The Marquis De Sade, just his name is enough to chill some people's bones. In fact his name bestowed upon the English language one of the best words to describe cruelty,sadistic. With that said, just who was the Marquis De Sade? He was a "nobleman" during the period of the French Revolution.
In case you wonder why I put nobleman in quotations it's because his reputation was far from it. Oh the irony, De Sade got pleasure from pain. He often inflicted it on not so willing people. He fits in a category along with the likes of Elizabeth Bathory and Rod Ferrel, I suppose warped minds think alike.
What drove his brutality? Some think it was his time in the Bastille, still others think he may have been mentally ill. My personal thoughts are that he may have had a psychopathic personality and that his warped hungers were fulfilled only momentarily when he was indulging in them. Thus it pushed him more and more into acts of depravity.
Nothing seemed to keep De Sade in check, like a vampire of masochism the more he indulged his dark side, the more his dark cravings seemed to engulf him. He could be compared to the Vampire Lestat from Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles. Sometimes though, fact is far more frightening than fiction.
Whatever the cause of De Sade's derangement, nowadays he would have most certainly been locked away. Rubber room and straight jacket anyone? De Sade fancied himself a philosopher, everything he wrote showed terrifying insight into the psychopathic mind because he not only wrote of it, he embodied it.
He spent much of his life in and out of imprisonment, in my opinion his time imprisoned is what severely warped his psyche, making an already bad situation worse. Due to his reputation several scandals that involved his servants and various women of ill repute erupted.
He was arrested for his controversial writings as well. He was finally declared insane, and rightfully so. He later died in an insane asylum where he had spent the least scandalous part of his life. Even in death though, De Sade's reputation as a deviant masochist has haunted researchers and various others who have sought to understand him.
I suppose we never will.
