During the last days of the ancien régime, imprisoned in a fetid cell atop the Bastille, a depraved aristocrat composed the most blasphemous novel ever written. But in death, the Marquis de Sade has gone from enemy of the French state to national treasure— a transformation capped in 2014, when the scroll bearing his 120 Days of Sodom sold for $10 million. Now that manuscript is at the center of France's biggest fraud case. 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 9:00 on 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.
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