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| “ | If you're going to martyr yourself, do it for God, not a chambermaid. | „ |
| ~ Dr. Royer-Collard threatening Abbe de Coulmier. |
Dr. Royer-Collard is the main antagonist of the play Quills and its 2000 film adaptation. He is a cruel, pious psychiatrist ordered by Napoleon to torture the Marquis de Sade into silence. He is a fictionalized version of an actual historical figure.
In the film adaptation, he was portrayed by Michael Caine, who also portrayed Jack Carter in Get Carter, Dr. Robert Elliott in Dressed To Kill, Chester King in Kingsmen: The Secret Service, Michael Jennings in On Deadly Ground, and Arthur Tressler in Now You See Me and Now You See Me 2.
Biography[]
Dr. Royer-Collard is a wealthy, respected alienist (psychiatrist) working for Napoleon's court, who is well-known for prescribing brutal treatment methods for mental illness such as bloodletting, purgatives, and invasive surgery. He specializes in treating "sexual perversions" such as homosexuality. Ironically, he himself is secretly a depraved, sadistic pedophile who lusts after preteen girls.
Film[]
Napoleon sends Royer-Collard to the Charenton asylum to silence the Marquis de Sade, who is smuggling his erotic and anti-authoritarian writings out of the asylum to the French public. Royer-Collard presents the asylum's liberal-minded director, the Abbé de Coulmier, with an ultimatum: unless he cracks down on de Sade and stops him from publishing, Napoleon's government will shut down the asylum. He offers to inflict his trademark tortures on de Sade, but the Abbé declines.
Royer-Collard then goes to the Panthemont Convent in Paris to pick up his intended bride, a barely teenage orphan named Simone. He violently rapes her on their wedding night, and afterwards keeps her under lock and key at the chateau provided to him by Napoleon.
Their marriage is a source of gossip among the asylum's employees, and inspires de Sade to write a satirical play called "The Crimes of Love" about a pious, lecherous old man marrying an innocent young girl. De Sade tricks the Abbé into letting him perform it at the asylum, with his fellow patients as actors. Royer-Collard and Simone attend the premiere, and he fumes with indignation as he watches himself being parodied as a perverted rapist. He shuts down the asylum's theatre and once again threatens the Abbé with closing the asylum unless de Sade is brought under control.
Meanwhile, de Sade's wife Renée Pelagie visits Royer-Collard and, much to his surprise, asks him to keep her hated husband locked up forever. Also at her suggestion, Royer-Collard orders that de Sade's writing tools be taken away permanently. Even this does not work, however; de Sade keeps writing, using his own bodily fluids as ink. After finding out that the asylum's chambermaid, Madeleine, has been helping de Sade smuggle his writing out into the world, Royer-Collard has her savagely whipped.
Meanwhile, Simone finds a copy of de Sade's novel Justine, which inspires her to act on her feelings for Prioux, the chateau's architect. They run away together, leaving a "Dear John" letter for Royer-Collard written on a page from de Sade's novel. Royer-Collard takes his humiliation out on de Sade, ordering him tortured. That night, Royer-Collard hears Madeleine scream as she is she is assaulted and murdered by the inmate Bouchon, but he deliberately ignores them.
A year after de Sade's death and the Abbé's descent into madness, Royer-Collard puts a new Abbé in charge of the asylum, while putting the patients to work covertly publishing de Sade's writing posthumously; ever the hypocrite, he keeps the proceeds for himself. He introduces the new Abbé to his predecessor, who is now locked up in de Sade's old cell. Royer-Collard refuses the former Abbé's pleas for quill and paper to write, provoking the former cleric to try to strangle him through the bars of his cell.