To define any of this more rigorously, we must, of course, throw out the initial premise and start again seriously—Sade was an aristocrat. But that leads me from, not to, my point.

Pornography is didactic. That is one of its intrinsic qualities—a quality that has more to do with the type of attention we pay to it than the intention of the writer. Better, then, a pornographer like Sade who at least tries, however clumsily, to take advantage of this quality and, more importantly, takes responsibility for what he preaches. This is certainly preferable to the bulk of modern pornographers who, convinced they are writing healthy, liberating, sexually un-hung-up entertainments, are actually espousing, when their work is examined, the most conservative and reactionary Weltanschauung, one that no Victorian patriarch would have argued with.

The didactic purpose of Sade’s major work, that diptych of novels the first of which has been ubiquitously available in one form or another since I learned to read, and the second of which has been nearly unobtainable since its composition (only paragraphs of it had been translated into English as late as 1968), was “to bring to birth the New Woman.”

And what stranger sister volumes are Justine and Juliette!

For almost three centuries, people have taken the former as the virtual synonym for pornography. For much of the same period, people could never quite agree whether or not the latter was even extant.

Justine, or the Miseries of Virtue, for three hundred-odd pages, depicts a young woman who believes passionately that the myths of Womanly Virtue and Female Honor are sacred to God; she suffers every conceivable abuse and indignity at the hands of society in the impossible attempt to live up to these ideals till, moments after she finishes recounting the pathetic comedy of her life story to her sister, Juliette, she is struck down by lightning—by the God she was so sure would bring her at least one breath of peace before her death, in reward for her belief. That, anyway, would be Justine’s interpretation. But, Sade assures us, there is no such God. Her death came, as all of ours must, from chance; for the rest, she is the victim of stupidity, ignorance, and truly pernicious values.

Juliette, or the Riches of Vice, the sister volume (but what a sister!—over a thousand pages to Justine’s three hundred!) gives us the story of Justine’s long-lost sibling: Juliette quickly learned in childhood, she narrates, that womanly virtue and female honor—any trait society deigns to call “virtuous,” but the “womanly” ones in particular—are a sham and are only invoked at the expense of the “virtuous” person to the profit of those in the position to apply the label, even if they are applying it to themselves. Hiding behind the facade of “the virtuous,” unscrupulous men and women have exploited her as a child, body, soul, and fortune. Therefore, by the age of twelve, Juliette decides to commit any and every crime and violence to better herself, or simply for amusement: she indulges in theft, blackmail, a panoply of sexual pleasures and atrocities; she commits innumerable murders, some for gain, some for passion, and an amazing number from sheer caprice. Some are clever and sly; many are overt, violent, and gory. As a result of all this, she gains wealth, social prestige, personal happiness with her final husband and her remaining lovers, male and female—and lives to a ripe, joyous old age.