Epstein and Maxwell Should Have Had It This Good

As the Marquis de Sade (yes, that Marquis de Sade) had it at the Bastille before he was removed shortly before it was stormed and demolished. From Simon Schama’s Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution:

If ever there was a justification for the Bastille, it was the Marquis de Sade. But if the crimes which put him there were unusually disgusting (by the standards of any century,) his living conditions were not. He received visits from his long-suffering wife almost weekly and when his eyes deteriorated from both reading and writing, oculists came to see him on a regular basis. Like others in the “Liberty” tower, he could walk in the walled garden courtyard and on the towers. Only when he abused that right by shouting cheerful or indignant obscenities to passersby (which he did with increasing frequency in 1789) was it curtailed.

In many ways Epstein and Maxwell are true heirs of de Sade. In our time they pandered to an elite who came up on an ethos that life’s main goals were to get laid, high or drunk, and that it wasn’t who you knew or what you knew but who you partied with, which puts the lie to the whole “meritocracy” business that we have been regaled with for so long. The reason why they ended up in the conditions they did–and in the case of Maxwell is still enduring–is that what they knew could get many of these “mertiocrats” in a lot of trouble. The final exposure of all of this is at the heart the current controversy over the “files.”