The Sinner's Grand Tour

by Tony Perrottet

  “So what if Sade was a rapist?” Finn railed. “A lot of French aristocrats did much worse. And if he was such a bastard, why did the villagers help him whenever the police were raiding? Why did his servants refuse to leave him?”

  Finn’s wife Caron, a New Zealander, was patiently chopping a salad throughout this tirade. I asked her if she shared Finn’s passion for the marquis. “I think it’s good in a marriage to have different interests,” she said sweetly.

  WAITING FOR PIERRE

  Next morning I visited L’Espace Lacoste, the tiny office for Cardin’s summer festival, and applied for an official audience with the seigneur. The manager, Fabienne, stifled an incredulous laugh at my folly. “You want to visit Monsieur Cardin’s château?” she said. “I’m afraid he is a very busy man.” She suggested I contact the media director of the sprawling Cardin Empire in Paris, one Monsieur Hoesse—a man who, I soon discovered, never answered his phone or e-mails unless you were a head of state. Instead, Fabienne offered to sell me tickets to the first festival show, Marco Polo, for $260 each.

  In fact, everyone I met took pleasure in telling me how impossible it would be to even talk to Cardin, let alone wangle an invitation to the château. “Monsieur Cardin is a very generous man,” confided one official at the Savannah School of Design, an American art academy that had set up in the village, “but he is also a very private man.” Expats shook their heads consolingly, recalling their own fleeting exchanges with Cardin; they talked to me in gentle tones, as if to a mental patient. I could hear them thinking: “Why should you get into the château when we’ve never been invited, not even for a lousy café crème. Why don’t you just go on back to New York?”

  Biding my time, I tried to behave like any other Francophile visitor enjoying the Provençal idyll. I would wake up early, wander down to boulangerie, buy a ridiculous quantity of croissants, then hang out with the gang on the balcony, watching the morning sun creep over the valley floor. You could see why there are no secrets in small villages. We soon found out that every word we said was being overheard by our next-door neighbor, Margaret. Margaret was a tiny, eighty-five-year-old grand dame who lived in the dark, antique-filled hobbit’s house across the lane but made sudden theatrical appearances in her doorway. She had moved here from Zimbabwe decades ago and had once run the most lively bar in the village, but now she spent her time chatting with friends and adopting stray felines. Her favorite was a tough ginger pussy named William.

  “Here’s William,” she would announce to the boys. “William the Conqueror, I call him. I was going to have him spayed, but he has such lovely hairy balls.

  “William with the great big conkers!” she added, and cackled maniacally.

  I spent much time in the Cardin-owned Café de Sade, a minimalist terrace that looked out over the village square. After a couple of days I was officially a regular and began chatting with the affable manager, Gérard, who had worked with Cardin for twenty years in Maxim’s restaurant in Paris. “Don’t worry,” Gérard reassured me. “Monsieur Cardin is here almost every day. You will meet him!” But I didn’t.

  The village of Lacoste.

  Slowly, I began to insinuate myself into the village, with the help of my Gallic credentials—“We are the Perrottets, mes amis, our ancestor used to be mayor under Napoléon!” True, it was a sure-fire conversation starter. Locals knew there was once a horde of Perrottets here. There was even a tiny hamlet called Perrottet nearby, so I dragged the gang there to have our photo taken standing beside the sign. In the Lacoste cemetery, there were still a few faces of my ancestors, in 1920s black-and-white photographs enshrined at family plots, the last of the Perrottets to expire in Provence. Les kept saying “Wow, they all look like you!” which I found mildly disconcerting.

  And I got to learn a lot about Lacoste’s miniature class war. It didn’t take much prompting for villagers to air their grievances against their new châtelain, Cardin, which echoed the bitter feudal resentments of the eighteenth century. Jacques Trophemius, a wiry farmer in his fifties, declared Cardin a “megalomaniac” drunk on his own wealth, who was destroying the village by buying houses at triple their value. Old people can’t turn the money down, and young people can no longer afford to move in. “These streets used to be filled with children playing! Where are they now?” He waved a hand theatrically. “This village is dying.” I also dropped around to a farmhouse to meet Yves Ronchi, founder of the radical Association for the Harmonious Development of Lacoste. A grandfatherly vigneron who came up from his basement in galoshes and an apron as if he’d just been stomping grapes, he argued that modern France was recreating all the inequalities of the ancien regime. “This country should stand for liberty, equality, fraternity. That’s why we fought the Revolution! But the rich today have a new sense of privilege. They ignore laws and trample our democratic rights.” Yes, Cardin had poured €30 million into his renovations, he said, but the result was bricolage—a rushed job, makeshift, not serious. “When you look inside Cardin’s houses, there is no character, no history, no soul. The details are gone. It’s just empty space.”

  Still, there was life in the village yet. One morning, I noticed a half dozen women sitting in the plaza, all intently shelling green beans, like Madame Defarge knitting before the guillotine. “Are you coming tonight, Monsieur Perrottet?” a large woman with pink hair asked pointedly, fondling a wad of tickets from the Lacoste Association for Parties. The beans were for a monstrous aioli feast, she said—the whole district would be there.

  Our arrival had coincided with the start of Lacoste’s “popular festival,” whose revelries resembled an outtake from Jean de Florette. Every day saw a different rustic event. There were donkey races through the Rue Basse, which littered the streets with excrement for days. There were three-legged races for adults, which were so violent that bones were broken. And there were nightly feasts, Breughelian affairs where hundreds of families sat along trestle tables and devoured unlimited supplies of pistou soup, washed down with a watery wine that cost less than Coca-Cola. After dark, there would be either a rock concert or theatrical piece, both shockingly bad, while the kids could watch the latest blockbuster on an outdoor screen, Jacques Tati style.

  The festivities sometimes got out of hand, keeping the local gendarmes busy. One night, a brawl began between rival village members when a roulette table was set up in the plaza, and someone got stabbed in the chest with a broken bottle.

  The boys became obsessed by the seedy carnival games. Sam never tired of plucking plastic ducks out of a water trough, while Henry became smitten with a real shooting gallery. Apart from winning a vast number of key rings, he got lucky one night and won a pellet gun from the prize rack. “It is prohibited for children under fourteen,” the lady snapped, then immediately handed him the gun. “You could have your eye out,” she added angrily.

  “Don’t shoot the cats!” Les yelled, running after Henry. “Or Sam …”

  I had sometimes wondered whether my wayward progeny paid any attention to dinner conversations with Les about the Marquis de Sade. But I gathered they did one morning when they begged for chocolate croissants for breakfast.

  “They must be black!” Henry said. “As the devil’s bottom is black!” Then tried to stifle his laughter.

  “No,” Sam observed. “The devil’s bottom is red. He’s red all over.”

  This theological discussion was repeated whenever black was mentioned, with the phrase becoming an embarrassing catch-cry.

  I’d been stalking Cardin for a week without success when the day arrived for the festival’s most anticipated event, the village bullfight. This Provençal version didn’t involve any animal torture; instead, it was the human participants who suffered. In the blistering heat, a young bull chased teams of teenagers around a makeshift arena, while they tried to throw plastic hoops over its flailing horns. Whenever the enraged animal butted an unlucky player headfirst into a bale of straw, the crowd let out a roar of approval. A brass band would
break into raucous music. Drunks danced about in glee, waving beer bottles and screaming insults. Of course, Henry and Sam were also up on the fence, howling for blood like pagans at the Colosseum.

  At one point, I saw Les on the opposite side of the bullring, waving her arms frantically. At first I thought she was just getting into the festivities with surprising enthusiasm. Then I realized she was pointing up at the château high on the hill above us.

  “Cardin!” she mouthed. “He’s up there!”

  I wheeled around, shielding my eyes against the flaring sun. I could just make out two figures on the castle’s roof, leaning over the battlements—two men, one older with florid white hair, the other much younger. As I watched, the younger one handed something over. The lenses glinted in the sun. Binoculars.

  He’s watching us! I realized. The lord of the manor is inspecting the peasants at play. It was a relief to finally confirm Cardin’s presence in Lacoste, but I also felt a vague sense of dread. How the hell was I going to get inside that castle?

  “Oh, putain!” screamed one of the players, as the vachette raked his ribs with its horns. The crowd roared even louder as the ambulance men reluctantly put down their beers and prepared to enter the arena with the stretcher.

  The binoculars remained fixed for a few more minutes, then the two figures disappeared back inside the château. Cardin was preparing his own festival, which he would personally open the next night. At last! He was emerging from seclusion.

  Enough of these rustic diversions. Like my slippery ancestor André, I would have to start mingling with the aristocrats. Even if sitting through a $260 French rock opera was the price I would have to pay.

  THE RULING CLASS

  In this schizophrenic village, I was realizing, everything came in pairs. Cardin’s swank Café de Sade, where the chef would throw together a fine chèvre chaude salad, had its counterpart in the shabby Café de France—refuge of the anti-Cardinites, where grizzled yokels would tear at roast chicken like gourmandizing Orcs. Now Lacoste’s gritty festival would be countered by Cardin’s upscale extravaganza catering to the Paris-Riviera crowd. Instead of wheelbarrow races and fistfights, the diet would be classical concerts and avant-garde art. No watery vin ordinaire and buckets of soup for them: Cardin’s audiences would enjoy chilled champagne and imported shellfish.

  The rock opera would be staged en plein air right outside the castle. Maybe I could even crash the after-party. So I dashed back into the ticket office and from the smirking Fabienne bought the last two standby tickets to Marco Polo that night. The show was too late for Sam, so Les missed out and Henry was my date. This actually made sense, a French rock opera being better entertainment for ten-year-olds.

  “Come, Henry!” I declared, after we’d dressed in our finest summer threads. “The game is afoot!”

  While the alleyways of Lacoste were as dark as Salem on a witch-hunting night, high above the village, Sade’s estate was throbbing with life once again. Hundreds of BMWs, Mercedes, and Jaguars were parked in the fields around the château, and we fell in line with streams of society women stiletto-hobbling across the rocky terrain. Cardin’s conversion of Sade’s old rock quarry was like something out of science fiction. We entered past monstrous carved blocks like the pillars of an Egyptian temple to the brilliantly lit venue, a 1,600-seat amphitheater beneath the stars.

  At the bar, models in sheath dresses were serving bubbly with the Maxim label.

  “What, no Coke?” Henry wailed.

  In the distance, I spied the man himself. He looked fabulous for his eighty-eight years, in a dark blue blazer and crisp white shirt, his mop of tousled white hair over designer glasses. A bevy of peroxide blonde women fluttered around him. Forming an outer ring were young men in silk jackets and designer stubble, like hipster bodyguards. Soon Marco Polo began with samurai break-dancers on stage, while a giant screen came to life with scenes from Japanese anime. Henry and 1,600 French people were agog.

  It struck me that the Marquis de Sade would surely have approved of Lacoste’s artsy new life. The stage was his most enduring passion. One of the first renovations he made to the château was to install a sixty-seat private theater, and he lured out-of-work actors from Paris to join his theatrical troupe. They performed a string of surprisingly staid comedies, which Sade would write, direct, design, stage manage, and star in. The marquis also had a philanthropic streak. In 1772, he began to invite the Costains to his plays. At dusk, the villagers would pass the Goat’s Gateway in their Sunday finery, the Perrottets along with the Appys, the Layandes, the Payans, and Fontpourquières. Democratic as it all sounds, Sade wasn’t entirely certain of his rustic audience, and he hired a string of musclemen to act as château security, in case of a “tumult.”

  To his dying day, despite the notoriety of his pornographic works, Sade’s dearest wish was to be recognized as a playwright. Even at Charenton mental asylum, he put on theatrical shows with the inmates as actors, which became a popular night out for chic Parisians. (Actually, Sade’s youthful crimes also sound like one-man performance art pieces. On one notorious occasion, he kept a prostitute hostage while he defiled her with an array of Christian symbols. If Sade had lived in the 1980s, he might have won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts—“Piss Christ Returns.”)

  Come to think of it, Sade would have approved of Cardin’s profession too, for he was also obsessive about fashion. His prison letters are filled with demands for the latest styles. “Send me a little prune-colored riding coat,” Sade ordered his wife in 1781, “with a suede vest and trousers, something fresh and light but specifically not made of linen.” In the same missive, he requests a suit that is “Paris Mud in hue—a fashionable color this year—with a few silver trimmings, but definitely not silver braid.…”

  Three hours of French rock opera took their toll. Henry was fading, so we slipped out past the looming château. While I was peering up at the windows, now lit from within, he asked: “Dad, how come you’re so interested in getting inside the castle?”

  “Well,” I began evasively, “a very strange man used to live there.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Um, he had this dungeon, you see, and …”

  “Dungeon?”

  Luckily, Henry spotted a ginger cat darting through the shadows, and the subject was dropped.

  FIRST BLOOD

  It was 9:00 a.m. the next morning when I ran into Cardin in the street. I was returning with my morning haul of croissants when I saw him heading straight toward me. He was with a couple of immaculately coiffed women about to enter a gallery; one of them was opening it with a wad of keys. Half-asleep and taken by surprise, I hovered uncertainly. Then, not knowing what else to do, I followed them inside.

  “Bonjour,” I chirped to the consort with the keys, when she looked at me inquiringly. “Do you mind if I look at the art?”

  I wandered the gallery, doing my best to look like a sophisticated collector, while preparing myself to engage Cardin in winning banter. But when I turned around, he and his friends had vanished. I looked out in the street desperately. No sign. It was as if they’d just popped down some secret trapdoor.

  “Oh my God, you didn’t talk to him?” Les said, when I returned to the garret. “That could have been your only chance!” I was plunged into depression. It was true. So many Costains despised him that he must have fled for his safety.

  That afternoon, I confessed my flub to Gérard. He told me not to worry—while the festival was on, Cardin liked to come to the village at that time every morning, when it was still very quiet and not too hot. “You should look for him then,” he advised.

  And so I did, lurking on the Rue Basse again at 9:00 a.m. the next day. I was about to give up when I glimpsed Cardin walking into one of the old mansions being converted into a hotel. OK, I thought. This was my big chance. Why was I even so nervous? I took a deep breath, pretended I was just passing by, then entered the work site.

  “Bonjour!” I said chee
rily.

  “Qui êtes vous?” Cardin asked immediately. Two laborers stared at me.

  I introduced myself, trying not to babble. “I’m a historian from New York. I’m curious about the renovations. Do you mind if I have a look?”

  To my surprise, Cardin walked up to me and shook my hand. He was wearing tailored slacks and a floral shirt with the cuffs casually rolled; up close, he seemed far taller and stronger than his advanced years would suggest.

  “The upstairs is finished, if you would like to see it?” Cardin said.

  “Bien sûr.”

  We had to use an exterior staircase where a worker’s truck was parked, blocking off the lower steps entirely. But Cardin simply grabbed the fence and began to hoist himself up. It was too ambitious at first; he swung back and forth like a limbo dancer under the metal bar. I hovered beneath him with my arms outstretched, terrified that he was about to crack his skull—oh my God, I’m going to be responsible for the death of a modern fashion icon!—but no, with a renewed effort, he got himself up.

  On the second floor, he proudly showed me the different suites, each decorated in a different style and color and filled with angular modern furniture. I made appropriately admiring noises, trying to play it cool, and complimented him on Marco Polo—a work of genius—while I racked my brain for how to steer the conversation. I couldn’t just ask to see his home; that would be vulgar. An invitation had to arise organically.