The Mystified Magistrate
Page 20
THE HUSBAND WHO TURNED PRIEST: A TALE OF PROVENCE
1. Two towns in the Vaucluse region of France, the former a hill town in the Luberan mountains only about three or four miles from Sade’s château at La Coste. Apt, about ten miles away to the east, was the county seat of the region, where dwelt the marquis’s lawyer, a man named Gaufridy, to whom Sade entrusted his business affairs for several decades. The region described is one Sade knows intimately.
2. The convent of Saint-Hilaire still stands today, a mile or two from Menerbe (which two centuries after this tale was penned became the site of Peter M ay le’s A Year in Provence) on the road to La Coste. In Sade’s time it was indeed a Carmelite monastery (today it is privately owned), but there is no indication in any historical records I could find that any “Father Gabriel” ever dwelt within its not-so-hallowed walls, or that the moral qualities (or lack thereof) of its inhabitants were as Sade described.
3. The main castle of the area was Sade’s own, at La Coste.
4. According to tradition, the Carmelite order traces its roots back to the prophet Elijah.
5. A local wine of the Vaucluse region, with which in all probability Sade had direct experience. One of today’s best Chateauneuf du Pape wines is from Château la Nerthe, which may well be a descendent of Father Gabriel’s vintage.
6. Sade may be referring here to his own dear wife, Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil de Sade, who spent a great deal of her life trying to explain away or atone for her husband’s misdeeds. At the time these stories were written, Sade had been in prison for seven years, and in the Bastille for three, and during the later years of his incarceration, Madame de Sade lived in the Paris convent of Saint Aure, where she increasingly came under the influence of the Church and her father confessor, who urged her to work not only to save her own soul but that of her husband. She may well have accomplished the former, certainly not the latter.
7. Until 1789, Sade himself was lord of the manor of La Coste and the surrounding area. In pre-revolutionary times, hunting on the land owned by the local noble—in other words, poaching—was subject to the severest penalties under the law. Further, only nobles were allowed to bear arms, so the very fact that Rodin and Father Gabriel were out shooting game was a crime in itself.
8. As noted, there are sometimes contradictions in numbers and figures in some of Sade’s stories, essentially because, as noted earlier, only the penultimate version of these tales came down to us, the so-called “Yellow Notebook,” which did not contain the author’s final corrections. Earlier, Madame Rodin was twenty-eight. I’m sure she still was, on the day her husband said mass, and Sade’s suddenly making her six years younger is a slip of his usually careful pen.
THIEVES AND SWINDLERS
1. Carnival time in France in Sade’s day was the last week before Lent.
2. The rue Quincampoix, which still exists today, runs between the rue aux Ours and the rue des Lombards in what today are Paris’s third and fourth arrondissements. For four centuries before Sade’s time, it had been the site of the Drapers Guild, one of Paris’s richest. Rosette’s uncle Mathieu was not the only wealthy money-lender to live there. In “The Misfortunes of Virtue” and Justine, the “moneylender” (in “Misfortunes”) and the “famous Parisian usurer” (in Justine), both odious misers (who are one and the same), live on the rue Quincampoix.
3. On the Normandy-Paris route, Pontoise was a coach stop about twenty miles from central Paris. In the eighteenth century it was the next-to-last stop before reaching the city center.
4. On the outskirts of Paris. This was the last coach stop prior to reaching the city center. Clearly the coachman in whose care Rosette had been placed by her father failed miserably in his task.
5. Sade here is remembering, fondly or not, a church with which he is familiar. It was there, on May 17, 1763, that he and Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil were married.
THE GASCON WIT
1. A region of southwestern France bounded on its western side by the Bay of Biscay. The thick Gascon accent is the butt of frequent jokes on the part of other French regions, as is the region’s tendencies to embellish hard facts on the one hand and wiggle out of deals on the other. Indeed, faire le Gascon means “to beg or boast”; and un offre de Gascon—a Gascon offer—means a hollow offer.
2. Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683). Under Louis XIV, the indefatigable minister with several portfolios; he was successively superintendent of building under the Sun King, controller of finance, and secretary of state. He was also a staunch supporter of French arts and letters, and for the last twenty years of his life was a member of the French Academy. The very notion that an unknown and unannounced officer could barge into Colbert’s Versailles quarters brings Sade reasonably close to the Theater of the Absurd.
3. A variant of cadédiou, a mild Gascon swearword.