Exactly two hundred years ago the Marquis de Sade sat in his dirty, rat-infested cell in the Bastille, cursing his fate and yet remaining loyal to his odd way of looking at human nature. The American War of Independence was just ending, and the French Revolution was warming up. Sade’s time was an age of reason, we say, a time when the universe seemed knowable and when it was compared to a clock in its mechanical precision. His was also a time when the wealthy strutted their affectations and quests for pleasure publicly and when the hypocrisy of public values rendered social justice arbitrary and capricious. In other words, it was a time much like ours.
Although Sade spent a good portion of his life in detention, his biography reads like an adventure story: educated by a cleric uncle, well positioned in the military, falling in love with actresses, loved and hated by his mother-in-law, escaping from prison with his valet, pursued by an indefatigable Inspector Maurais, released in revolution to serve as magistrate, becoming fat and bloated in an asylum cell shared at times with a young woman, watching from his window as his compatriots were hanged. In the midst of this adventurous and distressing life, he wrote novels, plays, and essays that carry an exceedingly dark point of view rarely equaled in literature.