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Witches' Sabbath
El sabbat es una confesión que traspasa la propia vida de su autor, el judío alsaciano Maurice Sachs, y se sitúa en el género de la autobiografía novelada. Se trata de las memorias de un aventurero en las que el lector será testigo del principio del fin de una Europa que empezaba a desangrarse y con ella sus élites intelectuales y artísticas. Maurice Sachs no es sino el máximo exponente de aquella debacle: judío, homosexual, farsante, embaucador, y lo más espinoso, también delator. El estallido de la Segunda Guerra Mundial impidió la publicación de El sabbat, que por fin vio la luz en 1946, cuando Sachs ya había muerto. El éxito fue inmediato, al mismo tiempo que este fascinante aquelarre generaba una interminable polémica.
316 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1946
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April 7, 2019
An interesting and entertaining autobiography, but not nearly as "evil" as the author claims. His life reads like a roller coaster: born to "republican", i.e. non-religious , Jews in Paris, he attended school in England where he discovered and enthusiastically practiced his homosexuality. Back in France, he converted to Catholicism and started training for the priesthood. He was kicked out after it was discovered that he was gay. Later on, he went to the US, converted to protestantism, and was married for a short time to the daughter of a preacher. Coming back to Paris with a steady American boyfriend in tow, he hit rock bottom. The description of the seedy hotel where they were staying at the time left me spellbound. Throughout, Sachs was involved in several shady business schemes and had a few episodes suffering from alcoholism. Still, he managed to write and befriend a number of famous writers, among which Cocteau -- whom he disliked --, Gide and Leduc. During the war, a period not covered by the book, he worked for the Gestapo for some time before being sent to a concentration camp himself. He was killed during a forced march to another camp in 1945.
December 7, 2018
Maurice Sachs died, age 39, when an SS bullet in 1945
entered his neck (or so we're told). It was the Hollywood
ending to a life of flesh & fantasy. The self-destructive
Sachs was a French charmer, cad, deceiver, thief. He had no
morality at all. A worldling, however, he had 'Something' -
wit, looks, schlong ? There's a lot we'll never know.
A gambler in the social sense, he became a special ami of
Cocteau & Gide while in his teens. He knew Picasso, Chanel,
Soutine and the philosopher Jacques Maritain. This startling
memoir and other writings make him a (notorious) Underground Literary Figure.
Born into a connected Jewish family that went bankrupt, he lived life on the edge. Dated 1939, this memoir was finished in 42, a year before he was arrested by the Gestapo. Reportedly an informer, Sachs even double-crossed the most deadly thugdoms. His life is a staggering mini-series --.
For ex: age 15 he helped his feckless mum (Dado deserted yrs earlier) flee to England after she bilked a friend out of thousands. He never saw her again.
A "Felix Krull" in his teens, he plunged into lit-art circles of the 20s, using rels and, we assume, male sex poobahs. He was always on his own but found lively pals, of one sort or another. Of his forays w women, he admits, "For me, woman is a hearth; it is man who represents pleasure."
Meeting Maritain, he suddenly decided to convert to Catholicism and become a priest. He gives an intense explanation of his need for Godliness. Then, feeling religio pressures, he's off to see Glenway Westcott and Rebecca West at Juan-les-Pins. The kneeling position at a long Mass, he explains, gave him a pesky erection.
Starving again, he luckily falls into creating a library for Chanel. The loot rolls in, but he's quickly in debt. Chanel fires him...presumably for theft, we never know...he consoles himself at a male brothel furnished by Proust.
Some art dealing dibbles and it's off to America where he marries the daughter of a minister -- I'm not making this up, you know. Their Babbitty wedding in Smalltown, USA, is hilarious and, to this day, painfully real. He dashes back to France - with a lad - after the honeymoon. "We lacked the essential thing," he deadpans"--love."
An alcoholic spiral downward ends his memoir as WW2 looms. His doubtless collaboration results in an SS bullet. Crammed with eloquent writing, this is a fascinating - and disturbing - work. Why didnt this flim-flam marvel go to Hollywood when he was in the US? He could have been a mega-mogul. Mais non, the French sensibility scorns Hollywood "pop." Vive la difference !
entered his neck (or so we're told). It was the Hollywood
ending to a life of flesh & fantasy. The self-destructive
Sachs was a French charmer, cad, deceiver, thief. He had no
morality at all. A worldling, however, he had 'Something' -
wit, looks, schlong ? There's a lot we'll never know.
A gambler in the social sense, he became a special ami of
Cocteau & Gide while in his teens. He knew Picasso, Chanel,
Soutine and the philosopher Jacques Maritain. This startling
memoir and other writings make him a (notorious) Underground Literary Figure.
Born into a connected Jewish family that went bankrupt, he lived life on the edge. Dated 1939, this memoir was finished in 42, a year before he was arrested by the Gestapo. Reportedly an informer, Sachs even double-crossed the most deadly thugdoms. His life is a staggering mini-series --.
For ex: age 15 he helped his feckless mum (Dado deserted yrs earlier) flee to England after she bilked a friend out of thousands. He never saw her again.
A "Felix Krull" in his teens, he plunged into lit-art circles of the 20s, using rels and, we assume, male sex poobahs. He was always on his own but found lively pals, of one sort or another. Of his forays w women, he admits, "For me, woman is a hearth; it is man who represents pleasure."
Meeting Maritain, he suddenly decided to convert to Catholicism and become a priest. He gives an intense explanation of his need for Godliness. Then, feeling religio pressures, he's off to see Glenway Westcott and Rebecca West at Juan-les-Pins. The kneeling position at a long Mass, he explains, gave him a pesky erection.
Starving again, he luckily falls into creating a library for Chanel. The loot rolls in, but he's quickly in debt. Chanel fires him...presumably for theft, we never know...he consoles himself at a male brothel furnished by Proust.
Some art dealing dibbles and it's off to America where he marries the daughter of a minister -- I'm not making this up, you know. Their Babbitty wedding in Smalltown, USA, is hilarious and, to this day, painfully real. He dashes back to France - with a lad - after the honeymoon. "We lacked the essential thing," he deadpans"--love."
An alcoholic spiral downward ends his memoir as WW2 looms. His doubtless collaboration results in an SS bullet. Crammed with eloquent writing, this is a fascinating - and disturbing - work. Why didnt this flim-flam marvel go to Hollywood when he was in the US? He could have been a mega-mogul. Mais non, the French sensibility scorns Hollywood "pop." Vive la difference !
September 10, 2025
POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD!!!
Born into a diamond-dusted lineage of fractured marriages, powdered gloves, and discreet scandals, the notorious Maurice Sachs fashions his life into a carefully lit pyre. He opens in rue Théodule-Ribot with a “dimanche paresseux,” and by page ten has already inherited paresse from his father, psychodrama from his mother, and “un grain de folie” from whichever grandparent was available.
The first theft arrives on cue in a cousin’s handbag (“deux sous,” precisely priced for a tartelette), but appetite isn’t the motive, compulsion is. From there he stumbles into the Bains du Ballon d’Alsace, finds religion among lace and lace among priests, pleads guilty before ever being charged, and conducts a flirtation with Catholicism.
His expulsion from the collège de Luza follows a love letter to Jean Bersa, delivered via school scandal. He perfects the art of voluntary ruin, falling in love with his cousin’s death, indulging in larcenous pleasures, and learning from the marquis de Sade with the fervor of a theology student.
A boy named Bara introduces him to physical rites, though the rendezvous ends with Bara's abrupt expulsion, leaving Sachs mid-liturgy, mid-fantasy, mid-sentence. By adolescence, masturbation has been elevated to spiritual method, and by twenty he’s moved on to both Cocteau and the communion wafer with equal erotic intent.
Each chapter performs a confessional striptease, removing one moral at a time until all that’s left is a man screaming into his own silence. One minute Sachs is quoting Stendhal – “je ne trouve en moi rien de ce que vous appelez le sens intime” – and the next he’s seducing a soldier while reciting Dante.
He tries piety, he tries crime, he tries Berlin. He fails each with style. He joins the seminary, fasts his way into ecstasy, and confesses to a priest while planning his next orgy. He sleeps with friends, betrays strangers, and shops for God like he’s buying shoes in the Marais.
By the final act, Sachs is flickering between Sade and Saint Augustine so rapidly the reader develops a spiritual migraine. His Paris becomes a haunted arrondissement of aborted conversions, broken pacts, stolen cufflinks, and bored aristocrats drunk on both port and despair.
Sachs recounts his Jewish origins in an embarrassed, bemused, and thoroughly theatrical tone. His circumcision is described with the flair of an avant-garde revue: the mohel “avait un tremblement dans le pouce,” leading to what Sachs calls “un baptême au sang tiède” that haunts his underwear and his metaphysics alike. Later, he fantasizes about a rabbinical orgy while attending synagogue on rue des Tournelles, distracted equally by the cantor's voice and the bulge in the choirboy’s trousers.
Cocteau appears as a saint with a hangover, greeting Sachs “with the smile of a tired sphinx,” mourning Apollinaire then laughing at Colette. He sketches angels and burns them because “angels smell of must,” downs powders with hot milk, and stages tantrums as comic operas, expelling Radiguet only to recall him in tears. Picasso betrays him, Picasso redeems him. He kisses a cardinal’s hands, praises the devil’s, guards Proust’s chocolate-stained letters like relics, and finally dances naked in muslin to prove art immortal before collapsing on velvet.
His flirtation with Genet is a tragicomic pas de deux of mutual loathing and erotic intrigue, complete with a duel of glances in a Montparnasse toilet and a missed opportunity in a friend’s narrow bed.
Gide enters like a Calvinist in a plaid, declaring that “truth is worth more than elegance and literature must smell of sweat.” He speaks of the Congo like a prophet, admits each young man is a judge, and laughs at Mauriac before silencing himself in guilt. He caresses sentences as cats, claims writing must accuse itself, cites Saint Paul for pederasty and Saint Augustine for holidays, calls Wilde a revelation and morality a worm-eaten piece of furniture. He scolds Sachs for writing to seduce instead of obey, prays with eyes wide open, and dreams of a Gospel read aloud by laughing children. Gide appears like a moral revenant, quoting Marcus Aurelius while Sachs contemplates shoplifting cufflinks from his host.
At one point Sachs considers founding a homo-erotic religious order based on the Rule of Saint Benedict, “mais avec moins de prières et plus de caresses.” And in a surreal artistic turn, he claims to have posed nude for a Cubist painter who insisted on painting only his “angoisse du foie” rather than his face.
The title Le Sabbat sprouts horns early. Sachs doesn’t reference witches directly, but the reader gets enough goatish detail to fill a heretical barnyard. One scene has him reading St. Teresa while masturbating beneath a portrait of Pius X, his cries of ecstasy confused for glossolalia by a visiting Dominican.
Later, he attempts to fast for forty days and ends up hallucinating St. John of the Cross urinating into a silver chalice. He describes a secret party thrown by the poet Rabut – “un sabbat élégant” – where guests wore masks of saints and flagellated each other with sprigs of lavender while reciting Mallarmé backward.
The “sabbat” becomes Sachs’s shorthand for any spiritual orgy, emotional intoxication, or theological hangover. He even likens his bouts of Catholic obsession to “une messe noire intérieure,” complete with incense, remorse, and a guest list of former lovers disguised as minor prophets. The devil never needs to appear. He is scheduled, confirmed, and fashionably late, like any decent Parisian.
And then Sachs vanishes in Hamburg, in a prison, in rumor, in ash, in God’s blind spot, most likely lynched by Nazis.
True to the French tradition, Le Sabbat doesn’t really come to a conclusion, instead it hisses, like a candle drowned in its own wax. The book lights a match in a confession booth and watches the confessor go up in flames.
Born into a diamond-dusted lineage of fractured marriages, powdered gloves, and discreet scandals, the notorious Maurice Sachs fashions his life into a carefully lit pyre. He opens in rue Théodule-Ribot with a “dimanche paresseux,” and by page ten has already inherited paresse from his father, psychodrama from his mother, and “un grain de folie” from whichever grandparent was available.
The first theft arrives on cue in a cousin’s handbag (“deux sous,” precisely priced for a tartelette), but appetite isn’t the motive, compulsion is. From there he stumbles into the Bains du Ballon d’Alsace, finds religion among lace and lace among priests, pleads guilty before ever being charged, and conducts a flirtation with Catholicism.
His expulsion from the collège de Luza follows a love letter to Jean Bersa, delivered via school scandal. He perfects the art of voluntary ruin, falling in love with his cousin’s death, indulging in larcenous pleasures, and learning from the marquis de Sade with the fervor of a theology student.
A boy named Bara introduces him to physical rites, though the rendezvous ends with Bara's abrupt expulsion, leaving Sachs mid-liturgy, mid-fantasy, mid-sentence. By adolescence, masturbation has been elevated to spiritual method, and by twenty he’s moved on to both Cocteau and the communion wafer with equal erotic intent.
Each chapter performs a confessional striptease, removing one moral at a time until all that’s left is a man screaming into his own silence. One minute Sachs is quoting Stendhal – “je ne trouve en moi rien de ce que vous appelez le sens intime” – and the next he’s seducing a soldier while reciting Dante.
He tries piety, he tries crime, he tries Berlin. He fails each with style. He joins the seminary, fasts his way into ecstasy, and confesses to a priest while planning his next orgy. He sleeps with friends, betrays strangers, and shops for God like he’s buying shoes in the Marais.
By the final act, Sachs is flickering between Sade and Saint Augustine so rapidly the reader develops a spiritual migraine. His Paris becomes a haunted arrondissement of aborted conversions, broken pacts, stolen cufflinks, and bored aristocrats drunk on both port and despair.
Sachs recounts his Jewish origins in an embarrassed, bemused, and thoroughly theatrical tone. His circumcision is described with the flair of an avant-garde revue: the mohel “avait un tremblement dans le pouce,” leading to what Sachs calls “un baptême au sang tiède” that haunts his underwear and his metaphysics alike. Later, he fantasizes about a rabbinical orgy while attending synagogue on rue des Tournelles, distracted equally by the cantor's voice and the bulge in the choirboy’s trousers.
Cocteau appears as a saint with a hangover, greeting Sachs “with the smile of a tired sphinx,” mourning Apollinaire then laughing at Colette. He sketches angels and burns them because “angels smell of must,” downs powders with hot milk, and stages tantrums as comic operas, expelling Radiguet only to recall him in tears. Picasso betrays him, Picasso redeems him. He kisses a cardinal’s hands, praises the devil’s, guards Proust’s chocolate-stained letters like relics, and finally dances naked in muslin to prove art immortal before collapsing on velvet.
His flirtation with Genet is a tragicomic pas de deux of mutual loathing and erotic intrigue, complete with a duel of glances in a Montparnasse toilet and a missed opportunity in a friend’s narrow bed.
Gide enters like a Calvinist in a plaid, declaring that “truth is worth more than elegance and literature must smell of sweat.” He speaks of the Congo like a prophet, admits each young man is a judge, and laughs at Mauriac before silencing himself in guilt. He caresses sentences as cats, claims writing must accuse itself, cites Saint Paul for pederasty and Saint Augustine for holidays, calls Wilde a revelation and morality a worm-eaten piece of furniture. He scolds Sachs for writing to seduce instead of obey, prays with eyes wide open, and dreams of a Gospel read aloud by laughing children. Gide appears like a moral revenant, quoting Marcus Aurelius while Sachs contemplates shoplifting cufflinks from his host.
At one point Sachs considers founding a homo-erotic religious order based on the Rule of Saint Benedict, “mais avec moins de prières et plus de caresses.” And in a surreal artistic turn, he claims to have posed nude for a Cubist painter who insisted on painting only his “angoisse du foie” rather than his face.
The title Le Sabbat sprouts horns early. Sachs doesn’t reference witches directly, but the reader gets enough goatish detail to fill a heretical barnyard. One scene has him reading St. Teresa while masturbating beneath a portrait of Pius X, his cries of ecstasy confused for glossolalia by a visiting Dominican.
Later, he attempts to fast for forty days and ends up hallucinating St. John of the Cross urinating into a silver chalice. He describes a secret party thrown by the poet Rabut – “un sabbat élégant” – where guests wore masks of saints and flagellated each other with sprigs of lavender while reciting Mallarmé backward.
The “sabbat” becomes Sachs’s shorthand for any spiritual orgy, emotional intoxication, or theological hangover. He even likens his bouts of Catholic obsession to “une messe noire intérieure,” complete with incense, remorse, and a guest list of former lovers disguised as minor prophets. The devil never needs to appear. He is scheduled, confirmed, and fashionably late, like any decent Parisian.
And then Sachs vanishes in Hamburg, in a prison, in rumor, in ash, in God’s blind spot, most likely lynched by Nazis.
True to the French tradition, Le Sabbat doesn’t really come to a conclusion, instead it hisses, like a candle drowned in its own wax. The book lights a match in a confession booth and watches the confessor go up in flames.
December 12, 2022
"Uno se hunde como en un pozo hasta lo hondo para encontrar un manantial de agua clara. Y mientras más se desciende por las paredes negras, mejor se comprende la soledad infinita en la que se oye resonar, en el silencio del universo, el eco de nuestra voz a la que, al principio, nadie responde. Un paso más y el primer sonido que se percibe ¿no será el lejano rumor del universo que reenvía el eco de nuestra propia soledad?"
Maurice Sachs: prototipo del bohemio parisino de entreguerras, judío, homosexual, oscuro sinvergüenza, estafador, maldito desde la cuna y delator. En "El sabbat", a modo de confesión, nos relata su vida y extraña y fascina como en tan pocos años pudo vivir tantas vidas. Entre el mundo del lumpen, su paso por el seminario (!) y los ambientes artísticos, sus encuentros con Gide, Cocteau, Chanel, Jacob, sus comentarios sobre "En busca del tiempo perdido". Una delicia muy bien escrita. Una de esas lecturas que te llevan a querer leer mil libros más para ahondar en la época.
Si me pongo exquisita, le habría pedido algo más de profundidad en algunos temas y recortar en otros. Pero en definitiva, he pasado una semana de vacaciones tan a gusto con él.
Según se explica en la profusa introducción, el estallido de la II Guerra Mundial retrasó su publicación hasta 1946, cuando Sachs ya había caído muerto a manos de los mismos nazis con los que colaboraba como delator.
Maurice Sachs: prototipo del bohemio parisino de entreguerras, judío, homosexual, oscuro sinvergüenza, estafador, maldito desde la cuna y delator. En "El sabbat", a modo de confesión, nos relata su vida y extraña y fascina como en tan pocos años pudo vivir tantas vidas. Entre el mundo del lumpen, su paso por el seminario (!) y los ambientes artísticos, sus encuentros con Gide, Cocteau, Chanel, Jacob, sus comentarios sobre "En busca del tiempo perdido". Una delicia muy bien escrita. Una de esas lecturas que te llevan a querer leer mil libros más para ahondar en la época.
Si me pongo exquisita, le habría pedido algo más de profundidad en algunos temas y recortar en otros. Pero en definitiva, he pasado una semana de vacaciones tan a gusto con él.
Según se explica en la profusa introducción, el estallido de la II Guerra Mundial retrasó su publicación hasta 1946, cuando Sachs ya había caído muerto a manos de los mismos nazis con los que colaboraba como delator.
December 9, 2020
J’ai lu ce livre parce que c’était écrit sur le dos que Sachs avait beaucoup fréquenté Violette Leduc pendant un certain temps. Enfin, Sachs avait connu beaucoup de gens de talent. Hélas, il avait lui-même très peu.
Mon passage préféré du « Sabbat » il raconte la fois où la maison d’édition lui avait confié la tâche d’évaluer « De l’ouest, Rien de Nouveau » d’Erich Maria Remarque. Sachs qui buvait beaucoup à l’époque l’a laissé moisir sur son bureau pendant plusieurs mois sans le lire. Alors, l’agent de Remarque l’a offert à une autre maison d’édition qui l’a publié. Comme partout ailleurs dans le monde, le succès du roman en France a été énorme.
La vie de Sachs était mouvementée, courte et tragique mais son livre est drôlement ennuyant. On y trouve des quelques passages intéressants mais on aurait souhaité beaucoup plus.
Mon passage préféré du « Sabbat » il raconte la fois où la maison d’édition lui avait confié la tâche d’évaluer « De l’ouest, Rien de Nouveau » d’Erich Maria Remarque. Sachs qui buvait beaucoup à l’époque l’a laissé moisir sur son bureau pendant plusieurs mois sans le lire. Alors, l’agent de Remarque l’a offert à une autre maison d’édition qui l’a publié. Comme partout ailleurs dans le monde, le succès du roman en France a été énorme.
La vie de Sachs était mouvementée, courte et tragique mais son livre est drôlement ennuyant. On y trouve des quelques passages intéressants mais on aurait souhaité beaucoup plus.
December 4, 2025
Bijzonder ego-document van een schrijver met een opzienbarend leven. Sachs is bijna zijn eigen romanpersonage.
December 30, 2013
My husband bought me a copy of this for Christmas. I hadn't heard of Maurice Sachs but Bill had read one of his novels and absolutely loved it. This was his autobiography. Parts of it read more like a novel than an autobiography. It was a story of a very interesting man and definitely deserved to have been written down. It was the story of someone who would probably be called "troubled" he lived life to excess and drank too much, visited too many prostitutes and stole too much, lived on too much credit. But he wrote much more deeply about his interest in Catholisim than he did about his time of "vice". When he did write about the decadent periods of his life it seemed like he was never really enjoying himself. Instead he was filled with the loathing of alcoholism. He went from having lots of money to being very poor. It was his time of poverty when he was living with the man he really loved that were the most interesting and saddest parts of the book. Reading the book you can't help but wonder if so much of the despair was because he was a queer Jewish man living in a prejudiced society. I feel like I missed out not being more familiar with the people he was spending time with in the book, but it made me want to find and read more of his novels. It was a very sad and touching story. I only wish it had had more depth and details. It seemed to be lacking in the truth that later beat novels writing about similar experiences have.
May 9, 2023
The writing is great, and an interesting visit in Paris at the time of Gide of Cocteau. I don't know if I read it wrong, but it's funny like at the beginning the author doesn't seem to think Cocteau's writing are gonna be important for the posterity.
The writing is good and I got caught into the autobiography of this author I didn't know - bought some of the works of people he was working with in publishing just to see. However, I'm a bit tired of seeing men writing about woman, and overall, the men saturated writing world at the time. I know it is the time that makes it, but as it is a diary, there are things I couldn't relate of found distasteful. It is not a problem per se, as I said, it is the times that want it and I don't discriminate. It's just that now that I have tasted women diaries from that time or earlier (even if most are not French, at least not writers), it is hard to come back to a men saturated perspective.
Otherwise, there are things I found relatable, even if it is not my main concern when I read. I, too, tried to impress people from a higher society I didn't belong in, I am also too dissolute, money spending, substance addicted if not watched, to be serious about writing or doing any kind of arts, even though I just have the thing in me. I know the author ended up meeting famous authors, and writing books, which I certainly won't - but that part, about always touching a world and not being talented or mature enough to fit in, I felt it. I always wondered what happened to his wife, though. I also tried spirituality before failing miserably. In the end, isn't the fact that I related to part of the book which made my experience mixed? I wonder.
In the end, I think it is a good work of exorcism that produced Sach here, and I am glad I read it. The style is not outstanding - but it is good. If you like French authors from this period and their style of writing, you will definetely find that in this book, alongside a portrait of a rocambolesque life which is enough to make a memoir as distracting as a novel, which I wasn't expecting. I love the honesty of the writer which summons the héros of Balzac, Stendhal and all the like, because you definetely find them in him - I know that writing yourself is a game, that you invent yourself as a character somehow. But it is well done. You will find more of Balzac or Stendhal in this book than Cocteau I believe. This is a book written by a young boy in changing, troubled, dissolute times - isn't this what we are experiencing right know?
Thank you L'imaginaire de Gallimard for the new French edition - they never find to have an outstanding choice of books, books that you don't find elsewhere, that are a bit underground and will require you digging, or taking on a whim - I did the latter and have no regrets.
The writing is good and I got caught into the autobiography of this author I didn't know - bought some of the works of people he was working with in publishing just to see. However, I'm a bit tired of seeing men writing about woman, and overall, the men saturated writing world at the time. I know it is the time that makes it, but as it is a diary, there are things I couldn't relate of found distasteful. It is not a problem per se, as I said, it is the times that want it and I don't discriminate. It's just that now that I have tasted women diaries from that time or earlier (even if most are not French, at least not writers), it is hard to come back to a men saturated perspective.
Otherwise, there are things I found relatable, even if it is not my main concern when I read. I, too, tried to impress people from a higher society I didn't belong in, I am also too dissolute, money spending, substance addicted if not watched, to be serious about writing or doing any kind of arts, even though I just have the thing in me. I know the author ended up meeting famous authors, and writing books, which I certainly won't - but that part, about always touching a world and not being talented or mature enough to fit in, I felt it. I always wondered what happened to his wife, though. I also tried spirituality before failing miserably. In the end, isn't the fact that I related to part of the book which made my experience mixed? I wonder.
In the end, I think it is a good work of exorcism that produced Sach here, and I am glad I read it. The style is not outstanding - but it is good. If you like French authors from this period and their style of writing, you will definetely find that in this book, alongside a portrait of a rocambolesque life which is enough to make a memoir as distracting as a novel, which I wasn't expecting. I love the honesty of the writer which summons the héros of Balzac, Stendhal and all the like, because you definetely find them in him - I know that writing yourself is a game, that you invent yourself as a character somehow. But it is well done. You will find more of Balzac or Stendhal in this book than Cocteau I believe. This is a book written by a young boy in changing, troubled, dissolute times - isn't this what we are experiencing right know?
Thank you L'imaginaire de Gallimard for the new French edition - they never find to have an outstanding choice of books, books that you don't find elsewhere, that are a bit underground and will require you digging, or taking on a whim - I did the latter and have no regrets.
December 1, 2025
If you decide to read this, skip the postscript. It adds that haunting quality that the rest of the text desperately tries to resolve. It also denounces the book as trash, which in my opinion, it is very far from.
The rest of the book is wonderful. The essays on Gide and Cocteau, the passages on Malraux, Max Jacobs, Soutine, Remembrandt are all great. The essay on Proust is alright. It doesn't say much. Overall, the memoir is filled with introspection, beauty, wretechedness and undeniable attempts at optimism in a nihilistic world.
Here's a passage I like
As space is occupied by a prodigious world of systems, of galaxies each of which has its own center of attraction but which remain isolated from the other systems by an incredible number of light years, I saw our universe divided into as many galaxies as beings, and I believed I could never slow down the dreadful rotation that was myself, and never be able to participate in the whirling of another superior system that would repulse me for fear of breaking its enormous, precise, monstrously personal equilibrium. I was forgetting that the spiral rejects, in the form of meteors, certain harmful bodies.
I saw myself still resembling, by one or two characteristics, too many different persons; and no one resembled me enough to give me confidence in myself.
The rest of the book is wonderful. The essays on Gide and Cocteau, the passages on Malraux, Max Jacobs, Soutine, Remembrandt are all great. The essay on Proust is alright. It doesn't say much. Overall, the memoir is filled with introspection, beauty, wretechedness and undeniable attempts at optimism in a nihilistic world.
Here's a passage I like
As space is occupied by a prodigious world of systems, of galaxies each of which has its own center of attraction but which remain isolated from the other systems by an incredible number of light years, I saw our universe divided into as many galaxies as beings, and I believed I could never slow down the dreadful rotation that was myself, and never be able to participate in the whirling of another superior system that would repulse me for fear of breaking its enormous, precise, monstrously personal equilibrium. I was forgetting that the spiral rejects, in the form of meteors, certain harmful bodies.
I saw myself still resembling, by one or two characteristics, too many different persons; and no one resembled me enough to give me confidence in myself.
July 1, 2025
Het Egoïsme, dat in alle menselijke wezens even sterk is, neemt echter van de ene generatie op de andere, verschillende verschijningsvormen aan; die van vijftien jaar geleden was heel open: we wilden dat iedereen eraan deelnam. Tegenwoordig is het een afzondering, waarbinnen ieder alleen wil zijn. Gisteren werd de geest van de loopgraven op ons overgedragen, waardoor we geloofden, dat alles nog van iedereen was. Vandaag hebben de grote sociale denkbeelden (paradoxaal genoeg) iedereen een bekrompen bewustzijn van zijn eigen persoon en van zijn geestelijk goed gegeven.
August 6, 2017
Memorias de los años de juventud de un escritor que pasa por abyecto y maldito pero que aunque no utiliza el libro para autojustificarse, sí que sirve de examen de conciencia. Homosexual en una época en la que era escandaloso, seminarista, devoto católico en la adolescencia, admirador de Cocteau, caradura irredento, sus mejores páginas están en la segunda mitad, cuando su vida en Estados Unidos se desmorona por un matrimonio ficticio y vuelve a París para pasar sus años del hambre. En todo caso, no es tan fiero como lo pintan.
March 10, 2020
Se non fosse per i lunghi elogi dedicati agli idoli che hanno influito sulla vita dello scrittore, questo romanzo autobiografico sarebbe stato un vero capolavoro. Quasi in ogni pagina c'è sempre una frase che ti arriva dritta come una pugnalata, facendoti riflettere sulla condizione di un uomo che cercava disperatamente di essere amato. Non si può dire che la vita sia stata giusta con lui, ma neanche la morte lo è stata altrettanto. Per questo mi auguro che ogni lettore ne apprezzi le sue doti, perché in fondo il suo più grande sogno è sempre stato quello di essere un bravo scrittore.
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November 13, 2012This book came out in a 1950s British translation as Day of Wrath: Confessions of a turbulent youth with the most hilarious cover blurb.
Sachs was a notorious and insatiable homosexual and in his writings and his attitude, in his penchant for betrayal, the feminine temperament is particularly noticeable.
January 25, 2013
"Male child born stop badly brought up stop unhappy stop left family stop went into business traveled retuned stop turned out badly repented took orders left became soldier discharged seeks order."
Sachs' autobiographical summary delivered via telegraph.
Sachs' autobiographical summary delivered via telegraph.
October 13, 2017
I'm rather speechless. This was a fantastic book. It seems a lot of people like to describe him as immoral and rather careless, but I think he was just like anyone else trying to make their way through life. His writing is profound and just so amazing. I believe it offers an insight that we don't tend to read too often.
January 28, 2025
The first thirty years or so of this writer's life. Has many digressions and is often overwrought. Much of it feels meandering but at its best, it's luminous. The warts and all portraits of people like Max Jacob and Jean Cocteau shine in the most loving way.
September 30, 2020
This is a good read, but the implication made on the cover that these memoirs are "scandalous" is nonsense. There is nothing here that I would not allow a junior high kid to read.
April 9, 2024
L'histoire tragique d'un homme qui rate à peu près tout ce qu'il entreprend. Très belle lecture.
October 23, 2025
Sans grand intérêt. Passages intéressants sur Cocteau et Gide.
December 30, 2015
Maurice Sachs. La atracción del mal
La ocupación alemana de Francia fue una ocasión excepcional para crear una bonito número de monstruos. No crearlos, dado que ya estaban ahí, esperando su ocasión, sino más bien para ponerlos en valor. Además, como precisamente aquellos tiempos no fueron nada gloriosos para los franceses (el antisemitismo no fue cosa de cuatro escritores y, por las dudas, tenían el régimen de Vichy), los monstruos fueron una necesidad. Como no se podía juzgar a todo un país, mejor juzgar a unos cuantos, ejemplarmente. Y para eso la literatura siempre fue algo muy práctico. Porque lo escrito escrito está. Y porque nadie piensa que la literatura pueda cambiar el mundo, excepto para mal. A diferencia de Louis Ferdinand Céline, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle o Robert Brasillach, Maurice Sachs (que hubiera hecho las delicias de cualquier tribunal), escapó a la justicia francesa. Y escapó, paradójicamente, porque lo mataron los nazis. Y la paradoja es que murió cuando la guerra acababa y él se había pasado los últimos años trabajando voluntariamente para los alemanes. Fue su último saludo en el escenario.
Maurice Sachs dedicó su vida a la destrucción. La de los demás. Una vida vivida para el mal. Eso le atormentaba (El sabbat da buenas muestras de este arrepentimiento continuo), pero no tanto como para lograr ir más allá de algunas lamentaciones. En el libro encontraremos algunos apuntes, algunas pistas, sabremos que algo va mal, pero el escritor se cuidará de confesar sus pecados, dejándolo en algo genérico. Drogadicto, traficante, estafador, corruptor de menores a los que prostituía. Más tarde, colaborador con los alemanes, delator. En fin, no se privó de nada, aunque nunca tuvo mucho. Su vida fue ciertamente compleja y, aun prescindiendo de entrar en esos detalles más oscuros, no tuvo desperdicio. Frecuentó los ambientes literarios más en boga, trabajó para Gallimard, para la NRF, y ahí quedan esos retratos de Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, André Gide o Coco Chanel que recoge su libro.
Hay que decir que Sachs tenía una innegable habilidad para la escritura (aunque eso no le acababa de dar nunca para comer: sus gustos siempre le requerían mucho más dinero del que le aportaban sus oficios). De entre todas sus obras (algunas no muy afortunadas), es El sabbat aquella que le otorga un lugar en la historia de la literatura, más allá de su propia persona. Un libro que trata de sí mismo desde su infancia hasta poco antes de la guerra y en el que no es nada amable con nadie, empezando por él. Su habilidad para desmenuzar (no pocas veces a cuchillo) cada época que atravesó y sus circunstancias, le permiten trazar un apasionante relato. Como estuvo en todos lados (desde exclusivos colegios privados hasta el seminario, pasando por el ejército o lo más granado del mundo de la escritura) lo que tiene que decir es mucho, y sobre casi todo tiene una opinión y es capaz de crear un mundo de apasionadas (y apasionantes) reflexiones.
Sin duda, lo que más disfrutaremos será sus ajustes de cuentas con sus contemporáneos. Para empezar Jean Cocteau, que por entonces lo era todo. Estaba en todos lados, cogía de todos los sitios, devolvía alguna cosa de las que se llevaba y era inevitable encontrárselo de algún modo. Para odiarlo o para amarlo, pero no para dejarlo pasar. Sachs lo amó, lo cual no evita que su retrato sea un retrato cruel, más entregado a desnudarlo que a retratarlo en alguna cómoda pose. Aunque de eso tampoco se libre Max Jacob, con el que también tuvo una estrecha relación. Claro está que da tanto juego como Cocteau, pero tampoco se librará, entre elogio y elogio, de alguna patada en la espinilla. Algo así como André Gide, aunque este acabará mucho mejor parado, quedando en un simple retrato afilado de una persona que fue muy importante en su enésimo intento de ser bueno.
Su escritura tiende a la destrucción (también la autodestrucción) como lo tiende su propia vida. Fue un péndulo con tendencia a ir hacia el mal y soñar con el bien (eso sí le otorgamos el beneficio de la duda de no ser un completo farsante, un mentiroso sin remedio). El sabbat es todo eso: una vida difícil pero una vida buscada. El testimonio de un tiempo donde todo fue posible (entreguerras) o lo parecía, y donde una persona dispuesta a perderse se perdía. Y Sachs lo estaba. Apasionadamente.
Escrito para Détour.
La ocupación alemana de Francia fue una ocasión excepcional para crear una bonito número de monstruos. No crearlos, dado que ya estaban ahí, esperando su ocasión, sino más bien para ponerlos en valor. Además, como precisamente aquellos tiempos no fueron nada gloriosos para los franceses (el antisemitismo no fue cosa de cuatro escritores y, por las dudas, tenían el régimen de Vichy), los monstruos fueron una necesidad. Como no se podía juzgar a todo un país, mejor juzgar a unos cuantos, ejemplarmente. Y para eso la literatura siempre fue algo muy práctico. Porque lo escrito escrito está. Y porque nadie piensa que la literatura pueda cambiar el mundo, excepto para mal. A diferencia de Louis Ferdinand Céline, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle o Robert Brasillach, Maurice Sachs (que hubiera hecho las delicias de cualquier tribunal), escapó a la justicia francesa. Y escapó, paradójicamente, porque lo mataron los nazis. Y la paradoja es que murió cuando la guerra acababa y él se había pasado los últimos años trabajando voluntariamente para los alemanes. Fue su último saludo en el escenario.
Maurice Sachs dedicó su vida a la destrucción. La de los demás. Una vida vivida para el mal. Eso le atormentaba (El sabbat da buenas muestras de este arrepentimiento continuo), pero no tanto como para lograr ir más allá de algunas lamentaciones. En el libro encontraremos algunos apuntes, algunas pistas, sabremos que algo va mal, pero el escritor se cuidará de confesar sus pecados, dejándolo en algo genérico. Drogadicto, traficante, estafador, corruptor de menores a los que prostituía. Más tarde, colaborador con los alemanes, delator. En fin, no se privó de nada, aunque nunca tuvo mucho. Su vida fue ciertamente compleja y, aun prescindiendo de entrar en esos detalles más oscuros, no tuvo desperdicio. Frecuentó los ambientes literarios más en boga, trabajó para Gallimard, para la NRF, y ahí quedan esos retratos de Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, André Gide o Coco Chanel que recoge su libro.
Hay que decir que Sachs tenía una innegable habilidad para la escritura (aunque eso no le acababa de dar nunca para comer: sus gustos siempre le requerían mucho más dinero del que le aportaban sus oficios). De entre todas sus obras (algunas no muy afortunadas), es El sabbat aquella que le otorga un lugar en la historia de la literatura, más allá de su propia persona. Un libro que trata de sí mismo desde su infancia hasta poco antes de la guerra y en el que no es nada amable con nadie, empezando por él. Su habilidad para desmenuzar (no pocas veces a cuchillo) cada época que atravesó y sus circunstancias, le permiten trazar un apasionante relato. Como estuvo en todos lados (desde exclusivos colegios privados hasta el seminario, pasando por el ejército o lo más granado del mundo de la escritura) lo que tiene que decir es mucho, y sobre casi todo tiene una opinión y es capaz de crear un mundo de apasionadas (y apasionantes) reflexiones.
Sin duda, lo que más disfrutaremos será sus ajustes de cuentas con sus contemporáneos. Para empezar Jean Cocteau, que por entonces lo era todo. Estaba en todos lados, cogía de todos los sitios, devolvía alguna cosa de las que se llevaba y era inevitable encontrárselo de algún modo. Para odiarlo o para amarlo, pero no para dejarlo pasar. Sachs lo amó, lo cual no evita que su retrato sea un retrato cruel, más entregado a desnudarlo que a retratarlo en alguna cómoda pose. Aunque de eso tampoco se libre Max Jacob, con el que también tuvo una estrecha relación. Claro está que da tanto juego como Cocteau, pero tampoco se librará, entre elogio y elogio, de alguna patada en la espinilla. Algo así como André Gide, aunque este acabará mucho mejor parado, quedando en un simple retrato afilado de una persona que fue muy importante en su enésimo intento de ser bueno.
Su escritura tiende a la destrucción (también la autodestrucción) como lo tiende su propia vida. Fue un péndulo con tendencia a ir hacia el mal y soñar con el bien (eso sí le otorgamos el beneficio de la duda de no ser un completo farsante, un mentiroso sin remedio). El sabbat es todo eso: una vida difícil pero una vida buscada. El testimonio de un tiempo donde todo fue posible (entreguerras) o lo parecía, y donde una persona dispuesta a perderse se perdía. Y Sachs lo estaba. Apasionadamente.
Escrito para Détour.
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