edited the letters of the Marquise. De Sade's passion for the
younger sister continued (he idealized her as Juliette), though
she was placed in a convent beyond his reach, and at a much later
period he eloped with her and spent perhaps the happiest period
of his life, soon terminated by her death. It is evident that
this unhappy marriage was decisive in determining De Sade's
career; he at once threw himself recklessly into every form of
dissipation, spending his health and his substance sometimes
among refinedly debauched nobles and sometimes among coarsely
debauched lackeys. He was, however, always something of an
artist, something of a student, something of a philosopher, and
at an early period he began to write, apparently at the age of
23. It was at this age, and only a few months after his marriage,
that on account of some excess he was for a time confined in
Vincennes. He was destined to spend 27 years of his life in
prisons, if we include the 13 years which in old age he passed in
the asylum at Charenton. His actual offenses were by no means so
terrible as those he loved to dwell on in imagination, and for
the most part they have been greatly exaggerated. His most
extreme offenses were the indecent and forcible flagellation in
1768 of a young woman, Rosa Keller, who had accosted him in the
street for alms, and whom he induced by false pretenses to come
to his house, and the administration of aphrodisiacal bonbons to
some prostitutes at Marseilles. It is owing to the fact that the
prime of his manhood was spent in prisons that De Sade fell back
on dreaming, study, and novel-writing. Shut out from real life,
he solaced his imagination with the perverted visions--to a very
large extent, however, founded on knowledge of the real facts of
perverted life in his time--which he has recorded in _Justine_
(1781); _Les 120 Journees de Sodome ou l'Ecole du Libertinage_
(1785); _Aline et Valcour ou le Roman Philosophique_ (1788);
_Juliette_ (1796); _La Philosophie dans le Boudoir_ (1795). These
books constitute a sort of encyclopedia of sexual perversions, an
eighteenth century _Psychopathia Sexualis_, and embody, at the
same time, a philosophy. He was the first, Bloch remarks, who
realized the immense importance of the sexual question. His
general attitude may be illustrated by the fo