At twenty-eight, he attracted much attention by a scandal in which he played a prominent part. He lured a shopkeeper's wife, Rose Keller to a house in the suburbs of the French capital where he used to hold revels.
Threatening the woman with a pistol, he bound her hands and feet and whipped her to the blood.
The next morning, Rose Keller managed to free herself, jumped out of the window and summoned help. De Sade was arrested but the affair was soon hushed up by powerful friends at the court of Louis the Fifteenth.
That incident is characteristic of sadism in love's relations. His victim's sufferings supplied De Sade with the artificial stimulation which normal desire would produce in a normal man.
Soon after this, De Sade eloped to Italy with his wife's sister.
On his way to Italy, he stopped in Marseille and organized an orgy in the course of which he gorged his guests with candy containing some poisonous aphrodisiac drug. Two of them died.
This time, a court rendered a death sentence against the murderous pervert, who eluded the police for a time and was finally confined in the fortress of Vincennes for thirteen years.
It was said at the time that a woman had been found in a house where he indulged in all sorts of debauches, unconscious and bleeding from a hundred scalpel wounds which had severed many veins.
De Sade devoted his enforced leisure to writing. His published works fill up ten volumes. They contain a description of the most atrocious sexual cruelties. The author makes a childish attempt at establishing a "satanic" morality based on the fact that "virtue is always punished by the world and vice always rewarded." His atheism is no more than a satanic ritual.
De Sade's literary output, which is devoid of any artistic merit and is only of interest to the student of abnormal psychology, bears the stamp of hopeless intellectual inferiority trying to justify itself by representing the entire world as a combination of a brothel and a torture chamber and mankind as a herd of blood-thirsty and sex-crazed lunatics. A sinister autobiography and wish fulfilment.