Eugenie De Franval and Other Stories

"This is Sade’s version of Pygmalion, really. And, being Sade, it’s a fairly twisted version of Pygmalion. It’s the story of Franval, a libertine who marries a beautiful young woman but his interest isn’t really in her, but in the child he wants to have with her. So the Pygmalion myth of a man falling in love with his own creation is played out in this text as a father-daughter incestuous relationship. Franval raises his daughter in isolation from her mother and the outside world, and creates his own curriculum for her education—a little like Rousseau in Emile . Sade perversely presents Franval as progressive—for example, he refuses to have his daughter dressed in restrictive corsets and so on. But then there’s obviously a less than progressive reason why he prefers her in loose clothing… As Eugénie grows up she falls in love with her father, and the story becomes a battle between the Christian values represented by Eugénie’s mother and the libertine values represented by the incestuous lovers. Eugénie says to her father, “I was not afraid to defy customs which, since they vary from country to country, cannot be considered sacred”. Sade is very keen to point out that different cultures have different values and thus that there are no absolute values. There are different debates going on in that short story. The priest, Clervil, serves as a spokesperson for Christian morality, and Franval often uses moral relativism to push back against Catholic doctrine. But I think you’re right: underlying it is a kind of amoralism. There’s a sense in which Eugénie is free because she’s kept away from all of these moral prejudices. There is this contradiction in the text in which she’s presented as a character who is utterly free from all contamination by religion or morality. At the same time, from a different perspective, she’s obviously the product of a very tightly controlled and manipulated environment in which her father has been the dominant—and abusive—figure. I don’t think anyone ever convincingly converts in Sade. Whenever a character converts it’s always for reasons of respectability. Sade published “Eugénie de Franval” in a collection called The Crimes of Love and did so under his own name. He was now trying to become a respectable man of letters, so evidently he needed to have his villain recant at the end. And the circumstances in which he does so are rather odd: Franval gets caught in a thunderstorm and suddenly realises the error of his ways. And his conversion is pretty creepy too—the text talks about him profaning the dead body of his wife. This is Sade being respectable-ish. What’s striking in the edition that you will have read—in the excellent translation by David Coward—is that there are two scenes which Sade cut from his edition. There’s one scene in which Eugénie tries to seduce the priest, and there’s another extraordinary scene in which Eugénie is literally put on a pedestal and offered as a spectacle to Franval’s best friend, Valmont—the classic name of a libertine. Put politely, it is a scene of pornographic consumption and masturbation. “Eugénie de Franval” is a fascinating text because it’s Sade writing for a public readership and just about staying within the bounds of decency. I chose it as a kind of contrast to the 120 Days, to show that there’s another side to Sade. There’s the Sade that’s seemingly unrestrained and unchecked. His dictum in the 120 Days and other writings is “tout dire” (say everything). That said, he doesn’t actually tell all in 120 Days : he keeps little secrets in the text. There are little closets in the castle which remain closed to the reader. So, even when he’s at his most excessive, he still creates the illusion of keeping a little in reserve. But in “Eugénie de Franval” it’s him working within much tighter constraints. He wants this story to be read. So, there’s an interesting dialogue going on between the narrator and his readers but there’s an even more interesting dialogue going between the lines and that’s between Sade and ourselves. That’s a tricky one. Is it the narrator who is unreliable or is it the author? We’re used to the idea of an unreliable narrator—a narrator we can’t trust. The classic unreliable narrator is one who may be lying or mistaken as to the truth. With Sade, I’m not sure whether the narrator is unreliable. The narrator is doing a certain kind of job. The problem is that we’re worried about the author being unreliable. If this story were not by Sade, we would have fewer concerns about the narrator being unreliable. We might be a little suspicious, but we tend to assume, lazily, that authors have good intentions; that when a moral point is being made, it’s being made sincerely. The problem with Sade is that you don’t have those certainties any more. There seems to be hypocrisy in this story. But how much of that hypocrisy is the source of our own suspicion? “With Sade, I’m not sure whether the narrator is unreliable. The problem is that we’re worried about the author being unreliable” There’s a very interesting bishop called Jean-Pierre Camus who wrote short stories very much like Sade but a century earlier. If you read these you find exactly the same moral tone that Sade adopts, and equally lurid content. But he’s a bishop. So, we don’t dismiss him as a hypocrite quite as quickly as we do Sade—depending on how we feel about Catholic bishops of course. So assigning unreliability is complex in the case of Sade’s fiction: it’s difficult to know how much of our suspicion comes from the text and how much comes from our own preconceptions about Sade. Absolutely. In terms of mothers, it’s often said that Sade hates mothers. Sade was never close to his own, and had a terrible relationship with his mother-in-law, obviously, given that she put him in prison. But there’s a recurring theme in Sade’s fiction—and particularly in Philosophy in the Boudoir —about severing the sense of connection between generations, and between mothers and children in particular. It’s striking that in “Eugénie de Franval,” Eugénie is separated from her mother for the first seven years of her life and has no feelings of gratitude for being brought into existence by her. In other works this extends to the relationships between fathers and children too: why should we be grateful to either of our parents for simply indulging their sexual appetites? As for Franval and Eugénie, there is a sense in which Franval falls in love with his daughter, as she does with him. It’s not just a sexual attraction but an intellectual one: she is a perfect embodiment of his philosophy, and the perfect opposite of her virtuous, repressed mother."