One of the most interesting and least-emphasized aspects of Sade's character is his thorough dislike of his own peers and of the corrupt nobility of his time. Sade hated Paris, and Versailles even more; his eventual demise was in great part caused by the fact that he refused to pay court to the king, refused to network with his fellow nobles, refused to work the room in any aristocratic milieu whatsoever. And this haughty aloofness from circles of power, which he shared with his very rustic, reclusive wife, left him without any base of social support in those frequent cases when he got into trouble with the law.

He made all his friends, ironically, amid those very classes of society that were preparing the Revolution of 1789 -- amid the lawyers, tradesmen and artisans of Provence, and also among the more liberal clergy. Sade's romantic attachment to La Coste was closely connected to this hatred for France's central government, and to his archaic political ideals. That ideology can only be described as a very bizarre blend of radical libertarianism and robber-baron elitism. He felt intense nostalgia for those anarchic eras of the early middle ages, before the rise of nation-states, when every warrior lord had total control over his vassals and was not constrained by the edicts of any other ruler.

When you think about Sade, don't think 18th century -- think 10th century. At La Coste, Sade could retain precisely that illusion of primeval autonomy, feel like the feudal seigneur whose most deviant whims could remain unchallenged. And it would not be outlandish to surmise that the very aura and topography of his dwelling at La Coste may have further aroused him to defy the law, in sexual matters as in every other sphere of life.

In his wonderful book "The Poetics of Space," Gaston Bachelard writes: "Our house is a body of images that gives us a proof or an illusion of stability." This illusion of power and stability is pivotal to Sade's passion for La Coste. As his transgressions multiplied this retreat would grow increasingly talismanic to him: It became the only dwelling where he felt totally safe, a utopian refuge from family reprimands and the meddlesome interventions of the Crown.

That refuge came to be all the more needed in 1772, six months after Sade moved his family to Provence, when he engaged in his most outrageous debauches to date. In the nearby metropolis of Marseilles, he choreographed a particularly festive orgy with four prostitutes and his valet. The complex choreography of this particular frolic included whipping four prostitutes and being severely whipped by them in return (Sade loved numbers, and on that occasion recorded that he had received 748 blows); he also indulged in active and passive sodomy with his valet, and passed out some carelessly concocted homemade aphrodisiacs to the assembled company. This caused the girls to feel rather ill for a day. Two of them brought charges of sodomy and attempted poisoning against Sade, and a week later he received the first of many official warrants that would be issued by the kings of France -- first Louis XV, then Louis XVI, for his arrest.

From then on he was a hunted man. He lived on the lam for the next few years, seeking refuge in Italy, or in the wilds of the Vaucluse. But in 1777, after a few more outrageous bacchanals, he was finally captured thanks to the cunning of the woman who would turn out to be his nemesis -- his altogether remarkable mother-in-law, Mme. de Montreuil, who is a pivotal character of the Sadean epic. She lobbied Louis XVI, who had just ascended to the throne and was notoriously more prudish than his libertine grandfather the XV, for a lettre de cachet, or sealed letter. This was an arbitrary order of arrest and detention that could be issued and signed only by the king and could imprison the accused for life without any legal hearing, and was often used by the rich and powerful to get their fractious relatives out of the way.

We're now in February 1777. Sade has made one of his rare trips to Paris on family business, and is staying at a hotel on the Rue de Jacob when a posse of police came to arrest him with a warrant signed "Louis." He is taken to Vincennes and placed in cell No. 11, which tourists can visit to this day. "It was about time!" Mme. de Montreuil wrote to a relative. "All is now in order."

However Sade did have one more chance to revisit his beloved domain at La Coste. The following year, 1778, he was transported, under heavy guard, to a jail in Aix-en-Provence, to stand trial on the charges of sodomy and attempted poisoning he had incurred several years before at Marseilles. He was exonerated in a matter of hours of all charges, and joyfully returned to his cell, looking forward to the next day, when he would be free to live out his days at La Coste with his cherished wife.

But he was dragged out of bed at 3 the following morning by yet another detail of police and informed that he was being returned to Vincennes on the basis of a brand-new sealed letter his in-laws had just obtained from Louis XVI. Three days later he managed to make a sensational nighttime escape, rented a coach and set out to his beloved La Coste.

This stay at La Coste - Sade's very last sojourn in his domain -- was the shortest-lived of all. His mother-in-law saw to that. Barely five weeks later, a posse of men again appeared at La Coste to return Sade to Paris, and the jail of Vincennes. In a letter to his wife, he elaborates on the chagrin he suffered as he passed through the towns so familiar to his childhood -- Cavaillon, Avignon -- where dozens of his relatives still lived:

"What a sight, dear God, what a sight! After having been congratulated by my entire family, after having spread the news that my tribulations were over, that the trial had canceled all punishment ... after all that, to be arrested with a rage, a zeal, a brutality which would not be used toward the worst rascals of society's scum, to be hauled -- tied and muffled -- throughout one's own province and through the same towns in which one had just proclaimed one's innocence ... "

The prisoner and his jailers reached Vincennes after a 10-day journey. Sade remained in jail for 13 years, first at Vincennes, and then at the Bastille. It is in prison that this renegade who, if left at liberty, would have remained yet another tedious 18th century debaucher, became a writer; "The 120 Days of Sodom" and the first drafts of "Justine" were written at the Bastille. Indeed, it could be said that it is Sade's consummately proper mother-in-law who was the midwife of his savage texts.

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