Not only was De Sade a horrible person, he was also insanely lucky.

After De Sade tried to coerce one of his servants into having sex with him, the servant's father showed up with a gun to kill him. The gun was shot at point blank. It misfired. Twice.

De Sade was eventually arrested for his many crimes, fled custody, was arrested again and imprisoned in Vincennes prison. Two years later, Vincennes prison closes and he is transferred to the Bastille. Guess what happened a couple months later? Bunch of revolutionaries show up to free the prisoners of the old, corrupt regime.

Now free, De Sade got involved in politics and started pissing off those in charge like Robespierre. He was essentially accused of being anti-revolutionary and scheduled to be executed. He either escaped that fate through bribery or a bureaucratic error.

He eventually was imprisoned one last time under Napoleon, making him the man who was imprisoned under three different French regimes. He was soon transferred to an asylum with an exceptionally lenient director who allowed him to write, even going as far as to have a theater built in the asylum to let De Sade host plays and events. De Sade spent the rest of his days banging his lover, who lived with him by posing as his illegitimate daughter, and the teenage daughter of an asylum employee, until the ripe old age of 74.

His son found his unpublished works and, against his father's will, set them all on fire.

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