Pardon My French: The Marquis de Sade
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Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it. Conflicted is a member of the Evergreen Podcast Network, and as always, I'm your host, Zach Cornwell. Welcome to episode 13, Pardon My French. In the spring of 1966, the United Kingdom was in the grip of a tabloid media frenzy.

The murder trial of the century was about to begin. A young couple, Ian Brady and Mira Hindley, had been accused of a series of murders that had plagued northern England over the past two years. The emotions around this case were so intense that these defendants had to be placed in security boxes encased in a protective screen to shield them from any vengeful courtroom attendees. And their crimes were truly shocking.

Together, this young man and young woman had allegedly tortured, sexually abused, and killed five children between the ages of 10 and 17, before burying their bodies in shallow graves across a span of isolated, windswept grassland, or moors. And that detail gave the case its famous name, the Moors Murders.

Over the next 14 days, beginning on April 19th, the jury listened to the details of the case. And it was an absolute layup for the prosecution. They had a mountain of evidence. They had the bodies. They had the murder weapons. They had eyewitness testimony. They even had video evidence of one of the murders, which the young couple had themselves filmed for later viewing. But the prosecution had something else.

Also within this massive body of evidence was a book, a very old book, one that had been written almost 300 years before in Paris amidst the violence and chaos of the French Revolution. The novel was called Justine, and it was infamous even in its own time. Napoleon Bonaparte himself called it, quote, the most disgusting book that the most depraved imagination has ever birthed, end quote.

This copy of the book had belonged to one of the accused killers, Ian Brady. He treasured it and read it often. But why would the prosecution include something like this? They had such a colossal amount of damning evidence. Such incontrovertible proof of the couple's guilt. Why bother showing the jury some old book? What possible significance could it have?

Well, the prosecution believed that a key to the twisted worldview of Ian Brady and Mira Hindley could be found within the novel's wrinkled pages. It was argued that this book had been a key inspiration for the killing spree that had left several innocent children dead.

The prosecution read passages from Justine to the jury, and the scenes of sexual violence described in the novel and what had been committed in real life were remarkably similar. One could not help but believe that the killers had done their best to translate the brutal fantasies of the author into the real world.

As historian Donald Thomas wrote, quote, The defendants seemed not only indifferent to the charges against them, but almost to be acting under the immediate orders of some invisible spirit. His power was greater than any of the forces of law arranged against them.

End quote.

The public became utterly fixated on this idea that this long-dead author, this disgraced and debauched French aristocrat had, through his writing, stretched long, corruptive fingers across the centuries and buried them within the minds of Ian Brady and Mira Hindley. Donald Thomas elaborates, quote, "...the public was left with the impression of the murderers as an evil young couple who had carried out their crimes as loyal disciples of Sod."

End quote. And it wasn't exactly a hard pill to swallow. The Marquis de Sade, then and now, is regarded as an infamous, terrifying figure, cloaked in scandal, rumor, and violence. Superstitious critics often said that his books could literally alter the brain chemistry of those brave enough to read the words. If you read these books, they could drive you insane. One writer named Jules Janine said in 1834, quote,

Be warned by me, whoever you may be, do not touch these volumes, for you will never enjoy a night's sleep again. End quote. Another writer said that Saad's books could, quote, drive students to madness and death. End quote. These were books that contained, as historian Neil Schaefer wrote, quote, horrors so shocking as to be almost beyond human imagination. End quote.

There's actually one story about a girl who dared to read the Marquis de Sade's writing, and what she found inside horrified her so much that she immediately ran off to a convent and became a nun. Now this is all probably starting to sound a little bit like a ghost story, and in a way, it kind of is. The literary spirit of the Marquis de Sade has haunted Western thought for centuries.

His name is literally a synonym for cruelty and perversion. It's where we get the word sadism, which the dictionary defines as, quote, delight in cruelty, extreme cruelty, or the derivation of sexual gratification from the infliction of physical pain or humiliation on another person, end quote. As the Marquis de Sade wrote himself, quote,

Cruelty is in nature. We are all born with a portion of cruelty that only education modifies. But education is not natural. It contravenes nature as much as cultivation does trees. Cruelty is then nothing else than man's energy, uncorrupted by civilization. End quote. The Marquis de Sade is the S in S&M, the Sado to the masochism.

In the centuries since his death, his books have been banned and burned, suppressed and stigmatized. Up until relatively recently, the 20th century or so, his descendants did everything they could to bury all traces of this blemish on their family history. His legacy is nothing short of a battleground to this very day, where scandalous devil's advocates wage war with modern-day Puritans over the issue of censorship,

freedom of speech, and the outer limits of acceptable sexuality. The Marquis is the textbook definition of a love him or hate him historical figure. Many revere him. As a French erotic author named Pierre Guyotot gushed, "Sade is, in a way, our Shakespeare. He has the same sense of tragedy, the same sweeping grandeur.

Taking pleasure in the suffering of others is not such an important part of his writings as people claim. He has his tongue sticking out permanently. He is incessantly ironic. End quote.

Others see him as nothing more than a pervert, a loathsome rapist whose ideas, writing, and memory deserves to be left in the dustbin of history. As a writer named Michel Onfray observed, quote, It is intellectually bizarre to make Saad a hero. Even according to his most hero-worshipping biographers, this man was a sexual delinquent. End quote.

Some see his intrinsic value even while acknowledging his flaws. As one philosopher said, "...one must always return to Sod, to observe mankind in its natural state and to understand the quality of evil." He's been called both the freest spirit who ever lived and a frenetic, an abominable assemblage of all crimes and obscenities.

Love him or hate him, the Marquis de Sade has made an indelible mark on our culture. A whip mark, as the man himself would have probably preferred to characterize it. A raised red welt on our literary consciousness. One 19th century expert on erotic literature named Henry Spencer Ashby said this about Sade, quote, The Marquis de Sade is perhaps one of the most extraordinary men who ever lived.

End quote. But who was this guy? And what was so scary about his writing? Were his lurid stories autobiographical? Had he actually done these awful things? Or were they just his deepest, darkest fantasies poured out harmlessly onto the page?

And are they harmless? Do his stories have the power not only to titillate, but to inspire us to violence and depravity, as the prosecutors of the Moores murder case theorized? A 19th century critic named Theophile Gautier didn't think so, saying, quote, End quote.

So, this enigmatic figure, the Marquis de Sade, is obviously the subject of today's episode. On this show, we usually discuss trends and wars and movements, how people inflict change on society. But today, we're going to invert a little bit. We're going to talk about the effects society inflicted on one particular man, his family, and his writing.

and how he dealt all that pain back on the world. So let's go discover who the Marquis de Sade really was. Let's go find the man behind the monster.

This podcast is supported by FX's English Teacher, a new comedy from executive producers of What We Do in the Shadows and Baskets. English Teacher follows Evan, a teacher in Austin, Texas, who learns if it's really possible to be your full self at your job, while often finding himself at the intersection of the personal, professional, and political aspects of working at a high school. FX's English Teacher premieres September 2nd on FX. Stream on Hulu.

In the year 1794, the city of Paris was convulsing with upheaval, violence, and paranoia. The French Revolution was in its fifth year, but to most Parisians, it must have seemed like the 50th. What had begun as a good faith attempt to reform the French Empire into a constitutional monarchy with a king controlled and reigned in by a representative assembly had accelerated exponentially and spun out into political chaos.

Every year brought fresh transgression. Every day the stack of bodies got higher and higher and higher. The French King, Louis XVI, was dead. His soft, lily-white neck had fallen under the heavy iron blade of the guillotine just a year earlier, in 1793.

and many more had followed him. His wife, the famous Marie Antoinette, was executed shortly after him. Then their friends and courtiers and connections, and in fact, the guillotine soon became very busy. The famously efficient death machine and its operators hungered most of all for blue blood, the aristocrats and royalists who'd come to represent everything wrong with France. Many were forced to flee the country,

But Madame Guillotine was still hungry. The train of liberty and equality and revolution quickly jumped the tracks, and soon the high ideals of freedom and fraternity, which had defined the early years of the revolution, twisted and mutated into something else.

As historian Neal Schaeffer writes, quote, On September 17, 1793, the National Convention enacted the Law of Suspects, under which revolutionary committees throughout France were empowered to arrest, try, and execute all suspicious persons. Treason was so broadly defined as to include gestures, laughter, and even presumed thoughts.

The Terror now had a powerful machine with countless blades that would purge the nation, or so it was claimed, of bad blood. End quote. Thousands upon thousands were arrested under this law of suspects. Henchmen would show up at your door, search your house and haul you off, and then throw you in prison, where you would await your eventual last kiss from Madame Guillotine. One of these prisoners was a man named Louis Saad.

According to notes taken by his jailers, he was, quote, five feet, six inches tall, hair and eyebrows gray blonde, forehead high and broad, eyes pale blue, nose medium, mouth small, chin round, face oval and full, end quote. Louis Saad was no stranger to prisons. He had spent almost a third of his life in jail. But now at the age of 54, it seemed he'd finally come to the end of his rope.

Day after agonizing day passed as he waited for the moment of his execution. And what made it so much worse was the fact that the guillotine was in earshot of his cell on the other side of a walled garden.

Every day, he could hear the prisoners climb the steps, hear their last words, hear the pull of the rope and the fall of the blade, and the thud of something wet into a wicker basket. At the end of every day, the executioners would empty huge wooden buckets of blood, vats of it, into the drainage ditches nearby. And it smelled so bad that the entire neighborhood actually complained.

More than 1,800 times, Louis Sade listened to this ritual over the course of a month, and it nearly drove him insane. Louis Sade had a lot of time to think and reflect during that month. He was old, half-blind, obese, and sick, but according to one person who saw him, quote, the tired eyes still held a certain brilliance and acuteness, which shone from time to time like a fading spark on a dead coal.

End quote. Louis waited every day for his name to be called, for the moment of his death to come. Louis Saad, enemy of the Republic, you are sentenced to die, they would say, and off with his head. But Louis was not his real name. His true name had been given to him half a century earlier, and he must have entertained thoughts of screaming out his title once he finally ascended the scaffold for all the rabble to hear.

My name, he would say, is Donatien Alphonse François, the Marquis de Sade. The Marquis de Sade was born and raised in a very different world than the one he found himself inhabiting in 1794. In place of dank prison cells and rivers of blood, there were towering chateaus and goblets of sweet French wine.

Sade was born in 1740 into a cradle of luxury, a member of one of the oldest aristocratic families in France. He was old money. And when I say old money, I mean old money. The Sades could trace their lineage back 400 years to the 13th century. They had power and influence, and it wouldn't have been out of the question for a member of the Sade family to spend the occasional afternoon hunting with the king of France himself.

It's almost impossible to fully convey just how different pre-revolution France was from post-revolution France. Sade's childhood was firmly nestled in the heart of old-school aristocratic Europe. This was the heyday of courtly intrigue, opulent aristocrats, and free-thinking decadence. Sex, wigs, and rock and roll. Donatien de Sade, the Marquis, described his childhood this way, quote,

Born in Paris in the bosom of luxury and plenty, I believed from the time I could reason that nature and fortune had joined together to heap their gifts upon me. I believed it because people were foolish enough to tell me so, and this ridiculous prejudice made me haughty, despotic,

Looking at his life on paper, Saad seemed to have everything. But something was conspicuously absent. His parents, especially his mom.

Sade's mother had no interest in raising her son. Her passions were not for motherhood but for climbing the rungs of French high society. The rigors and frustrations of parenthood were just not a priority. Little Donatien came out of his mother's womb and was immediately swallowed up by a veritable army of nurses, servants, and valets.

His mother, for all intents and purposes, was gone. Off whining, dining, and traveling. The little boy was rarely ever alone, but he couldn't have felt more lonely.

As historian Francine de Plessis Gray writes, "...he may have felt resentment by the age of ten toward the glacial, self-absorbed mother who seemed too lazy to come and see him. Too lazy, perhaps, to love anyone. Upon seeing other children being hugged by their mothers, he may well have felt a wave of anxiety at the possibility that he would never be cuddled, caressed with the kind of passion that only a mother can bestow."

But Saad's early childhood woes went far deeper than basic mommy issues. Almost immediately, the people around him noticed how hot-tempered and violent he could be.

One day, when he was only four years old, he was on a play date, and his playmate was a prince of the royal family, a little kid who was only six or seven. Well, the four-year-old Saad became fixated on a toy that the other boy had. And out of nowhere, Saad attacks the prince. He kicks him, beats him, scratches him. He pulls his hair, and he pummels his face. And it takes several grown adults to pry the shrieking little boy off the other kid.

That little scuffle cost Donatian de Sade dearly. Soon after, he was sent to live with his grandmother, who thought she could calm the boy down and raise him right. And this was the first instance of a pattern we will see over and over again with Sade over the course of his life. Transgression and punishment. Crime and consequence. Over and over and over. The original sadist was clearly a masochist at heart.

Well, Desaad's grandmother quickly realized she got way more than she bargained for. She spoils him in every regard. And shockingly, this only makes the situation worse. We're not given exact details on Saad's behavior, but words like "temper," "anger," and "outburst" pop up a lot. Shortly after, his grandmother throws in the towel and sends him to live with his uncle.

This is a common feature of Saad's childhood. He's passed from family member to family member like some kind of cursed idol. No one really wanted him. And the picture that starts to form is one of a profoundly lonely little kid. So Saad goes to live at his uncle's chateau. And it was in this place that he found his true source of solace, books.

Sod's uncle had a huge library. Like, picture the first time Belle finds the library in Beauty and the Beast. This massive stack of books, the ladder, the whole shebang. If the real world offered nothing but anger and disappointment for young Sod, books offered a way out, a release. Apparently, the adolescent Sod spent so much time in his uncle's library that he could find specific volumes with his eyes closed.

He read and read and read voraciously. Novels and philosophy and history were like crack to this kid. Words and ideas provided a temporary escape from his emotional isolation. Saad's time in his uncle's chateau was also the first time that, pivotally, he began to become aware of the concept of love and sex.

His uncle was a priest, or an abbé, which was a title that typically carried with it strict laws of celibacy. While Uncle Abbé had no time for silly little promises like that, the abbé had women coming in and out of the chateau like an assembly line. Wham, bam, thank you ma'am, let us pray. And Saad definitely noticed it. As an adult, he mockingly referred to his Uncle Abbé's house as a bordello, or a whorehouse.

By this point, Saad was about 10 years old, and his family decided that this angry bookish child needed a stern, structured education. So he was packed up and sent to the Jesuits College in Paris. And this was not just any old boarding school. As historian Francine de Plessis Gray describes, quote,

It was the most prestigious and rigorous educational institution of its time, and its 3,000 students included the offspring of France's most powerful families. End quote. Under the famously strict tutelage of the Jesuits, young Saad would have his first encounter with something that would become an obsession for the rest of his life.

Whipping, beating, and caning. The Jesuits were big believers in corporal punishment. It was literally in the instruction manual, called the Instruction Manual for Christian Schoolmasters. Quote, the rod is necessary. It produces good behavior and must be used. End quote. If a student messed up or got into trouble, they were beaten with a heavy rod on the ass repeatedly in front of the entire student body.

Saad must have seen this happen many, many times while he was enrolled in the school. And something about it wormed its way into his brain. He decided he kind of liked watching these punishments. And even more startling to him, he kind of liked receiving them too. Now, there's a lot of back and forth amongst historians about this. Some people will swear up and down that this was the moment that Saad's sexual preferences became fixed for the rest of his life.

It was like a light switch was suddenly flipped and boom, Saad's kinks emerged fully formed. Others will say, no, no, this is a much more gradual thing. There are lots of facets and factors that molded to Saad's unorthodox tastes. End quote. Although I will let Saad himself have the final word on the origins of his own sexuality. Quote,

End quote.

A quick note about tastes here, by the way. As a rule, I don't kink shame on this show. People are into whatever they're into. Zero judgment. And rest assured, Sod is not infamous because he liked to give and receive a little spanking now and again.

That was literally child's play. His fantasies and ideas would become much darker and much bloodier as the years went on, but we will get to that eventually. The truth is we don't know what happened to Saad at the Jesuits College, if anything. We don't even know for sure if he was beaten. But in his later writings as an adult, he is suspiciously quiet about his time at that educational institution. So either something happened or nothing did.

Saad spends about three to four years at the boarding college and when he's 14 years old, his father, the Count of Saad, pulls him out of school. And he says, "Look here, son, back in my day, when I was your age, I was already serving my king and country in the army. So, surprise, you're gonna do the same thing." And just like that, 14-year-old Saad is granted a commission in an elite cavalry regiment and becomes an officer in the French military.

It sounds a little sensational, but the aristocracy of the 18th century did this all the time. The military was essentially finishing school for most teenage boys. You know, you get out there, see the world, maybe pick up a dashing scar or two. And the vibe was very similar to an old school fraternity, like Animal House with cannons and uniforms.

To Sod, this was great news. This teenager, barely more than a tween really, must have been absolutely psyched. No more exams or lectures or classrooms. He'd get a dazzling, handsome uniform, a beautiful horse, and a sword and a pistol. Ladies love a man in uniform after all. So to Sod, this was super cool. Every teenage boy's dream.

Well, Saad's time in the army was destined to be much more than just pageantry and parades, because in the same year France decided to throw bows with some other formidable European powers: Great Britain and Prussia. Before he'd even broken in his new cavalry boots, Donatien de Saad realized he was going to war. The Seven Years' War, to be precise. And Saad really comes out of his shell in the army.

For whatever reason, it just suited him perfectly. And it's at this point in his life, when he's slowly becoming an adult, that we see a remarkable transformation. The quiet, sulking bookworm goes into the military cocoon and becomes a swaggering, charming rake. At 18 years old, he was, according to most sources, head-turningly handsome. With curly blonde hair, pale blue eyes, the ladies absolutely loved him.

Sod the womanizer was born. And this is when we start to get actual letters written by the man himself, and we get a sense of his personality in his own words. And of course, it's very fitting that most of it involves sex,

As he wrote while stationed in Germany, quote, End quote.

Saad's reputation as a charmer and a womanizer continued to grow. His commanding officer wrote to Saad's father, quote, Your dear son is doing marvelously. He is friendly, easygoing, and amusing. We're taking good care of him. His little heart, or rather his body, is furiously combustible. German girls, look out.

But it wasn't all Prussian cougars and chasing tail for Captain Donatien. This was a war after all, and in that Saad excelled as well. His temper and anger, what he would have euphemistically called passion, could be weaponized into something very useful on the battlefield. When push came to shove, Saad was not just some pampered aristocrat who would hide in a command tent.

he exhibited genuine courage. As he remembered, quote, "War began, and dare I say, I fought well," end quote. His superior officer agreed, noting that Saad was, quote, "Quite deranged, but very brave," end quote. Despite his valor, his good looks, and his talents with women, Saad still felt very lonely in the army. He didn't really have anyone that he considered a true friend.

He also started to realize that he didn't like people very much, at all. As he wrote in a letter to his father, quote, I have few friends, perhaps none, because I know no one who is truly sincere and would not sacrifice you 20 times over for the slightest advantage. Whom can we trust anyhow? Friends are like women. When put to the test, the goods often prove defective. End quote.

Yes, even at a young age, Sade was a budding misanthrope and misogynist. When the Marquis de Sade was 22 years old, the Seven Years' War ended. Brave soldiers like Sade had done their best, but France had ultimately lost. It had been absolutely humiliated by Great Britain and Prussia. And the consequences of losing this international scuffle were disastrous for the reputation of the French monarchy.

France lost all of its North American colonies and saw its global power significantly diminished. The seeds of discontent that would eventually explode into the violence of the French Revolution had been planted. But the 22-year-old Marquis de Sade couldn't have been more oblivious to the growing tenor of unrest in his country. He didn't know it, but an expiration date had been stamped on his opulent, privileged existence and maybe even his life.

But for now, he was in his prime, and it was time to lick the wounds of defeat, and maybe lick a little something else, as only an aristocrat's son knows how. It was time to party. As Sod's father wearily complained, quote, End quote.

Saad loved the big city, and there was no bigger city than Paris. France's famous metropolis quickly became Saad's favorite hunting ground. This is how one aristocrat described the city at the time, quote,

End quote.

In other words, there was nothing quite like Paris. Well, the young Marquis found more than his fair share of pleasures and distractions in the City of Lights. Basically, the Marquis de Sade goes full playboy. Picture the Wolf of Wall Street and you might have a conservative idea of his shenanigans. All of this exasperated his father, who grumbled, quote,

My son never misses a ball or a play. It is infuriating. End quote. Saad was spending extravagant amounts of money, chasing pretty young actresses during the day and creeping into seedy brothels at night. He was a dashing 22-year-old with a metric ton of privilege, seemingly immune to consequences, and flush with a ravenous appetite for everything life had to offer.

But while Saad was living it up in Paris, his father, the Count of Saad, was making other plans. For years, the elder Saad had been guarding a dirty little family secret. They were broke. So how did that happen?

Well, navigating the French aristocracy, climbing the ladder, gaining favors from the king, incurred some seriously hefty price tags. You know, this was a world that was all about appearances and excess. To be taken seriously, you had to have the best clothes and the best food and the best houses. And that sucked the Saad family fortune bone dry.

But the father had a solution. And the solution lay in the son. If the young Marquis could be married off to an up-and-coming wealthy bourgeois family, the Saads could get back in the black. Back in the money. After a long search that took almost two years, Saad's dad finds a suitable match for his son. And her name was Renée.

Renée Montreuil was the eldest daughter of a prominent Parisian judge and her family was new money. A stark contrast to the generational privilege of the Sades, the Montreuils had built their fortune recently through commerce and politics.

Well, the old money and the new money would prove to be unlikely allies. The Saad family name was good as gold, even if their bank account was coughing up dust. After all, they were old blood aristocracy, and that still meant something. The Montreuils, on the other hand, were flush with cash, but they didn't have that respected generational legacy that went back centuries. So, on paper, this was a win-win.

If Renée, the young bride-to-be, had any reservations about this, she didn't have much of a choice. None of the young French women in her position did. Arranged marriages happened all the time. As historian Maurice Levert writes, "...girls were handed over to strangers and told to behave like ladies, but really they were pawns in a game of ambition and profit, tokens in a traffic of influence, a quest for preferment and wealth."

Renée had never met the young man that she was about to marry and she must have been incredibly nervous. Renée was somewhat of a black sheep in her family. Historian Maurice Lever describes her in this way in his biography of Sade: "She had a soldier's demeanor and no attempt at elegance. She wore old clothes, old shoes, and put on heavy gloves to split wood.

Yet her judgment of others was sound, and her writing lively, colorful, and often picturesque. End quote. In other words, René was a bit of a tomboy, but a sensitive, honest soul with very few pretensions.

And she was not exactly thrilled to be marrying this young Marquis with a rakish reputation. And she didn't think highly of old money aristocrats at all, once describing them as, quote, a bunch of riffraff, the most successful of whom are the most fraudulent.

End quote. But it wasn't up to her. And in the end, the tomboy married the playboy on May 17th, 1763. On that day, Renee met her new husband for the very first time, a vivacious, handsome young man with blonde hair and pale blue eyes. At the time, she probably thought she'd hit the jackpot. Well, she had not.

The Montreuils, in their desire for a higher social standing, had just swallowed a poison pill. The Marquis de Sade's father had swindled them. This charming son-in-law that the Montreuils had acquired would cost them dearly over the course of their lives. Not only money and trouble, but heartache and pain. Sade's father gloated in a letter, quote,

These are good people whom my son will be quite happy with. As for me, what makes up my mind is that I'll be rid of the boy who has got not one good quality and all the bad ones. I pity them for making such a bad buy, someone capable of all sorts of foolishness, and I have done things to get rid of him that I would never have done had I loved him tenderly. I do not think I can pay too much for

for the pleasure of never hearing about him again. I cannot help feeling pity for them on the acquisition they have just made. On Easter Sunday, 1768, about five years after the Marquis and Renée were married, a young woman bursts into a Paris police station. One look at her and everyone can see she is terrified. Her eyes are wide, she's jumpy,

Her clothes are disheveled, her hair is a mess, and she also appears to be bleeding from her lower back. This woman's name was Rose Keller. She was a 36-year-old German immigrant, and she didn't speak French very well, but the police officer could tell she was clearly rattled.

She'd been accompanied to the police station by several local women who'd found her running frantically along the side of the road. Once the woman stopped shaking and managed to calm down a little bit, she told the room of people what had happened to her over the course of the day. Rose Keller was essentially a homeless woman, and that Easter Sunday she'd been begging, asking for charity outside a church at the Parisian Place des Victoires.

At around 9 in the morning, she heard someone call out to her. She looked across the street and saw a young, well-dressed gentleman leaning against a statue of Louis XIV. He was wearing a long gray coat and wore a hunting knife on his belt. He had pale blue eyes. And the gentleman says something like, Hey there, you look like you could use a little extra money. How about we go back to my place?

Well, Rose Keller wasn't much of a French speaker, but she knew what that meant. And she says, look, I'm not that kind of girl. No, thanks. The gentleman smiles and says, no, no, no, you misunderstand me. God, how embarrassing. All I meant was that I'm in need of a housekeeper. And if you come back to my house and tidy it up for me, I'll pay you very well.

Rose Keller's inner alarm bells must have been ringing, but she looks at this guy with the nice clothes and the fancy knife and the handsome face, and she sees dollar signs. And for a little afternoon cleaning, totally worth it. So she says, okay, I'll clean your house.

"'Wonderful,' says the gentleman. He claps his hands, a carriage rolls up, and the two hop inside. The carriage rumbles over the Paris cobblestones, out of the city, and onto the dirt paths of the countryside. Eventually, they arrive at a little cottage, and the gentleman takes her hand and leads her inside. He lights a candle and says, quote, "'Follow me, my love,' and he takes her downstairs into a small, dimly lit room."

The candlelight flickers across the walls, and Rose Keller starts to see what's hanging on them. Whips, switches, flagellation instruments of multiple sizes and shapes. Then the gentleman says, quote, Undress. Rose Keller replies, What for? For fun, he says. Rose Keller, despite her fear, says defiantly, quote, I would rather die, end quote.

Something dangerous flashed in the gentleman's pale blue eyes, and he responded, If you don't undress, I'll kill you and bury you in the garden. Now, what's it gonna be? Many hours later, at the police station, a doctor examined Rose Keller's lower back. She had been whipped several times with a cat-of-nine-tails or a birch rod.

She also claimed that the gentleman had made little cuts on her backside with a knife and poured hot red wax into the wounds. Although the doctor couldn't find any evidence of that. And the doctor asked, had he done anything else to her? Had she been raped?

"'No,' she said with a confused shrug. To paraphrase her testimony, it was this theatrical descent into the downstairs room, the reveal of the whips, the undressing, and then he pushed me down on the bed, tied me up, and whipped me. I couldn't see what was happening behind me, but then I heard him make a noise, and he was done.'

The gentleman wiped the sweat off his brow, disappeared into another room, and came back with snacks and wine like nothing ever happened. He rubbed an ointment on the welts on my back. Then he said he'd be back later that night, and he left.

Well, naturally, after whatever that was, Rose Keller was freaked the hell out, and she didn't know if these games were going to escalate. If she didn't leave right then and there, she very well might end up buried out back in the garden. During the whipping, she told him she didn't want to die before having confessed on Easter Sunday. The gentleman replied, quote, End quote.

Well, while the gentleman was gone, Rose Keller finds an unlocked window upstairs, ties sheets together, and climbs out the window. A few hours later, she's sitting in front of the policeman, telling her story. Her description of the gentleman matched reports they had on a notorious libertine and lothario in the area. The Paris authorities were well acquainted with this man. This was obviously the work of the Marquis de Sade.

At the Saad's home in Paris, a representative of the court arrives to inform them of the charges being brought against the Marquis. His wife, Renée, listens to all of this with shock. And to her even greater shock, the Marquis admits that yes, he was the man they were looking for, although he told the story much differently.

The Marquis claimed that he had solicited a prostitute named Rose Keller who agreed to accompany him to an isolated cottage for the purposes of sex. They had agreed on a price and she came along willingly. The whips and rods had freaked her out a little bit, but she made no cries of protest. Other than the whipping, which she had agreed to, he had not hurt her.

The Marquis also scoffed at the charge that he had cut her with a knife. That was absolutely a lie, he said. Maybe the strikes from the whip had been painful enough to be perceived as knife cuts, but no, he didn't do that.

And of course she denied that she was a prostitute. Prostitution was illegal. Of course, she would never admit to that. Still, his version could not account for the fact that the woman had literally climbed out a window to get away from him. The Marquis' wife, Renée, listened to all of this information. She heard every fact and absorbed every detail. And before long, she realized what she had to do. She sends a message to her mother. And it says...

Please, help us make this go away. In the five years since they'd been married, Renee had grown to love her libertine husband dearly. She knew that his sexual tastes were unorthodox, even dangerous, but she loved him anyway. And Saad loved her for loving him in spite of it all. He'd never felt truly understood by anyone, but Renee seemed to know what made him tick.

She'd never tried to tie him down in a monogamous relationship and she never judged him. But now the couple found themselves in serious legal trouble under the threat of ruinous scandal. However, if they could grease the right palms, this could go away.

and for that they needed a fixer. Luckily, there was a very good one in the family: Madame de Montreuil. Renée's mother and Sade's mother-in-law was a formidable figure. She was the real power in the family, both intellectually and financially. Her social connections were vast spiderwebs of influence, and she could pull at any number of threads to puppeteer situations to her advantage.

A family friend described the Madame de Montreuil as, quote, End quote. Renée had a more frank assessment of her mom, saying, quote, End quote.

Madame de Montreuil loved her daughter Renée deeply, even though they couldn't have been more different. The daughter was a gentle, earnest tomboy, and the mother a fierce and cunning socialite. And now Mama Bear saw her daughter's happiness threatened. Initially, Madame de Montreuil had liked the Marquis de Sade. He was fun. He was good-looking. He came from an important family and had wit and intelligence that could keep up with her own.

But regardless of whether she personally liked him or not, the family did not need this kind of embarrassment or scandal. So Madame de Montreuil whips out her checkbook. Rose Keller, the accuser, is offered an obscene sum of money to withdraw the charges and stay silent on the Marquis de Sade's sexual predilections.

The frightened German immigrant agreed. She took the money and ran, and in the end, the marquee was shielded from any serious legal consequences.

Now, it's very important to note that whippings and beatings were not avant-garde sexual practices in pre-revolutionary France. S&M was downright mundane, long before Saad's name ever became associated with it. As one police inspector noted, quote, There is not a brothel today in which one does not find canes and whips in large numbers. I have found many men who come looking for a good thrashing."

End quote. The whipping was not the issue in this case. It was the kidnapping, the cutting, the threat of death, and the sensational nature of it all taking place on Easter Sunday. You know, the confess to me stuff.

And that made it heinous in the eyes of the authorities and the public press. As one newspaper said at the time, quote, His behavior in this crime clearly proves that he is crazy. He is a sick mind, more insane than it is wicked, and it is believed that his mind is unhinged. End quote. As Francine du Plessis Gray writes in her book At Home with the Marquis de Sade, quote, It turned him overnight into a media celebrity. End quote.

And what did Sade himself think of all this ruckus? He thought it was ridiculous, overblown nonsense. He complained, quote, I am a libertine, but I am no criminal and no murderer, end quote. People did this kind of kinky stuff all the time. So why was he the target in a society as debauched as Ancien France? Furthermore, as a member of the aristocracy, he considered himself above the law.

Why should anyone care if he drew a little blood on some homeless hooker? In fact, that power dynamic was a big source of his excitement. Quote, Beauty, virtue, innocence, poverty, none of these can serve as protection to the object we covet. On the contrary, poverty gives us our victim and makes it pliant. End quote.

On the issue of complete and unrestricted sexual freedom, he was utterly defiant, saying, "...I respect all tastes and fantasies, however bizarre they may appear. It is only by enlarging the scope of one's tastes and one's fantasies, by sacrificing everything to pleasure, that the unfortunate individual called man, thrown despite himself into this sad world, can succeed in gathering a few roses from among life's thorns."

His mother-in-law, Madame de Montreuil, did not share his dismissive, freewheeling attitude or his philosophical musings. Frankly, she was tired of his bullshit. She wrote, "...such hidden infidelities are an offense to his wife and to me."

but this public misbehavior will do him irreparable harm if it becomes known. When I am working so hard to use my friends for his advancement and benefit, when he is indebted to his wife and to us for hushing up an affair that might have ruined him forever and earned him years in a dungeon, these are the tokens of gratitude we receive? We are not always masters of our hearts, but we can always be masters of our behavior.

and it is on the basis of our behavior that we are judged. He is taking too much advantage of my patience." The Rose Keller affair, as it came to be known, was the first of three key scandals that essentially ruined Sa's life.

This was strike one. Now, you'd think that after a close scrape with the law, the Marquis would wise up and lay low. But the truth was, this guy was a compulsive pleasure seeker, a dyed-in-the-wool sex addict, completely oblivious to the harsh reality of cause and effect. And it led him down a very dangerous road. At the end of the day, he couldn't help but get himself into trouble. As Maurice Lever wrote, quote,

Drama was as necessary to Donatien de Sade as the air he breathed. Strike two happened years later, in 1772.

The Marquis de Sade was traveling, as he often liked to do, and one hot summer weekend he found himself in Marseille, which is a gorgeous port city in the south of France. It was a Saturday, and the Marquis decided that he wanted to have a little fun. So he asks his servant, a man named Latour, to go round up some young prostitutes for an orgy.

Now, before we go any further, it's important to note that orgies were not uncommon in French social circles in the 18th century. Like, at all. The deep tradition of true love and monogamy that defines our own society just was not there. People did this all the time, and they did it without getting themselves into trouble with the law.

But Saad had a talent for cranking things to 11 and ripping off the knob. So in Marseille, his valet procures four prostitutes all around the age of 20 for this orgy. Now before things get started, he passes a little box around with candies inside. Nothing wrong with that, right? A little candy. Well, the sweets were laced with Spanish fly.

If you don't know what Spanish Fly is, essentially it's a natural aphrodisiac derived from a beetle, a bug. And it basically inflames the blood vessels in certain areas of the body, and yeah, you're ready to go. It's kind of like a primitive Viagra, but for both men and women. Well, Saad gives these prostitutes way too high of a dose of Spanish Fly, which would be a problem later. But for now, the orgy is on.

As you might expect, Sod brings out the whips and the chains and the flails. He asks one of the girls to hit him with a whip that has sharp nails tied on the end. This was clearly some advanced level stuff and the prostitute can only hit him about three times before she loses her nerve. She's drawing blood and it freaks her out. Sod says, "Okay, wuss, go get that broom handle over there and hit me with that."

Investigators later found hundreds of marks carved into the bedpost. Apparently, Saad had been carving them into the wood with a knife, recording every single strike he received. And the final tally was 758.

But there was another feature to this orgy that caused some serious legal consternation. Despite the liberated sexual attitudes of the French, there was still one act that carried some serious legal consequences. Sodomy.

At the time, it carried the death penalty. You know, they burned people alive for this, literally. Not frequently, but it did happen. Well, this legal statute was a huge inconvenience for Saad because sodomy was literally his favorite sex act. Both with women and with men, giving and receiving, Saad was bisexual, and anyone who expressed a pearl-clutching attitude about that earned nothing but an eye roll from the libertine marquee.

And here's what he had to say about his bisexuality. End quote.

This orgy was clearly one for the books. It had everything. Like a full bingo card of scandalous sex acts, it had the whipping, the blood, the sodomy, and, pivotally, the aphrodisiacs. Well, as I mentioned before, Sod had made a critical mistake.

He'd given the girls way too high a dose, and they start getting sick. The next day, after Saad and his valet Latour are long gone, the girls start feeling terrible. Sweats, fever, chills. They can't even get out of bed, and then they start throwing up black bile.

For weeks, some of them hover dangerously close to death, but to everybody's relief, they recover. This accidental poisoning was interpreted as an intentional poisoning, and it results in a massive investigation and months of gossip.

The "poisoned sweets affair" as it came to be known was really, really bad for Sade. In many ways, it was the turning point for his entire life, because as I mentioned, sodomy carried the death penalty, as did poisoning, and this time there was no amount of strings his mother-in-law, Madame de Montreuil, could pull. In fact, she soon began secretly working to have him imprisoned. This was a bridge too far. She wrote to the courts, quote:

His family is greatly concerned that he should be securely detained, his mind being much deranged, and there is a good reason to fear that he may perpetrate some new madness. End quote. Saad soon found himself a wanted, hunted man.

And he was also deeply unnerved and angry at his mother-in-law's desire to have him imprisoned, saying, quote, Madame de Montreuil's mania is most extraordinary. She will perpetuate the dishonor of this unfortunate affair and make me personally live the saddest, most miserable life. End quote. The Parisian authorities couldn't find Saad anywhere.

He'd gone underground. So they held a symbolic public execution in which they created a straw dummy of Saad, which they beheaded and burned.

From that moment on, Saad was considered legally dead, and dead men have no civil rights. If they ever caught him, he would disappear into a hole forever. But his wife, the loyal, steadfast Renee, sticks by her man through all of this. She tries to bribe the prostitutes to recant their details of the story, but it doesn't do any good. Cat's basically out of the bag at this point. So

So, Renée hides her husband as best she can, avoiding police raids and searches of their estate in southern France. Her mother, the powerful Madame de Montreuil, could not understand her daughter's devotion to this notorious deviant. She wrote in a letter, quote,

Or does she fear that she one day may be punished by him? No matter what happens, she never utters a single complaint. She would allow herself to be chopped up into pieces before she would agree to anything she believed might hurt him. If they stay together, he will drag her down into the abyss with him. End quote. The Poisoned Sweets Affair was Strike 2. Strike 3 comes a couple years later, in 1774.

After all the gossip, the heat, the legal trouble, Saad's decision to do what he does next can only be interpreted as overtly self-destructive. As Francine du Plessis Gray writes, quote, This is the point at which Delnatian de Saad's quest for pleasure crosses the line between obsession and some kind of dementia. Broke, hunted by police, an outlaw, he now chooses to hold his most extravagant, outrageous bacchanal to date.

End quote. The Marquis de Sade had a chateau in the south of France, a castle essentially. And in the winter of 1774, the Marquis and his wife Renée disappear into this fortress, away from the prying eyes and wagging tongues of French high society. But before they begin what would be a months-long period of isolation, Sade hires six servants to stay with them over the course of the winter.

All of these servants are 15-year-old girls whom Saad personally chose for their physical beauty. They entered the chateau with promises that they would be paid lavishly. For six weeks, no one was allowed in or out of this fortress. And every day after 3 p.m., all the doors and the gates were locked tight, and the lights inside the house went dark.

People in the local area could only guess what kind of depraved, nocturnal activities were happening in the lair of the infamous Marquis. Eventually, people start asking questions. Madame de Montreuil had her suspicions as well, saying, quote, "...in his chateau with her," meaning René, "...he is invulnerable and totally secure and permits himself whatever his heart desires."

The parents of these adolescent servants soon realize that this is more than just a seasonal gig. They hadn't heard a peep out of their daughters in weeks, so they start petitioning the local government to intervene. Eventually, these six teenage girls emerge from the Chateau de Sade.

Several have visible marks, wounds, and scars. One is pregnant. All souvenirs from the violent sex games of the Marquis. For six weeks, the Marquis de Sade had been the stage manager of a cast that he himself had assembled. He'd used his isolated chateau as a personal playground to indulge his fantasies and satisfy his appetites. The truth is, no one knows exactly what happened inside.

The girls wouldn't talk specifics and insisted that they'd been treated more or less fine. But everyone else could draw conclusions. And that was enough to finally push the Marquis past the point of no return. Strike three. At first glance, this last scandal sounds very sinister. But compared to the other two scandals, there's not a lot written about what actually happened in the Chateau. The girls just wouldn't talk.

The previous two scandals, Rose Keller and the Poisoned Sweets, are exhaustively documented by historians. Writers can and do break down literally every detail of these orgies and encounters moment to moment. Every bump, grind, whip, and moan, which I have spared you from. You're welcome. After all, this is a history show, not Penthouse Forum, but this third

This third scandal is barely documented at all. The fallout is, but what actually happened inside the rooms of the Chateau is not explicitly mentioned in any primary source, letter, or court document. And we'll probably never know what actually happened. But the fallout was intense. One girl's father actually tries to kill Saad, which honestly, understandable.

One morning, he marches into the chateau and aims a pistol two inches in front of the Marquis' chest. Then he pulls the trigger. A big noise, thick belch of smoke, but nothing happens. The bullet was a misfire. This incident deeply rattled the Marquis.

For so many years, he'd pushed and pushed and pushed the envelope. He'd even come to enjoy the attention and his own dark reputation. As he said to his lawyer, quote, I pass for a werewolf in these parts. Poor little chicks with their words of terror.

End quote. Not that this bad reputation wasn't extremely inconvenient. He complained, quote, End quote. But after the scandal of the little girls, as it came to be called, the Marquis realizes he's at the end of his rope. So he goes on the run again.

He disappears to Italy for several months, and he pops up randomly here and there across southern France. But then, the Marquis gets some very bad news. His mother, the estranged, distant mother who had no interest in raising him, was dying.

All his life, the Marquis de Sade had wanted nothing more than the smallest token of affection from his birth mother. He never really got to know her, and she rarely visited him. But now, she was about to be gone, and he thought, maybe, maybe we can square things, maybe we can make this right. So, he decides to take the risk, and he travels to the city of Paris to say goodbye.

A few weeks later, he's in an apartment in Paris and he hears a knock on the door. It's the police. His mother was not dying at all. She was already dead. In fact, she'd been dead for three weeks. The delayed news had been part of an elaborate trap to flush him out, set by none other than Madame de Montreuil, his mother-in-law.

In 1774, at the age of 34, the Marquis de Sade disappears into a towering French prison called Vincennes. He would spend roughly the next 13 years of his life behind bars, or as the contemporary euphemism went, quote, admonished behind the bar, end quote. And what came out of that prison would chill bones and arouse passions for centuries to come.

These days, when someone goes into a modern prison system, they usually have at least an inkling of the amount of time they're going to be there. A judge will say, for the crime of X, you are sentenced to the punishment of Y. You may not be happy about it, but you have a pretty firm idea of how long you're going to be cut off from society.

We take that certainty for granted, but the psychological benefit of that is huge. Because it means there's a light at the end of the tunnel. A defined endpoint for your pain. Something to work towards. Something to look forward to. It means there is life after this. Well, when the Marquis de Sade was marched into his new home, the impregnable citadel of Vinson prison, he had no clue when he'd be getting out.

He had no clue if he'd ever get out. In fact, he hadn't even been officially convicted of a crime. In her quest to put her deviant son-in-law behind bars, Madame de Montreuil had secured an important legal document from the King of France. It was called a lettre de cachet, which is just French for sealed letter. Well, a lettre de cachet allowed you to imprison someone indefinitely.

not for what they had done, but for what they might do in the future. No trial, no jury, no verdict, no legal process whatsoever.

The Lettre des Cachés was a hugely corrupt aspect of the French justice system that allowed wealthy or influential families to make problematic family members disappear. It was a blank check from the highest authority in the land to completely destroy anyone who was inconvenient to you.

And that was exactly what Madame de Montreuil intended for the Marquis de Sade. She was going to throw away the key and never look back. Maybe then her daughter, Renée, would be able to move on and let go of her toxic husband. Madame de Montreuil wrote in a letter, quote, The man has been arrested and locked up in a fortress near Paris. So now I am at peace and I believe everyone will be happy. End quote.

She tried to rationalize what she had done in a letter to her daughter Renee saying, quote, He certainly did what he did. If he did it in full possession of his senses and in cold blood, he certainly deserves at the very least to be prevented from doing it again. It is therefore necessary that some years pass to calm his blood, cool his imagination, end quote. But to Renee, this was an unspeakable betrayal. She said, quote,

I cannot forgive her for having him arrested. End quote. Under the legal power of the Lettre des Cachés, Sade was thrown into the bowels of the prison that would be his home for the next decade, for the rest of his life, as far as he knew. And here's how one inmate described the experience of entering that prison, Vincent. Quote, The iron doors turn on their enormous hinges, and the vaults echo this unhappy harmony.

End quote.

Saad was imprisoned in a tower, in cell number 6. After a while, the guards wouldn't even mention him by name, he was just simply known as Monsieur Le Six, or Mr. Six. It sounds a little bit like a supervillain name, right? Mr. Six? Well, the Marquis de Saad reflected on his own situation, quote,

End quote.

The Marquis was famous for his explosive temper and all he could do was write angry, furious letters to the outside world. In one he said, quote, "'It is for my own good,' they say. So it is for a man's own good to put him at risk of going crazy, for his own good to have his health ruined, for his own good that he is fed on the tears of his own despair, and I confess that I have never been so fortunate to sample such goodness.'"

End quote. And he knew exactly who had put him there. In a letter to Renee, he wrote, quote, End quote.

Sod's sudden change of fortune was nothing short of mental whiplash. He was a libertine without liberty, a wild child in a cage. And that pulled at the fabric of Sod's sanity. He asked his jailers, his wife, his lawyers, over and over and over again, when would he be released? He was obsessed with finding out this date. He was even suicidal. He wrote, quote, "'When will I get out?'

Tell me, tell me, or I will smash my head against the walls that contain me. Tell me. Do not take my soul from me piecemeal. Do not shred it piece by piece as you are doing. My despair is exploding. It is violent. My expressions portray it for you. You see it. I am no longer in my right mind. The horror of a fate which they will not allow me to glimpse any end is too much for me to bear, and I cannot take it anymore."

End quote. Physical human contact was everything to Saad. I mean, it was the meaning of life as far as he was concerned. And now, overnight, that was gone. He was all alone with his thoughts. And that can be a dangerous thing. Quote,

End quote. In his sorrow and frustration, he even lashed out at his loyal wife, Renee. Quote, End quote.

End quote.

But in spite of all of that written abuse, Renée was ride or die. She loved her husband Donatien deeply, and she tried to console him as best that she could, writing, quote, I know a few, and I mean very few, a rare few hearts and souls like yours. If you do not on occasion lose your poor head and write some rather disagreeable things, you would be perfect, but you will always be perfect for me.

The Marquis de Sade was deprived of many things in prison, but the most traumatic loss for him was sex. The Marquis de Sade was an addict, and anytime you take away something from an addict, they're going to go through withdrawals.

All of his elaborate sex games and diabolical fantasies were impossible in prison, probably for the best. Historians have performed extremely in-depth investigations on what made Saad tick sexually, and the consensus on the source of all his kinks and fetishes was that he had a psychological obstruction to getting there.

He needed extreme stimulants like the whippings and the pain and the blood to get off. Normal sex just did not cut it for Saad. And he was very aware that he was different, saying, quote, What man wouldn't change his taste at once if he could and wouldn't prefer to be like the rest of mankind instead of being peculiar if he had the power?

End quote.

But while Saad was clearly willing to play the sympathy card from time to time, at the end of the day he was proud of who he was. Defiant, even. He wrote, quote, "...my way of thinking, you say, cannot be approved. What difference does it make to me? The truly crazy person is the one who thinks in a certain way for the sake of others. My way of thinking is the fruit of my reflections. It grows out of my existence."

End quote.

At the end of the day, Saad knew the truth of himself. He knew who he was to the core. As he explained in a letter to his wife, quote, End quote.

Saad liked what he liked. Nothing could change that. But when it came to fulfilling his sexual desires in prison, the Marquis had to make do with what he could. He sent exact dimensions and specifications to René, asking for specially crafted sex toys that he could pass off as everyday items, anything to spice up the solitary confinement he had to endure.

It's actually kind of funny to read the letters about this too. Renee hated doing this facade. She had to go to the craftsmen and commission objects that were obviously dildos. And if the dimensions weren't right, he'd complain and he'd make her go get another one. And it was just incredibly embarrassing for her. In one letter, he said one of the objects was, quote,

Comfortable? Unfortunately, too comfortable. The point is that I'm not putting it in my pocket, but elsewhere, where it is still far too small. End quote. And because it's the Marquis de Sade, of course he cataloged and counted every, uh, session. After ten or so years, the final tally was 6,536 introductions, as he called them.

But as the years went on and the world passed him by, the Marquis de Sade's mind began to fracture and corrode under the stress and isolation of prison. There's a really interesting period that you can follow in his correspondence where he becomes convinced that letters from his wife and others contained a secret code. He thought that each letter contained numerical signals that told the future or offered clues to when he would be released.

It was all in his own head, but he believed that he could derive special significance from the exact number of paragraphs, the lengths of sentences, the dates mentioned, and he added them up and multiplied them, trying to find some hidden meaning. Here's one example of that in a letter to Rene. Quote, I'm constantly finding marks on every 36 lines. I was hopeful that it meant 36 weeks, but what do they mean? Maybe they refer to months?

End quote. And no signal was too much of a stretch. In another letter, he wrote, quote, Recently, because you wrote a 23, my walk was shortened. 2 to 3 p.m. was all I was allowed, and that makes 23. End quote. This is obviously the product of a mind under extreme duress. Rene insisted, quote, As for signals, I tell you once and for all that I have never sent you any. End quote.

The Marquis eventually snaps out of this obsession and he apologized. Quote, I think I fell victim to some sort of madness. End quote. The Marquis was losing it. And he knew it. The weeks, the months, and the years in prison pass. And they begin to take a toll not only on his mental state, but his physical health.

Saad gains a massive amount of weight. He was barely allowed out of his cell for any amount of exercise, and so he put on a lot of pounds. It didn't help that he was constantly asking Rene to send him indulgent foods like fresh salmon pate, biscuits, cookies, and cake. The Marquis had a huge sweet tooth. He griped to Rene, quote,

I asked for a cake with icing, but I want it to be chocolate. Chocolate as black as the devil's ass is black from smoke." You gotta admit, the Marquis de Sade could actually be pretty funny when he wanted to be. But then, Sade starts to notice another physical change. His vision gets blurrier and blurrier in his right eye. He finds himself hovering centimeters from the pages of his books, trying to make out the words.

The Marquis de Sade was going blind, and this was his absolute worst fear. His gift was for language. His passion was for ideas. Without the ability to consume books, those sanity-saving snippets of entertainment, he would truly go mad.

So he begs the prison doctor for some kind of eye medicine. He tries a few ointments and drops, but nothing really works. Instead, the doctor makes a suggestion. He says, look, man, reading books for hours and hours at night by the dim light of a single candle is killing your eyesight. Give your eyeballs a break and try writing instead. It's a little better for your eyes.

The Marquis had always enjoyed writing. He dabbled in plays and theater in his younger days, but he never really committed himself to the craft of it. But now, at the lowest point in his life, at absolute rock bottom, Saad discovers his true passion, something more exciting and liberating than all the orgies, parties, and high-class hookers in the world. His writing could offer a way out.

As historian Donald Thomas said, quote, He began to construct a kingdom of his own within the confines of his prison room. He would be the actor rather than the victim, supreme in his own thoughts and imagination. If there could be no escape outwards from the walls of his prison, perhaps there might be an escape inwards. There were those who had expected him to go mad, as other men did after years of captivity, but he was not to go mad.

On the contrary, he was to shock the minds of his bourgeois readers with terrifying intellectual clarity. He would employ his sanity against his enemies as though it were a weapon of total war. End quote. As the Marquis himself said, quote, My pen will be my weapon. Patience. Patience. He who laughs best, laughs last. End quote.

Writing became a form of vengeful self-therapy for the Marquis, a way to inflict pain and horror and shock on a society that had left him for dead in a stone tower. And it was within those pages that he could bring to life the fantasies and obsessions that the real world could never accept. On paper, he was truly free, free to indulge the darkest and most depraved corners of his mind.

As writer Albert Camus said, "...intelligence in chains loses in lucidity what it gains in intensity. In prison, dreams have no limit and reality is no curb." Oscar Wilde came to a similar conclusion a century later, saying that in captivity, "...the mind is forced to think."

It becomes the sure prey of morbid passions, obscene fancies, and thoughts that defile, desecrate, and destroy. This is when Saad's sexual tastes begin to transform from an eclectic collection of kinks and oddball fetishes into a pitiless moral philosophy. Sadism, as a literary concept, was born in that cell.

He wrote about his epiphany, quote, I am here alone. I am here at the end of the world, hidden from all eyes and beyond the reach of any creature. There are no more restraints and no more obstructions. There is nothing here but God and conscience. End quote. A French thinker named Simone de Beauvoir said, quote, Sade went into prison a man and he came out a writer.

The Marquis de Sade is the type of person that when you peek into the folds of his brain, he will scare you. And there's a temptation to reflexively back away and run for the hills and say, man, what a freak, what a lunatic, what a weirdo.

But if you stick around, if you take a deep breath and steel yourself and really give it a hard gaze, this is a guy who had some profound things to say about the human condition. Saad believed in his bones that there was no purpose in life except for the pursuit of physical pleasure. Everything else was a waste of time.

It's the old, we're not here for a long time, but we're here for a good time, philosophy. He also utterly rejected traditional Christian morality. In fact, he despised all religion because he thought that they were mental barriers to the pursuit of the true meaning of life.

He believed that the entire construct of civilization and the codes of morality it upheld were deeply unnatural. Mother Nature had no moral code, he argued. It's random and violent and cruel. Rape, murder, and cruelty are commonplace in the animal kingdom. And to stray from that chaotic equilibrium was to reject what we really were, animals.

There's a phrase you'll often hear in movies like, you know, if we do that, we're no better than the animals. Well, Sod believed that we were animals, and all the pain and dissatisfaction in life came from trying to pretend that we weren't. Why not embrace it, he argued? Why not lean into the truth that we all know deep down?

Only by breaking through these artificial barriers, by surrendering fully to the cruel, selfish, violent pursuit of self-gratification, could we ever be truly happy. As Donald Thomas wrote in his biography of the Marquis, quote, Saad was the bearer of bad news about the human race, end quote.

Now, naturally, the Marquis could not express these ideas directly, but he did so through his characters and his books. His fictional protagonist became the mouthpiece for his entire worldview. And if it shocked you, and it did shock most people, he could just say, oh, that's the character's point of view. It's just fiction.

There's this metaphor that I keep coming back to whenever I think about Saad's philosophy and his general attitude about sex. Have you ever turned over a log in the woods or something? You turn it over and you see squirming insects and creepy crawlies of all description? Well, Saad did that with human sexuality. He turned over the log and he liked what he saw.

As he said, quote, the greatest pleasures are born from conquered repugnances, end quote. In other words, get messy, get dirty, get over yourself. Instead of jumping back from the metaphorical insects under the metaphorical log, scoop them up, kiss them, love them, relish the sensation that simultaneously horrifies you and excites you.

Well, the Marquis de Sade was about to take all of those views and translate them into a story, a novel which would become one of the most notorious texts in Western literature. His magnum opus, entitled The 120 Days of Sodom, and he would write it in an environment even more demoralizing than his current abode at the prison of Vinson. In the mid-1780s, Sade was informed that he was being transferred,

He was going to the Bastille.

On a summer night in 1785, in his new cell at the Bastille, the Marquis de Sade was working feverishly. He had spent days carefully gluing pieces of paper together, about five inches wide each, until he had created a single blank scroll over 49 feet long. This was the canvas on which he would write his masterpiece. He'd specifically constructed it this way so that it could be rolled up and hidden inside the wall of his cell.

Because the words he was about to put down on paper, he did not want anyone finding or confiscating. At the top of this 49-foot sheet of paper, he wrote the following introduction, an almost microscopic cursive. Quote, End quote.

For 37 days straight, for three hours a night, every single night, Saad wrote this impure tale. It told of four powerful men, four politicians who were bored of life. The world held no novelty for them anymore, no excitement. So they entered into a pact.

Together, they would spend four months in a dark, isolated castle, a fortress in the center of a black forest, completely inaccessible to the outside world. Into this castle, they would take with them a harem of 28 young people, dozens of beautiful men and women, and once inside, no one would leave.

No one would be allowed to leave. Together, they would spend the next 120 days pushing their minds and bodies far beyond the horizons of morality and acceptable sexuality. They would pioneer a dark frontier that no one in the world but them had the stomach for. This novel that Sod wrote is essentially a horror story.

I'm not going to get into the detail of what happens in Saad's fictional castle, but it is objectively disgusting and extremely upsetting. Think of the worst horror movie you've ever seen, the most violent, disturbing, keep-you-up-for-days film you've ever witnessed. Then multiply it by like a thousand. Saad created an exhaustive, almost tediously descriptive chronicle of every awful sexual act he could think of. There's mutilation.

torture, cannibalism, rape, infanticide, and it goes on and on and on. Personally, I have not read it. I refuse, frankly. Just skimming a few choice excerpts and the plot summary on Wikipedia was enough to ruin my day. And trust me, it'll ruin your day too. Do not read The 120 Days of Sodom. As a French philosopher named Georges Bataille wrote, quote,

Nobody, unless he is totally deaf to it, can finish the 120 days of Sodom without feeling sick. End quote. Although I know some of you will turn this off and immediately start looking up the details out of curiosity, I'm just saying you've been warned. It's also interesting to think about the power of that. Think about how often people talk about how desensitized we are in the 21st century.

And we are, almost from adolescence, submerged in depictions of extreme violence. Now, I'm not saying it's a bad thing. Objectively, I love a good violent video game. But the fact that nighttime scribbles from a minor French aristocrat still have the power to shock and repulse two and a half centuries later, that is quite a feat. Of course, the natural question is, why? Why would someone write something like this?

Well, in Saad's view, this was not an erotic novel. The sex was not meant to titillate or excite. He thought of it as a scientific document, an attempt to codify and categorize every dark perversion and horrific sexual act that the human mind could dream up. And maybe it was some kind of self-exorcism.

He had all this stuff whirling around in his brain, accelerated and intensified by the incredible strain of prison. And he just had to get it out. He had to let it flow out of his head and onto the page, where he could finally stop fantasizing about these extreme acts in an attempt to break the numbness of prison, to feel anything at all. As one historian noted, quote,

in the secret universe of his skull he had committed acts of the most monstrous kind which no eyes but his own would ever witness even though the crimes were confided to paper so long as its hiding-place remained undiscovered his deeds would remain as secret as those of his heroes

End quote. This novel was also an exercise in a kind of meta-sadism. It's painful to read. It's gross and stomach-churning, and Saad knows that. He's getting off by inflicting mental distress on us, the readers. He was a man in deep psychological pain, who turned that pain back on his audience.

In the end, the 120 days of Sodom clocked in at a mind-blowing 250,000 words. But for some reason, after 37 days, Sod stopped working on it. Maybe he got bored, maybe he freaked himself out, but the 49-foot-long manuscript would stay hidden in the walls of the Bastille, untouched and unfinished. The Marquis, meanwhile, moved on to other stuff.

Slightly more mainstream fare, at least as he saw it. In the span of a few short years, the Marquis wrote, according to Francine du Plessis-Gray, quote, End quote.

Obviously, most of these were extremely sexual in nature and extremely transgressive. They were characterized by a moral apathy, sexual cruelty, and shocking violence. Nothing as insane as the 120 days of Sodom. That was in a class all its own. But Sod clearly had developed a unique voice.

And he sent this stuff to his wife, Renee, to get her opinion, her critique. And she was basically like, dude, what the hell is this? But she was a good sport, she knew his writing was very important to him, and she gave him fair, honest feedback.

One letter said, quote, End quote.

As the last decades of the 18th century came to a close, the Marquis wrote and wrote and wrote. But outside his cell window, the world was changing. Rapidly.

The American colonies had successfully rebelled against Great Britain and founded their own nation. France, almost bankrupted by its efforts to aid that American Revolution and undermine their rival, was in economic shambles, and the embers of revolution and violence were beginning to spark. The Marquis could hear unrest outside his tower window in the Bastille. He could hear the anger in the streets.

One day, a crowd had gathered outside, a protest against the French monarchy, and Saad starts screaming at the top of his lungs from his window, quote, End quote.

This was not true, at all. The Marquis was just trying to get back at the guards for all the cruel treatment he'd endured at their hands. Well, Saad gets punished for this little outburst. The warden transfers him out of the Bastille and to a mental hospital where he would make less trouble. Less than a week later, on July 14th, revolutionaries storm the Bastille. They massacre the warden and carry his head through the streets on a pike.

The Marquis de Sade was safely guarded at the asylum, but his books, his manuscripts, his plays, and all his writing were still in his cell at the Bastille. They had not been moved yet. Well, the mob breaks in and steals or burns everything. All his papers, all his writing, years worth of work and mental toil, gone. Overnight.

When Saad found out, he was devastated. Quote, I had been extremely busy in the Bastille. Everything was torn up, burned, carried off, pillaged. For the loss of my manuscripts, I have shed tears of blood. Beds, tables, chests of drawers can all be replaced, but not ideas. I will never be able to describe my despair at this loss. End quote.

Everything he had written was gone, except for one thing. Still hidden in the wall, written on a tiny roll of parchment, was his manuscript for the 120 days of Sodom. Two days before the storming of the Bastille, someone found its hiding spot. A man with a very long French name that I cannot pronounce competently, so we'll just leave it at that. And he took it home and he kept it hidden.

He never told anyone about it. For three generations, this family took care of this historical document.

Well, the Marquis de Sade thought his masterpiece had been "lost forever," destroyed in the turbulence he himself had agitated. But almost a century later, in the 19th century, it was sold to a collector and published in 1904. It was a miracle, but the Marquis' defining piece of intellectual property survived a revolution in 119 years.

Meanwhile, back in Saad's day, things happened very fast in the turbulent first years of the French Revolution. And I'm not an expert on the subject by any means, so I won't pretend to be, but things escalate to the point where the king, Louis XVI, is essentially held captive by his own people. Saad's wife, Renée, described the climate of fear in her letters from the period. Quote,

End quote. It was in this environment of uncertainty and emotional distress that Rene starts looking inward.

She starts thinking about her life, and she reflects on all the misery her husband had caused her. The stress, the anxiety, the years of loneliness. He had driven a wedge between her and her family. He had turned her into a glorified servant, fetching snacks and books and dildos, and not once had he ever said, thank you. As historian Francine du Plessis-Gray writes in her examination of René, quote,

Like innumerable wives of our own time who have suffered through years of psychic battering, Renée had been led to a breaking point by an accumulation of griefs. Her husband's repeated threats and insults, the painful acknowledgement of her own blundering dedication, her infatuation waning, her illusions about her husband dissolving, she returned to natural gravity. Basically, Renée had an epiphany.

a moment of clarity. After all these years, she wasn't in love with her husband anymore. As historian Neal Schaefer observed, quote, "'Long-suffering Renée, like the French people, was also eager for a change.'"

The Marquis de Sade, meanwhile, was still stuck in a mental asylum. But one day he gets some great news. The lettre de cachet, the royal legal device that his mother-in-law had used to keep him imprisoned indefinitely, was now void.

The king was powerless, therefore all his legal decrees were meaningless. So the new republican government starts releasing all of his political prisoners, and the Marquis de Sade was one of them. After 13 long years, after a prolonged period of mental anguish and isolation that it's hard to even fathom, he was free.

But he did not have a penny to his name. All his aristocratic privileges meant nothing in this brave new world. But at least he had his pen, his freedom, and the love of his life, Rene. When he steps out of the mental asylum and breathes the free air for the first time, he knows that this is a new beginning, a second chance.

The very first thing he does is to go see his wife, Renee. He rushes down to the house she's staying at, expecting to be welcomed with open arms. But a servant tells him she won't come down. She refuses to see him. His wife, the Marquis is told, is divorcing him.

Saad, of course, blames his mother-in-law, quote, "Once again the Montreuils, always and everywhere the Montreuils. They have forced my wife to separate from me. She did not want to do it. There is nothing they did not invent, nothing they did not do, to sway her decision." End quote. In reality, Renée had just fallen out of love with him. She was in her forties, suffering from illnesses, and she just wanted a little peace.

Her mother, Madame de Montruil, was not psyched that Sade was out of prison, but she didn't consider him a threat anymore. Certainly not to the family's reputation. That meant nothing in a post-revolutionary society where the old world was being dismantled piece by piece. And prison had tamed the wild young Marquis. Now he was poor, old, and powerless. The Marquis de Sade couldn't cause trouble for anyone anymore.

Madame de Montruil commented, quote, I do want him to be happy, but I seriously doubt that he knows how, end quote. Admittedly, the Marquis didn't have much to be happy about, as he took stock on April 14th, 1790, quote, In prison, I have lost my eyes, my lungs, but I have gained, for lack of exercise, a corpulence so enormous that I can scarcely move. All my senses are deadened.

I no longer have an appetite for anything. I love nothing. The world that I was insane enough to miss so intensely now seems boring to me and sad. There are times I feel driven to become a monk. I have never been so misanthropic as when I came back to live among men. They seem alien to me now. I still sometimes talk to myself when there was no one there at all.

End quote. In short, Saad was a 50-year-old morbidly obese sex addict with no prospects. As he complained, quote, I have fallen in the middle of Paris with not one Louis in my pocket, without knowing where to sleep, where to eat, or where to get some money. End quote. Even the thing that had brought him the most joy, maybe the only thing that had ever brought him joy, sex, left him cold. He was too old, too sick, too in pain to enjoy it anymore.

As Saad said, quote, End quote. This very low period after he's released from prison is the country music phase for Saad. He's got no truck, no girl, and no job. There are a lot of people who would just give up in the same situation.

but not our friend Donatien de Sade. It was true the Marquis had nothing, but he did have one thing that they could never take away, his mind. Sure, his health had been irrevocably ravaged by prison, but his intellect had been sharpened and clarified. His talents as a writer had never been more potent. And luckily for Sade, the hottest literary trend in revolutionary France at the time was erotica.

or as the French refer to it, books that are read with one hand. The atmosphere of uncertainty, change, and violence had whipped up an appetite for sex and hedonism like never before. Live for today, because tomorrow you might be dead. In fact, this craze for sexy literature was called "la foutreau manie," which literally translates to "fuckomania,"

So, Saad goes to work. He contacts publishers and begins writing to make a buck. As Saad explained to an acquaintance, quote, I needed money. My publisher asked for something quite spicy, so I made him a book capable of corrupting the devil himself. End quote. The result was his famous novel Justine, which we mentioned at the top of the episode.

It was, as Maurice Lever described, quote, one of the most powerful and striking creations of French literature. And at the time, it made some serious waves, as one reviewer wrote, quote, The title might attract and deceive sensitive and honest souls, but everything that the most deranged imagination can possibly invent in the way of things indecent, sophistic, and disgusting is collected in this bizarre novel. End quote.

Aside from a scandalous yet blossoming literary career, Saad also gets involved in revolutionary politics. He renounces his title of Marquis and changes his name to the much more acceptable Louis Saad.

A flamboyant showboat like Saad was loathed to give up his fancy title, but this was about survival. The moneyed elite who had sucked the country dry were being killed in the streets, and Saad needed to distance himself from that system as much as possible. Thankfully, he already had a lot of street cred. If anyone questioned his patriotic bona fides, he could say, look guys, I've been the victim of the old regime for the past 13 years. No one dislikes the king and his cronies more than me.

Privately, Sade acknowledged that he was just playing the game to survive. "I adore the king, but I detest the old abuses. What am I at present, an aristocrat or a democrat? Tell me if you please because I for one have no idea." Well, Sade ends up playing this game so well that he's made a judge for a particular district in Paris.

And it was in this job that he begins to see the really ugly side of the revolution. Or rather, it starts to turn very ugly right in front of his eyes. On January 21st, 1793, the French king, Louis XVI, is executed by guillotine in front of a massive crowd. His wife, the famous Marie Antoinette, soon followed him, and this marks the beginning of an extremely bloodthirsty phase in French history.

anyone with aristocratic or royalist affiliations was harassed, harangued, and often murdered. It was a miracle that Sade was able to navigate this system and stay alive, considering his reputation and his aristocratic connections. If anyone was ripe for the shopping block, it was Sade. He was heir to one of the oldest families in France. He's got a rap sheet longer than the 49-foot murder sex novel he wrote in the Bastille. If you're going to guillotine anyone,

It's going to be Saad. But he plays the game, he keeps a low profile. He uses his writing talents to make money but also to give flourish to political documents and patriotic decrees. But all the political killing left an extremely bad taste in his mouth. Despite the murderous acts of his characters and his books, Saad despised the very concept of the death penalty.

Which, if you think about it, does jive with his worldview. He was all about extreme personal liberty. And there is no greater infringement on personal liberty than being killed by the state. Unfortunately, in his position as a judge, Saad had to make decisions that often led to people's deaths. So he's caught in this terrible conundrum of having to keep up appearances as a fervent servant of the revolution while staying true to what he believed.

As a judge, he was extremely lenient, almost suspiciously so. And it starts to raise a few eyebrows among his colleagues who start to wonder if Saad was a little too soft for this brave new world they were trying to create. Well, one day Saad gets a case file on his desk. A new family was up for review. It seemed that they had been very wealthy before the revolution and had some troubling royalist connections. But when he reads the name on the page,

His jaw drops. Montreuil. As in Madame de Montreuil. As in the in-laws that had locked him up for a huge portion of his life. Biographies on the Marquis de Sade tend to focus a lot on the fun stuff. The sex, the violence, the indulgence. And it's really easy to get caught up in that stuff and it's easy to blur the lines between Sade's writing and Sade the man.

And this decision that he's about to face is a defining moment for Saad the man. What he's about to do tells us the kind of person who he really was. Saad had every reason to want these people dead. His mother-in-law had been an object of his hatred for decades, a fixation for all his misfortune and anger and sadness forever.

This was a person who he once called, quote, an infernal monster, a venomous beast. I do not think it is possible to find a creature in the world more abominable. Not even hell vomits up anything close, end quote. And now, in a bizarre, ironic twist of fate, her life was in his hands. What people do with power, when they have it, tells you everything you need to know about them. You know,

You know, we live in a world where people with power and influence and money use those advantages as tools to hurt and punish the people they don't like. Of course, it's not a new phenomenon by any means. It happens in every society, on every continent, in every era. But the point I'm trying to make is that power over life and death is a serious test of character.

Sod had every reason to condemn his in-laws to the guillotine. Every cell in his body must have been screaming, do it, screw her. She kept you locked away like an animal for years. It destroyed your health, wrecked your marriage. You would have died in that cell if she had had her way. Doesn't she deserve a little payback? Doesn't she deserve to die for what she did to you?

So Saad writes down his verdict. He decides to save the Montreuils, to save their lives.

After all you've heard today, you could be forgiven for thinking the Marquis de Sade is a piece of shit. You might think he's a disgusting, misogynistic creep. A deviant who deserved every bit of pain and suffering that he got. And that viewpoint is totally fair. But, humbly, I don't think he was a monster. You may disagree with that.

There are many that do. But Saad's decision to save his in-laws from the guillotine demonstrates a deep sense of humanity and mercy and self-restraint that monsters just don't have. You gotta remember, he hated these people. But he couldn't bear to be responsible for their deaths. He couldn't bear to hurt them back. For someone who loved to dole out pain so much, the Marquis de Saad could not hurt these people.

He could not inflict suffering when it had real life or death consequences. When I was researching this episode, I kept coming back to this incident over and over again, and I'm not a scholar on Saad by any means, but this strikes me as the moral climax of his entire life.

Obviously, not condemning someone to have their head chopped off doesn't make you a saint, but it is remarkable that he made the choice that he made, considering the time, the atmosphere, and the personal circumstances. Well, this decision to save the Montreal's had repercussions. People were already beginning to doubt Saad's commitment to republican justice. His leniency was a bit of a red flag, and that, combined with some scathing remarks against Christianity, landed Saad on a kill list.

He was arrested, imprisoned again, and marked for death.

Every day, in his cell he hears the fall of the guillotine and the thump of the heads outside his window. Saad knew his time was up. When Saad's day finally comes, June 9th, 1794, the prison bailiff walks the corridors of the prison, reading out all the names of the people condemned to die. He reads out about 25 names, but for some reason, he never calls Saad's name.

Louis Sade was marked as absent from the rolls. All of those other people had their heads chopped off that afternoon, but Sade was safe in his cell, overlooked. How this happened is a little bit of a mystery. Some historians chalk it up to a clerical error, the chaos and ineptitude of a political system that declared people enemies one day and friends the next.

But other historians believe that Sade made appeals to some powerful friends or bribed officials to let him off the hook. Everyone has their pet theory, but no one really knows what saved the Marquis de Sade from the Scythe of Liberty, as it was called. On the same day that he was set to be executed, the administration that had put him on the kill list, led by the fanatical Maximilien Robespierre, was overthrown.

The executors were executed, and before long, the Marquis de Sade was a free man, yet again. He had escaped death by a hair's breadth. But as we said earlier, Sade is such a glutton for punishment. He is an irrepressible pusher of the envelope. So what does he do after barely surviving the reign of terror? He writes a book even more graphic and scandalous than all of his previous ones. As a police report said in 1801, quote,

I had been informed that Saad, ex-marquis, notorious for having authored the infamous novel Justine, was imminently planning to publish an even more horrendous work, called Juliet." The novel Juliet is about a woman who fully embraces Saad's philosophical viewpoint of pleasure at all costs. She kills, tortures, and rapes for her own amusement.

And as she does these things, her life gets better and better. She becomes happier and happier. Saad seemed to be making the argument that by doing what you want, whenever you want, to whomever you want, happiness could be yours. Juliet has some of the most mind-bogglingly creative sexual imagery I've ever seen. It's nuts.

And I want to read you a brief rundown of some of the highlights as summarized by historian Francine du Plessis Gray. And just a warning, this passage gets extremely graphic. And if you're still with me at this point, I'm going to assume it won't bother you too much. But just a courtesy warning. Gray writes this about Saad's novel, Juliette.

Quote,

We encounter a character named Minsky, an omnivorous Russian giant who owns a private guillotine, whose ejaculations shoot 20 feet upward, whose mobile dining room furniture – tables, chairs, candelabra – are composed of hundreds of artistically arranged naked girls.

End quote.

This kind of wild, dreamlike imagery was sought exploring a concept that would not be popularized until almost a century later under Sigmund Freud: the concept of the unconscious mind. The idea that our minds harbor desires and impulses that we don't even know about.

Also, in his portrayal of lesbian and bisexual relationships, he was exploring the concept of sexuality as a spectrum, which would not gain a mainstream foothold until Alfred Kinsey popularized the idea in the mid-20th century. That was less than 100 years ago. The point being, Saad was incredibly ahead of his time. But all of this wild stuff got him in trouble again.

Napoleon Bonaparte, who by this point had seized control of France and positioned himself as its dictator, was enraged by the content of Justine and Juliet. He demanded that the author of the content be imprisoned and every copy of the books burned.

Saad was declared insane by the state and confined to a mental asylum, where he would spend the rest of his life. The authorities said he suffered from, quote, libertine derangement, end quote. Now, at face value, that sounds like a very sad way to end our story, but the Marquis de Saad made the most of his time at the insane asylum. He was free to walk around and have visitors, but most importantly, he was free to write.

Well, to the Marquis, a writer without a pen was like a junkie without a needle. He wrote books and plays and even had his fellow inmates at the asylum perform in his productions. He seemed, at last, to have achieved some semblance of contentment. As he wrote to an acquaintance a few years before his death, quote, Perhaps you would presently like a word about me. Well then, I am not happy, but I am well.

At the age of 74, the Marquis de Sade closed his pale blue eyes for the last time and died comfortably in his bed at the asylum. In the end, he'd spent 32 years of his life in some kind of captivity. Sade never really achieved true happiness, but maybe in his creative oasis at the asylum, he had found something resembling contentment.

If he had any advice for younger generations, some lesson to be gleaned from his seven decades of life, it was this, quote, Your body is yours and yours alone. You are the only person in the world who has a right to take pleasure from it and to permit whoever you will to get pleasure from it. Take advantage of the happiest time of your life. They are but too short, those happy years of our pleasures."

If we are fortunate enough to have taken advantage of them, pleasant memories console and divert us in our old age." No one could have ever accused the Marquis de Sade of wasting his younger years, but ironically, in his pursuit of pleasure, he spent most of the latter half of his life incarcerated and persecuted, separated from the thing he loved. Shortly after Sade was buried, a scientist dug up his body and stole his skull.

Well, the grave robber was a phrenologist, which is a debunked pseudoscience that looks at the shape of someone's skull to determine their personality type. This scientist expected to find severe deformations in the skull of this monstrous author, this world-famous pervert who had dreamt up the most insane depraved fantasies. The phrenologist was disappointed. He didn't find any abnormalities. Instead, he found a skull that was, quote,

In every respect, just like that of a father of the church. End quote. In other words, Sod's skull wasn't any different than the most innocent priest's. He wasn't a monster. He was just like us. And maybe that's what scared people the most. This has been Conflicted. Thanks for listening.

Conflicted is a proud member of the Evergreen Podcast Network. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Instagram for updates, news about upcoming shows, and semi-daily musings about history. If you enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, rate, and review wherever you get your podcasts. And as always, thank you so much for your time, and have a great day.

I'm Ken Harbaugh, host of Burn the Boats from Evergreen Podcasts. I interview political leaders and influencers, folks like award-winning journalist Soledad O'Brien and conservative columnist Bill Kristol about the choices they confront when failure is not an option.

I won't agree with everyone I talk to, but I respect anyone who believes in something enough to risk everything for it. Because history belongs to those willing to burn the boats. Episodes are out every other week, wherever you get your podcasts.