We wrote here a few years back about designer Pierre Cardin’s plans to restore the Marquis de Sade’s old home. I was pleased to see a BBC report last month describing his excellent progress:
Provence has its fair share of heart-stoppingly beautiful hill-top villages, most of them crowned by a half-ruined castle from which the visitor looks out in blissful reverie over a landscape of lavender, vineyards and distant mountains. But how many of them can also boast of 18th Century sexual perversions, and of revolutionaries baying for the blood of an orgy-addled literary maverick?
Marquis de Sade’s Lacoste château is now mostly in ruins, but has been transformed in recent years thanks to the philanthropy of another maverick, Pierre Cardin… Visitors are treated to views, excellent food and that elusive sensation of stepping into another time. A little more than two centuries ago, it was where Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade began his career of erotic scandal.
It takes a certain leap of the imagination, but where the cicada now sings there really were orgies with nuns and servant girls. Possibly. We do know the man synonymous with the act of gaining pleasure by inflicting pain on others based much of the action in his later (banned) works on his time in Lacoste…
After a hot climb up steep cobbled lanes, visitors emerge among the ruins of the château. A renovated central section is where Cardin has his home and is off-limits to the public. Otherwise you are free to wander between broken-down walls and vanished gardens, look down on village roofs and muse on what it must have been like in its earlier incarnations…
‘Muse’? Right. Apparently there’s a statue of a pair of outstretched arms. I wonder if it’s ever adorned with rope? Or whether any tourist girl’s yet been thoroughly abused, beaten, shamed in the grounds? I really should plan a trip…