Mysteriously, though, it's escaped the gentrification that's transformed its immediate rivals.
Whereas Bonnieux and Menerbes boast upmarket shops and restaurants, barely 200 souls live in Lacoste—nearly half of them outsiders—and its few streets are little more than petrified pathways winding down the hillside.
Even with the festival under way, Lacoste seems all but deserted.
As for Sadeian touches, there is a gay restaurant called 'Loofoc,' but that refers to a 'seal' rather than cottaging, and the inevitable Café de Sade is just a drab café-cum-newsagents.
'Am I missing something?' I ask Finn.
He assures me there are no secret S&M rings in the village; they don't even get many BDSM pilgrims here. 'Sade's not marketed at all.'
As a pacifist vegetarian and recovering alcoholic, he's probably the least likely defender of sadism you could find.
However, just as Sade's wife stuck by him for years, aiding and abetting him, you can't help but wonder if the Marquis appeals to his admirers' inner masochist.
The local schoolteacher who first started restoring the chateau—his widow passed it on to Cardin—used to claim he was 'the last slave of the Marquis de Sade.'
Now that dubious honor seems to have been passed to an Irish gardener whose scraggly cap of black curls makes him look like a friendly labradoodle.
Or maybe I've got Finn all wrong.
'A few of the things that brought Sade down was that he went into a church and took a Eucharist and a chalice,' he explains nonchalantly.
'And he put the Eucharist in a woman's vagina and had sex with her and challenged God. He also masturbated into the chalice. But so what? Big deal. Nowadays, people are going into churches all over the world and stealing stuff and breaking them.'
Somehow that doesn't seem like the same thing at all.
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