OOC Reference - Timeline
Youth (1740-1762)
1740Birth of Sade at the Condé palace in Paris, where his mother, a lady-in-waiting to the Princess, intended her son to become the playmate of the young Prince de Condé, nearly four years his senior.
1744After fighting with the Prince de Condé and displaying little respect he is sent away to his paternal grandmother's at Avignon, Provence.
August 16, receives the elders of one of his father's estates, who prostrate themselves at the boy's feet.
1746In the care of his uncle, Abbé de Sade at one of the Sade estates at nearby Saumane, a walled and moated chateau, complete with a deep dungeon--the very sort of place Sade's imagination would return to throughout his life.
1750Sade, accompanied by his tutor, Amblet, returns to Paris to begin an undistinguished career as a day-student at the famous Jesuit school, Louis-le-Grand. He probably lived in Amblet's apartment. Sade's mother may have already effectively separated from her husband, taking up residence in the Carmelite convent on the rue d'Enfer in Paris, where she would die in 1777.
1754May, Sade was enrolled in the training academy for the Chevau-légers at Versailles, the King's Light Cavalry, an elite corps that admitted sons from only the best families.
1755December 14, Sade is commissioned second lieutenant in the King's Foot Guard.
1756The Seven Year War begins.
1757January 14, Sade is commissioned a "cornette," or standard bearer, in the Carabiniers.
1758June 23, Sade sees heavy fighting at Krefeld, keeping a journal of his experiences.
1759April 21, Sade is commissioned captain of the Burgundy Cavalry.
1760August 12, Sade writes to his father from an encampment, explaining that he is incapable of "paying court" to his superior officers, and adding that he has no friends among his equals because he cannot trust them.
1762May 25, Sade's uncle, the abbé, is arrested in a Paris bordello.
Summer, Sade in garrison, falls in love with a woman ten years his senior, but is persuaded not to marry her. Marriage (1763 - 1771) 1763February 10, the Paris Peace Treaty marks the end of the Seven Years' War. Sade is demobilized and enjoys himself in Paris with balls and actresses while his father attempts to negotiate a marriage for his son with the rich but socially inferior Montreuil family.
March, Sade woos Laure de Lauris, of a noble Provencal family, but flees to Avignon when her father discovers him in her bedroom.
April, from Avignon, Sade woos Laure by letter. When she rejects him, he accuses her of infecting him with a venereal disease, and threatens to tell her new lover all about it.
May 17, Sade reluctantly returns to Paris to marry the woman he had seen for the first time only two days before the ceremony. She is Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil. The newlyweds live with the Montreuils in Paris. Almost immediately, Sade's mother-in-law, Mme de Montreuil, concludes that Sade's father has cheated the couple of the money he promised in the Marriage Contract.
June, Sade continues libertine activities with prostitutes in his secret apartment on the rue Mouffetard.
August, Sade brings his wife to his in-laws' estate, Echauffour, in Normandy.
October 15, Sade returns to Paris alone on business, but on October 18 hires a prostitute, Jeanne Testard, who the next day complains to the police about his sacrilegious conversation. She did not claim to have been assaulted in any other way but verbally.
October 29, Sade is arrested and imprisoned in the Royal chateau of Vincennes by means of a lettre de cachet.
November 13, Sade is released to exile at Echauffour under the continuing surveillance of Inspector Louis Marais, the head of the Vice Squad.
1764January, Sade's uncle, the abbé, publishes the first volume of his Life of Petrarch.
April 3, Sade is granted permission to return to Paris.
July, Sade begins a successful courtship of Colet, a young actress-courtesan.
November, Inspector Marais warns the proprietress of a bordello not to permit Sade to take girls away with him to his private apartments.
1765February 8, Inspector Marais, still keeping Sade under surveillance, reports that the marquis slept with the actress La Beaupré.
April 26, Inspector Marais reports that Sade has become the third among the lovers of Beauvoisin, an actress-courtesan.
Summer, Sade takes Beauvoisin to La Coste, his ancestral home in Provence. Sade's uncle, the abbé, keeps Mme de Montreuil informed; she is most concerned about the public scandal and agrees to help him keep her daughter in the dark.
1766January, Inspector Marais continues to report on Sade's exploits with actresses and prostitutes.
January 18, Sade injures a horse with his epee in a traffic dispute.
Summer, Sade supervises construction of a private theater at his chateau of La Coste.
1767January 24, Sade's father dies, having left his considerable debts for his son to pay.
August 27, Sade's wife gives birth to their first son, Louis-Marie, in Paris.
1768February, Sade disturbs his neighbors at his rented pleasure house in Arcueil, outside Paris, by bringing prostitutes there.
April 3, Easter Sunday, Sade takes a prostitute, Rose Keller, to his Arcueil house for a whipping. She escapes and presses charges. Even though Keller drops the charges for a generous settlement, the extraordinary public scandal forces the King to imprison the marquis under a lettre de cachet to remove him from ordinary prosecution.
November 16, Sade is released from prison to go into exile at his chateau of La Coste.
1769April 2, Sade is granted permission to return to Paris for medical treatment.
June 27, Sade's wife gives birth to their second son, Donatien-Claude-Armand.
September to October, Sade travels in Holland, keeping a journal of his impressions.
1770Sade is not permitted to appear at Court; moreover his efforts to actively rejoin his regiment are rebuffed.
1771April 17, the Sades' third child is born, Madeleine-Laure.
September, Sade is released after a short stay in Fort-l'Evêque for debt. Sade takes his wife and children to live at La Coste, and is soon joined there by his wife's younger sister, Anne-Prospère, who soon becomes his lover. Through the winter and spring, Sade puts on plays at his chateaux using a troupe of professional actors. Prison (1772 - 1790) 1772June, Sade employs Spanish Fly in a series of orgies at Marseilles with prostitutes, who become ill from the drug. Condemned in absentia for poisoning and for sodomy, Sade flees to Italy with Anne-Prospère.
December 8, Sade is arrested in Savoy by means of a lettre de cachet arranged by his mother-in-law, Mme de Montreuil. He is imprisoned at the Fortress of Miolans.
1773April 30, Sade makes a daring escape from Miolans; later, he goes into hiding around La Coste.
1774January 6, Mme de Montreuil arranges a police raid on La Coste to arrest her son-in-law by means of a lettre de cachet, but he flees in time and goes into deeper hiding.
Autumn, Sade returns to La Coste with five young servant girls and a young male "secretary," and is joined there by his wife.
1775January, some of the relatives of the young servants lodge formal complaints about their sexual mistreatment. Mme de Montreuil hushes up the scandal and even has one of the most talkative servants imprisoned for several years under a lettre de cachet.
July 17, Sade flees to Italy, complaining about his neighbors in Provence: "If anyone so much as whips a cat in this province, they all say, ‘It`s Monsieur de Sade who did it.'" In Italy he keeps a journal of his views on art, sex, etc.
1776July, Sade returns to La Coste from Italy.
October, Sade hires several young servant girls, all of whom leave except for Catherine Trillet.
1777January 14, Sade's mother dies in her convent in Paris.
January 17, M. Trillet comes to retrieve his daughter Catherine, whom Sade calls "Justine." She refuses, and M. Trillet shoots point-blank at Sade, but his gun misfires.
January 30, Sade and his wife depart the relative security of La Coste for Paris to see his sick mother (but she was already dead and buried, details Mme de Montreuil failed to mention in her letter).
February 13, Sade is arrested under the lettre de cachet previously obtained my his Mme de Montreuil. He is imprisoned in the royal chateau of Vincennes, "this grave where they have buried me alive." He would spend 13 years behind bars.
December 31, Sade's uncle, the abbé, who helped to raise him, dies.
1778June 14, Sade is conducted by Inspector Marais to Aix for his successful appeal of the verdicts of sodomy and of poisoning the Marseilles prostitutes. Nevertheless, he is informed that he must return to prison under the lettre de cachet obtained by Mme de Montreuil.
July 16, on the return trip to Vincennes, Sade escapes from Inspector Marais and hides out at La Coste, where he initiates an affair with his intelligent and witty housekeeper, Mlle de Rousset.
August 26, Sade is arrested at La Coste by Inspector Marais (who is eventually punished, possibly fired, for his disrespectful words to the marquis). Marais transports Sade back to Vincennes. Sade will spend his time writing letters to his wife Renée, demanding food, clothes, and especially books. He will also write plays, stories, and novels. Renée will beg the authorities, "Do not judge him from his writings, but rather judge him by his deeds."
1781July 13, Sade's wife is granted her first visit in more than four years. She had not seen him since the day of his arrest on February 13, 1777.
1784February 29, Sade is transferred to the Bastille when Vincennes is closed as an economy measure.
1785October 22, Sade begins the final draft of his masterpiece, 120 Days of Sodom. He finishes 37 days later, and hides the scroll in his cell (where a guard finds it and saves it before the Bastille was destroyed).
1787July 8, Sade completes The Misfortunes of Virtue.
1789April 27, rioting breaks out in the neighborhood around the Bastille, whose guard is reinforced.
June 2, from his cell, Sade shouts to the crowd below, using a pissing-tube as a megaphone, saying that the prisoners are being slaughtered inside and calling on the crowd to come to their rescue.
July 4, Sade is transferred to the insane asylum at Charenton, and thus by two weeks misses out on being among the other four prisoners lionized by the Revolution.
July 14, the Bastille is sacked; Sade loses all of his manuscripts.
1790April 2, Sade is released from Charenton after the National Assembly votes to abolish lettres de cachet: "I am free at last." However, his wife sues for separation and Sade is required to repay her dowry (which he never does).
June, Sade publishes the first of his political pamphlets. Others written for his section follow. He also publishes a clandestine edition of his erotic novel Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue.
July 1, Sade, calling himself Citizen Louis Sade, joins the section of the Place Vendôme, later called section des Piques, one of the most radical of all Paris sections and the spawning ground of Robespierre himself.
August 25, Sade meets Marie-Constance Quesnet, age 33, a former actress, abandoned by her husband. Sade's relationship with her and with her six-year old son Charles will last the rest of Sade's life.
October 22, Sade's sado-sexual play Oxtiern is performed in Paris and causes a disturbance. The Works (1792 - 1802) 1792March 5, Sade's play The Suborner is booed off the stage by Jacobites in the audience.
August 10, attack on the Tuileries by anti-monarchists; the savage murder of Sade's relative and friend, Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre.
September 17, La Coste is sacked by rioters.
Sade sits on several committees for his section, for which he writes political reports and pamphlets.
1793January 21, Louis XVI is guillotined.
July 23, Sade is appointed president of his section, in which capacity he helps his in-laws, the hated Montreuils, escape punishment.
October 16, Marie-Antoinette is guillotined.
December 8, Sade is arrested "as suspect," and spends the next ten months during the Great Terror in various prisons until, finally, under sentence of death, he narrowly escapes the guillotine.
1794July 26, Sade is indicted, an occurrence tantamount to a death sentence.
July 27, Robespierre is overthrown and guillotined the next day, ending the Reign of Terror. Thus, Sade was spared.
October 15, Sade is finally released.
1795Hyper-inflation robs the rents from Sade's estates of their purchasing power. Most of Sade's correspondence consists of demands for more money from his lawyer and business agent in Provence, Gaufridy.
Sade publishes Aline and Valcour, his first publicly acknowledged novel. At the same time, he publishes clandestinely another novel, The Philosophy in the Bedroom.
1796October 13, in desperate need of money, Sade sells La Coste.
1798July 31, Sade's financial crisis continues to worsen, and now he is without food. He warns Gaufridy: "if I do not receive any money here within a fortnight, I am determined to blow my brains out."
September, for financial reasons, Sade and Mme Quesnet are obliged to separate: she lives with friends, and Sade and son Charles subsist on handouts and on the former marquis' new job as the prompter at the theater at Versailles.
1799November 10, Napoleon Bonaparte comes to power in a coup.
December 13, Sade's play Oxtiern is performed in a theater at Versailles, even as he takes refuge in the poorhouse there.
1800Sade publishes a collection of his short stories, The Crimes of Love, starting a paper war in literary journals about this work and Sade's unacknowledged erotic novels.
1801March 6, Sade is arrested in the offices of his publisher, who had also brought out Sade's anonymously published ten-volume, illustrated erotic novels, La Nouvelle Justine and L'Histoire de Juliette. The police discover manuscripts and corrected pages in Sade's handwriting. After interrogation, he is sent to Sainte-Pélagie prison, where Mme Quesnet visits him regularly. This is an extra-legal incarceration; no charges were ever brought. Here begins his final detention, lasting almost 14 years.
1802May 20, Sade pleads with officials: "I want to be set free or tried."
Asylum (1803 - 1814) 1803March, accused of trying to molest some young prisoners near his cell, Sade is sent another prison, Bicêtre.
April 27, Sade is transferred to the insane asylum at Charenton in order to avoid further scandal and a public trial of his allegedly pornographic works. His family (his ex-wife, his two sons, and his daughter) agree to pay for his pension there. Sade and the director of Charenton, François Simonet de Coulmier, develop a relationship of friendship and mutual respect, as Sade helps the director test a new therapy by putting on plays with patients and professional actors.
1804August, Mme Quesnet is permitted to move into a room next to Sade's.
1805April 14, Coulmier permits Sade to leave the asylum grounds and attend Easter mass at the parish church of Charenton-Saint-Maurice. Charenton is reprimanded by the police authorities, exposing a rift in the way both sides viewed the danger to the public posed by the 65-year-old alleged pornographer.
1806Sade writes one of his last letters to his old lawyer Gaufridy: "Perhaps you would now like a word about me? Very well, I am not happy, although I am well."
1807June 5, Sade's massive ten-volume erotic novel begun in 1806, Les Journées de Florbelle ou la Nature dévoilée, is seized in a police search of his room (after Sade's death, it would be burned by his son, Donatien-Claude-Armand).
1808Sade's daily Journal reveals the return of his counting mania and his paranoid belief that random numbers can foretell the date of his release.
September 15, Sade's younger son, Donatien-Claude-Armand, marries his cousin Louise-Gabrielle-Laure de Sade.
1809June 9, Sade's elder son, Louis-Marie, serving in Napoleon's army in Italy, is killed in an ambush.
July 12, Napoleon's prison commission informs him that the prisoner Sade "preaches crime in his speech and in his writings" and that he ought to "be kept in detention and deprived of all outside communication."
October 18, new police orders put Sade into solitary confinement and deprive him of pens and paper. Coulmier succeeds in ameliorating this harsh treatment.
1810July 7, Sade's wife Renée-Pélagie dies at her family's estate in Normandy.
1812December 4, Sade completes his novel, Adélaïde de Brunswick.
1813May 6, the government orders Coulmier to suspend all theatrical performances.
Sade finishes the final draft of a novel, Histoire secrète d'Isabelle de Bavière, and publishes another, La Marquise de Gange.
1814July 21, Sade's surviving Journal records a sexual encounter with a 17-year-old worker in the asylum, Magdeleine Leclerc. Their sexual relations had started much earlier, for Sade's meticulous records indicate that this is their 57th sexual rendezvous. Sade is also teaching her to read and write.
November 27, Magdeleine visits "for two hours, and I was very pleased with it," Sade wrote in his Journal.
December 2, after a brief illness, Sade dies in his sleep at the age of 74. He left a generous bequest to Mme Quesnet who stayed with him to the end. *Biography dates by Neil Schaeffer **Everything in italics is time spent in prison/asylums.
1744After fighting with the Prince de Condé and displaying little respect he is sent away to his paternal grandmother's at Avignon, Provence.
August 16, receives the elders of one of his father's estates, who prostrate themselves at the boy's feet.
1746In the care of his uncle, Abbé de Sade at one of the Sade estates at nearby Saumane, a walled and moated chateau, complete with a deep dungeon--the very sort of place Sade's imagination would return to throughout his life.
1750Sade, accompanied by his tutor, Amblet, returns to Paris to begin an undistinguished career as a day-student at the famous Jesuit school, Louis-le-Grand. He probably lived in Amblet's apartment. Sade's mother may have already effectively separated from her husband, taking up residence in the Carmelite convent on the rue d'Enfer in Paris, where she would die in 1777.
1754May, Sade was enrolled in the training academy for the Chevau-légers at Versailles, the King's Light Cavalry, an elite corps that admitted sons from only the best families.
1755December 14, Sade is commissioned second lieutenant in the King's Foot Guard.
1756The Seven Year War begins.
1757January 14, Sade is commissioned a "cornette," or standard bearer, in the Carabiniers.
1758June 23, Sade sees heavy fighting at Krefeld, keeping a journal of his experiences.
1759April 21, Sade is commissioned captain of the Burgundy Cavalry.
1760August 12, Sade writes to his father from an encampment, explaining that he is incapable of "paying court" to his superior officers, and adding that he has no friends among his equals because he cannot trust them.
1762May 25, Sade's uncle, the abbé, is arrested in a Paris bordello.
Summer, Sade in garrison, falls in love with a woman ten years his senior, but is persuaded not to marry her. Marriage (1763 - 1771) 1763February 10, the Paris Peace Treaty marks the end of the Seven Years' War. Sade is demobilized and enjoys himself in Paris with balls and actresses while his father attempts to negotiate a marriage for his son with the rich but socially inferior Montreuil family.
March, Sade woos Laure de Lauris, of a noble Provencal family, but flees to Avignon when her father discovers him in her bedroom.
April, from Avignon, Sade woos Laure by letter. When she rejects him, he accuses her of infecting him with a venereal disease, and threatens to tell her new lover all about it.
May 17, Sade reluctantly returns to Paris to marry the woman he had seen for the first time only two days before the ceremony. She is Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil. The newlyweds live with the Montreuils in Paris. Almost immediately, Sade's mother-in-law, Mme de Montreuil, concludes that Sade's father has cheated the couple of the money he promised in the Marriage Contract.
June, Sade continues libertine activities with prostitutes in his secret apartment on the rue Mouffetard.
August, Sade brings his wife to his in-laws' estate, Echauffour, in Normandy.
October 15, Sade returns to Paris alone on business, but on October 18 hires a prostitute, Jeanne Testard, who the next day complains to the police about his sacrilegious conversation. She did not claim to have been assaulted in any other way but verbally.
October 29, Sade is arrested and imprisoned in the Royal chateau of Vincennes by means of a lettre de cachet.
November 13, Sade is released to exile at Echauffour under the continuing surveillance of Inspector Louis Marais, the head of the Vice Squad.
1764January, Sade's uncle, the abbé, publishes the first volume of his Life of Petrarch.
April 3, Sade is granted permission to return to Paris.
July, Sade begins a successful courtship of Colet, a young actress-courtesan.
November, Inspector Marais warns the proprietress of a bordello not to permit Sade to take girls away with him to his private apartments.
1765February 8, Inspector Marais, still keeping Sade under surveillance, reports that the marquis slept with the actress La Beaupré.
April 26, Inspector Marais reports that Sade has become the third among the lovers of Beauvoisin, an actress-courtesan.
Summer, Sade takes Beauvoisin to La Coste, his ancestral home in Provence. Sade's uncle, the abbé, keeps Mme de Montreuil informed; she is most concerned about the public scandal and agrees to help him keep her daughter in the dark.
1766January, Inspector Marais continues to report on Sade's exploits with actresses and prostitutes.
January 18, Sade injures a horse with his epee in a traffic dispute.
Summer, Sade supervises construction of a private theater at his chateau of La Coste.
1767January 24, Sade's father dies, having left his considerable debts for his son to pay.
August 27, Sade's wife gives birth to their first son, Louis-Marie, in Paris.
1768February, Sade disturbs his neighbors at his rented pleasure house in Arcueil, outside Paris, by bringing prostitutes there.
April 3, Easter Sunday, Sade takes a prostitute, Rose Keller, to his Arcueil house for a whipping. She escapes and presses charges. Even though Keller drops the charges for a generous settlement, the extraordinary public scandal forces the King to imprison the marquis under a lettre de cachet to remove him from ordinary prosecution.
November 16, Sade is released from prison to go into exile at his chateau of La Coste.
1769April 2, Sade is granted permission to return to Paris for medical treatment.
June 27, Sade's wife gives birth to their second son, Donatien-Claude-Armand.
September to October, Sade travels in Holland, keeping a journal of his impressions.
1770Sade is not permitted to appear at Court; moreover his efforts to actively rejoin his regiment are rebuffed.
1771April 17, the Sades' third child is born, Madeleine-Laure.
September, Sade is released after a short stay in Fort-l'Evêque for debt. Sade takes his wife and children to live at La Coste, and is soon joined there by his wife's younger sister, Anne-Prospère, who soon becomes his lover. Through the winter and spring, Sade puts on plays at his chateaux using a troupe of professional actors. Prison (1772 - 1790) 1772June, Sade employs Spanish Fly in a series of orgies at Marseilles with prostitutes, who become ill from the drug. Condemned in absentia for poisoning and for sodomy, Sade flees to Italy with Anne-Prospère.
December 8, Sade is arrested in Savoy by means of a lettre de cachet arranged by his mother-in-law, Mme de Montreuil. He is imprisoned at the Fortress of Miolans.
1773April 30, Sade makes a daring escape from Miolans; later, he goes into hiding around La Coste.
1774January 6, Mme de Montreuil arranges a police raid on La Coste to arrest her son-in-law by means of a lettre de cachet, but he flees in time and goes into deeper hiding.
Autumn, Sade returns to La Coste with five young servant girls and a young male "secretary," and is joined there by his wife.
1775January, some of the relatives of the young servants lodge formal complaints about their sexual mistreatment. Mme de Montreuil hushes up the scandal and even has one of the most talkative servants imprisoned for several years under a lettre de cachet.
July 17, Sade flees to Italy, complaining about his neighbors in Provence: "If anyone so much as whips a cat in this province, they all say, ‘It`s Monsieur de Sade who did it.'" In Italy he keeps a journal of his views on art, sex, etc.
1776July, Sade returns to La Coste from Italy.
October, Sade hires several young servant girls, all of whom leave except for Catherine Trillet.
1777January 14, Sade's mother dies in her convent in Paris.
January 17, M. Trillet comes to retrieve his daughter Catherine, whom Sade calls "Justine." She refuses, and M. Trillet shoots point-blank at Sade, but his gun misfires.
January 30, Sade and his wife depart the relative security of La Coste for Paris to see his sick mother (but she was already dead and buried, details Mme de Montreuil failed to mention in her letter).
February 13, Sade is arrested under the lettre de cachet previously obtained my his Mme de Montreuil. He is imprisoned in the royal chateau of Vincennes, "this grave where they have buried me alive." He would spend 13 years behind bars.
December 31, Sade's uncle, the abbé, who helped to raise him, dies.
1778June 14, Sade is conducted by Inspector Marais to Aix for his successful appeal of the verdicts of sodomy and of poisoning the Marseilles prostitutes. Nevertheless, he is informed that he must return to prison under the lettre de cachet obtained by Mme de Montreuil.
July 16, on the return trip to Vincennes, Sade escapes from Inspector Marais and hides out at La Coste, where he initiates an affair with his intelligent and witty housekeeper, Mlle de Rousset.
August 26, Sade is arrested at La Coste by Inspector Marais (who is eventually punished, possibly fired, for his disrespectful words to the marquis). Marais transports Sade back to Vincennes. Sade will spend his time writing letters to his wife Renée, demanding food, clothes, and especially books. He will also write plays, stories, and novels. Renée will beg the authorities, "Do not judge him from his writings, but rather judge him by his deeds."
1781July 13, Sade's wife is granted her first visit in more than four years. She had not seen him since the day of his arrest on February 13, 1777.
1784February 29, Sade is transferred to the Bastille when Vincennes is closed as an economy measure.
1785October 22, Sade begins the final draft of his masterpiece, 120 Days of Sodom. He finishes 37 days later, and hides the scroll in his cell (where a guard finds it and saves it before the Bastille was destroyed).
1787July 8, Sade completes The Misfortunes of Virtue.
1789April 27, rioting breaks out in the neighborhood around the Bastille, whose guard is reinforced.
June 2, from his cell, Sade shouts to the crowd below, using a pissing-tube as a megaphone, saying that the prisoners are being slaughtered inside and calling on the crowd to come to their rescue.
July 4, Sade is transferred to the insane asylum at Charenton, and thus by two weeks misses out on being among the other four prisoners lionized by the Revolution.
July 14, the Bastille is sacked; Sade loses all of his manuscripts.
1790April 2, Sade is released from Charenton after the National Assembly votes to abolish lettres de cachet: "I am free at last." However, his wife sues for separation and Sade is required to repay her dowry (which he never does).
June, Sade publishes the first of his political pamphlets. Others written for his section follow. He also publishes a clandestine edition of his erotic novel Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue.
July 1, Sade, calling himself Citizen Louis Sade, joins the section of the Place Vendôme, later called section des Piques, one of the most radical of all Paris sections and the spawning ground of Robespierre himself.
August 25, Sade meets Marie-Constance Quesnet, age 33, a former actress, abandoned by her husband. Sade's relationship with her and with her six-year old son Charles will last the rest of Sade's life.
October 22, Sade's sado-sexual play Oxtiern is performed in Paris and causes a disturbance. The Works (1792 - 1802) 1792March 5, Sade's play The Suborner is booed off the stage by Jacobites in the audience.
August 10, attack on the Tuileries by anti-monarchists; the savage murder of Sade's relative and friend, Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre.
September 17, La Coste is sacked by rioters.
Sade sits on several committees for his section, for which he writes political reports and pamphlets.
1793January 21, Louis XVI is guillotined.
July 23, Sade is appointed president of his section, in which capacity he helps his in-laws, the hated Montreuils, escape punishment.
October 16, Marie-Antoinette is guillotined.
December 8, Sade is arrested "as suspect," and spends the next ten months during the Great Terror in various prisons until, finally, under sentence of death, he narrowly escapes the guillotine.
1794July 26, Sade is indicted, an occurrence tantamount to a death sentence.
July 27, Robespierre is overthrown and guillotined the next day, ending the Reign of Terror. Thus, Sade was spared.
October 15, Sade is finally released.
1795Hyper-inflation robs the rents from Sade's estates of their purchasing power. Most of Sade's correspondence consists of demands for more money from his lawyer and business agent in Provence, Gaufridy.
Sade publishes Aline and Valcour, his first publicly acknowledged novel. At the same time, he publishes clandestinely another novel, The Philosophy in the Bedroom.
1796October 13, in desperate need of money, Sade sells La Coste.
1798July 31, Sade's financial crisis continues to worsen, and now he is without food. He warns Gaufridy: "if I do not receive any money here within a fortnight, I am determined to blow my brains out."
September, for financial reasons, Sade and Mme Quesnet are obliged to separate: she lives with friends, and Sade and son Charles subsist on handouts and on the former marquis' new job as the prompter at the theater at Versailles.
1799November 10, Napoleon Bonaparte comes to power in a coup.
December 13, Sade's play Oxtiern is performed in a theater at Versailles, even as he takes refuge in the poorhouse there.
1800Sade publishes a collection of his short stories, The Crimes of Love, starting a paper war in literary journals about this work and Sade's unacknowledged erotic novels.
1801March 6, Sade is arrested in the offices of his publisher, who had also brought out Sade's anonymously published ten-volume, illustrated erotic novels, La Nouvelle Justine and L'Histoire de Juliette. The police discover manuscripts and corrected pages in Sade's handwriting. After interrogation, he is sent to Sainte-Pélagie prison, where Mme Quesnet visits him regularly. This is an extra-legal incarceration; no charges were ever brought. Here begins his final detention, lasting almost 14 years.
1802May 20, Sade pleads with officials: "I want to be set free or tried."
Asylum (1803 - 1814) 1803March, accused of trying to molest some young prisoners near his cell, Sade is sent another prison, Bicêtre.
April 27, Sade is transferred to the insane asylum at Charenton in order to avoid further scandal and a public trial of his allegedly pornographic works. His family (his ex-wife, his two sons, and his daughter) agree to pay for his pension there. Sade and the director of Charenton, François Simonet de Coulmier, develop a relationship of friendship and mutual respect, as Sade helps the director test a new therapy by putting on plays with patients and professional actors.
1804August, Mme Quesnet is permitted to move into a room next to Sade's.
1805April 14, Coulmier permits Sade to leave the asylum grounds and attend Easter mass at the parish church of Charenton-Saint-Maurice. Charenton is reprimanded by the police authorities, exposing a rift in the way both sides viewed the danger to the public posed by the 65-year-old alleged pornographer.
1806Sade writes one of his last letters to his old lawyer Gaufridy: "Perhaps you would now like a word about me? Very well, I am not happy, although I am well."
1807June 5, Sade's massive ten-volume erotic novel begun in 1806, Les Journées de Florbelle ou la Nature dévoilée, is seized in a police search of his room (after Sade's death, it would be burned by his son, Donatien-Claude-Armand).
1808Sade's daily Journal reveals the return of his counting mania and his paranoid belief that random numbers can foretell the date of his release.
September 15, Sade's younger son, Donatien-Claude-Armand, marries his cousin Louise-Gabrielle-Laure de Sade.
1809June 9, Sade's elder son, Louis-Marie, serving in Napoleon's army in Italy, is killed in an ambush.
July 12, Napoleon's prison commission informs him that the prisoner Sade "preaches crime in his speech and in his writings" and that he ought to "be kept in detention and deprived of all outside communication."
October 18, new police orders put Sade into solitary confinement and deprive him of pens and paper. Coulmier succeeds in ameliorating this harsh treatment.
1810July 7, Sade's wife Renée-Pélagie dies at her family's estate in Normandy.
1812December 4, Sade completes his novel, Adélaïde de Brunswick.
1813May 6, the government orders Coulmier to suspend all theatrical performances.
Sade finishes the final draft of a novel, Histoire secrète d'Isabelle de Bavière, and publishes another, La Marquise de Gange.
1814July 21, Sade's surviving Journal records a sexual encounter with a 17-year-old worker in the asylum, Magdeleine Leclerc. Their sexual relations had started much earlier, for Sade's meticulous records indicate that this is their 57th sexual rendezvous. Sade is also teaching her to read and write.
November 27, Magdeleine visits "for two hours, and I was very pleased with it," Sade wrote in his Journal.
December 2, after a brief illness, Sade dies in his sleep at the age of 74. He left a generous bequest to Mme Quesnet who stayed with him to the end. *Biography dates by Neil Schaeffer **Everything in italics is time spent in prison/asylums.