The Death of the Crimson Marquis

December 2, 1814 Charenton-Ste. Maurice: The Alleged Death of the Crimson Marquis

When Madeleine le Clerc fled from Charenton asylum, most considered her the last, bespoilt victim of the infamous "Crimson Marquis," Donatien Alphonse François de Sade. We now acknowledge the truth to be far stranger.

The Marquis had lived as a political prisoner of Le Bonaparte, in Charenton Asylum for the last thirteen years of his life, a fading, debauched relic from a France before the terror. But, in his final days, the staff and inmates of the Sanitarium noted a remarkable change in the behavior of the beastly creature: now and then he would cry out for mercy, ask for forgiveness for a myriad of his sins, even begged for the local Monseigneur to attend to the welfare of his soul. When he at last expired, several nurses swore that he looked relieved, as though finally free of a lifetime of torment.

In the weeks that followed, after Le Clerc disappeared, the Marquis' own son, Donatien Claude Armand, began to employ a small army of gendarmes, the better to protect him from intruders that he claimed bedeviled him at night. When a vault at Chateu de Lacoste was found violated and emptied, Claude Armand had all his father's writings burned, and began to divest himself utterly from his family's legacy and titles. Among the belongings pilfered, amidst innumerable decrepit tomes and devices of pleasure, a life size pink marble statue of Narcissus dating back to pre-Augustan Rome. How the statue was removed without the aide of a carriage and team of horses, the gendarmes could not fathom.

Tracking the provenance of the statue was difficult without the original, but Charles August Swinburne, said to be the Marquis' spiritual and poetical descendant, claims that it was once in the possession of John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester. From there it was traced back in labyrinthine, and often fashion to many of the great and vicious decadents of ages past: Elizabet Bathory, Pope Innocent XII, supposedly even Caligula himself.
The story would remain curious but unremarkable were it not for the testimony of a French Indochine hotelier in 1896 who claimed that a remarkably well-preserved Madeleine Le Clerc was a guest of his establishment in Saigon for some ten years, during which time she did not appear to age a day. Using the name Justine, the hotelier claimed that she met with all manner of men and women, making noises "frightful enough to wake the dead" at all hours of the night. The vast majority of these especial guests were not seen after visiting this "Justine Inimitable."

The hotelier claims that he hired a team of coolie to investigate this woman's comings and goings and they discovered a clearing in the jungle that she frequented. At the center of this clearing was a statue, wrough in pink marble, and scrificed on its altar were dozens of bodies in various states of decay. The coolies ran, says their employer, but not before noticing that one of the bodies, old and wizened, was unmistakably Le Justine. This suspicious amateur investigator decided to cease all inquiries, when someone who had been a guest of the curious woman checked out of the hotel on the behalf of the long time guest, and was last seen leaving town along a jungle road, a new paramour on his arm.