The story goes that when, after doing a stint of 11 years behind bars (in Vincennes, the Bastille, and Charenton), the Marquis de Sade was appointed a judge at La Coste in 1793, he was asked by local révolutionnaires to serve on a tribunal that would shortly be remitting large numbers of aristocrats to the guillotine. As an aristocrat himself, Sade would supply the right sort of cachet. The already notorious libertine, however, is said to have declined this peculiar honor by remarking with aplomb, “I have killed many times for pleasure, but never for principle.”

If true, and the story certainly has the witty Sadean ring, the story is also quite false. Sade was no part- time assassin. Despite a couple of justifiable accusations that he beat various women, including his wife, who continued to visit him weekly in the Bastille during his incarceration, and despite a probably trumped- up conviction on charges of “libertinage,” there is but a single recorded instance of his having killed anyone at all. This occurred when he threw a man through the window of a whorehouse. Some would say that this athletic atrocity was quite enough— in fact too much. A monster need not emphasize his monstrousness through repetition: a solitary act will make his case. Yet with Sade, as with Machiavelli, there persists a bizarre discrepancy between facts such as these and an unparalleled reputation for personal barbarism, between a relatively placid life, mostly devoted to writing plays, and an infamy as colossal as Dracula’s. Indeed Sade's infamy is far worse than that of Dracula, whose name has failed to make its way into common parlance as an eponym, one in Sade's case synonymous with taking pleasure in sexual cruelty or more generally, in punishments and tortures.

While one may be tempted to believe that the world simply needs its blamable monsters, and so quickly lit on de Sade as a convenient target, a much more likely cause is to be found in his surviving books, which are not only awash in tides of sexual sadism, as well as eddies of sexual mockery and pools of spankings, but also flooded with such tidal waves of sexual murders and slaughters as clearly to mark the tranquil marquis as the most aesthetically bloodthirsty author who ever lived.