Fear of De Sade

Начало книги

There’s not a chink of light anywhere. It’s not surprising that the Baron of LaChafoi, with all his forty-some years lived to the full, doesn’t see anyone when he opens his eyes. He doesn’t understand why he’s here. They’ve thrown him into a stone cell – he could tell from touching – and slammed the door. It all began a week before, when he was awakened after a night of debauchery and excess, surrounded by guards shouting insults and accusations. He could hardly remember where he was – and nothing of what had happened in the last few hours. Somebody had been murdered but they didn’t say who it was: ‘Everyone who is still alive is a suspect!’ they shouted. As a provincial nobleman who had survived the Revolution, it wasn’t the first time he’d heard that. But since the upstart Buonaparte had crowned himself Emperor, he had never been humiliated in such a fashion. They were probably talking about the other three who had taken part in the orgy, the baron concluded, without realising that, if there had been a murder, the most probable thing was that one of them was dead, and so there were only two left excluding him. That was what he underlined later to the tribunal – and it seems that it was that line of reasoning that determined what he later realised was his detention – insisting at the end that the last thing he remembered doing was swallowing the aphrodisiac in some aniseed pastilles.

Читать дальше →