Emerging from the morning fog shrouding the art galleries and boutiques of Paris’s 7th Arrondissement, the police arrived at the Hôtel de La Salle at 9:00on November 18, 2014. Once home to the author of France’s code of civil law and, after that, sundry dukes and duchesses, the seventeenth-century mansion was now the headquarters of Aristophil, an upstart investment company founded by Gérard Lhéritier, the son and grandson of a plumber. In just over two decades, the then-sixty-six-year-old Lhéritier—the “king of manuscripts,” as he’d been dubbed by the local media—had amassed the largest private collection of historical letters and manuscripts in the country, effectively cornering the market. Among his 130,000-odd holdings were André Breton’s original Surrealist Manifesto, love notes from Napoleon to Josephine, the last testament of Louis XVI, and fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls.



The bulk was housed in Aristophil’s Museum of Letters and Manuscripts, around the corner on Boulevard St.-Germain. But Lhéritier’s marquee acquisition rested inside a custom-made glass display on the mansion’s ground floor: a yellowed, fraying parchment, four and a half inches wide and nearly forty feet long, densely covered on both sides with 157,000 ornately handwritten words so minute they are virtually illegible without a magnifying glass. Composed in a prison cell by Donatien-Alphonse-François, better known as the Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom has been variously described as “one of the most important novels ever written” and “the gospel of evil.”

A plaster mold of Sade’s skull. Redux

Lost for more than a century and smuggled across Europe, it became one of the most valuable manuscripts in the world when Lhéritier purchased it for seven million euros ($10 million) in March 2014—a year that happened to mark the bicentennial of Sade’s death, as well as the final stage of his two-century-long reevaluation. An exhibition in Aristophil’s offices was timed to coincide with a nationwide series of events that would culminate in December. Lhéritier, a somewhat stout and diminutive man with thinning gray hair in a well-tailored suit and tie, was with a few employees discussing a recent reception he had attended at the residence of then president François Hollande when his assistant rushed in to inform him that the police were downstairs. Dozens of other agents were simultaneously raiding Aristophil’s museum, the offices of several Aristophil associates, and Lhéritier’s villa in Nice. While the officers seized company documents, financial records, and computer hard drives as potential evidence, the French courts froze his business and personal bank accounts.

Lhéritier stood accused of duping nearly eighteen thousand clients out of $1 billion. The claim, if true, would make him the architect of the largest Ponzi scheme in French history.

The extensive wars that Louis XIV had to wage throughout the course of his reign, while exhausting the state’s finances and the people’s resources, nevertheless uncovered the secret to enriching an enormous number of those leeches always lying in wait. . . . It was toward the end of this reign . . . that four among them conceived the unique feat of debauchery we are about to describe. . . . The time has come, friendly reader, for you to prepare your heart and mind for the most impure tale ever written since the world began. . . .

So Sade began The 120 Days of Sodom on October 22, 1785, while imprisoned in the Liberty Tower of the Bastille. Scattered around him were assorted personal effects, a privilege afforded to inmates of his stature: stacks of books on everything from the existence of God to the history of vampires, packages of Palais-Royal biscuits, bottles of lavender cologne, and one wooden dildo crafted, for personal use, to the Marquis’s precise specifications. Born to a noble family in 1740, Sade had spent his life mired in scandal—he narrowly dodged a bullet fired by the father of one of his servants, slashed a beggar and poured hot wax into her wounds, and offered to pay a prostitute to defecate on a crucifix, to give a small but representative sample. In 1777, Sade’s powerful mother- in-law, Madame de Montreuil, understandably sick of his antics, secured an arrest warrant for the Marquis signed by her friend Louis XVI. Sade was locked away on no charges. By the time he began The 120 Days of Sodom, he had been jailed for eight years. Working by candlelight in the Bastille had rendered him nearly blind. Nonetheless, he wrote, “it is impossible for me to turn my back on my muse; it sweeps me along, forces me to write despite myself and, no matter what people may do to try to stop me, there is no way they will ever succeed.”

The 120 Days of Sodom tells the story of four aristocrats who abduct sixteen boys and girls between the ages of twelve and fifteen and subject them to four months of what would later be called, after the author, sadistic rape and torture. The novel begins with pedophiliac priests and golden showers, and things only degenerate from there—to incest, bestiality, coprophilia, necrophilia, starvation, disembowelment, amputation, castration, cannibalism, and infanticide. By day 120, the château is awash in bodily fluids and strewn with corpses. Sade wrote every evening for thirty-seven days, joining pages end to end to form a single scroll, and hid the obscene and blasphemous manuscript in the wall of his cell.

On July 3, 1789, Sade was forcibly transferred to a mental asylum outside Paris after using the funnel from his pissing tube as a megaphone to denounce his captors. Eleven days later, an insurgent mob stormed the Bastille; the French Revolution had begun. Sade was released a year later, amid the upheaval. Calling himself “Citoyen Louis Sade,” he dabbled in politics before being arrested again in 1801 at the age of sixty-one. Sade spent his final years back in the asylum. He went to his grave believing The 120 Days of Sodom had been destroyed in the sacking of the Bastille. “Every day,” he wrote of the missing work, “I shed tears of blood.”

A nineteenth-century engraving of the Marquis and his muses. Redux

two years before lhéritier’s indictment, as a troop of Napoleonic guards played an imperial march and women made up to look like eighteenth-century courtesans sipped Champagne with government ministers, Aristophil’s founder stood behind a podium at the Hôtel de La Salle and welcomed his guests to the brand-new “pantheon of letters and manuscripts.” Recent reports that the outfit was in trouble were nothing but unfounded “attacks,” he said. “A successful company provokes jealousies, desires, questions, and creates opponents. . . . It is a permanent struggle.”

Lhéritier had labored for years to reach such heights. As a working-class boy from Meuse, in northeastern France, he dreamed of living by the sea in Nice. After an unexceptional military career, he settled into a modest family life and a job at an insurance company in Strasbourg. He launched a company on the side, investing in diamonds, but it went bankrupt in 1984. He married and had two children, then divorced in 1987. On a trip to Paris, Lhéritier visited a stamp shop in hopes of finding a gift for his son. Inside, he spotted a small envelope bearing the words “Par ballon monté” that, he learned, had been sealed during the 1870 Prussian siege of Paris and flown over the invading armies via balloon—one of the first letters ever sent by air. It cost 150 francs (less than twenty dollars). He felt like a “gold digger who discovers a vein,” Lhéritier later wrote. He started Valeur Philatéliques, trading in rare Monegasque stamps. French authorities charged Lhéritier with fraud for allegedly inflating their value; in March 1996, he spent two weeks in prison, though he was later acquitted. According to Intimate Corruption, the 2006 book Lhéritier wrote about “the Monaco stamp affair,” he was the victim of a government conspiracy.

Lhéritier was already on to his next venture. In 1990, he founded a third company called Aristophil, fusing the words for art, history, and philology. The operation remained relatively small until 2002, when he acquired a series of letters written by Albert Einstein discussing the theory of relativity. Lhéritier paid the auction house Christie’s $560,000 for the lot, a fraction of what he figured a serious collector would be willing to spend. But finding such a buyer would take time.

Instead, Lhéritier devised an alternative business model: He divided the ownership of the letters into shares—a common practice in real estate but largely unknown in the rarefied world of antiquarian books and manuscripts. That once out-of-reach market would now be open to schoolteachers, clergymen, shopkeepers, and anyone else who wanted to make a tax-exempt investment in the country’s literary heritage. For as little as a few hundred dollars, they could become part owners of this history-changing correspondence—or if they preferred, letters by the hand of Cocteau or Matisse. The shareholders would have the option to sell their stake back to the company after five years. In the interim, Aristophil would insure and safeguard the letters while promoting them through exhibitions in its newly opened Museum of Letters and Manuscripts, thus boosting their value. Independent brokers promised returns of 40 percent. Soon the mere involvement of Aristophil at an auction would send bids skyward. It was the start of a bull market in letters, drawing out manuscripts that had been moldering in château libraries for generations.

The 120 Days of Sodom has been variously described as “one of the most important novels ever written” and “the gospel of evil.”

France’s antiquarian book and manuscript shops are concentrated in the Paris neighborhood of St.-Germain-des-Prés. Down cobblestone alleyways, behind doors marked Livres Anciens and Autographes, historical letters and signed first editions were long bought and sold by those who shared a love of the written word, and deals were sealed with a handshake. Now these treasured works were being packaged and traded, owned by people who rarely saw their acquisitions or ran their fingertips across the paper. They had become investment vehicles like any other, and the old guard was up in arms.

From his stylishly appointed shop a few blocks from Aristophil’s headquarters, Frédéric Castaing watched Lhéritier’s rise with disgust. The grandson of a celebrated antique dealer, and the son of the proprietor of Maison Charavay, the oldest and perhaps most respected manuscript shop in the world, Castaing was the biggest name in the letters market. Until Lhéritier came along.

“Their sales arrangements were an absolute vulgarity,” Castaing, his hair swept up in a striking pompadour, said of Aristophil when I visited his shop in November 2016. “Baudelaire plus 12 percent, Victor Hugo plus 12 percent.” He had a special hatred for Jean-Claude Vrain, a book dealer whom Lhéritier had tapped to help price his offerings. Some say the discord began with a dispute over politics. Others say Vrain’s flamboyant ways simply represented everything Castaing despised. In 2005, before ever meeting Lhéritier, Castaing published a crime novel, Rouge Cendres (Red Ashes), about a shady attempt to corner the Parisian letters market, with one of the main villains, Augustin, modeled on Vrain. “In the [auctions], he never sat down like you and me, in a silence of good taste,” he wrote of Augustin. “No, he’d stay on his feet at the back of the room, he’d speak harshly at everyone and he’d bid like one orders a café crème.”

Castaing, who frequently spoke out against Lhéritier, was hired to handle a major sale by the esteemed Hôtel Drouot in 2012. The auction was an abject failure: Forty-nine of the sixty-five lots went unsold. Lhéritier, it turned out, had told his associates not to bid. Castaing later found copies of the auction catalog on his shop’s doorstep every morning for a week—the belles lettres equivalent of a horse’s head in his sheets.

The year before, the French government had declared that a series of letters written by former president Charles de Gaulle that had been purchased by Aristophil and divvied up among investors in fact belonged to the state. When staff under Aurélie Filippetti, the newly appointed minister of culture, reviewed the letters turned over by Aristophil, they discovered that Lhéritier had given them photocopies. Once confronted, he relinquished the originals, but Filippetti would not forget the affront.

Aristophil’s 120 Days of Sodom exhibition opening. Redux

Around the same time, Belgian authorities launched a fraud and money-laundering investigation into Aristophil in Brussels, where the company had opened a second Museum of Letters and Manuscripts. And in December 2012, the Autorité des Marchés Financiers, France’s SEC, issued a warning about investing in unregulated markets like letters and manuscripts. A year later, reports emerged that for the first time ever, Aristophil declined to buy back some of its investors’ manuscripts at the expected rate of return. (Lhéritier’s lawyer says there was never a guarantee to repurchase.)

Yet if Lhéritier was worried, he didn’t show it. The opening gala at his new headquarters was like a thumb in the eye of his enemies. He had won $210 million in Europe’s EuroMillions lottery the previous November—the biggest jackpot in the country’s history—and invested some $40 million of his winnings in Aristophil. And he was preparing to make his most audacious acquisition yet.

Sade was wrong: The 120 Days of Sodom wasn’t lost in the siege of the Bastille. It was discovered by a young man named Arnoux de Saint-Maximin, who spirited the rolled-up parchment out of the crumbling prison and sold it to the Marquis de Villeneuve- Trans. Villeneuve-Trans’s descendants hid the manuscript in their Provençal estate for more than a century, ultimately selling it to a German collector in 1900. In 1904, the Berlin sexologist Iwan Bloch published a few hundred copies of Sade’s previously unknown novel, ostensibly for scientific purposes.

“We would take it out of the box three or four times a year. It was not something we showed everybody.”

The scroll returned to France in 1929, when it was purchased by Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, patrons of the European avant-garde movement who traced their ancestry to Sade. The Noailles allowed a Sade authority to borrow the manuscript and produce a more accurate version of the text, which he published via limited subscription to avoid censorship. The family then kept the scroll in a library cabinet, breaking it out for readings when entertaining luminaries like Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. “I remember when intellectuals would come to visit, it was always a special moment to show them the manuscript,” says Carlo Perrone, the Noailles’ grandson. “We would take it out of the box three or four times a year. It was not something we showed everybody.” In 1982, Perrone, then in his twenties, received a panicked call from his mother: The manuscript was gone. She’d lent it to a close friend, the publisher Jean Grouet, who’d smuggled it into Switzerland and sold it for roughly $60,000. The buyer was a department-store magnate, Gérard Nordmann, owner of one of the largest private collections of erotica in the world. Perrone traveled to Switzerland to retrieve the manuscript, offering to buy it back. But Nordmann refused, telling Perrone, “I will keep it for the rest of my life.”

A scene from Salò, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film adaptation of Sodom. Alamy

After a lengthy legal battle, France’s highest tribunal ruled that the manuscript had been stolen and ordered that it be returned to the Noailles. But Switzerland, which hadn’t yet ratified the UNESCO convention requiring the repatriation of stolen cultural goods, disagreed. In 1998, the Swiss federal court ruled that Nordmann had purchased it in good faith.

The manuscript’s author, meanwhile, was enjoying a cultural resurgence. By the time the French ban on his books was lifted in the 1970s, Sade was seen in some circles as a man ahead of his time: muse of the surrealists, forerunner of Freud, even prophesier of the Holocaust. With his works now published by the distinguished Bibliothèque de la Pléiade and Penguin Classics, the “Divine Marquis” had entered France’s literary pantheon.

For generations, the Sade family refused the title “Marquis” because of its notorious associations. Today, Hugues de Sade, a direct descendant, sells wine, spirits, and beer under the brand Maison de Sade. “He must be looking up right now from his grave, smiling,” Hugues told me, sitting in his flat on the outskirts of Paris, where a bronze of his famous ancestor’s skull enjoys pride of place on his coffee table. He is holding out hope for a Sade-themed line of Victoria’s Secret lingerie.

Nordmann remained true to his word: He kept The 120 Days of Sodom for the rest of his life. After his death in 1992 and his widow’s in 2010, Nordmann’s heirs put his collection of erotica up for sale. Sensing an opportunity, Bruno Racine, the director of the National Library of France, with the backing of France’s Commission of National Treasures, lined up roughly $5 million in private donations to buy the historic scroll in 2013. The sellers agreed to share the proceeds with Perrone and his family.

Two days before the deal was to be finalized, the Nordmanns backed out. Maybe, as Perrone would later tell the French press, the courtroom battles were still too fresh for the family to make a deal involving the manuscript’s former owners. Or maybe the Nordmanns had an inkling they could hold out for a better offer.

Not quite a year later, in March 2014, Lhéritier announced that he’d purchased The 120 Days of Sodom for $10 million. The bulk of the proceeds went to the Nordmanns and to Perrone and his family. The rest covered taxes, fees, and, presumably, a hefty commission for Vrain, the mastermind behind the deal.

Aristophil’s now-shuttered Museum of Letters and Manuscripts. Redux

Lhéritier, accompanied by a television news crew, chartered a private jet to claim his prize. He offered to donate the manuscript to the National Library after exhibiting it for five to seven years, in exchange for a significant reduction in his company’s tax obligation. The National Library was on board with the agreement, but Filippetti’s Ministry of Culture, still smarting from the de Gaulle episode, declined. “Suspicion against the sustainability and integrity of Aristophil led the state not to proceed with this proposal,” Racine, whose term as National Library director ended in 2016, told me in an email.

The Musée d’Orsay asked to borrow the scroll for its blockbuster exhibition “Sade. Attacking the Sun,” opening that October. Lhéritier refused, believing that if he lent the manuscript to the museum, which operated under the authority of the minister of culture, he might never get it back, thereby losing it to the French government without the benefits of his original offer. Instead, a month before the museum’s show, he mounted his own exhibition. Perrone did not attend. “My relationship with Lhéritier was not that friendly,” he says.

Two months later, the police showed up at Lhéritier’s door.

“Filippetti and some malicious prosecutors thought that the manuscript would be submitted free of charge after Aristophil’s destruction,” Lhéritier told me through a translator. “They placed a bomb in the heart of Aristophil and its museums, and it exploded.”

“The guy’s objective goal in life is not money; it is respectability.”

Lhéritier is sitting at his dining table in his fortresslike stone villa in the hills above Nice, wearing a cobalt-blue suit with a plaid open-collared shirt and matching pocket square. In the bright white light coming off the Mediterranean on this warm December 2016 day, he looks older, more tired, than he appears in even relatively recent photos. This is the first time Lhéritier has spoken at length publicly about the rise and fall of Aristophil since he’s come to be regarded as France’s Bernie Madoff. Agents in the country’s consumer-affairs and fraud-prevention division, leery of Aristophil’s unusual business model, spent years investigating the company. Interviewing Castaing and other sources in the manuscript market, they concluded that Lhéritier built Aristophil as an elaborate shell game. According to lawyers representing the company’s former clients, Lhéritier and his colleagues considerably overvalued Aristophil’s holdings while using new investments to pay off old ones and make new purchases so that the operation would appear sound.

Financial investigators referred the case to the French public prosecutor’s office, which ordered the raids in November 2014. Four months later, an investigating judge indicted Lhéritier, according to multiple news accounts, on charges of fraud, money laundering, deceptive marketing practices, and breach of trust. (Lhéritier’s lawyer would not comment on the specific charges.) He now faces up to ten years in prison.

The novelist Gonzague Saint Bris (third from left) hosts the Marquis’s descendants Elzéar (with a bronze of Sade’s skull), Hugues, and Thibault de Sade for the bicentennial of the Marquis’s death in 2014. Getty Images

Authorities also reportedly indicted three Aristophil associates: Vrain, an accountant, and one of the company’s directors. (Vrain would not comment on any charges.) Employees continued to operate the museum and the 120 Days of Sodom exhibit for several months without pay, even though the collections were under government seal.

The courts tied up Lhéritier’s lottery winnings, his properties (although he’s still allowed to live in his $5 million villa), his three racehorses, and his two hot-air balloons. The only reason Lhéritier has any money at all is thanks to his son, Fabrice, to whom he’d bestowed a portion of his EuroMillions windfall.

Out on a $2.5 million bail, Lhéritier now spends his days preparing for his criminal trial, a date for which has not yet been set. In his timber-ceilinged villa, which features indoor and outdoor pools and a dramatic view of the sea, the divorcé shows me photos of his children and grandchildren among the elegant antiques and paintings in gilded frames. In the bathroom, an electronic toilet boasts a heated seat and a self-opening lid—the ultimate throne for the son and grandson of a plumber.

It’s a charmed existence, but a far cry from the bustle of Aristophil headquarters and the buzz of Paris auction houses. “The guy’s objective goal in life is not money; it is respectability,” says his lawyer, Francis Triboulet. “But now everyone has abandoned him.” Yet Lhéritier remains confident. “It might take two or three years, but they aren’t going to get me,” he says. When I ask how many years in prison he thinks he’ll receive, he makes a circle with his fingers: zero.

According to Triboulet, Lhéritier cannot be convicted of fraud because Aristophil never guaranteed it would buy back investors’ manuscript shares. Its contracts simply stated that investors could offer to sell back their shares to the company after five years. As for the 40 percent returns shareholders expected from their investments? The overzealous promises of independent brokers, not company policy. Anne Lamort, the former president of France’s booksellers syndicate, has long suspected Lhéritier was up to something, but concedes that the government’s case against him isn’t particularly strong. “I think it is very difficult to prove fraud or the exaggerated manuscript estimates,” she says. “There is no objective measure and no witnesses.”

If Aristophil was a hoax, Triboulet says, why would Lhéritier have invested millions of his lottery winnings into the company? “It’s the first time in my life that the main victim of a system which is alleged to be a fraud is considered the main fraudster of the business.” But rumors swirl about that lottery jackpot. Some believe Lhéritier bought the winning ticket from somebody else to legitimize his spending—an old Whitey

Bulger trick. (Lhéritier vehemently denies that there was anything improper about his lottery win.)

Gérard Lhéritier with Sade’s manuscript in 2003. Getty Images

“I brought to the general public, to the working class and others, all of the artists of the School of Paris and the great celebrities of the humanities,” he says. Powerful interests in the Ministries of Culture, Finance, and Justice were out to destroy him, he claims, because he threatened the cultural status quo and dared to flaunt his success. “In order to live happily in France, you have to live hidden,” he says. For his part, Hugues de Sade largely agrees. “He is someone who was able to find his niche and exploit it in a very intelligent way,” Hugues says of Lhéritier. “But in France, we always criticize people who succeed. We like to gain money, but we don’t like to talk about it.” There’s something appealing about Lhéritier’s tale, the way this outsider upended the exclusive world of letters through pluck, innovation, and good fortune. But then I remember all the people who believed in this man. With interest, Aristophil owes approximately $1.5 billion to its nearly eighteen thousand investors. That includes Geoffroy de La Taille, an actor and father of five who along with his wife invested $230,000 in the company, figuring the earnings would help his family through the lean times between roles. And Robert Cipollina, a motorcycle racer turned small-business owner in Avignon who planned to use the returns on his $45,000 investment to buy a new car. He changed his mind in 2014, deciding the profits would go to his children as he lay dying from leukemia. “I would prefer to have my dad back, but I also don’t want them to have his money,” Aude Nehring, Cipollina’s daughter, told me angrily when I visited her and her family in Germany. “What is going on here? Do we have a chance to get the money back?”

"They have to be patient and confident. Their collections still exist. They haven’t lost anything.”

Selling off Lhéritier’s assets wouldn’t come close to making his investors whole. Seeking alternatives, some of the alleged victims have formed associations and filed lawsuits against ancillary businesses linked to Aristophil, like its banks and notary. For now, they have little to show for their investment save for a contract produced by a company that no longer exists.

Lhéritier doesn’t spend much time pondering Aristophil’s investors. While he expresses sympathy for their troubles, he maintains that he is not to blame. “I would tell the clients to address themselves to the authors of this destruction, not to me,” he says. “There is only one thing to say to the clients, and I have said this since the beginning: They have to be patient and confident. Their collections still exist. They haven’t lost anything.”

After being hidden away for almost three years, The 120 Days of Sodom emerged from its vault late last year. In a second-floor gallery in the modernist Parisian citadel that houses the Drouot auction house, the scroll was rolled up and placed on a pedestal, surrounded by other treasures confiscated from Aristophil. Aguttes, the Parisian auction company that won the contract to store and sell the company’s holdings, announced last November that the liquidation of the collection would start on December 20 with a blockbuster sale.

The original manuscript of The 120 Days of Sodom. Joining pages end to end, the Marquis de Sade wrote 157,000 words in three weeks and hid the scroll in the wall of his cell in the Bastille. He died believing it had been destroyed in the prison siege that ignited the French Revolution. Shutterstock

Then, on December 18, the French government declared The 120 Days of Sodom a national treasure. When the auction begins on a cold and dreary afternoon two days later in one of Drouot’s largest halls, the auctioneer steps up to the podium and explains to the packed crowd that the designation means the manuscript will be removed from view while the state works to negotiate a fair-market price.

Minus its star attraction, the auction proceeds desultorily. Onlookers spill out into the hallway; video screens display offers in dollars, pounds, yuan, and other currencies; news cameras zoom in on bidders whispering, mouths covered, into their cell phones, gesturing subtly to the auctioneer when the price is right. But there is little drama. Even Vrain, conspicuous as ever in a wide-brimmed hat, remains seated for most of the sale, avoiding the sort of ostentatious displays that so incensed Castaing. (The latter isn’t in attendance, preferring the intimacy of one-on-one sales and refusing to take financial advantage of the debacle.) Vrain, who hasn’t spoken to Lhéritier since the raids, dismisses criticisms he’s faced because of his connection to Aristophil. “I have run my business the way I have wanted to,” he told me when I visited his bookshop the year before. “Some people like me; some people don’t. I don’t give a shit.” The few times Vrain does bid, he walks away with several of the biggest sales of the auction: an original Balzac manuscript for $1.5 million, a calligraphic edition of an Alexandre Dumas drama for $100,000. But many of the lots don’t meet even the low end of the valuations the auction company had assigned, let alone the inflated prices Aristophil’s clients paid for them. Nearly a third go unsold.

As the auction wraps up, several longtime Parisian book and art dealers gather downstairs at L’Adjuge, the auction house’s café, to reflect on what just transpired. “It was a black sale!” declares Serge Plantureux, who specializes in photographs. “The atmosphere was like a funeral.” Anne Lamort agrees that the sale didn’t go well as she sips her coffee. And this was only the first and most notable of the Aristophil auctions; Aguttes has promised roughly three hundred more over at least the next six years to liquidate all 130,000 items Aristophil had amassed. “There will be a paralysis effect for the next ten years,” Lamort predicts.

Everything—Lhéritier’s claims that his empire was built on real value, the investments of his clients, the stability of the shaken manuscript market—hinges on these auctions. Judging from the first sale, everyone involved has reason to worry.

But the onetime king of manuscripts continues to deny any responsibility. “I am furious after this auction,” he wrote in an email. “The choice of Aguttes as auction manager is a humbug.” He believes the auctioneer wasn’t experienced enough in manuscripts, and that it was foolhardy to mount such a high-profile sale less than a week before Christmas. “My old customers will lose a lot of money.” Lhéritier insists that his letters are worth the prices he promised because the age of handwritten documents is coming to an end. “People have boxes and boxes of letters” in their basements, he says. “These are completely hidden treasures.”

One treasure that probably won’t ever reach Lhéritier’s predicted value is The 120 Days of Sodom. While it now seems likely to end up in the National Library, without a public auction or bidding war, it’s doubtful the manuscript will fetch the $10 million Lhéritier paid in 2014, much less the $15 million for which he sold it to 420 Aristophil investors. In the end, The 120 Days of Sodom may belong to all of France—and to no one.

Perhaps, Lhéritier muses, the scroll really is cursed: “Maybe if I hadn’t touched the manuscript, Aristophil would still be here.” He says this with a laugh as he sits in the rooftop restaurant of a posh Nice hotel, drinking an espresso in the brilliant sunshine and looking out over the sea. He admits that he’s never thought too hard about the deeper significance of Sade’s scandalous opus, never intensely contemplated the dark, insidious corruption it describes. He never finished reading it.