The Marquis De Sade spent 32 years in prison or in mental hospitals. The scroll, which started its life in prison, is thus under lock and key once again, waiting for the courts to decide its future. The exhibition was cut short when the director of the foundation was charged with fraud. Decades of legal wrangling ensued between the Nouailles and the Nordmanns, only resolved in 2014 when a private foundation acquired the scroll for €7m and placed it on display in Paris. But he smuggled it over the border to Switzerland, and sold it to a leading collector of erotica, Gérard Nordmann. Sade’s descendants, the Nouailles family, bought the scroll back in 1929 and kept it until 1982, when they entrusted the publisher, Jean Grouet, with its valuation. His family held on to it for more than a 100 years before eventually selling it to a German collector, who allowed the pioneering sexologist Iwan Bloch to publish the novel for the first time in 1904. Somehow it escaped the storming of the Bastille in the hands of a young man called Arnoux de Saint-Maximin, who then sold it to a Provençal aristocrat, the Marquis de Villeneuve-Trans. Though Sade never saw his scroll again, its story was far from over.
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