Who was the Marquis de Sade? Was he a sadist, a lecher, a madman, or what? In Quills, directed by Philip Kaufman as an adaptation of Doug Wright’s stage play, we encounter the Marquis (played by Geoffrey Rush), whose actual name was Comte Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, in Charenton Asylum, compulsively writing ribald stories. (Although originally imprisoned for sodomy and kidnapping, he was among those released from the Bastille by the masses of the French Revolution in 1789, but then returned to confinement in 1804, his family preferring an insane asylum to prison for him.) While incarcerated, his stories were smuggled out with the assistance of a laundress named Madeleine (played by Kate Winslet), who in turn was in love with him, albeit platonically. The stories were, of course, unacceptable to the ruling authorities, based on Christian morality, so he was progressively punished more and more. The first sanction was to remove his writing instruments, the quills. Next, after he used chicken bones with wine to write a story on his bedsheets, everything was removed from his cell. Then he used his blood to write a story on his clothes, resulting in complete removal of his clothes and water torture. Finally, when he told his stories to the inmate in the next cell, who repeated the story down the line to the laundress, but one of the inmates was so excited by the story that he started a fire, while another had sex with and killed the laundress. The Marquis’s next punishment was to have his tongue removed, and he was chained into a hole, where he wrote on the wall with his own shit. Meanwhile, according to the movie, Napoleon was so angered upon obtaining a copy of the Marquis’s Justine (1791) that he assigned to the prison Dr. Royer-Collard (played by Michael Caine), who arranged for the various progressively harsh punishments, including a whipping of the laundress at one point. The Abbé of the prison (played by Joaquin Phoenix), who preferred to treat the inmates with compassion and love, at first approved of Royer-Collard’s punishments of the Marquis but objected to the whipping of the laundress. Gradually, the Abbé Coulmier became so infatuated with her that her death at the hands of the guillotine executioner, who was also insane, caused him to go mad. When Columier attempted in vain to save the Marquis, an atheist, by asking him to kiss his cross. In the end the Abbé was himself incarcerated, begging for quills to write more ribald stories. Quills places us amid the turmoil of the aftermath of the French Revolution, when the masses were tasting political freedom, and the learned Marquis pushed the envelope toward greater sexual freedom. One point of the story, explicitly articulated by the Marquis in the film, is to prove that religious leaders who censor pornography in the name of Christianity are admitting that they can only control the minds of the faithful by acting in a totalitarian manner. To quote from one of the Marquis’s epigrams, “Religions are the cradles of despotism. . . . To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.” A second point is that those who inflict sadistic punishment are far more depraved than those who write stories about the thin line between pleasure and pain experienced through sex. As the Marquis once said, “Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.” In the film the Marquis dies after swallowing the Abbé’s cross, though in actuality he died of respiratory failure in 1814. According to the tagline of the film, “There are no bad words . . . only bad deeds.” However, the message of the film is unfortunately lost because the Marquis of Quills appears to be more of a sideshow freak than an intellectual who pondered the ultimate consequences of the French Revolution. MH