In normal individuals, love and suffering are antithetic terms, love meaning joy and pleasure, (sexual and egotistical), suffering being only conceivable when the craving for love is ungratified, when the lonely lovers are parted by life, when one of them has been robbed by death of his mate, etc.
=Algolagnists.= There are abnormal human beings, however, known technically as algolagnists (from algos, pain, and lagneia, enjoyment), who cannot imagine or enjoy love when it is entirely dissociated from some form of suffering.
The active algolagnists must inflict some pain, physical or mental, upon their mate in order to enjoy the pleasures of love to their full extent. The passive algolagnists only attain the highest degree of amorous satisfaction when they are submitted by their mate to painful or humiliating treatment.
Active algolagnists are known more commonly as "sadists," an expression created by Moreau de Tours. Krafft-Ebing, the most famous writer on sexual perversions coined for passive algolagnists the expression "masochists."
The word sadist is derived from the name of Marquis de Sade, a French pervert of the eighteenth century, whose life and writings well illustrate the form of love which is constantly associated with acts of cruelty.
=Donatien Alphonse François de Sade= was born in Paris, June 2 1740, the offspring of an aristocratic family of Provence. Among his ancestors was the Laura of Petrarca's sonnets.
At fourteen, he joined a cavalry regiment. He went thru the Seven Years War during which he witnessed the most ruthless atrocities. On his return, at the age of twenty-seven, he married, but soon after his marriage was arrested for some deed of cruelty committed in a house of prostitution.
His father's death left him heir to an important government position but his life of excesses gave him little time to attend to his duties.
At twenty-eight, he attracted much attention by a scandal in which he played a prominent part. He lured a shopkeeper's wife, Rose Keller to a house in the suburbs of the French capital where he used to hold revels.
Threatening the woman with a pistol, he bound her hands and feet and whipped her to the blood.
The next morning, Rose Keller managed to free herself, jumped out of the window and summoned help. De Sade was arrested but the affair was soon hushed up by powerful friends at the court of Louis the Fifteenth.