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"View Slideshow\n\nThe French Revolution was hard on ch\u00E2teaux, and the ancestral home of the Marquis de Sade in Provence was no exception. The castle that rose precipitously from its rocky promontory overlooking a valley of the Lub\u00E9ron suffered at the hands of the citizens of Lacoste, who destroyed the hilltop castle and then used it to quarry stone for building the village below. Gravity was on their side as they tumbled the blocks downhill.\n\nFor two centuries the jagged silhouette haunted the hill, a beautiful ruin, the kind that took to moonlight. The broken profile lingered as a reminder of both the revolution and the marquis who caused his family name to enter the dictionary as a noun. The beauty was charged with cultural memory and tagged by violence.\n\nWeather and time threatened to undo remnants still standing, especially after the death of an English professor in nearby Apt, who owned the ruins and had taken up the cause of preserving the ch\u00E2teau. \"A friend, an artist, told me, \u2018Pierre, you must buy the castle,' \" remembers Pierre Cardin, the couturier, who adds, \"I was taken by a certain enthusiasm and encouraged by the marvelous view.\" Cardin bought the ch\u00E2teau from the professor's widow, and with it came an oil portrait of the aristocrat and 70 acres, which included an abandoned quarry.\n\nToday, a drawbridge leads to a courtyard, and at the far end, a front door opens onto a living area, directly on axis with the portrait of the good marquis. His reputation precedes him, so his rather bland face, under a powdered wig, seems strangely innocuous, even benign, for a man who spent a third of his life in prison on morals charges. He was jailed during the ancien r\u00E9gime and happened to be languish-ing in the Bastille when the revolution erupted, springing him. Later, Napoleon incarcerated the apparently incorrigible marquis for the rest of his life. Literature was the beneficiary. Twenty-five years of imprisonment imposed writerly discipline on a man who might have found other things to do.\n\nA complete reconstruction would have cost the ch\u00E2teau its particular karma. \"I wanted to keep it as though, at a distance, it hadn't been touched,\" says Cardin, who, on a quiet afternoon with nobody around, wears sensible black shoes, khakis and a plain plaid shirt under a casual blazer. In Lacoste, the quintessential Parisian takes a vacation from the fashion ramp.\n\nRather than a full-scale re-creation of the ch\u00E2teau, the couturier decided to rebuild selectively and progressively, and he is just finishing the last of the projects, the terrace ramparts. The ch\u00E2teau and its grounds serve as his country retreat and as a precinct for a summer festival. Over a monthlong period (this year it's July 6 through August 6), Cardin hosts concerts and operas both in the courtyard and in the quarry behind the ch\u00E2teau. He notes that the ghost of the marquis seemed alive, well and mischievous when a summer storm struck four years ago, just after Ren\u00E9e Fleming sang. The Karnak-like quarry, with huge caverns of rock still scored with cut lines, was inundated, drenching the elegant, mostly French crowd on its way to the ch\u00E2teau for dinner. Chignons collapsed.\n\nGiven the scale of Sade's and Cardin's respective reputations, the restored house is relatively modest, occupying only one edge of an island of land surrounded by bluffs. Much of the reconstruction was devoted to stabilizing perimeter walls, ramparts and underground cisterns and granaries and to building quarters for passing troupes.\n\nWithin the profile of the ruin, Cardin basically reconstructed an apartment that consists only of several bedrooms, a dining room, a library and a salon. Remnants of Gothic vaulted ceilings remain in places, but new ceilings were structured matter-of-factly with reinforced beams that do not attempt to evoke the originals. Teasing ironies seeped into a project that paired Cardin and Sade as comrades across time. In what was thin air open to the sky, Cardin sited his duplex master suite in the same place, at the same elevation, as the marquis's own. Cardin painted the interiors in a peach that suffuses the interior with warmth and intimations of innocence. Beneath the oil of Sade, Cardin has placed a bronze tabletop sculpture by Rodin depicting a couple exploding apart in an abstraction of ecstasy. Sade looks on with an air of indifference.\n\nCardin has perfect pitch of the eye, and while he was designing clothes, furniture and housewares, famously applying lessons of Modernist abstraction, he collected antiques, and the interior is a biographical sketch of a life spent in curiosity and travel. He mixes 17th- and 18th-century chairs that might have occupied these spaces with pre-Columbian masks, a portrait from an Egyptian mummy, mirrors and chairs from India, provincial paintings, Oriental divans and a Buddha he acquired 60 years ago. Some pieces, like a Renaissance cabinet and chest, are important; others he might have found in a Paris flea market on a Sunday outing.\n\nFrench ch\u00E2teaux are often exercises in Cartesian reason, but Sade's is really an episodic honeycomb of history. What starts as an apartment on the main floor leads by circuitous flights of stairs back in time past rooms built into the hillside below the main floor. Farther down, a stairway cuts into the live rock, leading to a guards' room at the base of the castle, roofed by a barrel vault carved into the rock. Cardin points out an olive press cut from the stone floor. The site is ancient. \"All this was Rome,\" notes the couturier, gesturing to a landscape once integral to the Roman empire.\n\nIn the same restoration, the couturier who made his reputation on abstractly modern fashion has painstakingly brought back to life a cultural artifact and given a literary figure a place on the map. At the same time, he shows a deep respect for history, and for that man who famously made a name of himself."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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