Pass notes: Donatien Alfonse François

Eh? You may know him as the Marquis de Sade.

Appearance: Short and enormously fat, the man who put the Sade into sadism was apparently nonetheless something of a hit with the 18th-century ladies.

But weren't his tastes on the, ahem, rough side? Only if you're going to get sniffy about a bit of sodomy, the odd bout of whipping, the occasional orgy, a spot of coprophilia. Or the prostitutes he dosed up with Spanish fly so that he could stick his nose between their buttocks and smell their farts.

Enough already. I suppose no one stopped him because he was a top French toff? Au contraire, he was sentenced to death twice and banged up eight times, which gave him lots of time to write.

Ah, repentant prisonhouse memoirs? Er, no, actually - pornography about orgies, whipping and sodomy. Then there's that great scene in Juliette, where Pope Pius VI has sex with the depraved heroine on the main altar of St Peter's while hundreds of monks masturbate appreciatively.

I get the picture. So what's the old perv doing in Pass Notes? Well, depending on who you listen to, he discovered the unconscious before Freud, was a top critic of the Enlightenment and forerunner of Nietzsche, was a sexual and political revolutionary, broke the taboo about female desire, etc, etc. Oh, and Geoffrey Rush is playing him in Quills, a new film about his declining years with Kate Winslet as a saucy laundress.

Oh yes? Not what you think. Apparently the poor old Marquis was so fat he was reduced to autosodomy in his last years.

Auto? Don't ask. Anyway, you can't entirely blame him. Apparently his loathing of female private parts and obsession with bottoms stemmed from the fact that his mother didn't love him.

The man in his own words: "Go fuck away the livelong day."

Do say: "Had a good day at the orifice, Count?"

Don't say: "Garçon, there's Spanish fly in my soup."

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