Death of an Institution, Institutional Deaths

Illixim and I were discussing Famous People's Deaths the other day, and de Sade came up. We both thought that he would have died of syphilis or something extravagant, or that he had died in prison.

Sadly, this was not the case.

"In 1801 Napoleon Bonaparte ordered the arrest of the anonymous author of Justine and Juliette. Sade was arrested at his publisher's office and imprisoned without trial; first in the Sainte-Pélagie prison and, following allegations that he had tried to seduce young fellow prisoners there, in the harsh fortress of Bicêtre.

After intervention by his family, he was declared insane in 1803 and transferred once more to the asylum at Charenton. ...In 1809 new police orders put Sade into solitary confinement and deprived him of pens and paper, though Coulmier succeeded in ameliorating this harsh treatment." He died in 1814 in Charenton.

On an interesting side note, "He had left instructions in his will forbidding that his body be opened upon any pretext whatsoever, and that it remain untouched for 48 hours in the chamber in which he died, and then placed in a coffin and buried on his property located in Malmaison near Épernon. His skull was later removed from the grave for phrenological examination. His son had all his remaining unpublished manuscripts burned, including the immense multi-volume work Les Journées de Florbelle."

You know what helps make crazy people better? Leaving them all alone with their thoughts and no way to let them out! Hurrah! I'm surprised they didn't come back to find that he had scratched words into his skin with his own nails or something. I've come close to that under nowhere near as desperate circumstances.

So, then our conversation turned to Masoch. Neither of us knew how he had died, so we looked it up.



"In his late fifties, his mental health began to deteriorate, and he spent the last years of his life under psychiatric care. According to official reports, he died in Lindheim, Germany in 1895. It is also claimed that he died in an asylum in Mannheim in 1905."

So...either he was crazy or he was crazy and died in an asylum.

Both of us found it very tragic and disturbing that the 'creators' or 'fathers' of sadism and masochism...both died in asylums. Sigh.

On a more amusing side note, we found it rather amusing that they could never have met and theoretically buggered each other. And that they wouldn't have. Even if they could have.