Marguerite Coste
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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- Marguerite Coste was a 25-year-old prostitute when on Saturday evening June 27, 1772 she met the Marquis Sade in her Marseilles apartment. The Marquis offered her several pastilles from his crystal candy box. After a few moments he asked the prostitute to lie face down on the bed so that he could lick her bottom and she could fart into his mouth. She declined his request to sodomize her and after "amusing himself with her person" the Marquis paid her six francs and left. Ms. Coste spent the next week vomiting and suffering from severe stomach pain. Apparently Sade had dosed his candy with cantharis ("Spanish Fly") and Ms. Coste (among several other prostitutes visited by the Marquis) got violently ill. Ms. Coste eventually recovered but not before she set in motion the wheels of justice over the Marquis. On December 8, 1772 Sade was arrested in Italy in connection with what has become known as the "Marseilles Affair."[1]
After an episode in Marseille in 1772 that involved the non-lethal poisoning of prostitutes with the supposed aphrodisiac spanish fly and sodomy with his male servant Latour, the two were sentenced to death in absentia for sodomy and said poisoning in the same year. They were able to flee to Italy, and Sade took the sister of his wife with him, with whom he had an affair. His mother-in-law never forgave him for this. She obtained a lettre de cachet for his arrest (a royal order by which an individual could be arrested and imprisoned without stated cause and without access to the courts). Sade and Latour were caught and imprisoned at the Fortress of Miolans in late 1772 but managed to flee four months later.
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