Pornography: Men Possessing Women, by: Andrea ... - Feminish

arrest. Nanon was imprisoned; her infant daughter died at Lacosteshortly after she was born because the wet nurse’s milk went dry.Sade was again threatened with arrest. He escaped again to Italy.The fifteen-year-old girl who had been most severely injured andhad been sent to Sade’s uncle had not, in nine months, recoveredfrom her injuries. She was finally taken to a hospital where the Sadefamily conspired to keep her from talking with anyone to whom shemight reveal what had happened to her. By this time, the Abb6believed that Sade should be imprisoned.For a year, Sade traveled in Italy. He complained of beinglonely. One of the kidnapped girls, still kept at Lacoste, died.Another escaped and went to the police. Against the advice ofRen6e-Pelagie, Sade returned to Lacoste. More women wereprocured for him. Sade kept spending money on women whileRenee-Pelagie lived in near penury. He hired servants, locked themup, forced them to submit to him. A father of a servant hired bySade tried to shoot him. T he daughter signed a statement defendingSade. T he authorities ordered the woman returned to her father.She was not.Another attem pt was made to arrest Sade. He hid. O n beinginformed by Madame de Montreuil that his mother was dying inParis, he went there. She died before he arrived, but in Paris Sadewas arrested under a lettre de cachet. Madame de Montreuil had toldthe police Sade’s whereabouts. He was sent to Vincennes, where hewas imprisoned for nearly six years. In 1784, he was transferred tothe Bastille. In 1789, the people of France were near revolution.Sade rigged up an improvised loudspeaker from his cell andexhorted the people to lay siege to the Bastille. He was moved toCharenton, a lunatic asylum. O n July 14, 1789, the Bastille wasstormed and its warden killed. In 1790, Sade was released fromCharenton along with all prisoners who had been imprisoned underlettres de cachet by the old regime.During the years of his imprisonment in Vincennes and theBastille, Sade wrote the body of literature for which he is bestknown (though his literary career did not begin in prison; he haddone some writing and even produced and directed theatrical events