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magdaleina
AIM/IM: SchmooeyFoo
E-mail: weirdophreak17@yahoo.com
Other Characters: Morgan Adams
Character Name: The Marquis de Sade
Series: Quills
Age: 54
From When?: Just after his death
Inmate/Warden: Inmate
Abilities/Powers: No special powers. He's an able rider, swordsman and marksman though.
Personality: The Marquis has never been anything if not opinionated. He is unashamed of his views, especially not of voicing them, and he has little care for causing grief for the people that trouble him as well. He likes to shock people -- as a matter of fact, he enjoys it more than is probably healthy, and many of his exploits and writings were exercises in this rather than the purporting of his genuine beliefs. Definitely, he is of the kind that believe that people should speak without fear of punishment, and despite his very open views on the rights of the artist, he does not appear to so readily think that artists should be responsible for the impact of their work. The fact that he posts clear disclaimers on all of his writings is a clear show of that.
He does have morals. He would never practice the things he writes about, with the exception of a few odd kinks that were, truthfully, common among most men of the Aristocracy that'd been schooled by the Jesuit lycee. He writes all the horrid things that he does because they are there in his mind and must be purged in some fashion. Most of all, he is openly disgusted by the human preoccupation with associating all bad things with demons or the preternatural; much of his writing is there to illustrate that there is true evil in the world, and man is more than capable of it without help from demons or the Devil.
Lascivous by nature, he is very frank about the subject of sex, even the more bizarre corners of the practice. In fact, people might be inclined to think that it's all he ever really has on his mind, given how much he writes about it, and that he enjoys shaking people up by likening it to almost everything. ...That being said, they're probably right.
An amorous fellow, he also seems to enjoy nothing more than courting the favor of someone he admires. Though his prose does tend to be on the verbose and laughably purply side, there is a notable charm to his speech and his writing when he is feeling particularly amiable.
The Marquis calls himself an Atheist, though his beliefs in terms of higher power are more complicated than a mere term could really define. He professes Atheism, naturally, because in the time he is from, there are only two choices: You either believe in the Christian interpretation of God (particularly Catholic), or you don't believe in anything at all. That was how things worked back then. There were no other faiths with which to compare to. What the Marquis believed in as a higher power, however, was Nature as a living entity, so in some way, he did actually have some spirituality in him after all. He is so very preoccupied with talking about there not being a God -- just to piss Christians off -- that it tends to overshadow the fact that he does believe in some sort of deity; he just doesn't have the verbage to really express it as such.
History: (Note that I do make use of some actual history, here, to buffer the character's background, but I have adjusted some details to fit the version of De Sade that is in the movie -- supporting those historical innacuracies rather than changing the film, itself, to fit what actually happened.)
Born in the Conde palace in Paris to the Comte Jean-Baptiste de Sade and Marie-Eleonore de Carman and first christened Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade, the Marquis was born to a life of privelage in the last decades of the French aristocracy. As the spoiled rotten only child of his parents, he came into his early adulthood and a lifestyle that would have been marked as excessive even among other Libertines. He served as a colonel in a regiment of Dragoons during the whole of the Seven Years' War and left the service a decorated soldier, remarked to have orchestrated a number of the successful campaigns for the French -- often by means of tactics that were regarded by his superiors as insane. He departed with such comments as his record as "it's a good thing he's on our side", in fact.
Whether it was the impact of the war or his own bad habits that sent him back to his usual habits, none could really be certain, but he put his father to shame with the amount of debts he began to stack up. Soon, he was arranged to marry the eldest daughter in a family that was not part of the old nobility, as his family was, but among the rising wealthy middle class. Renee Pelagie de Montreuil was a much plainer woman than most, but remained a steadfast supporter of her husband for much of their lives together. The Marquis had such a deep love and sense of friendship with her that he kept much of his more distasteful exploits a secret, and when caught, exercised great expense to keep such news from her. He continued to rent apartments in the city with which to entertain prostitutes and courtesans and actresses (all VERY common for aristocratic men at this time, by the way) to handle those vices he felt ashamed to defer to Renee for. He served his first jail sentence (though eventually reduced) when a prostitute reported him for shouting blasphemies at her during intercourse. (No, I'm actually not making that up.) Shortly afterwards, much of his exploits could never again be kept secret, as the King and his consort, Madame de Pompadour, out of boredom began hiring private agents to track the sexual exploits of the nobles and report back to them with them. Essentially, in some of the final years of the Monarchy in France, the Aristocracy had lost their right to privacy, all to entertain a King and his disinterested Mistress.
Many of the Marquis' scandals continued to remain under the notice of his wife, often with the help of her mother, a controlling and shrewd woman who went to very great lengths to maintain the image of her family. He would be catapulted into the ranks of the imfamous, however, when a prostitute by name of Rose Keller (claiming to only be a widow looking for work) accused him of kidnapping her, whipping her to the point of bleeding, cauterizing the wounds with hot wax, and then keeping her prisoner. Though no physical evidence of any reported injuries being found upon immediate inspection, it was largely accepted that the scandal took place anyhow -- some people even going on to claim that that Marquis had developed a salve that healed on contact (and these people actually BELIEVED this). It was just before full blown chaos erupted that the Marquis finally came clean with his wife and made plain to her the events that took place that night. Upon his arrest she became the loudest supporter for his release.
He was still sentenced to jail time, despite no evidence of the charges being brought to light. It was at this time that his mother-in-law secured a lettre-de-cache from the King. Generally used by nobles to keep their loved ones out of the lower courts in times of trouble, to lighten their sentencing, this became a curse for the Marquis, as it gave his mother-in-law the power to have him thrown in jail at any time, without trial, whenever she felt like he was making too big a spectacle of himself.
Unable to return to military service thanks to the exorbitant debts caused by the Rose Keller incident (he had to sell his commission), the Marquis' life from then on would continue to be no less complicated.
The Marquis spent more than half of his life in prisons or asylums, often in the wake of many different scandals that his mother in law wished to keep quiet. It was in captivity that a number of his already unhealthy appetites became odd obsessions. The Marquis began writing as a way to stave off his loneliness, as he had little more than a brick wall to talk to most times. Constantly mistreated by the guards, stripped of his privelages (sometimes with provocation, sometimes without -- he was not a very pleasant prisoner), his writings that were not merely letters to his continually devoted wife were often stories -- some becoming more and more laden with his libertine philosophies, and then more violent and perverse with time. It is, in fact, these writings, coupled with many of the dubious scandals of his life, that led to the invention of the word sadism.
Tensions between the Marquis and his wife continued to grow steadily, due to separation, reputation and paranoia (he suspected she was having an affair for some time, though this proved not to be true), on through the Revolution, and in that time he continued to be in and out of prison. Involved in the politics of the time, he was hated even by his new contemporaries as much of his philosophies tended to have an anti-Christian undertone, among other things, and it was by clerical error alone that he and his wife were not among those aristocrats reserved for the guillotine. His home in prison at the time of the Terror, in fact, overlooked the site from where many nobles were executed.
In the time of Napoleon, the Marquis, with the help of his now estranged wife, was interned at the Charenton Asylum for the Insane, run by the Abbe de Coulmier, an idealist who employed curatives for his patients by more proactive means than his contemporaries, such as music and art therapy. After some years living in this place (he spent close to a decade there, more or less), he became less petulant, largely due to his comfortable accomodations, but also because the Abbe provided him all the ink, quills and paper he required to write. The Abbe did this, naturally, because he believed the writing soothed his mind and made him less unpleasant. One other contribution made him more docile, however, and this was the friendship he developed with a laundress at the asylum, a young Madeleine Leclerc, who began to practice reading through him. She admired the Marquis, finding his writings, in most cases, funny and entertaining, not to be taken seriously despite their rather sinister content for the time. Eventually, she began to aid him in smuggling manuscripts of his work to a publisher, and what came of thi was the production of the novel, Justine, which threw the whole of France into riot.
Napoleon initially ordered the author of the novel shot, but his advisors provided another solution -- so as not to make the Marquis a martyr. Instead, he sent one Doctor Royer-Collard to the Asylum to oversee the Abbe's work there. By means of coercion, Royer-Collard was able to use threats of closure to see to it the Abbe tightened the Marquis' leash for every infraction and disobedience. One by one, his privelages were taken away, including his quills and paper, and in protest, the Marquis continued to devise more and more creative ways to continue writing, starting with wine on bed linens, coming to the use of blood and eventually even excrement as inks. All of his possessions, including his clothes, were taken from him, and when the dictation of one of his last stories led to the Madeleine's murder by the hands of another inmate, his tongue was removed, leading to his eventual decline by infection. The Abbe, once a dear friend of his, held him dying as he swallowed the man's crucifix and choked to death on it, choosing that over permitting the man to procure a last repentance from him.
User LJ:
magdaleinaAIM/IM: SchmooeyFoo
E-mail: weirdophreak17@yahoo.com
Other Characters: Morgan Adams
Character Name: The Marquis de Sade
Series: Quills
Age: 54
From When?: Just after his death
Inmate/Warden: Inmate
Abilities/Powers: No special powers. He's an able rider, swordsman and marksman though.
Personality: The Marquis has never been anything if not opinionated. He is unashamed of his views, especially not of voicing them, and he has little care for causing grief for the people that trouble him as well. He likes to shock people -- as a matter of fact, he enjoys it more than is probably healthy, and many of his exploits and writings were exercises in this rather than the purporting of his genuine beliefs. Definitely, he is of the kind that believe that people should speak without fear of punishment, and despite his very open views on the rights of the artist, he does not appear to so readily think that artists should be responsible for the impact of their work. The fact that he posts clear disclaimers on all of his writings is a clear show of that.
He does have morals. He would never practice the things he writes about, with the exception of a few odd kinks that were, truthfully, common among most men of the Aristocracy that'd been schooled by the Jesuit lycee. He writes all the horrid things that he does because they are there in his mind and must be purged in some fashion. Most of all, he is openly disgusted by the human preoccupation with associating all bad things with demons or the preternatural; much of his writing is there to illustrate that there is true evil in the world, and man is more than capable of it without help from demons or the Devil.
Lascivous by nature, he is very frank about the subject of sex, even the more bizarre corners of the practice. In fact, people might be inclined to think that it's all he ever really has on his mind, given how much he writes about it, and that he enjoys shaking people up by likening it to almost everything. ...That being said, they're probably right.
An amorous fellow, he also seems to enjoy nothing more than courting the favor of someone he admires. Though his prose does tend to be on the verbose and laughably purply side, there is a notable charm to his speech and his writing when he is feeling particularly amiable.
The Marquis calls himself an Atheist, though his beliefs in terms of higher power are more complicated than a mere term could really define. He professes Atheism, naturally, because in the time he is from, there are only two choices: You either believe in the Christian interpretation of God (particularly Catholic), or you don't believe in anything at all. That was how things worked back then. There were no other faiths with which to compare to. What the Marquis believed in as a higher power, however, was Nature as a living entity, so in some way, he did actually have some spirituality in him after all. He is so very preoccupied with talking about there not being a God -- just to piss Christians off -- that it tends to overshadow the fact that he does believe in some sort of deity; he just doesn't have the verbage to really express it as such.
History: (Note that I do make use of some actual history, here, to buffer the character's background, but I have adjusted some details to fit the version of De Sade that is in the movie -- supporting those historical innacuracies rather than changing the film, itself, to fit what actually happened.)
Born in the Conde palace in Paris to the Comte Jean-Baptiste de Sade and Marie-Eleonore de Carman and first christened Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade, the Marquis was born to a life of privelage in the last decades of the French aristocracy. As the spoiled rotten only child of his parents, he came into his early adulthood and a lifestyle that would have been marked as excessive even among other Libertines. He served as a colonel in a regiment of Dragoons during the whole of the Seven Years' War and left the service a decorated soldier, remarked to have orchestrated a number of the successful campaigns for the French -- often by means of tactics that were regarded by his superiors as insane. He departed with such comments as his record as "it's a good thing he's on our side", in fact.
Whether it was the impact of the war or his own bad habits that sent him back to his usual habits, none could really be certain, but he put his father to shame with the amount of debts he began to stack up. Soon, he was arranged to marry the eldest daughter in a family that was not part of the old nobility, as his family was, but among the rising wealthy middle class. Renee Pelagie de Montreuil was a much plainer woman than most, but remained a steadfast supporter of her husband for much of their lives together. The Marquis had such a deep love and sense of friendship with her that he kept much of his more distasteful exploits a secret, and when caught, exercised great expense to keep such news from her. He continued to rent apartments in the city with which to entertain prostitutes and courtesans and actresses (all VERY common for aristocratic men at this time, by the way) to handle those vices he felt ashamed to defer to Renee for. He served his first jail sentence (though eventually reduced) when a prostitute reported him for shouting blasphemies at her during intercourse. (No, I'm actually not making that up.) Shortly afterwards, much of his exploits could never again be kept secret, as the King and his consort, Madame de Pompadour, out of boredom began hiring private agents to track the sexual exploits of the nobles and report back to them with them. Essentially, in some of the final years of the Monarchy in France, the Aristocracy had lost their right to privacy, all to entertain a King and his disinterested Mistress.
Many of the Marquis' scandals continued to remain under the notice of his wife, often with the help of her mother, a controlling and shrewd woman who went to very great lengths to maintain the image of her family. He would be catapulted into the ranks of the imfamous, however, when a prostitute by name of Rose Keller (claiming to only be a widow looking for work) accused him of kidnapping her, whipping her to the point of bleeding, cauterizing the wounds with hot wax, and then keeping her prisoner. Though no physical evidence of any reported injuries being found upon immediate inspection, it was largely accepted that the scandal took place anyhow -- some people even going on to claim that that Marquis had developed a salve that healed on contact (and these people actually BELIEVED this). It was just before full blown chaos erupted that the Marquis finally came clean with his wife and made plain to her the events that took place that night. Upon his arrest she became the loudest supporter for his release.
He was still sentenced to jail time, despite no evidence of the charges being brought to light. It was at this time that his mother-in-law secured a lettre-de-cache from the King. Generally used by nobles to keep their loved ones out of the lower courts in times of trouble, to lighten their sentencing, this became a curse for the Marquis, as it gave his mother-in-law the power to have him thrown in jail at any time, without trial, whenever she felt like he was making too big a spectacle of himself.
Unable to return to military service thanks to the exorbitant debts caused by the Rose Keller incident (he had to sell his commission), the Marquis' life from then on would continue to be no less complicated.
The Marquis spent more than half of his life in prisons or asylums, often in the wake of many different scandals that his mother in law wished to keep quiet. It was in captivity that a number of his already unhealthy appetites became odd obsessions. The Marquis began writing as a way to stave off his loneliness, as he had little more than a brick wall to talk to most times. Constantly mistreated by the guards, stripped of his privelages (sometimes with provocation, sometimes without -- he was not a very pleasant prisoner), his writings that were not merely letters to his continually devoted wife were often stories -- some becoming more and more laden with his libertine philosophies, and then more violent and perverse with time. It is, in fact, these writings, coupled with many of the dubious scandals of his life, that led to the invention of the word sadism.
Tensions between the Marquis and his wife continued to grow steadily, due to separation, reputation and paranoia (he suspected she was having an affair for some time, though this proved not to be true), on through the Revolution, and in that time he continued to be in and out of prison. Involved in the politics of the time, he was hated even by his new contemporaries as much of his philosophies tended to have an anti-Christian undertone, among other things, and it was by clerical error alone that he and his wife were not among those aristocrats reserved for the guillotine. His home in prison at the time of the Terror, in fact, overlooked the site from where many nobles were executed.
In the time of Napoleon, the Marquis, with the help of his now estranged wife, was interned at the Charenton Asylum for the Insane, run by the Abbe de Coulmier, an idealist who employed curatives for his patients by more proactive means than his contemporaries, such as music and art therapy. After some years living in this place (he spent close to a decade there, more or less), he became less petulant, largely due to his comfortable accomodations, but also because the Abbe provided him all the ink, quills and paper he required to write. The Abbe did this, naturally, because he believed the writing soothed his mind and made him less unpleasant. One other contribution made him more docile, however, and this was the friendship he developed with a laundress at the asylum, a young Madeleine Leclerc, who began to practice reading through him. She admired the Marquis, finding his writings, in most cases, funny and entertaining, not to be taken seriously despite their rather sinister content for the time. Eventually, she began to aid him in smuggling manuscripts of his work to a publisher, and what came of thi was the production of the novel, Justine, which threw the whole of France into riot.
Napoleon initially ordered the author of the novel shot, but his advisors provided another solution -- so as not to make the Marquis a martyr. Instead, he sent one Doctor Royer-Collard to the Asylum to oversee the Abbe's work there. By means of coercion, Royer-Collard was able to use threats of closure to see to it the Abbe tightened the Marquis' leash for every infraction and disobedience. One by one, his privelages were taken away, including his quills and paper, and in protest, the Marquis continued to devise more and more creative ways to continue writing, starting with wine on bed linens, coming to the use of blood and eventually even excrement as inks. All of his possessions, including his clothes, were taken from him, and when the dictation of one of his last stories led to the Madeleine's murder by the hands of another inmate, his tongue was removed, leading to his eventual decline by infection. The Abbe, once a dear friend of his, held him dying as he swallowed the man's crucifix and choked to death on it, choosing that over permitting the man to procure a last repentance from him.
