In the fall of 1792, the point at which the French Revolution took a radical turn, Sade suffered one of his life's great sorrows: He learned that La Coste was sacked, almost to the ground. The ruins that you see today are in part the result of this ransacking. "No more La Coste for me!" he wrote to his closest friend, his lawyer in Apt. "What a loss! It is beyond words! I'm in despair!"

A few years later, after the downfall of Maximillien Robespierre's terrorist government, Sade, reduced to penury, like millions of other French citizens, by the financial crash of the mid-1790s, was forced to sell La Coste. The buyer was a native of Bonnieux who was a deputy to the Council of 500, France's chief legislative body, and whose delusion of grandeur was to create a landed dynasty in this area of Provence. But he was not even able to enjoy La Coste, for shortly after its purchase he was purged out of government and exiled in Guyana, where he died 18 months later without ever having spent a night in his new Provençal domain. For the following century and half the property belonged to a series of local landowners, who used the ruins of the increasingly dilapidated château as a keep for goats and sheep and cattle, or even as a stone quarry.

As for the continuation of Sade's career, between 1791 and 1800 he published, in strict anonymity, several of his pornographic works, of which "Justine" and "Juliette" are the most famous. What is less well known is that he also published, under his own name, more than 20 excruciatingly chaste, excruciatingly boring plays, and a few equally chaste and tedious prose fictions, of which he was immensely fond.

One should note that Sade's highest ambition in life was to be a popular, respectable playwright, on the Marivaux or Congreve model, and he would never acknowledge having authored any of the pornographic works for which he has became famous. Notwithstanding his numerous noms de plume, the authorship of "Justine" and "Juliette" was suspected by Napoleon's government, and Sade spent his last 13 years at the insane asylum of Charenton. He was incarcerated there in 1801 at Napoleon's orders on the grounds that his writings expressed a state of "libertine dementia." He died there in 1814, at the age of 74, already a legend, and still denying that he had ever, ever written a line of smut.

So why bother with Sade at all? What is there to learn from this creep who makes us want to puke, who makes us want to take a shower every 10 minutes, and who above all often bores us into a stupor, this buffoon who, two centuries before Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst, pioneered the very notion of boredom as an aesthetic value? And what do we as readers do with the Marquis de Sade? How do we relate to these scatological fantasies of carnage, sperm and rape whose repugnance is far more conducive to chastity than to any libidinous behavior? (As Simone de Beauvoir put it, "Sade's perverse bucolics have the grim austerity of a nudist colony.")

The answer is that we're forced to deal with a man who's had a profound influence on artists such as Gustave Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire, Guillaume Apollinaire, Luis Buñuel and Octavio Paz. Moreover, the interface between morality, literature and censorship lies at the heart of the question, "What do we do with Sade?" Gruesome deeds have been depicted with relish by many classic authors, from Sophocles to William Faulkner, and if we're going to judge literary works by their harvest of bloodshed, we might consider burning the Koran and the Bible (for example, the Book of Judges, Chapter 20, in which a Levite carves up his unfaithful concubine into 12 parts and sends one section of a limb to each tribe of Israel.)

Moreover, for true modernists who look on art as an irritant, a stimulant and a problem rather than a balm, who read for ideas rather than pleasure, Sade might be worth studying, if only as a historical curiosity, because he expressed several notions that were quite novel to Western thought. Beyond advancing the most extremist doctrine of individual liberty ever set forth, he proposed a revolutionary view of the human psyche. He broke with his contemporaries, who had limited their scrutiny to the surface of observed behavior, and explored those more hidden inclinations, which we now call the subconscious. Deriding the Enlightenment's Pollyanna-ish pieties concerning natural goodness, he emphasized the grim ambivalence of erotic and destructive impulses, of love and hate, that color most human attachments. A century before Freud, he saw that the manner in which these conflicting drives were repressed or fulfilled might provide the master plan of every individual personality.

Sade's single most lucid 20th century commentator is the British philosopher Stuart Hampshire. Hampshire sees him as a "serious figure in the history of thought" because he was the first to understand "the non-logical, or contradictory, nature of men's original attachments," and because he dared to discard "all civilized restraints" in depicting a primeval stage of humanity not yet curbed by the most fundamental taboos.

Sade was equally prophetic in his highly androgynous views of the human libido. Few thinkers since Plato have more eloquently argued that heterosexual relations are not any more "normal" than homosexual ones. Not unlike advocates of contemporary "queer theory," Sade championed a highly polymorphous view of erotic impulses in which heterosexuality was only one of many possible expressions of libidinal impulses, one fragment of the sexual spectrum available to human needs.

Another way the more adventurous reader might deal with Sade is to see him as the principal forerunner of modernism, a claim usually made for Nietzsche. He created a revolutionary and indeed sadistic new relationship between the reader and the author that forgoes the pleasure principle of traditional narrative and deals instead with insult, alienation and boredom. One of the most maddening and most modern -- if not postmodern -- aspects of Sade's writing is that he is programmed himself to foil most methods of decoding and typification. He never lets us know his true intent; there is no way of knowing whether he is writing on a level of subversive irony, whether he takes his wacky anarchist ideas seriously or whether they’re incited by his buffoonish exhibitionism.

Sade is a modernist, or even a postmodernist, because he brutally abolishes the traditional pact of trust between reader and writer; because he cracks, through his excesses, any traditional critical grid through which we might evaluate him; because he forces us to play his own game, which works through principles of indeterminacy and sadomasochistic traumatization. Sade was perhaps the first to propose that the goal of art is not pleasure, but the investigation of all possible boundaries.

The only thing left to do, I think, is to return to Provence, and envision Sade's beloved village, La Coste, at the end of our millennium:

"You can still stand, today, at that Southern rim of the castle wall where the Marquis and Marquise de Sade had their apartments, and enjoy the view they had from their bedroom windows. Looking straight down and East in the particularly glorious month of April, you will see, for miles on end, groves of pink and white cherry trees, budding vineyards interspersed with crimson poppies and violet Judas trees. Southward and two miles beyond, the village of Bonnieux tumbles down its hillock toward the Lubéron range, whose slopes yield some of the Vaucluse's loveliest wines. Looking left and North, majestic forests of spruce and oak, more hilltop hamlets, and orchards redolent with rosemary, thyme, and lavender stretch into the distance toward the snow-capped peaks of the Ventoux range."

The rest of Sade's village, a steep-pathed pinnacle of pale stone surmounted by the savage ruins of his castle, is equally unaltered from his time. In the 1990s, even the village's population, about 360 souls, remains about the same as it was in 1780. Its fiercely individualistic citizens delight in showing you those features of their village that are unchanging. The same Communist mayor, they boast, ran the town for 50 years of our century. They are proud, as the Marquis would have been, of their anti-clericalism -- in this predominantly Protestant community there are not enough observing Catholics to warrant a working church.

As for Sade's reputation: In the 1960s, after the last taboos on the publication of his works were lifted, his reputation went the way of most flesh in the second half of our century. He became a tourist attraction, with the happy result that his village grew steadily prosperous. As his works were being published in France's prestigious Pléiade edition and translated into dozens of foreign languages, the Marquis' name began to draw thousands of tourists to La Coste. Several of its struggling farms were converted into charming bed-and-breakfasts. Whether they had ever read a word of his or not, many visitors found La Coste such a pleasurable and amiable place that they eventually settled there, and today nearly half of its official residents are foreigners. A local vintner now manufactures a regional wine called "Cuvée du Divin Marquis," and restaurants in neighboring villages serve dishes with titles such as "Mousse glacée et son coulis d'orange a la Sade."

When queried about their views of the Marquis, local residents express opinions that range from bemused tolerance to fierce pride. To the owner of the town's hottest bistro, "Café de Sade," the sexual frisson evoked by this native son brings the community plenty of added business: "Thousands are drawn here by the romance of his name," she says, "the romance of the illicit." Another resident of La Coste who runs one of the village's most attractive bed-and-breakfasts, agrees: "His odor of sulfur draws the crowds," he says, "particularly the Germans." As for the mayor of La Coste, he finds Sade the writer "boring and repetitious," but militantly defends Sade the citizen: "He never committed the crimes he describes in his books," the mayor says. "Anyone has the right to jazz it up in his own home." The mayor's phrase is far nicer in French: "Tout le monde a le droit de faire la java chez soi."

But here's a detail that might give the Marquis the greatest pleasure of all: At midcentury the chateau of La Coste and its surrounding terrain were purchased by a progressive-minded local schoolteacher, whose widow still owns it. With admirable dedication, the couple partially restored Sade's domain and built a large theater in the stone quarries just below the castle. Jazz festivals, ballet performances and avant-garde plays are often produced there in summer, and one recent dramatic venture might have particularly enthralled Sade: a "fantastical melodrama" that concerns a love affair between the Marquis de Sade and Saint Teresa de Avila, and in whose denouement the saint follows the accursed writer into hell. The production, which originated at La Coste, received enthusiastic reviews, and went on to tour in Berlin, Rouen, France, and Bucharest, Romania. Strolling through the ruins of Sade's chateau, I've often thought of the merriment the Marquis would have expressed upon hearing of this posthumous success. His laugh might have been savage, cynically bemused.

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