"The 120 Days of Sodom" was written in thirty-seven days, ranging from October 22 to November 28, 1785. The place of writing was a cell in the Bastille, one of the prisons in which almost Half of the life of the writer. And the procedure used to convey his ideas to the paper, to materialize in a text his overflowing imagination, was to fill, with microscopic letter and on both sides, a roll of paper of something more than two meters long and twelve centimeters wide. The result is a work, scarcely outlined in three of its four parts, in which Sade, in a quasi-scientific spirit, carries out the most ruthless annihilation -physical and moral- ever written both of the human being and of the established social order.
