The original scroll on which the infamous Marquis de Sade wrote The 120 Days of Sodom, his novel on sexual depravity, paedophilia, cruelty and murder, has returned to France.
Sade's book was written in tiny writing on a narrow 12-metre-long strip of parchment in just 37 days while he was imprisoned in the Bastille and hidden in his cell. It was found when the jail was stormed during the French Revolution.
It has changed hands and been fought over several times in the centuries since, its ownership causing almost as much controversy as its contents.
Now the parchment, bought by a French manuscript dealer, will go on display at a private museum in Paris to mark the 200th anniversary of the author's death.
Sade's work details the depraved behaviour of four wealthy French libertines who rape, torture and finally murder their victims, who are mostly teenage girls in a remote mediaeval castle, in order to experience extreme sexual gratification. It was described by the author, whose name provided the term sadism, as "the most impure tale that has ever been told since our world began". The story remained unpublished until 1904 when it was obtained by a German psychiatrist who regarded it having scientific importance.
It has since been translated into many languages, and frequently banned as obscene. Feminist writer Andrea Dworking has condemned it as "vile pornography" and described Sade as the embodiment of misogyny.
In 1929, the scroll was bought by a member of the Noailles family who was a direct descendant of Sade. It was later stolen, smuggled into Switzerland and sold to a collector. A furious international legal wrangle ensued with a French court ordering it to be returned to the Noailles family, only to be overruled in 1998 by a Swiss court that declared it had been bought by the collector in good faith.
It was first put on display near Geneva in 2004. Gérard Lhéritier, president and founder of Aristophil, a company specialising in rare manuscripts, who bought the scroll for €7m (£5.75m) will put it on display at the Museum of Letters and Manuscripts in Paris, which he owns.
Sade, born Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, wrote much of his literary oeuvre of pornographic and sexually violent novels during the 32 years of his life he spent in prison and asylums, and he was sentenced to death for sodomy and poisoning.
He regarded The 120 Days of Sodom, also known as the School of Libertinism, as his magnum opus, but despaired, thinking it had been lost when the Bastille was stormed.
Sade died in 1814, after which his son ordered all his unpublished manuscripts to be burned.
Lheritier told French journalists he had offered to hand the scroll over to France's national library in five years, but said he had not had a response.
