The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Curse of the Marquis de Sade: A Notorious Scoundrel, a Mythical Manuscript, and the Biggest Scandal in Literary History by Joel Warner

Episode Date: March 2, 2023

The Curse of the Marquis de Sade: A Notorious Scoundrel, a Mythical Manuscript, and the Biggest Scandal in Literary History by Joel Warner The captivating, deeply reported true story of how one of the most notorious novels ever written—Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom—landed at the heart of one of the biggest scams in modern literary history. “Reading The Curse of the Marquis de Sade, with the Marquis, the sabotage of rare manuscript sales, and a massive Ponzi scheme at its center,felt like a twisty waterslide shooting through a sleazy and bizarre landscape. This book is wild.”—Adam McKay, Academy Award–winning filmmaker Described as both “one of the most important novels ever written” and “the gospel of evil,” 120 Days of Sodom was written by the Marquis de Sade, a notorious eighteenth-century aristocrat who waged a campaign of mayhem and debauchery across France, evaded execution, and inspired the word “sadism,” which came to mean receiving pleasure from pain. Despite all his crimes, Sade considered this work to be his greatest transgression. The original manuscript of 120 Days of Sodom, a tiny scroll penned in the bowels of the Bastille in Paris, would embark on a centuries-spanning odyssey across Europe, passing from nineteenth-century banned book collectors to pioneering sex researchers to avant-garde artists before being hidden away from Nazi book burnings. In 2014, the world heralded its return to France when the scroll was purchased for millions by Gérard Lhéritier, the self-made son of a plumber who had used his savvy business skills to upend France’s renowned rare-book market. But the sale opened the door to vendettas by the government, feuds among antiquarian booksellers, manuscript sales derailed by sabotage, a record-breaking lottery jackpot, and allegations of a decade-long billion-euro con, the specifics of which, if true, would make the scroll part of France’s largest-ever Ponzi scheme. Told with gripping reporting and flush with deceit and scandal, The Curse of the Marquis de Sade weaves together the sweeping odyssey of 120 Days of Sodom and the spectacular rise and fall of Lhéritier, once the “king of manuscripts” and now known to many as the Bernie Madoff of France. At its center is an urgent question for all those who cherish the written word: As the age of handwriting comes to an end, what do we owe the original texts left behind? About the Author Joel Warner is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in Esquire, Wired, Newsweek, Men’s Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, Popular Science, and Slate, among others. He currently serves as managing editor of the investigative news outlet The Lever and previously worked as a staff writer at International Business Times and Westword. He is also co-author of The Humor Code. He lives with his family in Denver, Colorado.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Strap yourself in, keep your hands,

arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks, it's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, the big circle stand in the sky, the big empire of data and information that will make you smarter, brillianter, and also when you're smarter and brillianter, I read that you're sexier to whoever you might want to be sexier to. I don't know if that's true, but the lawyer said I can probably get away with that one without being sued because there's no real corporation behind the sexuality. At least I don't know if that's true, but the lawyer said I can probably get away with that one without being sued because there's no real corporation behind the sexuality.

At least I don't think so. I don't know. Maybe that's the thing. Anyway, guys, before we do get those C&Ds from whoever was offended by me making that joke, be sure to show your family, friends, and relatives. I never know what the ramble is going to be on any given day. You're going to have to tune in and see what each one is. It's all improv. Anyway, guys, youtube.com, 4Chess Chris Voss, goodreads.com, 4Chess Chris Voss.

LinkedIn.com, 4Chess Chris Voss. See that big LinkedIn newsletter? That thing is killing it over there. In fact, there's a couple of them. There's the Chris Voss Show. There's the Chris Voss on LinkedIn. And there's the Beacons of Leadership. And then there's also another one.

So it's just a great place to be over there on linkedin so crazy numbers we've been seeing from that area over there anyway we have an amazing author on the show today i'm sure you're uh i'm sure you're here for the blame brain bleed because i think that's the theme of the show so uh i have some authors sometimes come on and go wait you're gonna make your guests brain bleed with my information not really but we're still waiting to be sued for that too uh anyway guys uh we have the author of the amazing new book came out february 21st 2023 uh the curse of the marquis de sad uh i believe i had that

pronounced correctly a note yeah there you go uh you can hear the author in the background uh chiming in so we got his uh validation there a notorious scoundrel a mythical manuscript and the biggest scandal in literary history and that's not me or my book that's this gentleman the curse of the marquis de saad uh joel warner is on the show with us today he's gonna be talking to us about his amazing book and you know i gotta tell you this is a side note and this i don't know why we're doing side notes because it's all we're the fourth wall on the show, but here we are. I just make it up as I go along, people. We don't write this show. Anyway, what was interesting was when I saw Joel's book and, you know, we go through all the really cool books

that are out there. And when I saw his book, I was like, I've never heard of this. And I've heard a lot of stuff, as most of you know, on the show, I can talk just about anything and everything. But I never heard of this book. And I was like, I really want to know what this is about. So I think you're going to want to know what it's about because you're actually going to find out that this is the core basis for some of the things you might've heard in life or some of the things you might be interested in. Anyway, welcome to the show, Joel. How are you? Good. Thanks for having me, Chris.

Thanks for coming. And it's an honor to have you on to talk about some of your stuff. Give us your dot com so people can find you on the interwebs. It's complicated. You go to www.joelwarnerbrothers.com. So www.joelWarner.com. There you go. Any relation to the Warner Brothers owner?

I forget his name. As far as I know, unfortunately, no relation. But, you know, if somebody has a connection, please let me know. There you go. In fact, do you think I'd remember his name? I was actually watching The Treasure of the Sierra Madre with Humphrey Bogart I think last night or something. And I was on a

24-hour fast, so I'm not sure what happened last night. But somehow I got through 24 hours of fast. Joel Warner is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in Esquire, Wired, Newsweek, Men's Journal, Bloomberg, Businessweek, Popular Science, and Slate, among others.

He's currently the managing editor of the investigative news outlet, The Lever, and previously worked as staff writer at International Business Times and Westworld. He's co-author of The Humor Code. He lives with his family in Denver, Colorado. So, Joel, what motivated you with that history you have in your rich bio to write this book? So like a lot of journalists, I'm just fascinated by super interesting stories. Stories, as you said, that I've never heard about and I assume most people haven't heard about that I think would be compelling enough to kind of lure readers along for two or three hundred pages and read like fiction but actually based on true stories. So a few years ago now, actually back in 2015, I had some friends who were writers and weirdos

like me who visited Paris and they said when they visited Paris, they wanted to go check out this notorious 40-foot-long scroll written in the bowels of the Bastille prison right before the French Revolution by the most notorious name in literature and considered the worst thing ever written. And they showed up at this museum where we were supposed to be, and the place was boarded up,

and there were French police carting boxes out the front door who told them that the operation had been shut down because the owner of the operation, the person who had just recently bought this notorious scroll, supposedly a cursed scroll, had then right after been accused

of being the bernie madoff of france wow that's super fascinating and i've never heard about it and there was no coverage of it at all here in the states so i'm like this it could be some potential i'm i was i maybe my curiosity was because uh you know in the title you have a notorious scoundrel and i was like wait there's someone bigger than me out there who's a notorious scoundrel? In fact, we were going to name the show that originally, The Notorious Scoundrel Show. In fact, if we do a side podcast, we'll do that as well. So give us an overview, like a 30,000-foot view of kind of what's in the book, and then we'll get into some of the details.

Yeah. So the book kind of tracks three different stories. One is the notorious scoundrel. This is the Marquis de Sade, who is this horrible French aristocrat. Definitely very much the Jeffrey Epstein of his day, except worse. Oh, wow.

But then instead of dying under mysterious circumstances in prison, he ends up becoming obsessed with becoming a writer. And he wrote some of the most despicable literature ever created. And that's actually how we have the term sadism or sadistic. Because the idea of deriving pleasure from pain comes from this horrible guy, the Marquis de sod so that's one of the stories his namesake de sod is the is the root word of sadism where it comes from is that correct

yes yes and they're still sod family members and it gets a bit awkward one of them uh was a government minister in france a lovely fellow who uh the press had a field day when they learned that Assad was in charge of family and women's matters. That was a few years ago. It sounds like the Fifty Shades of Grey of whenever this was written.

That's what a lot of people think, but actually it's much worse. It's much more like a literary version of the movie Saw or Hostel. It's much more like pure torture. It's horrible stuff. I don't want any of your listeners to go read that book. They can read my book, and I'm careful not to do big, gross quotes,

but don't read this novel, which is called 120 Days of Sodom. So that's the first story, okay? The second story is about this manuscript. So he wrote it while imprisoned, 40-foot-long scroll called 120 Days of Sodom, and it became one of these kind of mythical relics that after the fall of the Bastille

and the start of the French Revolution ended up being kind of transported all over Europe in the centuries to come and ended up hidden kind of transported all over Europe for the centuries to come and ended up hidden in a erotica collector's library, ended up in Berlin and helped fuel a sexual revolution in Berlin before the rise of the Nazis. It was then bought by famous Parisian art patrons and became a centerpiece of the Surrealism movement

in the 1930s in France. It was stolen and smuggled to Switzerland, ended up in the hands of one of the richest men in the world, and there were international court battles. So it was one of these incredible journeys. And then in 2014, it gets purchased for about $10 million, which makes it one of the most valuable manuscripts in the world, comparable to Shakespeare's First Folio and the Gutenberg Bible.

For $10 million, it was finally brought back to France. Okay, now it's good. Now it's safe. The curse is over, right? And then a few months later, the guy who bought it, who had this massive book and manuscript company, is accused of running the largest Ponzi scheme in French history. Wow.

So that's a third story. Are you worried about getting any part of the curse on you? Like, you know, King Tut or something? I keep telling people I'm hoping there's no curse because yeah i definitely wrote a whole book on this thing so you know i'm a i'm an optimistic guy i'm hoping uh hoping the curse skips over me yeah and these are these are facts this is a real dude and he wrote it in the bastille while he was in prison what was he in prison for can you you want to tease that out or you want to leave that so it's funny i mean things that Saad did as a young man is that, you know,

he engaged in blasphemous acts with a prostitute, locked a bunch of young men and women in one of his chateaus for his own sexual devices. He ran away to Italy with his sister-in-law who was living in a convent at the time so he did all these things and you know he kept getting accused of things he was you know

they tried to execute him a couple times but the reason that he got imprisoned was because his mother-in-law got sick of him oh wow because she was like I am done with this guy and all this stuff and she had a good friend in the last king of france and and so you know she was like louis

can you write one of your uh your royal uh letters and lock this guy up for you know with no actual charges and i'm like okay so yeah so so watch out for those mother-in-laws yeah that i mean that's still true today uh you know you gotta watch out for those it-in-laws yeah that i mean that's still true today uh you know you gotta watch out for those it's a joke we do on the show sometimes in the intro where we're like the chris voss show is the family that loves you and doesn't judge you uh unlike your mother-in-law it's a joke we'll oh yeah the ramble every now and then but uh no man i mean some of the things you listed there uh prostitutes uh you, uh, lucky people in chateaus. That's just Fridays around the Chris Foss show.

That's, that's a little bit of spirit. I know. I don't know what's going on. I'm just doing jokes here. People don't get all upset. Right. Me.

Um, but this is, this is really interesting. Uh, how does he write this thing? Is he supposed to be writing it in the prison? You know, and it's a 40 foot scroll.

Like, how do you, how do you make sure the guards don't take it and it's i mean it seems like a really unique piece of literary history i mean it's interesting so in some ways uh there was this kind of cottage industry about uh horrible rumors and stories coming out of this fearsome Bastille prison where everyone was locked away with the skeletons and rats. Now, Sade was part of the French nobility, part of the French aristocracy. Yeah, part of the French aristocracy and pretty high up. So, yes, he was locked away, but he had literally everything he could imagine in his cell.

He had hundreds of books. He had nice furniture. He had certain sexual devices crafted to very specific sizes by one of Paris' preeminent cabinet makers because, you know, he gets lonely in there. And so, no, he had access to writing materials. He had access to paper and quills and ink now this particular writing was so obscene so scandalous that he knew if he was caught with it even with even with his aristocratic reputation that he would get in trouble so he took lots of small pieces of paper and pasted them end to end and this thing's tiny this thing is it honestly looks like a roll of toilet paper so it's about four

inches wide wow and and he would write each page and then and then paste another page beneath it and keep writing he did this for like 27 nights um and then he and he rolled it up he rolled up this 40 foot long scroll and hit it between uh the stones of a cell wall because he didn't want anybody to find this thing wow and uh and so it's just it was deemed at the time that now now was was was was what he wrote in the 120 days of sodom uh was was it his own stories or was there was there a lot of this going on abuse by the aristocrats of commoners in sexual ways different things going on and he just was kind of the one who told on him this is one of the big outstanding arguments about the scroll which is

why the heck did this guy write this thing why would someone someone have spent, you know, this thing was a huge amount of work, this guy, you know, the writing is so small, it's hard to read with a magnifying glass, you know, so the question is, why would he have bothered writing this horrible thing? What was the point, right? And some people say, oh, it's because Saad was just this kind of deranged criminal, and he was writing about the stuff that he did, for example, when he locked young people in a chateau or stuff that that he wanted to do and it was his way of kind of acting this stuff out now other people say no sod was actually uh kind of a revolutionary ahead of his time and he was working to expose the corruption of the of the aristocracy to which he was born.

because, you know, because, you know, Saad was far from the only aristocrat doing horrible things at the time to seek out pleasure. There's lots of stories of abused aristocrats and that was one of the many factors that would lead to the French Revolution in just a few

years. But we don't know. We don't know what led this guy who was locked in prison to spend so much time and effort on this essentially unreadable manuscript. Wow. And now I know

the basis of the word sadism. Yeah. Yeah. He should have married the guy who wrote the scroll for masochism, you know, because everyone says sadism, masochism. I don't know what to mean. Exactly. But they're beautiful. There's probably a scroll for that. And this thing survives like the Nazi book burnings.

It sounds like, you know, there was a lot of people who liked it as a collector's item or a rarity or its novelty. But then there was also lots of people who want to hunt it down and kill it maybe and we've had that through history in fact we have that now where we have certain people that want to still burn books in fact there was a preacher recently who uh did a book burning i think uh so how does it survive all this stuff um no it is interesting where this thing isn't an incredibly unique and fragile object. And there were multiple points when it very well should have been destroyed. Like it narrowly escaped the sacking of the Bastille where it could have been destroyed. in Germany in the early 20th century and became it was seen as this kind of actually kind of a science an early scientific textbook of sexual diversity

and it was this was actually this kind of thriving Institute of sexual science in in Berlin at the time until the 1930s Nazis came in and ransacked the Institute it took all of the books, all the materials, and had a massive book burning. And so this scroll could have been destroyed then. It had escaped Germany a few years before then. Wow. And, you know, and moved on back to Paris for a bit where it was this kind of icon of the kind of avant-garde movement. So it is this kind of

this fascinating odyssey where it's almost like a movie where it keeps almost like Sod himself, it keeps escaping from execution at the last minute. Wow. And it's extraordinary. I mean, we've had people on that talked about the Rosetta Stone and different things. I mean, this is extraordinary in

literary history. I mean, regardless of what you think about sadism or you know some of the stuff that's in it just it's just the fact that how it's written and how it's endured and in the interest that people have in it um it's almost like the 50 shades of gray i mean of today i mean probably it's probably written better than 50 shades of gray originally the 50 shades of gray was like a horrible manuscript it probably still is i don't know i've never read it but evidently a lot of misspellings and different it was independent i think it was independently published but uh this is kind of interesting like now i know the root word of of uh sado or sadism and stuff like that i joke with

all my married friends they're sadists like all my hair married husbands. I'm like, you're a sadist. You guys love pain. That's why you guys get married. But I'm a single guy, and I've been single all my life, so I can tell that joke, and I can tease my married friends. And I can be like, hey, I'll just skip that joke. But no, it's interesting where this comes from. I tease my married friends a lot.

I revel a bit too much in my singledom and they hate me but they they also live vicariously through me you know because like i said we do the same things on weekends on fridays around here um so the they uh they this gentleman uh you talk about this particular rise and fall this gentleman uh in france who uh at one time was the king of manuscripts yes and um did the bernie made off of france that he you know they find him out for does that have anything to do with the manuscript or is that a whole nother issue it is all tied together uh in that um france is in particular these certain small neighborhoods in paris have long been known as the epicenter of the rare book world. So like, you know, if you were an elite rare book collector,

you would go to these tiny bookshops right off the center, you would go to the auction houses in central Paris. And that's, this is where you would kind of bid and buy and sell you know first editions of of hemmingway's novels of uh of original scripts of uh war in the worlds uh war of the worlds so this was like this is like this this was the elite market for the stuff people who were quite rich um and then in the early 2000s, this completely unexpected fellow, self-made son of a plumber in France. His name is Gérard Lierretier. He said, you know what? It's time to shake up this market. So he created a new company.

It was called Aristophyll. And he was like, hey, instead of only kind of rich people going and buying, selling this stuff, I'm going to open this market up to everybody. So he went out. He had independent advisors go to teachers and police officers and all sorts of kind of other middle class people all over France, all over Europe and say, hey, you can buy a share of this manuscript. You can buy a share of the little prints of this Mozart kind of concerto. And you can own a share of this literary history. And best of all, after five years,

when you sell your share back to us, you get a 40% return. So basically, he turned this tiny, elite, isolated market of rare books and manuscripts, and these things were real, into a giant

financial vehicle. it became just you know basically an investment company wow so so so this thing became huge 18 000 people invested this thing um yeah you know he you know he ended up collecting one of the largest uh or amassing the largest collection of manuscripts letters in the world and then in you know and one of his last acquisitions and one of his most famous acquisitions was this 10 million dollar scroll of the marquis d'assad you know and at that point he was kind of at the top of the world and then a few months later the authorities came in and said this thing is just a giant Ponzi scheme and we're shutting the whole thing down. Busted. So did the

French government ever have like an issue with this where they found it was an embarrassment? Maybe there was some political like we need to shut this down. This makes the French look bad as if you know those surrenders in World War I and II didn't look bad at all. That's a really

good question, Chris. And one of the things, I mean, it's kind of like a mystery around Saad, like what his motivations are. So this guy, Gerard Lierretier, the one-time king of manuscripts, he's yet to go on trial. So he's still awaiting trial. So that's why we have to say an alleged Ponzi scheme, because the authorities say this was a ponzi scheme and we're trying to protect everybody well the air ta says uh you

guys were just jealous of my success you were threatened by my success and you decided to destroy my operation especially because then you could get kind of choice manuscripts uh and and get them for the state including the scroll of the marquis design ah so maybe a politician yes you know those politicians that kind of say this too that sometimes they get caught up in some interesting stuff you know you always hear about that every now and then yeah but but they'd have to read it so that's true that's true yeah there's no audio book i don't think of 100% of the time. Is there an audio book of Fifty Shades of Grey? I don't know why I'm doing that.

Oh, I'm sure there is. But it seems like a good joke to reference. So this is really interesting. I mean, a historical thing. You see how this has somehow maintained itself over time. And so where is it now, if you can tell us? Or if you want to leave that in the book? We want people to buy the book so that they can find out.

Can I be incredibly selfish and self-serving and say that to find out where this notorious manuscript that has been all over Europe, where it is now, folks might have to go buy the book. Go buy the book. There you go. We were actually going to call the podcast that, the Incredibly Self-Serving Podcast, but people to call the podcast that the incredibly self-serving

podcast, but people just kind of know that's the way I roll anyway. So yeah, I think, uh, that arose the, the narcissist gas holes podcasts and, people just refer to a lot of options.

Yeah. They still run up to me at shows and stuff and events and they scream the whole part we sing at the beginning. Cause somehow that became a thing back in the day. And if I stopped doing it and get hate mail why do you stop singing the intro and i'm just like do it do we have to keep doing that it was like a bit we did of howard stern when howard stern would do the wnbc the chris voss show so we did it for a week and now it's stuck for 13 years so what are you gonna do uh anything more you want to tease out about the book so that we can get people to want to go?

Well, OK. So I tried to, you know, this is this is nonfiction. So everything that I write about happened. I have extensive, boring footnotes. This thing is third. But what I really try to do is write it like a thriller. I tried to really write it like this is, you know, I tried to write books like I've heard of Devil in the White City

by Eric Larson, which is about the serial killer. I tried to write it as a page turner because all I wanted to do was to entertain readers. So what I tried, so if folks are interested in larger than life, historical tales, if they're interested in international capers

looking for a good beach read or vacation read, I mean that's kind of how I tried to write this thing it's supposed to be fascinating and fun and for those listeners of yours who might be a bit squeamish, I don't know how many of your listeners would be like that, Chris.

They put up with me so far, so I don't know. Yeah, so this is probably not a concern, but I actually try not to focus kind of too much on the writing of this horrible manuscript because actually it is horribly written. Like, it's useless to read. To me, it's much more fascinating uh was the stories and the scandals and the people around this thing yeah i mean the history of it i mean that's that's what's always intrigued me and that's why we always have great authors like

yourself on the show is learning about history and some of the things that have gone on there's a lot of things i didn't know there's that fell through the nooks and crannies and stuff like this. And, yeah, I mean, I think my audience are mostly sadists because they enjoy the pain of listening to me every day. But there's that. They keep coming back for more, and I wonder about them. Maybe they need a psychiatrist, but we have those on the show, too. So we try and be all-inclusive as to take care of them. But, you know, I've seen parts of Fifty Shades of Grey

and the chicks dug it. What are you going to do? The history is amazing. Now I'm going to be able to walk around and brag to everybody that because of your book, I know the core root of sadism. People are going to be like,

why does he keep bringing up parties? It's'll be able to make your brain bleed a little bit yeah just a little bit just a little bit which is what you know but you know as a sadist it's what you want man yeah i mean i think i'm more of a masochist but uh i don't know i derive i derive pleasure from making uh people have painful noise in their eardrums from the sound of my voice. Yeah, that's pretty sadistic. Yeah, well, what are you going to do? For some reason, people sign up for it.

So I'll just keep doing it for 13 years. Well, this has been really insightful, Joel, to have you on the show. Give us your.com so people can look you up on the internet and find out what's wrong with you. I'll show my book how about that this is this is i'm supposed to be trying to put my book at my publisher so here it is here's the book you guys see that the curse of the mark the curse of the marquis de sade out now internationally you can find out how to buy it at your favorite local Favorite local bookstore at www.joelwarner.com. So www.joelwarner.com. There you go.

And thank you very much for coming on the show. Oh, thanks for the fantastic chat, Chris. I appreciate it. Yeah, it's been fun. And it's interesting, too. I think a lot of people will take interest in it because now you can walk around and you can be all smart and tell people,

hey, you know where sad sadism comes from that word. Uh, you know, and there's a, there's this dude and it's an interesting story, the Bastille and France and French lemon. And this sounds like something the French would come up with anyway, that I don't know. Oh yeah. Oh, it's very lovely people, but I know they hate us Americans. So whatever. Anyway, it's funny.

I'm just being funny. We love the French. I think we have a pretty good French audience. I think i'll have to check the numbers i know around the world they love us so uh anyway uh check out the book guys order wherever fine books are sold but only go to those fine bookstores because if you go to the bastille uh those alleyway bookstores you might you know need a tetanus shot or get mugged. I was mugged last week at one. Anyway, guys, order it up wherever fine books are sold. February 21st, 2023. The Curse of the Marquis de Sade.

A Notorious Scoundrel. A Mythical Manuscript. And the Biggest Scandal in Literary History. And that's not about me. That's kind of interesting. Anyway, guys, for the show to your family, friends, and relatives, remember the Chris Foss Show is like an MLM but not like an MLM. You need to have five people in your downline you refer the show to

or else there's nowhere else i'm just kidding folks go to youtube.com fortress chris foss goodreads.com fortress chris foss linkedin.com fortress chris foss oh it's a crazy place we are on the internet thanks for tuning in be good to each other stay safe and we'll see you guys next time and that's