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her, then, she claimed, cut her backside with a pen knife and poured sealing wax in the wounds. Later locked in an upstairs room, she managed to escape at about four in the afternoon and report the incident to the local authorities. This was precisely what the authorities had been waiting for: an innocent woman, not a whore, bound and tortured by the evil marquis. While the police and legal authorities of Arcueil proceeded with their investigation, the indomitable Madame de Montreuil sprang into action, motivated less by the desire to save her son-in-law than to preserve the family’s good name. She convoked the ever-faithful Abbe Amblet and the trusted attorney Maître Claude-Antoine Sohier and dispatched them to Arcueil to buy off Rose Keller. Simultaneously, she sent her husband to speak to his friends with influence at the court: the only way to nip the incipient scandal in the bud was to have the king issue a lettre de cachet 6 sequestering Sade in a royal fortress before the case was brought to the public courts. The plan worked, or so the family thought: Sade, accompanied only by his ex-tutor Abbe Amblet, journeyed to the royal prison at the Chateau de Saumur, where he was duly incarcerated. From there he wrote a deeply apologetic letter to his uncle begging his forgiveness and adding: “If people get wind of this affair down there, tell them it’s all a terrible pack of lies and say that I am with my regiment. . . .” In other words, dear uncle, lie through your teeth. But what Sade was learning to his distress if not edification was that public opinion was having an even greater effect on a population that was increasingly fed up with the so-called misdemeanors of the aristocrats, whose sexual indulgences were rarely punished with any severity. Sade made a perfect scapegoat: not only did he not conceal his predilections and practices, he tended to boast of them. For a man who abhorred hypocrites, to do less would have been to become one himself. But his candor and honesty were only feeding the public’s fury. “At this time he is the victim of the public’s ferocity,” wrote Sade’s beloved Madame de Saint-Germain 7 to his uncle on April 18. Be that as it may, from now on Sade would be a marked man, as he began to realize. Did that sure knowledge impel him to reason? Hardly, as events will show.
    Paying off Rose Keller was the easy part. Her demands were exorbitant—the price of silence in matters of scandal always comes high—and in this instance it was 2,400 livres, plus seven gold louis for medicines. Once again, Madame de Montreuil had triumphed, or so she thought. But in fact even the king’s letter de cachet could not save Sade this time. The criminal chamber of Parlement—or high court— in Paris, seized the information gathered by the Arcueil villagers, convened an investigation, and issued a warrant for the arrest of the marquis, who was already in jail under the king’s warrant. If Parlement was aware of this situation, it chose to ignore it, perhaps subtly hoping to thwart the Montreuils’ preemptive strike and play on public opinion. Part of the problem, for Sade, was that the head of Parlement was one Charles de Maupeou, long an archenemy of Monsieur de Montreuil, who saw a rare opportunity to discredit the family. In addition, in those days, only two decades before the Revolution, efforts were being made by various members of the judiciary to undercut the king’s authority. In all likelihood, first in issuing its warrant, then, when Sade failed to respond (which he could hardly do since he was already in prison), sending the official crier to trumpet in Paris, including under the Montreuils’ windows, that “the gentleman Sade” must appear in person for trial, the high court was trying to establish its legal authority over that of the king. Meanwhile, the prisoner, after being transferred from Saumur to the less lax prison of Pierre-Encize—ostensibly an act of sovereign kindness to