Beasts of the Bastille - a Revolutionary Serial

Part 9

For Part 1 of this serial, read HERE

For the previous part read HERE

PART 5 – The Sade Journal

EDITOR’S NOTE

The following tale by le Marquis Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, entitled “The Citizen’s Escapade” had been believed lost, but was recovered in 2017 when the MS was discovered during construction work at the former asylum of Charenton, concealed beneath a plaster panel.

The author, in a letter of 1802 to his wife the Marquise, which referred to this tale, claimed that it was no more than a factual documentary account of his time following release from Charenton, when he walked Paris as a free man and went by the plain revolutionary title of Citizen François Sade. The Marquise herself, and all subsequent scholars in Sadeian studies, poured scorn on this claim of factual biography for the text and treated it as a fiction, the lone work of this prolific writer which strayed from the strictly erotic or pornographic into Gothic horror fiction.

This editor reserves judgment. Naturally the details contained in the text are absurd, ludicrous if taken at face value as a factual account of true events. But it may well be that the fevered brain of the Marquis after his release from the asylum at Charenton on July 10th 1789, combined with the apocalyptic mood of those revolutionary days, caused him to imagine these events as actually happening to him. In which case it is indeed a biographical account, though not of factual events but of a psychotic episode in the author’s life, and no less a valuable document for the light it sheds on a time of great rupture in an already ruptured mind.

THE CITIZEN’S ESCAPADE

[manuscript dated July 15, 1789]

“What you call the French Race is nothing but a collection of riffraff like me, bleary-eyed, flea-bitten, chilled to the bone. They poured in from the four corners of the earth, driven by hunger, plague, tumors, and the cold, and they stopped here. They couldn’t go any further because of the ocean. That’s France, that’s the French people.”

So spoke my comrade, Citizen Louis-Ferdinand, in refutation of the Rights of Man to rebel against tyrannical forces, as we took coffee in the Café des Beaux Arts at the Palais Royal on the thirteenth day of June, 1789, the very eve of the great assault on the Bastille where I had lately languished as a captive.

I took umbrage at his words and slapped him, though not too hard, as he had been paying for our coffees and might well do so again.

“You!” I said. “And you a former officer in the French Army, a patriot and veteran of the American Revolution, to speak so!”



“Discount soldiers, heroes to the rich folk, scum to everyone else,” he spat out, heeding not my indignant blow and continuing with his rant. “We’re talking monkeys, you and I, throwing out tortured words, we are the minions of King Misery. He’s our lord and master! When we misbehave, he tightens his grip… his fingers round our neck, that makes it hard to talk, got to be careful…”

Clearly, the man had lost his mind. His venerable status as a former man of war and benefactor of my coffee consumption notwithstanding, I rose and strode away from his table. He went on declaiming treacherous sentiments and I felt sure he would fall foul of the many Jacobins around us, but it would not be me who would denounce him. I owed my former comrade at arms that much.

In the courtyard of the Palais Royale, many had gathered to hear the speech of Camille Desmoulins. His florid style and lisping delivery did not attract me in the least, and so instead of listening, I searched out faces in the crowd who might aid me in my quest to gain entry to the Bastille and recover the manuscript of my great work The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom.

Who did I spot there but Marat, the doctor, the scientist, the inventor, the orator and now the devoted rebel against the crown? I recognized him from the Jacobin papers I had been reading since my release from Charenton. There he was, scratching his great simian jaw, scratching simultaneously the bulge in his culottes, looking for all the world like a learned ape of dermatology.

And who was standing there with him? Why, the twin youths who had assailed my carriage just the week before, bringing me such delight and such torment! I felt a sudden throbbing in my loins and the urge to sink with these delightful monsters into libertine lassitude and erotic discharge. But I sensed also that there were great political matters afoot, and so bethought myself to approach the trio with circumspection. Was Marat also delighting in their perverse talents? I considered making this my first aim.

“Good day Citizen-Doctor Marat, and to you also my young friends,” I said, making bold to present myself to them all. Marat barely noticed me, but the young man and woman regarded me with an admixture of surprise, admiration and fiercely sexual hunger.

The woman spoke first, “They let a man such as you roam free?” Her mouth twisted into a devilish grin. Although I’d felt her teeth upon our first meeting, I had not inspected them until the morning sun glinted off them just then. This curious creature had canines not unlike a dog or cat. I felt my member stiffen at the thought of the scars she’d left there. I took her hand as though she were not in filthy peasants’ garb and kissed her moist, dirt-caked palm. I would have licked it if Marat hadn’t looked askance at me. Was that jealousy I detected in his pompous eyes?

“Abolishment of the Lettres de cachet, a divorce from my wretched wife, and I am Liberty itself.”

“None of us are free,” Marat growled. “We are slaves to our oppressors. But that will change, events must be set in motion tonight...”

I ignored him, since a man for whom violence must have a purpose other than self-gratification and the expression of aesthetic delight is both dangerous and tiresome.

Meanwhile this dog-toothed creature was sniffing at my neck like a madwoman. Her bosom pressed against me, the faint scent of sewage in her hair, were it not for the threat of re-incarceration, I would have torn her clothes from her body then and there and reveled in the shock and horror of the crowd as I flogged that beast within her. Her brother tapped her lightly on the shoulder and barely whispered her name, “Marie,” she stood and stepped back to his side.

Taking his hand she whispered back, “Forgive me, my soul.” He merely nodded while looking to Marat, who again looked wounded. Understandable, if he’d had her, than to lose her would be exquisite torture.

“What must be set in motion tonight?”

Marat, looking around at the crowd, “Just this morning Paris electors agreed to form a militia 48,000 men strong, from the bourgeoisie, if we don’t strike tomorrow, we’ll be overrun with unsympathetic rich men. Our revolution will never succeed. We’ll be crushed.”

The woman reached out and caressed his face, “Mon amour, you have a pact. You will have your revolution.”

He brushed her hand away. “All the same, I prefer to be prepared. The people will need guns and powder.” Their eyes lingered upon one another, before he looked away.

To brush away the hand of one so willing to give violent pleasure confirmed all I had long suspected about Marat. Clearly he was incapable of ecstasy unless it was brought about by masses of throbbing, armed, peasants begging for blood in the streets. A lone woman, violent or not was not enough; Marat needed mob violence to make his willy quiver.

The injustice of my being labeled a degenerate and him a revolutionary was not lost on me. That said, I too desired a revolution. A revolution of thought, one that made all men freer to follow their wills would benefit me particularly. And this revolution would naturally follow from the kind of class leveling Marat desired. I decided to insert myself into this threesome. The more the merrier, after all.

“If you’ll permit me, I know of a man who might be able to help you. That is to say, me.”

Marat looked at me just as wolfishly as the woman had, although, his motive was clearly different than hers. I was to be used, one way or the other. Since my meeting of the twins in the carriage, I had desired with painful ardency to be abused by them again. I needed to stay close to him in order to be with them.

“I know of an arms cache kept in the Hôtel des Invalides. I am former military, you know.”

“Too cruel and degraded even for the ranks, from what I heard,” Marat scratched absently at his torso. “How many guns?”

“Around 30,000.”

“And it’s only guarded there by the old soldiers of the Bastille?”

“Exactement, they won’t bother putting up a fight.”

Marat looked at the twins. The man nodded to him. “I have heard this as well.”

“The people are already rioting all over the city,” the woman said, her hand reaching out to me, strange white nubs protruded from her fingertips. Her brother interfered again. I was liking him less and less. If a man wants to be torn apart by a beautiful, filthy woman, that should be his right. The longer I was near her, the more certain I was that I would bleed to death in the street for her.

“Redirecting them to des Invalides should be a simple matter. Just a few of the right words, those I always have.” Marat looked up at the still lisping Desmoulins, standing atop a table outside the coffee shop. “I need to get him to shut up.”

The woman grinned, her wolfish teeth prominent and inviting, “Get to that table at the boulangerie,” she pointed at the opposite side of the courtyard from Desmoulins, then disappeared into the crowd. I followed, rapt, pulled along by her intoxicating promise of violence. The crowd seemed to part for her, as if they, too, could sense the beast lurking within and sought to flee. At Desmoulins’ impromptu stage she threw herself at his feet, grasping him so tightly he almost fell.

“Monsieur! Monsieur Desmoulins, Camille! Please! Our child, you must acknowledge our child! I can no longer bear the weight of responsibility on my own!” She wept, nearly hysterical, it was an impressive show. Desmoulins half crouched, half sat on the table, attempting to disentangle her from his legs.

“Mademoiselle, I do not know you, please let me go,” he muttered meekly, glancing around him in shame as the crowd snickered and pointed. From across the courtyard, I heard Marat’s call to attention. Marie still had Desmoulins entangled and I saw my chance to aid her in dissipating the crowd. I walked up to Desmoulins and offered an outstretched hand.

“Some assistance, Monsieur?” He gladly took it and with as much detachment as I could muster, I shoved Marie away. Touching her, even through her dress sent shivers of need through me, but I maintained impassive, dismissive even.

“Good Sir, you are a lawyer, are you not?”

Desmoulins, brows furrowed, nodded.

“I wonder if I might ask you for some legal advice, you see I am the former Marquis de Sade and I am currently in a protracted and bitter divorce from my wife and I wonder if I could trouble you for some legal advice.” I took the man’s arm and steered him to the coffee shop. Meanwhile, behind me, Marie had disappeared, and the crowd had moved to Marat’s side of the courtyard. The last words I heard from Marat before we slipped inside were, “Citizens, you need guns to fight a revolution, and I know where to get them. Tell me, do you want to be free?”

Once inside, I sat Camille Desmoulins down at a table and ordered a pot of coffee: “The gentleman will pay.” He looked dazed. Clearly the ruse of the damsel-in-a-state-of-embarrassment which young Marie had concocted had done its work on him. No doubt he was wondering what his sylph-like wife would say at this whiff of improper scandal; Desmoulins was, for all his radical airs and long hair of the romantic poet, a bourgeois househusband through and through. I served him his coffee and he sat there in stunned silence, his eloquence failing him completely.

Soon I slipped out of the coffee-shop and returned to the courtyard in the Palais-Royal. Marat was up on a table, haranguing the people, whipping them up into a frenzy. The brother and sister, hangman and wolf-woman, were standing there rapt in his words. Clearly there was no time to be lost. I approached the pair and propositioned them immediately.

“Come,” I said. “There are rooms for hire here at the adjoining guest-house. Let us retire and reacquaint ourselves.”

They agreed to come with me, and so we set off through the arcades. At that moment the noon cannon, lit by a magnifying glass which is positioned to ignite the fuse at exactly the meridian hour, set off its charge of blank explosives. Joseph the stalwart soldier didn’t startle, but Marie, perhaps from coquetrie, leaped so charmingly into my arms.

“Don’t worry, my dear,” I said to her. “Your protector Donatien de Sade is here to ensure you come to no harm.” I saw a sardonic grin from the brother, and then we were at the door of the guest-house adjoining the royal residence of the Duc d’Orléans, now known (like me) by a more plebeian name as Philippe Égalité.

What delightful sexual escapades, what sensual delights, awaited me in this rented room with this depraved pair dedicated entirely to the wishes of Lucifer and the realization of his kingdom on this earth? Such were my thoughts as I climbed the stair along with the wolfish twins…

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Join us for the final part as the Bastille falls on July 14th, 1789 2026