The Crimes of Love (Oxford World’s Classics)

D-A-F, M  S, was born
in Paris in  into an old patrician family. He was educated at the
Jesuit college of Louis-le-Grand and at military school at Versailles.
The end of the Seven Years War in  dashed his hopes of a
military career, and that same year he reluctantly made the good

match his impoverished father forced on him by marrying Renée-
Pélagie de Montreuil, daughter of a recently ennobled but wealthy

lawyer. Serious sexual misdemeanours brought him to the attention
of the police and he was jailed twice for his excesses. In , for
attempted murder and sodomy, he was sentenced to death and his
effigy was burned in his absence. In , after years spent in not
uncomfortable hiding, mainly at his chateau at La Coste near
Avignon, he was jailed and not released until .