120 Days: an itinerary

The ‘Things That Matter’ summer school, developed in collaboration with the Universities of Durham, Groningen, and Uppsala, took place on the week beginning 15^th June. Due to current circumstances, the course took place online, and I was fortunate enough to be in attendance. Morning sessions focused on the tensions between material objects and their digitisation, the opportunities represented by new and developing technologies and techniques, and what might risk being missed when researchers focus solely on digital sources – a series of questions which appear more relevant that ever in this new age of social distancing and limited travel.

Afternoon sessions were focused on group projects, for which we are asked to trace, examine, and analyse the itineraries of our chosen historical objects. The course participants came from a wide range of disciplines, areas, and indeed countries, which was reflected in the rich and diverse range of objects chosen. My team consisted of myself, Daria Segal (PhD candidate, University of Iceland), and Meggy Lennaerts (Master’s candidate, University of Groningen), and our chosen object was the Marquis de Sade’s infamous Les Cent vingt journées de Sodome manuscript, a literary and historical object which has had a long, varied, and at times scandalous journey.

Manuscript of Les Cent vingt journées de Sodome.

The study of the itinerary of the Sodome manuscript seemed to us to be particularly pertinent and timely, especially given its relatively recent declaration as a national treasure. Furthermore, while its travels are well told in editions of the text, the journey of the manuscript is often absorbed as part of the history of the text itself, rather than viewed as the itinerary of a separate, material object in its own right. Of course, the limited study of the materiality of the manuscript is likely largely due to the fact that it has always been in private hands, but its unique form, the author’s intensely emotional and physical relationship to the manuscript, the circumstances under which it was created, and the visceral nature of its contents, mean that a study of the materiality of the manuscript and its itinerary feels fitting, if not essential.

The manuscript began its life in the Bastille, and was written on tightly rolled, tissue-thin paper in miniscule handwriting, in just thirty-seven days. It was left behind when Sade was transferred from the Bastille to Charenton on 3^rd July 1789; Sade spent the rest of his life believing it lost. It was not, however, lost; the story goes that it was rescued by a man named Arnoux de Saint-Maximin, although there appears to be little record of why, or indeed who he was, and then sold or given to the Marquis de Villeneuve-Trans. It remained in the Villeneuve-Trans family for three generations, where it was likely seen by very few people; it is mentioned in Henry Ashbee’s 1877 Index Librorum Prohibitorum but as a rumour, rather than a text he had seen first-hand.

In the late 19^th or early 20^th century, the manuscript was sold to German sexologist Iwan Bloch, who had already published a biography of Sade, and who saw in Sade’s work, and particularly in Sodome, a great source for the study of sexual perversion. Bloch had the manuscript transcribed, and published it in 1904 under the pseudonym Eugène Dühren. After Bloch’s death in 1922, the manuscript’s location is unknown, but it resurfaces again in 1929, when it is bought by Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, a direct descendant of Sade’s. The Noailles were influential patrons of the arts, their circle including, among others, Salvador Dalí, Balthus, and Man Ray, who photographed the manuscript. Under the auspices of the Noailles family, Maurice Heine was allowed to produce a second, more accurate transcription of the manuscript, which was published in the 1930s.

In 1982, the manuscript passed from the Noailles’ daughter, Nathalie de Noailles, to Swiss collector of erotica Gérard Nordmann, although not without scandal; the manuscript had allegedly been stolen from the Noailles family before being sold to Nordmann, although a Swiss court ruled that Nordmann had purchased the manuscript legally and in good faith. After Nordmann’s death in 2004, the manuscript was sold to Gérard Lhéritier, French manuscript dealer and founder of the firm Aristophil, who exhibited it in the Musée des Lettres et Manuscrits. In 2015, however, an investigation was opened against Lhéritier, due to a suspected pyramid scheme fraud. The manuscript, along with others in Aristophil’s collection, was seized by French authorities, and is still being held to this day.

The itinerary of the manuscript of Les Cent vingt journées de Sodome is a rich and complex one, and makes for a fascinating study in its own right. But even a brief examination of the itinerary of the manuscript throws up enriching angles for the study of the text, its reception, and influence, especially as the text only existed in manuscript form for the first hundred years of its life. As our study of the manuscript’s itinerary develops, so too, hopefully, will our understanding of the itinerary of the text and the ideas within. This project, and the ‘Things That Matter’ course, has furnished me with a renewed appreciation of tensions between the material and the digital and the rich potential of emerging software, which can only be of benefit to my other ongoing research, particularly as regards the iconography of Voltaire.

– Josie Dyster, Research Assistant, Voltaire Foundation, Oxford

(Josie is a research assistant in the Digital Enlightenment. She is currently building on existing research by Professor Samuel Taylor (St Andrews) to create a digital Voltaire iconography database.)

Sade: a national treasure?

What do Ian McKellen and the Marquis de Sade have in common? They’re both national treasures in their respective countries.

Manuscript of Les Cent vingt journées de Sodome.

In Britain, a national treasure is someone who’s been around for quite a while, and generally regarded with respect and affection. Think Judi Dench and David Attenborough, Joanna Lumley and Alan Bennett, who are probably Britain’s favourite national treasures even though they might blanch at the label. Such is the enduring love for these reassuring yet sometimes quirky figures that even when scandal strikes – as when La Lumley was embroiled in that ghastly garden bridge brouhaha – we collectively sigh, shrug and continue in our comfortable love. This points to a trait common to many British national treasures: their pasts as well as their presents are rarely conservative. Though they may have a traditional keep-calm-and-carry-on attitude, there’s often something irreverent, naughty or even queer about them – think of Irvine Welsh, Helen Mirren and David Hockney. That’s why Kate Moss is already a national treasure, Nicola Adams might be one day, but the Queen will never be. Longevity doesn’t translate into insipidness, and Mary Beard exemplifies how a national treasure continues to stimulate, provoke and upset (some of) us.

National treasures in France, however, are not people but ‘des biens culturels qui présentent un intérêt majeur pour le patrimoine national au point de vue de l’histoire, de l’art ou de l’archéologie’, and whose expatriation is temporarily blocked so that their value can be determined by experts and potentially for the State to raise sufficient funds for their purchase. On 18 December 2017 France’s Ministère de la culture declared the manuscript of Sade’s 120 journées de Sodome to be a ‘trésor national’, a decision taken just before the twelve-metre long scroll was about to be auctioned off as part of a sale of manuscripts owned by the now discredited company Aristophil, a French investment firm that went bankrupt in 2015 after buying more than a 100,000 manuscripts and whose founder was charged with fraud last year. Sade’s scroll – as well as André Breton’s Manifestes du surréalisme which were also owned by Aristophil and were similarly designated a national treasure – cannot leave France for at least thirty months, during which time the State is expected to rustle up the funds to purchase it at a price such as it would reach on the international market. According to Le Figaro, that sum is in the region of 8 million euros, slightly more than the 7 million euros paid by Aristophil, which bought the manuscript in 2014, the bicentennial of Sade’s death.

Les 120 journées de Sodome – described by its author as the ‘récit le plus impur qui ait jamais été fait depuis que le monde existe, le pareil livre ne se rencontrant ni chez les anciens ni chez les modernes’, and somewhat surprisingly by both the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail as ‘an erotic masterpiece’ – appeared in the Pléiade series in 1990 and as a Penguin Classic in 2016. As the official website of the Ministère de la culture notes, ‘ce manuscrit, remarquable par sa forme particulière résultant des conditions de sa création en cellule lors de l’incarcération du marquis de Sade à la Bastille, son parcours fort mouvementé, sa réputation sulfureuse et son influence sur un certain nombre d’écrivains français du XXème siècle, est d’une importance majeure dans l’œuvre de Sade, en tant que premier véritable ouvrage, à la fois le plus radical et le plus monumental, bien que resté inachevé.’ Frédéric Castaing, member of the committee that advises on which works should be classified as national treasures, is quoted in the New York Times as describing Les 120 journées as a work that ‘that challenges, that reaches into the depths of humanity, of the obscure, […] a serious document of literature, of France’s literary history.’ Its canonization is now complete and irrefutable.

Ironically, Les 120 journées de Sodome works against the idea of nationhood. One of the books that inspired Sade’s novel is the Abbé Bertoux’s Anecdotes françaises (1767), which provides a pithy story or two to exemplify the ‘mœurs, […] usages et […] coutumes’ of the French nation for many of the years since 487. In contrast to Bertoux, who deploys the conventional anecdote to forge a collective and nationalist readership, Sade uses the obscene anecdote to create an individual and subversive reader. And yet there is a logic to this violent, obscene and radically atheist novel being declared – and publicly funded – as a national treasure. Sade writes in ‘Français, encore un effort si vous voulez être républicains’, the political pamphlet intercalated in La Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795):

‘Que les blasphèmes les plus insultants, les ouvrages les plus athées soient ensuite autorisés pleinement, afin d’achever d’extirper dans le cœur et la mémoire des hommes ces effrayants jouets de notre enfance [the phrase “effrayants jouets de notre enfance” of course refers to religion]; que l’on mette au concours l’ouvrage le plus capable d’éclairer enfin les Européens sur une matière aussi importante, et qu’un prix considérable, et décerné par la nation, soit la récompense de celui qui, ayant tout dit, tout démontré sur cette matière, ne laissera plus à ses compatriotes qu’une faux pour culbuter tous ces fantômes et qu’un cœur droit pour les haïr.’

With his manuscript now classified as a national treasure, it transpires that Sade has won just that kind of prize. Whether his fellow Europeans are in the mood to award a similar prize is less clear for now.

– Thomas Wynn, Durham University

Thomas Wynn’s translation and edition of The 120 Days of Sodom, produced in collaboration with Will McMorran (Queen Mary, University of London), was published by Penguin Classics in 2016.

 

Voltaire and Sade, with a dash of Casanova

I have spent a lot of time with Voltaire and Sade recently, editing La Prude for the Complete Works and translating The 120 Days of Sodom for Penguin Classics (this was a collaboration with Will McMorran, and our blog is here). The two works could not be more different.

Manuscript of Les Cent vingt journées de Sodome

Voltaire began work on his comedy in a writing frenzy in winter 1739-40 (‘Je n’ai jamais été si inspiré de mes dieux, ou si possédé de mes démons’, January 1740) but then tinkered with it for seven and a half years; Sade, on the contrary, carefully planned his novel for two and a half years, before writing it up in thirty-seven days in late 1785. Voltaire struggled to bring his comedy, which is based on William Wycherley’s often obscene The Plain Dealer (1676), into line with French taste and decorum, whereas Sade brazenly increases the abject sexual violence from page to page, even throwing in a couple of ‘supplices en supplément’ for good measure. A sense as to how these works differ might be gleaned from looking at a point of overlap, namely the presence of cross-dressing characters. And if Adam Phillips is right to suggest that ‘Two’s company, but three’s a couple’, then let’s bring in Casanova who joins our two friends in being recognized as an Enlightenment philosopher.

Adine dressed as a Greek boy in La Prude, in Collection complète des œuvres de M. de Voltaire, 1768.

There is plenty of pleasure in La Prude – unfortunately most of it happens off stage. The epicurean Madame Burlet is forever zipping from dinners to plays, eating, drinking and singing, and she appears to be a shopaholic (‘Amas nouveaux de boîtes, de rubans, / Magots de Saxe, et riches bagatelles’), but we never see any of this. The on-stage presence of Adine, dressed as Greek boy – apparently it’s the best way to keep lecherous Turkish pashas and sailors at bay – does stimulate desire in the eponymous prude Dorfise, but that desire is portrayed as ridiculous. Adine is a non-threatening, rather wimpy ephebe, and Dorfise is not only mocked for falling for her, but is also dehumanised in her final utterance, the nonsensical cry ‘Ah!’ Part of the audience’s satisfaction derives from seeing a character humiliated when the transvestite’s true identity is exposed.

Not so with Sade. On day 18 of the 120 Days, Madame Duclos tells of a man who ‘ne voulait du féminin que l’habit, mais, dans le fait, il fallait que ce fût un homme, et, pour m’expliquer mieux, c’était par un homme habillé en femme que le paillard voulait être fessé.’ There is no doubt as to the youth’s real identity, and his obvious drag is central to the scenario: it’s precisely in the old lecher’s transgression of having sex with this ‘masculine fouetteuse’, and in exposing that transgression to the employees of the brothel, that he finds his pleasure. The reader’s satisfaction comes from the narrator keeping both masculine and feminine elements of the youth’s persona visible, and with the older man shrugging off all judgment of his idiosyncratic behaviour: ‘Je voulus travailler à sa conversion, je l’assurai que j’avais des filles charmantes qui le fouetteraient tout aussi bien: il ne voulut seulement pas les regarder.’

Giacomo Casanova, by his brother Francisco Giuseppe Casanova, 1750-1755

Casanova tells of an encounter in an auberge in Cesena. Disturbed by a ruckus, he goes to the adjoining room where he sees poking out from under the bedclothes ‘une tête échevelée riante, fraîche, et séduisante qui ne me laisse pas douter de son sexe, malgré que sa coiffure fût d’homme’. This is Henriette, and the adventurer mentions no frisson deriving from her cross-dressing – his desire is provoked solely by the girl’s femininity. Her drag does, however, stimulate pleasure of another kind: ‘Cette fille n’avait que l’habit d’homme qui la couvrait, pas la moindre nippe de femme; pas seulement une chemise. Elle en changeait avec celles qui appartenaient à son ami. Cela me semblait nouveau et énigmatique.’ If exposure is central to cross-dressing in Voltaire and Sade, in Casanova the initial exposure gives way to mystery and reflection. Voltaire and Sade want to solve problems, Casanova revels in them.

– Thomas Wynn, Durham University