1763
Marquis de Sade marries [...]
Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade, better known as the Marquis de Sade (June 2, 1740 - December 2, 1814) was a French aristocrat and author of pornographic books. His name is the source of the word sadism.
Sade was born in the Condé palace in Paris. Initially he followed a military career and participated in the Seven Years' War. In 1763 he married; he would eventually have three children with his wife.
Shortly after his wedding, he began living a scandalous libertine existence and repeatedly abused young prostitutes and employees of both sexes, later also with help of his wife. A series of scandals and imprisonments followed. He was sentenced to death in 1772 but reprieved. He was imprisoned again in 1777, first in the dungeon of Vincennes and in 1784, after an escape attempt, in the Bastille in Paris.
[...] Simone de Beauvoir and other writers have later attempted to find traces in de Sade's writings of a radical freedom philosophy preceding that of existentialism. The surrealists admired him as one of their precursors, and Guillaume Apollinaire called him "the freest spirit that has yet existed". --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_de_Sade [2004]
your Amazon recommendations