The Marquis de Sade is not just the man whose name gave birth to the word "sadism"; he is a cultural explosive device still ticking today, a writer who permanently shattered the boundary between desire, power, violence, and freedom, an author who dared to say what no one wanted to hear and was imprisoned for nearly half his life because of it, an aristocratic libertine and a revolutionary without flags, a ferocious atheist in a century still terrified of God, de Sade wrote wh