stolen from a launderer by the vagrant who died in them.

  Coleridge’s blatant disregard for his own well-being was too much for his friends and family. He separated from his wife in 1808, and Wordsworth wrote him off as a lost cause in 1810. Coleridge’s literary career continued unabated, however, and he wrote poetry, criticism, and lectures all under the influence.

  After a near-fatal overdose in 1813, Coleridge retired to a home in Bristol where he hoped to wean himself off laudanum. “I had been crucified, dead, and buried, descended into Hell, and am now, I humbly trust, rising again, though slowly and gradually,” he wrote to a friend in May 1814.

  His rehab failed. In 1816, he moved into the home of a physician in Highgate, a London suburb. Despite the doctor’s attempts to regulate his patient’s laudanum dosage, Coleridge secretly obtained additional supplies from a local druggist. “I have in this one dirty business of laudanum a hundred times deceived, tricked, nay, actually and consciously LIED,” Coleridge wrote. At this point it was clear to him that he would never let go of opium, or it of him. They were wed for life.

  In 1834 Coleridge died of heart disease, though his spirit had long since been broken. “When I heard of the death of Coleridge, it was without grief,” Charles Lamb said. “It seemed to me that he long had been on the confines of the next world, that he had a hunger for eternity. I grieved then that I could not grieve. But since, I feel how great a part he was of me. His great and dear spirit haunts me.”