He penned it while surrounded by the possessions allowed to a prisoner of his social standing in the infamous Parisian prison. Geoffrey Rush as the Marquis de Sade and Kate Winslet as Madeleine 'Maddy' LeClerc in the 2000 film Quills And, as revealed in a fascinating new book about that document and its history, such suffering would undoubtedly have delighted Sade. It’s a novel so heinous that many who took possession of the original manuscript over the centuries to come were said to have been cursed. But that would be to underestimate the astonishing depths of depravity depicted within, acts said to have inspired the unthinkable crimes of Moors murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. It’s tempting to view the book as an early 50 Shades Of Grey. Yet one October evening in 1785, after being incarcerated for nearly eight years, he began to write 120 Days Of Sodom, a work of fiction whose content demonstrated that, for all his physical decline, there had been no dimming of the perverted appetites which led to his name inspiring the word ‘sadism’ for acts of extreme sexual cruelty.
Obese, thanks to the delicacies sent him by his adoring wife - eel pâté, chocolate cakes and bacon-wrapped thrush among them - the 45-year-old aristocrat suffered migraines and gout, and wore strange, mask-like leather goggles to help his failing eyesight. His time in the Bastille, one of the most notorious jails in Europe, had taken its toll on the Marquis de Sade, a man whose arresting blue eyes and curly blond hair had once so beguiled women, they stopped in the street to stare at him.
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