Art Of The Day Weekly

Sade, the last scroll

In September 1795, for twenty evenings, in the silence of the Bastille where he was in prison, Sade recopied in minute handwriting what would become his most famous work, the 120 Days of Sodoma. He glued pieces of paper tip to tip,and ended up with a scroll 12 metres long which he hid in a case, behind a stone in the wall. When he was transfered to the asylum of Charenton, a few days before 14 July 1789, he was not able to take his manuscript, which he thought was lost for ever like most of his commentators, until it reappeared in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century when the owner, the dermatologist-sexologist Iwan Bloch, gave a first transcription. The adventures of the scroll are as wild as the life of marquis de Sade. It was bought by vicomte Charles de Noailles in 1929 (his wife, Marie-Laure, was a descendant of Sade). It was lent in 1982, to be analyzed, to the publisher Jean Grouet, the former secretary of Françoise Sagan, who sold it fraudulously to a Swiss collector, Gérard Nordmann. It took thirty years of trials and mediations to reach a solution: the scroll was bought in the spring of 2014 by the musée des Lettres et Manuscrits for the slight sum of €7 million, including the indemnisation of the Noailles family.
• The scroll, partially urolled, is at the centre of the exhibition Sade, marquis de l’ombre, prince des Lumières at the musée des Lettres et Manuscrits, until 18 January 2015.

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