The Curse of the Marquis de Sade
A Notorious Scoundrel, a Mythical Manuscript, and the Biggest Scandal in Literary History
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • The captivating, deeply reported true story of how one of the most notorious novels ever written—Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom—landed at the heart of one of the biggest scams in modern literary history.
“Reading The Curse of the Marquis de Sade, with the Marquis, the sabotage of rare manuscript sales, and a massive Ponzi scheme at its center, felt like a twisty waterslide shooting through a sleazy and bizarre landscape. This book is wild.”—Adam McKay, Academy Award–winning filmmaker
Described as both “one of the most important novels ever written” and “the gospel of evil,” 120 Days of Sodom was written by the Marquis de Sade, a notorious eighteenth-century aristocrat who waged a campaign of mayhem and debauchery across France, evaded execution, and inspired the word “sadism,” which came to mean receiving pleasure from pain. Despite all his crimes, Sade considered this work to be his greatest transgression.
The original manuscript of 120 Days of Sodom, a tiny scroll penned in the bowels of the Bastille in Paris, would embark on a centuries-spanning odyssey across Europe, passing from nineteenth-century banned book collectors to pioneering sex researchers to avant-garde artists before being hidden away from Nazi book burnings. In 2014, the world heralded its return to France when the scroll was purchased for millions by Gérard Lhéritier, the self-made son of a plumber who had used his savvy business skills to upend France’s renowned rare-book market. But the sale opened the door to vendettas by the government, feuds among antiquarian booksellers, manuscript sales derailed by sabotage, a record-breaking lottery jackpot, and allegations of a decade-long billion-euro con, the specifics of which, if true, would make the scroll part of France’s largest-ever Ponzi scheme.
Told with gripping reporting and flush with deceit and scandal, The Curse of the Marquis de Sade weaves together the sweeping odyssey of 120 Days of Sodom and the spectacular rise and fall of Lhéritier, once the “king of manuscripts” and now known to many as the Bernie Madoff of France. At its center is an urgent question for all those who cherish the written word: As the age of handwriting comes to an end, what do we owe the original texts left behind?
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
We’re pretty sure you’ve never read a book like this before. It explores the literary scandals surrounding The 120 Days of Sodom, written in 1785 by the notorious Marquis de Sade while he was imprisoned in the Bastille. That novel is widely considered one of the most depraved books ever written, but journalist Joel Warner is more interested in the twisty history of the original manuscript than its content. The 120 Days of Sodom was discovered after the sacking of the Bastille in 1789, and Warner tracks the scroll’s mind-blowing journey from the French Revolution through the Victorian era and its erotic literature enthusiasts, and all the way to 1900s Berlin at the dawn of the study of human sexuality and 1920s Paris for the birth of surrealist cinema. And all that before it came into the possession of a 21st-century manuscript collector at the center of a Bernie Madoff–level financial scandal. The Curse of the Marquis de Sade is one of the most wildly interesting nonfiction books we’ve read in a while.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this illuminating account, journalist Warner (The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny with Peter McGraw) follows the trail of the Marquis de Sade's original manuscript of 120 Days of Sodom, an unfinished novel of sex and sadism, written on a scroll in 1785 while the author was a prisoner in the Bastille. Warner brings to life its various owners over two centuries, including French noblemen and German gay rights pioneers. In 1985, it ended up in the hands of rare manuscript dealer Gérard Lhéritier, a Frenchman who was more Bernie Madoff than the socialite man of letters he portrayed himself to be. His company, Aristophil, bought rare manuscripts and antique writings, then sold shares of them to unsuspecting investors at artificially inflated prices. When the Aristophil house of cards collapsed in 2014, the French government seized the manuscript of 120 Days of Sodom, along with Lhéritier's other assets. As of 2021, its estimated worth is €4.55 million and it is held in the National Library of France. The wealth of detail never slows Warner's well-paced narrative. Literary history buffs will want to check this out.
