While the Marquis de Sade’s life needs no great embellishment to make it interesting, it certainly benefited from the creative liberties of Philip Kaufman’s 2000 film, Quills. Based on Doug Wright’s 1995 play of the same name, the movie reimagines the Marquis de Sade’s final years in Charenton, asylum for the insane. Of course, what would a bit of hyperbole be without being somewhat rooted in the truth? Hence, basing the characters on real life people, including Abbé du Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix), Dr. Royer-Collard (Michael Caine) and even the laundress, Madeleine LeClerc (Kate Winslet), who anchors the entire narrative. Unsurprisingly, in reality, de Sade kept it much more illicit than his relationship with the laundress in the movie, wherein Madeleine actually seems semi-age appropriate for a de Sade played by Geoffrey Rush. For the real de Sade, Madeleine was both a fourteen-year-old girl and someone he did manage to penetrate for about four years rather than merely serving as a sort of “erotic tutor.”
The Abbé du Coulmier, too, was the director of Charenton, and did encourage de Sade to write his stories down, providing ink, quills and paper to do so. And yes, like Joaquin Phoenix’s du Coulmier, he was ordered to shut down theatrical productions at the asylum thanks to de Sade’s crude and crass playwriting skills. The film establishes early on that de Sade is a man constantly forced to live life in confinement. Starting with an opening scene of him staring out the window as an aristocratic woman is about to be guillotined. In de Sade’s mind, the scene is interpreted sexually with his voiceover, “The story of Mademoiselle Renare: a ravishing young aristocrat whose sexual proclivities ran the gamut from winsome to bestial. Who doesn’t dream of indulging every spasm of lust? Feeding each depraved hunger? Owing to her noble birth, Mademoiselle Renare was granted full immunity to do just that. Inflicting pain and pleasure with equal zest. Until one day, Mademoiselle found herself at the mercy of a man every bit as perverse as she. A man whose skill in the art of pain exceeded her own.” And as we see dirty hands caress her face, a masked man immediately recognizable to history buffs as a guillotine operator appears. She is not in the throes of sexual ecstasy, but tied and bound in the public square, the hordes ready to see the next head chopped off. In many ways, she will serve as the portent of what’s to come for Madeleine, the guillotine man himself winkingly played by Bouchon (Stephen Marcus), the oafish dolt at the asylum who has an unnatural, Lenny-like obsession with her.
Not to say that most of the men at the asylum don’t, but every time Bouchon sees Madeleine, he looks as though he might try to overpower and crush her. Luckily, du Coulmier is never far, always seeming to keep a watchful eye over her. As for Dr. Royer-Collard, he has his own “nubile piece” to help quell his repressed appetites–a sixteen-year-old orphan he picks up from the convent. Raping her on their first night together hardly seems worth the tradeoff of living in a ramshackle chateau, and it doesn’t take long for Simone (Amelia Warner) to get wise to the fact that she’d be better off exploring her sexual nature with the “humble servant” in charge of the repairs on the castle, Prioux (Stephen Moyer). That is, if she should ever want to enjoy sex again, which clandestinely reading the Marquis’ work informs her that she does.
The work in question is Justine, published anonymously and smuggled to a publisher by Madeleine, who views his work as essential to, ironically, keeping her pure. But everyone knows who is behind the debauched literature immediately, ergo de Sade grabs the attention of an irate Napoleon, demanding that he be killed. His advisor, however, warns that this could give too much of a dictatorial impression (sure, Napoleon is a dictator, but he won’t be one who kills artists, merely “rehabilitates” them). Thus, Dr. Royer-Collard is sent to oversee matters at Charenton.
Unlike du Coulmier, Royer-Collard’s methods are far more, well, medieval. Complete with torture racks and other horrifying apparatuses designed not to aid mental illness, but to stamp out the mind altogether. The Abbé, in contrast, believes that there is healing to be had in art, telling de Sade, “Purge these wicked thoughts on paper. Maybe they’ll govern you less in life.”
That, alas, is before du Coulmier has Royer-Collard breathing down his neck, threatening closure of the entire institution if he can’t get the Marquis in line. In other words, to prevent him from writing and publishing. As the exchanges between du Coulmier and de Sade become increasingly fraught–a case of purity versus sin–the uncensorable author snaps back, “I write of the great eternal truths that bind all mankind the whole world over. We eat, we shit, we fuck, we kill and we die.” Disgusted by his unwillingness to portray anything else of human nature, du Coulmier finally breaks, succumbing to Royer-Collard’s cruel methods by deciding to take away his quills. A suddenly contrite de Sade shouts, “I’ve all the demons of hell in my head. My only salvation is to vent them on paper.” Du Coulmier returns, “Try reading for a change. The writer who produces more than he reads… the sure mark of an amateur.” But de Sade is not exactly one for the Bible, a book with such non-lurid sexual descriptions as, “They lie together.” Thus, de Sade continues to plead, “I’ll die of loneliness, I’ve no company but the characters,” further adding with urgency, “Have you no true sense of my condition? Of its gravity? My writing is involuntary like the beating of my heart. My constant erection!”
Indeed, a touch of the graphomania exists in every writer, feeling a slight compunction during those hours when they are not writing. The tale of the real life de Sade’s composition of The 120 Days of Sodom, during which he wrote it in secret on a small scroll of paper he could hide inside of his cell (it smacks of V For Vendetta, doesn’t it?) echoes the film version of the Marquis using every possible form that can be used as ink and pen to write his prose when the quills are taken away. This includes wielding wine and a chicken bone as ink and pen, with his bedsheet for paper. When that’s all taken away, the ink and paper is his own blood and clothing. Later, his own excrement and the walls. Nothing can stop the Marquis from letting the filth pour forth from his mouth and out onto “the page.” And Madeleine is his sole remaining ally in allowing him to get his message across by any innovative and undercover means necessary. Unfortunately, that leads to her own demise during her last night at Charenton.
When du Coulmier visits de Sade down in the dungeon he’s been locked away in for inciting the institution into all-out bedlam as a result of his writing, he finds that the most tragic thing of all about Madeleine’s death to the Marquis de Sade is not how she died, but the fact that she was a virgin when plucked from the prime of her youth. That she never knew anything of the pleasure he illuminated for her in his prose seems to be the most affronting of all to him. Du Coulmier’s rage–for he loved Madeleine in a way priests are forbidden to–compels him to ask how de Sade can feel no remorse for what his iniquitous work hath wrought, accusing, “Your words–your words–drove Bouchon–” “Oh for fuck’s sake Abbé,” de Sade cuts him off. Then adds, “Suppose one of your precious inmates attempted to walk on water and then drowned. Would you condemn the Bible? I think not!” The overarching theme of censorship in Quills reaches a new crest here, as it is often the case that government and/or religious officials (Tipper Gore comes to mind) argue in favor of censoring artistic work because of what it “makes” people do (we know how that argument turned out for Judas Priest in the 80s). The way it supposedly influences them to commit unspeakable acts they otherwise would not have without being exposed to the art in question.
Quills posits that people are responsible for their own actions and that art–literature in particular–is merely the holding up of a mirror to a society that even to this day tries to hide from its own reflection.
