structural:scholar_edition
Marseilles affair and aftermath

In June 1772, Sade and his manservant, Latour, traveled to Marseilles on the pretext of obtaining a loan. On 27 June, they engaged in an elaborately staged orgy with four prostitutes. The orgy included sexual intercourse, flagellation, and, according to some witnesses, both active and passive anal sex involving Sade, Latour and one of the prostitutes. Sade offered the prostitutes aniseed -flavored pastilles laced with Spanish fly. One of the prostitutes, Marianne Laverne, became ill after eating the pastilles. That evening, Sade had sex with another prostitute, Marguerite Coste, who became critically ill after eating the pastilles. Coste filed a complaint with the police and, after an investigation, a warrant was issued for the arrest of Sade on charges of sodomy and poisoning.

Sade went into hiding, and his wife paid Laverne and Coste to withdraw their complaints. The Marseilles court, however, continued the prosecution, sentencing Sade and Latour to death in absentia on 2 September. The sentence was confirmed by the Cours des Comptes de Provence in Aix on 11 September, and Sade and Latour were burnt in effigy the following day. Sade was now in Italy with Anne-Prospère, a liaison which turned Madame de Montreuil into his implacable enemy. He wrote to his mother-in-law from Italy, disclosing his location, and she used her influence to secure his arrest and imprisonment in the Fortress of Miolans, then part of the Kingdom of Sardinia. He escaped from the fortress on 30 April 1773 and returned to France.

Sade narrowly avoided arrest in January 1774 when he was warned of an imminent police raid on his home in La Coste which had been arranged by Madame de Montreuil. Following the death of Louis XV in May, Madame de Montreuil successfully petitioned for a new lettre de cachet for Sade's arrest in the name of King Louis XVI. Meanwhile, Renée-Pélagie requested an appeal of her husband's death sentence.