Fear of De Sade

There’s not a chink of light anywhere. It’s not surprising that the Baron of LaChafoi, with all his forty-some years lived to the full, doesn’t see anyone when he opens his eyes. He doesn’t understand why he’s here. They’ve thrown him into a stone cell – he could tell from touching – and slammed the door. It all began a week before, when he was awakened after a night of debauchery and excess, surrounded by guards shouting insults and accusations. He could hardly remember where he was – and nothing of what had happened in the last few hours. Somebody had been murdered but they didn’t say who it was: ‘Everyone who is still alive is a suspect!’ they shouted. As a provincial nobleman who had survived the Revolution, it wasn’t the first time he’d heard that. But since the upstart Buonaparte had crowned himself Emperor, he had never been humiliated in such a fashion. They were probably talking about the other three who had taken part in the orgy, the baron concluded, without realising that, if there had been a murder, the most probable thing was that one of them was dead, and so there were only two left excluding him. That was what he underlined later to the tribunal – and it seems that it was that line of reasoning that determined what he later realised was his detention – insisting at the end that the last thing he remembered doing was swallowing the aphrodisiac in some aniseed pastilles. At no point on the agonising road which had led him in chains from the Château Lagrange, where he was found unconscious by the guards, to a local jail and to Bicêtre Prison in Paris, then on to the tribunal, and from there to the dark cell where he now found himself, did they bother to utter the victim’s name; since they didn’t reply to his questions, this explained why he had been taken for a madman for asking so many times who had died – ‘as if he didn’t know already’ – that was what they retorted, in a sarcastic, reproving tone which did nothing to alleviate his ignorance. Since he’d been woken by the guards, he hadn’t seen any of the other three, his fellow revellers, though he had already suspected, judging from his own fate, that since they were also suspects (at least the other two who must still be alive), they had probably ended up in the same place.