The Ghosts Of Sodom: Charenton Journals, Notes And Letters - Softcover

Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade (2 June 1740 - 2 December 1814) was a French aristocrat, revolutionary politician, philosopher, and writer famous for his libertine sexuality and lifestyle. He is best known for his erotic works, which combined philosophical discourse with pornography, depicting sexual fantasies with an emphasis on violence, criminality, and blasphemy. He is among the world's most famous authors.

Sade's Charenton diaries were first published in France in 1970, following their discovery in the Sade family archives. They consist of two cahiers or notebooks, the first of which covers the period June 1807 to August 1808, the second 18th July to 30th November, 1814. The second notebook, then, extends to just two days before Sade's death on December 2nd, 1814. Other surviving material from the Charenton years include a small number of letters (Pauvert reprints fourteen of these which include the 'Final Proposals Made to My Family' of 1805 and the much commented 'Last Will and Testament' of 1806) and notes for The Days At Florbelle, Sade's only libertine work of the period the manuscript of which was ordered to be burnt by Sade's younger son, Donatien-Claude-Armand, together with some other documents which he considered might cause embarrassment to the family.

The letters Sade wrote from prison from 1778 up to his release in 1790 have been extensively worked on. The Charenton letters and diaries, however, have in the past attracted little critical attention and no systematic English translation of this material has been published before. Even Sade's notes on The Days At Florbelle have drawn little more than passing comment from even the most assiduous of Sade scholars. This new edition will, then, make available to readers of English writing that could in the past be accessed by readers of French alone. There may be a number of reasons for this neglect, and I will suggest three main ones. Firstly, the diary entries themselves are often notoriously hard to interpret, full of puzzling and enigmatic abbreviations, mysterious allusions, infuriating non-sequiturs and coded or veiled uses of language and, especially, of numbers. All of these features present both critic and translator with serious challenges. Secondly, only two of the four cahiers that originally made up Sade's diary output during the Charenton years have survived, numbers 2 and 3 having no doubt been destroyed. Georges Daumas draws our attention to the chronological discontinuity between these two documents: between the first cahier of 1807-8 and the fourth of 1814. Daumas conjectures that no 2 was confiscated by the police (Pauvert adds that this probably occurred on June 5th 1807) and that no 3 was seized, together with other writings (eg, the manuscript of a play entitled La Tour Myst