The ghosts of Sodom / [Marquis de Sade].

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sade, marquis de, 1740-1814.

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

French

Subjects (All):

Sade, marquis de, 1740-1814--Diaries.

Sade.

Sade, marquis de, 1740-1814.

Authors, French--18th century--Diaries.

Authors, French.

Genre:

Diaries.

Autobiographies.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

138 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

London : Creation, 2003.

Language Note:

Translated from the French.

Summary:

The secret journal which the Marquis de Sade worked hard at maintaining, even when ill and ageing at Charenton asylum, reveals the shadowy life of an exceptional, strange man whose abuses are often legendary. The book takes us beyond the prisoner who once fled the Vincennes fortress; it also takes us beyond the prisoner of the Bastille whose imagination tortured him, both deliciously and cruelly, and who projected onto paper the burning and pitiable ghosts of his imagination with a desperate sensuality. This book contains the living, everyday presence of the old man, almost 67 years old when the "first notebook" begins of this once-lost journal.

He had seven years left to live in the "hospital-prison" of Charenton, where his days were slow and grim, full of everyday preoccupations, worries about money, nasty quarrels with the people around him -- but were also lit up by the sordid, squalid episodes of a final erotic adventure: the last flames of his senile passion. At the Charenton asylum, where he was under a liberal regime of surveillance, Sade's death approached, darkening the colours of his life and tearing apart his feelings.

Only the first (1807-8) and fourth (1814) of these notebooks have been rediscovered, out of a series of four.

The Ghosts Of Sodom also includes a selection of Sade's letters from Charenton, as well as the working notes for his terminal novel "The Days At Florbelle" -- a huge work deemed so pornographic that the only manuscript was burned by the police at the behest of Sade's own son.

Contents:

The Charenton Diaries 25

The Days At Florbelle 81

Charenton Letters 113

Last Will And Testamant 135.

Notes:

"The Charenton journals"--Cover.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

1840681012

OCLC:

52358235