THE mayor’s office in the tiny village of Lacoste in southern France has become used to fielding inquiries about the castle on the hill. Once the community’s greatest shame, the crumbling building has evolved into its greatest asset.

“People call up wanting to know if they can rent it for parties,” said Géraldine Allemand, the mayor’s secretary, referring to the château that was once the home of the Marquis de Sade, one of the 18th century’s most notorious figures. “It attracts a lot of people.”

His name lives on in the word “sadism” — he spent 27 years in prison for “acts of perversion and violence” — but nearly 200 years after his death the marquis is helping to fuel a property boom in the Luberon, already popular among the French glitterati.

An American art school has bought half of Lacoste. The other half is not complaining about its association with a figure who is often described as a serial rapist and torturer but who was depicted recently in a more flattering light by the actor Geoffrey Rush in the film Quills.

“We get a lot of crazy people expecting to find wife swapping clubs or cathedrals of sadomasochism,” said Liliane Ségura, owner of the Café de Sade. “But the de Sade name is good for us, all the same.”

Rumours abound of “weirdos and perverts”, as one local put it, holding private sadomasochistic seances on summer evenings in the ruins of the chateau. But since Pierre Cardin, the fashion designer, bought the building two years ago and pledged to restore it, visitors have had more wholesome reasons for being there.

Cardin has also been putting on a summer arts festival in the ruins. There is in addition a de Sade literary prize — the trophy is a black leather whip — in honour of “free thought”.

The first recipient was Catherine Millet, a librarian who wrote a steamy account of sexual adventures in Paris. It annoyed some of de Sade’s descendants who, however much of a paradox it may seem, thought the book “too smutty” to be associated with their family name.

The annual festival is more to do with music and theatre than de Sade, whose devotees are demanding readings from his best known works such as Justine, which describes in graphic detail the sexual encounters of a young village girl, or The 120 Days of Sodom, which was written in the Bastille and needs little explanation.

What de Sade would have made of it all is hard to say, although it seems likely that the spectacle of his beloved castle being put to such a use would appeal.

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