Word: sade
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...fact, is simply lending nature a helping hand. "What difference does it make to nature," asks a homicidal aristocrat in the novel Justine, "if a mass of flesh that is shaped like a biped today is reproduced tomorrow in the form of 1,000 different insects?" But De Sade's elaborately reasoned philosophy often seems written to justify his own special taste for vice and violence. Did he have to describe so many bloody orgies, and participate in so many, to prove his philosophical point...
Joining the army at 14, De Sade was soon launched on a program of orgies...
When he was discharged, his father forced him to take a rich, respectable wife, whom De Sade found "too puritanical and too cold." The honeymoon was scarcely over before De Sade went back to his orgies, which his ever faithful wife helped him to prepare...
Even in an age of sexual laxity, the marquis was often in prison for sexual offenses. In a frolic in Marseille, four prostitutes took turns flailing De Sade with a twig broom (they had refused to use his favorite whip studded with nails). Then De Sade fed a girl candies which she claimed were poisoned, but which De Sade insisted were only aphrodisiacs. The girl became so ill she went to the police. De Sade, who skipped town in the nick of time, was condemned to death in absentia and burned in effigy. When he ran off with his wife...
...Sade was horrified by prison but hardly cowed. He wrote a typically arrogant appeal to his wife: "Imperious, quick-tempered, uncontrolled, extreme in everything, with an unbridled imagination about sex that has never been equaled-there you have me; and once more, either kill me or take me as I am, for I shall not change." Cut off from sex, De Sade wrote about it-incessantly. His novel Aline et Valcour was mild enough; it contained only one poisoning and just a few flagellations...