A Sadistic Marquis Who Would Not Have Fared Well on Tinder
De Sade’s first big scandal occurred in 1768, when he lured a street beggar to his home with an offer of a housekeeping job. He tore off her clothes, tied her to a sofa, then flogged and poured hot wax on her. That’s not the kind of person apps like Tinder want on their platform. His victim finally escaped out a second floor window. De Sade’s family made the investigation that resulted in a royal decree that removed the case from the jurisdiction of the courts. Another scandal followed in 1772. De Sade and his body servant sodomized prostitutes in Marseilles after they incapacitated them with doses of Spanish fly.
They skipped the trial, fled to Italy, and were sentenced to death in absentia. The duo were caught and imprisoned in Savoy, but escaped after a few months and hid in de Sade’s rural castle in southeast France. There, the marquis had a high turnover of employees. He repeatedly hired youngsters as domestics, only for them to quit within a short time, complaining of predation and mistreatment. When the parents of local boys and girls complained to the authorities, de Sade was forced to flee to Italy once more, until things quieted down.