On the Marquis de Sade’s Justine, and the one thing he could never imagine.

Everyone treats Sade as dangerous. I find him, more than anything, disappointing.

Justine is the story of a good woman punished for being good. She is honest, chaste, devout, and the world repays each virtue with a fresh atrocity. Every time she chooses mercy or modesty, she is robbed, beaten, betrayed. Her sister, who chose vice instead, grows comfortable and rich. The novel ends with Justine at last taken into safety and then killed by a bolt of lightning through an open window, as if even the sky could not tolerate her goodness. Sade meant it as a joke at virtue’s expense. Heaven, he is saying, has no more use for the good than men do.

It is a clever piece of architecture. It is also, once you have understood it a single time, the entire book. What follows is the same scene rebuilt with different furniture, hundreds of pages of it, each cruelty announced and then performed and then explained. And this is the first of Sade’s failures, the one people mistake for boldness. He confuses volume with depth. He believes that if a thing is shocking, then more of it must be more profound. But cruelty repeated is not intensified. It becomes wallpaper. By the third chamber and the third lecture you are not appalled, you are bored, and boredom is the one response a book about desire cannot survive.

The lectures are the second failure. His libertines cannot do anything without first delivering a sermon on why nature permits it. Nature is indifferent, they say, the strong consume the weak, therefore everything is allowed. It sounds like philosophy. It is closer to a boy explaining why the rules do not apply to him. Sade reduces power to a single crude motion, the freedom to inflict harm, and he never once suspects there might be anything underneath it.

Which brings me to the thing he could not imagine, and the reason I keep him on the shelf rather than in my head.

Sade can picture only two women. There is Justine, who suffers, and there is the sister, who survives by learning to be as brutal as the men around her. The victim and the imitation. He has no third woman anywhere in him. He cannot conceive of authority that is a woman’s own, power that does not need to wound in order to be felt, that is obeyed not because of what it threatens but because of what it is. The idea of devotion offered freely, a person who kneels because they want to and not because they have been broken, is entirely outside his vision. He understands force perfectly. He understands power not at all.

That is the real poverty of Justine. Not its cruelty, which is tedious, but its imagination, which is small. Sade is the patron saint of people who think transgression and depth are the same thing.

The woman he could not write is the one I have spent my life becoming. I read him the way you might read an old map drawn by someone who never left the harbour. Useful, in its way, for seeing exactly how far he could not see.

I have written elsewhere about the brief window when the opposite was true, when a woman who wanted was allowed to win rather than suffer for it.