To this day, Sade's writings are unsurpassed in their configurations of cruelty.
Here's a sample passage from Justine, an underground bestseller that Sade publicly disowned in his craving for respectability:
'The Count sits down again, and, turning his attention to (two young boys), he now obliges them to suck each other, and now he arranges them in such a way that while he sucks one, the other sucks him, and now again the one he sucked first brings round his mouth to render the same service to him by whom he was sucked.'
The only thing that might be more outrageous today would be pedo-fiction written by a convicted child molester.
As it happens, Finn assures me, the Marquis loved children.
He guides me along the terrace and points to some stone buildings knotted around a farmhouse down in the valley.
'That was the old stables of the Marquis de Sade. There's a little headstone down there, and the rumor was that the Marquis killed somebody,' Finn says.
'But the true story is that the Marquis had an affair with one of his chambermaids, and she got pregnant. So the Marquis' wife shipped her down there, and the baby was stillborn and buried. So it's very easy to twist something.'
That story rings a bell.
'Is that part of the "Little Girls' Episode"?' I ask.
'It could've been.' He eyes me warily, as if to say, You know about that?
Unfortunately, I do.
By now you'll have gathered that I'm not the Marquis' biggest fan, mainly because of the twisted incident his apologists refer to as 'The Little Girls' Episode.'
In the interlude before he was captured, the Marquis hid out at Lacoste while his wife procured a houseful of teenaged servants for his amusement.
With the help of their chambermaid, the Sades hired one boy and five girls, all around fifteen years old and from far enough away to prevent them running back to their parents.
No one knows exactly what happened during those six weeks starting in December 1774, but based on Sade's previous abuses, it's not hard to imagine.
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