To understand Sade as a novelist, to read Sade as a practitioner of the genre of the eighteenth–century novel, we must begin to sift through and classify the multiple messages sent and formed around the author's name. Marcelin Pleynet has noted that “Sade” as a proper noun is generally excluded in our minds in favor of a common noun, “sadism,” and an adjective, “sadistic.” He further points out (p. 31) that this exclusion serves to deny Sade the literary dimension that is his due. Sade's name is never purely a proper noun: it is always pronounced in inverted commas. We thus hint at a larger–than–life human being: “the Marquis de Sade.” Or we turn the name into adjectives and common nouns (sadistic, sadist, sadism, sado-masochism) and thereby mark a signifying praxis, psychoanalysis and not literature. To understand Sade's difference as a novelist, to see what in his writing is truly different from the writing of Rousseau or Laclos, the captivity of the text to his improperly used name must come to an end. To speak schematically: in the first part of this essay I would like to try to consider the novels as texts henceforth independent of their author and thereby exempted from the connotations attached to the author's name, and specifically from the two versions of Sade we have come to accept: Sade the pervert and Sade the liberator. At the same time, I would like to distinguish between what I perceive as narrative material as such and the myth of Sade that has provided a cornerstone for psychoanalytical theory.