The biography, the philosophy, and some of the most influential works of the infamous French writer who shocked the world with his erotic novel, Justine.
No other writer has so scandalized proper society as the Marquis de Sade, but despite the deliberate destruction of over three-quarters of his work, Sade remains a major figure in the history of ideas. His influence on some of the greatest minds of the last century—from Baudelaire and Swinburne to Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky and Kafka—is indisputable. This volume contains Philosophy in the Bedroom, a major novel that presents the clearest summation of his political philosophy; Eugénie de Franval, a novella widely considered to be a masterpiece of eighteenth-century French literature; and the only authentic and complete American edition of his most famous work, Justine.
This literary portrait of Sade is completed by one of his earliest philosophical efforts, Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man, a selection of his letters, a fifty-page chronology of his life, two important essays on Sade, and a bibliography of his work.
“[Sade] remains a great, horrifying, but also vastly illuminating figure.” —Newsweek
“Justine is the most abominable book ever engendered by the most depraved imagination.” —Napoleon Bonaparte
“Shines a perverse and revealing spotlight on the entire era of the French Revolution . . . An important and elucidating book.” —Robert Lowry, Chicago Sun-Times
Whether this introduction be wrought before or behind, if she is not yet accustomed to it a woman always suffers. It has pleased Nature so to make us that we attain happiness only by way of pain.