Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, was born in 1740 into one of France's most prestigious noble families, raised partly in the Palace de Condé, educated by Jesuits, and commissioned as a cavalry officer. By his late twenties he had accumulated a series of police files, arrest warrants, and a death sentence for a crime he was accused of — allegedly poisoning four prostitutes with aphrodisiac sweets in Marseilles in 1772. He escaped to Italy with his sister-in-law, was captured, tried in absentia, and sentenced to death. When he returned to France in 1777 to visit his dying mother, he was arrested and this time imprisoned — beginning a period of confinement that would total nearly 27 years, interrupted by a few years of revolutionary freedom. In prison — first Vincennes, then the Bastille — Sade began to write. The conditions were comfortable by contemporary standards: he had a library of 600 books, armchairs, a desk, and his wife sent him fashionable clothes and food. Into this material comfort he poured an imagination of extraordinary darkness. In 1785, on a roll of paper twelve meters long, smuggled in piece by piece and glued together in secret, he wrote The 120 Days of Sodom — the most comprehensive taxonomy of sexual transgression in literary history, describing in clinical order every conceivable permutation of desire and its violation. He believed himself to be writing it to a future audience that did not yet exist. On July 2, 1789, twelve days before the Bastille fell, Sade was transferred to the Charenton insane asylum — partly because he had been improvising a megaphone from a funnel to shout to passersby below his cell that the prisoners were being murdered. The revolutionary mob that stormed the Bastille on July 14 looted his cell, and the manuscript of The 120 Days — which Sade believed lost forever — was secretly carried off. He spent the rest of his life thinking it had been destroyed. He died in Charenton in 1814. By 1840, the word "sadism" had entered the French dictionary.
A con artist convinced a cardinal that Marie Antoinette wanted to secretly purchase a diamond necklace — then used the scheme to destroy a queen who never knew the necklace existed.
