Shakespeare's Perfume. Richard Halpern

conforms to one’s preconceptions of it. In brief, however, the book depicts the actions of four debauched libertines who abscond with their young wives, a passel of exquisite, pubescent boys and girls, eight men chosen for the prodigious size of their penises, four middle-aged courtesans expert in the recounting of lascivious tales, four elderly ladies-inwaiting, and three cooks and their assistants. All are confined by the libertines within an impenetrably isolated chateau and (with the exception of the cooks) subjected to an encyclopedic array of tortures and violations.

      At the beginning of the novel, where Sade introduces his dramatis personae, he also remarks on the aesthetic principles that will govern his descriptions of them:

      But now let us retrace our steps and do our best to portray one by one each of our four heroes—to describe each not in terms of the beautiful, not in a manner that would seduce or captivate the reader, but simply with the brush strokes of Nature which, despite all her disorder, is often sublime, indeed even when she is at her most depraved. For—and why not say so in passing—if crime lacks the kind of delicacy one finds in virtue, is not the former always more sublime, does it not unfailingly have a character of grandeur and sublimity which surpasses, and will always make it preferable to, the monotonous and lackluster charms of virtue?³⁸

      If Sade adopts an aesthetics of the sublime for his sodomitical narrative, this is not simply a matter of artistic whim but is, rather, determined by the subjects of his story. The first of his four libertines, the Duc de Blangis, is possessed not only of monstrous and unquenchable appetites, not only of a penis so large that it lacerates and has even been reported to kill its victims, but also of thighs so powerful that they can squeeze the life out of a horse, as he demonstrates to his companions. The Duc de Blangis’s body is a source not of beauty but of sexual terror, a titanic and inhuman fount of destructive energies. It is itself sublime. But this bodily aesthetic is not, as one might suppose, reserved only for the male characters of the story. Sade returns to the concept of the sublime when he describes the four elderly ladies-in-waiting, who are chosen in part for their spectacular ugliness. Reflecting on the sexual appeal of such ugliness, he writes: