Sade, long known for being the unprintable,unpublishable and,in the words of Henry James, the great "unnameable", continues to be avoided by the mainstream, as well as the syllabuses of academic literature courses. Several university professors have even frankly confessed to me that they wouldn't touch Sade with a pair of tongs. This is due to his delight in all manifestations of evil, his notorious enjoyment of cruelty and self-inflicted pain, his immoralism and his picture of a loveless and destructive cosmos. For Sade, the universe has no features: there is no God, no goodness, no truth, no unity. Nature, the great aristocrat, is indifferent and the bad and strong triumph while the small and weak go to the wall. These sentiments, presented in their most bald form, may strike us as banal, though they do contain an essential germ of truth and right. The main story in this collection, amply illustrates this theme, as a pious, intensely moral girl, upon meeting with adverse circumstances, travels through life enduring the most agonising injustices imaginable, ranging from slavery, robbery, beating, mutilation and rape by a group of lecherous monks she had ostensibly sought out for aid. Nevertheless, she refuses to yield to the temptations of revenge and hate of the world which so cruelly treats her, but holds fast to her religious and moral principles. As a result, Sade has her punished for her virtues. Other tales touch on Sade's preoccupations with evil and good, including one that touches on lesbianism, though the overall selection is not as dark as it seems, containing a number of episodes of genuinely original humour and irony. "Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man" is one such story, employing the fashionable eighteenth century form of the dialogue. It consists in a dying man outarguing his priest, eventually convincing him of the advantages of vice and converting him to atheism. It's a shame that Sade is so underrated as a humourist.
