ABSTRACT
On 20 February 1781 the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) wrote a letter to his wife, ending with a plaintive passage, in which this short sentence keeps recurring: Je suis un libertin. The letter was written in the château of Vincennes, where in 1781 de Sade had already been a prisoner for four years. In the letter he discusses in detail some of the ‘affaires’ that led to his imprisonment. 1 He does not want to cover anything up: ‘Yes, I admit I am a libertine and in that area I have imagined everything that can be imagined. But I have absolutely not acted out everything that I imagined nor do I intend to. I am a libertine, but I am not a criminal or a murderer.’ 2
