to another account blue] eyes, already bore the languorous imprint of the vice which was to corrupt his whole being”; his voice was “drawling and caressing”; his gait had “a softly feminine grace.”  Unfortunately there is no authentic portrait of him.  His early life is sketched in letter iv of his Aline et Valcourt.  On leaving the College-Louis-le-Grand he became a cavalry officer and went through the Seven Years’ War in Germany.  There can be little doubt that the experiences of his military life, working on a femininely vicious temperament, had much to do with the development of his perversion.  He appears to have got into numerous scrapes, of which the details are unknown, and his father sought to marry him to the daughter of an aristocratic friend of his own, a noble and amiable girl of 20.  It so chanced that when young De Sade first went to the house of his future wife only her younger sister, a girl of 13, was at home; with her he at once fell in love and his love was reciprocated; they were both musical enthusiasts, and she had a beautiful voice.  The parents insisted on carrying out the original scheme of marriage.  De Sade’s wife loved him, and, in spite of everything, served his interests with Griselda-like devotion; she was, Ginisty remarks, a saint, a saint of conjugal life; but her love was from the first only requited with repulsion, contempt, and suspicion.  There were, however, children of the marriage; the career of the eldest—­an estimable young man who went into the army and also had artistic ability, but otherwise had no community of tastes with his father—­has been sketched by Paul Ginisty, who has also edited the letters of the Marquise.  De Sade’s passion for the younger sister continued (he idealized her as Juliette), though she was placed in a convent beyond his reach, and at a much later period he eloped with her and spent perhaps the happiest period of his life, soon terminated by her death.  It is evident that this unhappy marriage was decisive in determining De Sade’s career; he at once threw himself recklessly into every form of dissipation, spending his health and his substance sometimes among refinedly debauched nobles and sometimes among coarsely debauched lackeys.  He was, however, always something of an artist, something of a student, something of a philosopher, and at an early period he began to write, apparently at the age of 23.  It was at this age, and only a few months after his marriage, that on account of some excess he was for a time confined in Vincennes.  He was destined to spend 27 years of his life in prisons, if we include the 13 years which in old age he passed in the asylum at Charenton.  His actual offenses were by no means so terrible as those he loved to dwell on in imagination, and for the most part they have been greatly exaggerated.  His most extreme offenses were the indecent and forcible flagellation in 1768 of a young woman, Rosa Keller, who had accosted him in the street for alms, and