The French eighteenth century holds particular interest for a study of systems of sexual reference. It is not fortuitous that libertinage was a key term for the culture, used to denote both sexual and intellectual license, and it seems in retrospect almost inevitable that as the century moved into its final eruptive phase an author such as Sade should have insisted upon the necessary alliance between the two. Heir to the tyrannical bienséances of the recently triumphant polite society (le monde), yet philosophically dedicated to epicureanism, governed by an authoritarian complex of political institutions yet driven by a “modern” ethos of freedom and individualism, the culture exhibits nearly everywhere the same isomorphism: a visible, official orthodoxy overlaying, but not quite hiding from view, the scandal of a heterodoxy attempting always to emerge. Whatever stability the culture possessed, in fact, was assured neither by the power of the orthodoxy nor by the strength of its cultural antagonist, but rather by the evolving symbiotic relationship between the two. The tension between these opposing forces gives the age its peculiar historical identity. Significantly Rousseau, the cultural outsider who denounced the tension itself and refused to be part of it, found himself denounced in turn and cast out by the representatives of both sides, officialdom and philosophies. Sade, proposing a different but equally radical dissolution of the tension through the definitive triumph of libertinage, was to meet with the same fate.