The secret journal which the Marquis de Sade risked severe punishment in order to maintain, even when ill and ageing at Charenton asylum, reveals the shadowy life of an exceptional, complex man whose philosophies and works are legendary. In the "hospitalprison" of Charenton, under a liberal regime of surveillance, Sade's days were slow and grim, full of mundane preoccupations, worries about money, quarrels with the people around him — but were also lit up by the sordid, secret episodes of a final erotic adventure: the last flames of his passion, an affirmation of life even as death approached, darkening the colours of his life and tearing apart his feelings.
Only the first (1807—8) and fourth (1814) of these notebooks have been rediscovered, out of a series of four; they are now presented in English for the very first time, along with the first translation of "Phantoms", a short but extraordinary anti-religious polemic retrieved from Sade's Charenton working notes of 1803.
THE-GHOSTS-OF-SODOM also includes a selection of Sade's letters from Charenton, as well as the working notes for his terminal novel "The Days At Florbelle" — a huge manuscript seized at Charenton in 1807 and deemed so pornographic that it was burned by the police at the behest of Sade's own son. Also included are Sade's last will and testament, a Sade bibliography, and a full chronology of his life, plus the rare essay "De Sade: A Study In Algolagnia" by Montague Summers.