I can answer some of this. The long and short of it is that he was ill-renowned in his life enough to invoke comment from both King Louis XVI and Napoleon Bonaparte.

Please note that much of this answer comes from my book

Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, known as the Marquis de Sade, was born in 1740, to the Comte (Count) de Sade, who was a lord in Provence. The de Sade family line went back centuries; one of his ancestors was Laura de Noves, who Petrarch wrote his love poems to, thus kickstarting Renaissance poetry and inspiring Boccaccio—things come full circle. Additionally, he was the only child in a large household, so he was absolutely fawned over. According to John Phillips, he was more or less raised by his father and his uncle, Abbé Jacques François de Sade, both of whom were well-known libertines. By the time of de Sade's birth, 'libertine,' had come to mean that a person had an excessive and unfettered sex life, was frequently atheist, and attacked social and religious morals. As Phillips notes, the two men that raised Donatien were extreme libertines:

[T]he lustful Abbé enjoyed liaisons with a number of society women and even visited some of the more notorious Parisian bordellos, while the bisexual Count was on one occasion arrested for accosting a young man in the Tuileries Gardens. At the same time, both were highly cultured men. Sade's father was a close friend of Voltaire's and himself wrote verses, while Donatien's uncle in particular had a fine and extensive library which, alongside the classic authors, included all the major works of contemporary Enlightenment philosophy as well as a fair sample of erotic writings.

Indeed, as a result of their education and care, de Sade would achieve the heights of both libertinism and cultural refinement.

Like Rochester, de Sade enlisted in the military after his education, to fight in the Seven Years' War, and he apparently distinguished himself over the course of the next few years as a great fighter against the British and a heroic figure under fire. Immediately after the war, however, he turned to more enjoyable pursuits like visiting plays and operas, seducing actresses, and running up incredible debts. Like Rochester, he was forced to marry a woman from a rich family who wanted to marry into the nobility; she was Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil. De Sade and Renée-Pélagie would have two sons and a daughter, and the de Sade family line survives to this day; the current descendant has done much to redeem his infamous name.

However, very shortly after the wedding, de Sade was arrested and thrown into jail for the first of many times. The reason, as it turned out, was that he had hired a prostitute named Jeanne Testard for a night of debauchery, but had shocked her sensibilities when he talked about, among other things, "masturbating into chalices and thrusting communion hosts into women's vaginas, and had then frightened her with whips and other weapons into committing a number of similar sacrilegious acts," with the exception of anal sex, as it was punishable by death in Paris. He was imprisoned for a few months before being released, but the lesson did not stick, and a few years later he found himself in jail again for kidnapping a 36-year-old beggar named Rose Keller. According to trial transcripts, de Sade had spent the night subjecting her to whippings and pouring hot wax on her body before she jumped out a second story window and escaped to the police. He was commanded to leave Paris and never return, and he did not return. . . for several years.

The Marquis seemingly could not keep out of trouble. The next scandal that he landed himself in occurred after he and his valet travelled to Marseilles to borrow money, which he promptly spent in hiring four prostitutes for a night of debauchery. In addition to “acts of flagellation and sodomy,” he also gave the women an ‘aphrodisiac’ which was intended “to cause flatulence, the effects of which Sade found particularly arousing. One of the girls became ill and complained to the authorities that Sade had tried to poison her.” A warrant was soon issued for his arrest, but when the police arrived, they had already fled, “accompanied this time by the ravishing Anne-Prospère.” Despite his wife’s efforts to bribe the prostitutes to drop the charges, de Sade and his valet, Latour, were convicted and sentenced to death in absentia.

The 'ravishing Anne-Prospère' that Phillips mentions was, in fact, his wife's sister. De Sade was undeniably attracted to her, as she "represented to de Sade all the taboos that his fictional characters would take such pleasure in breaking; virginity, incest and religion." These were the biggest taboos that were assaulted in his works as manifestations of religious and social control, which de Sade loathed. Unfortunately for de Sade, Anne-Prospère's understandably upset mother succeeded in obtaining a lettre de cachet (which permitted arrest without a trial) against her son-in-law. After a series of cat-and-mouse escapes, Donatien was eventually thrown in the Bastille for 13 years, from 1777 to 1784.

It is impossible to deny the effects which that imprisonment had on the Marquis, indeed, if it were not for his access to pen and paper during his long periods of imprisonment, it is unlikely that he would have become a major writer in his lifetime. It seems like he turned all of his sexual energy and enthusiasm towards writing; by the end of his first period of imprisonment in 1788, he was able to list eight novels and short story volumes, two volumes of essays, twenty plays, and sixteen novellas. Of course, only a few of these survived the storming of the Bastille that kicked off the French Revolution—something, by the way, which the Marquis de Sade had a hand in instigating:

In the months and weeks immediately preceding the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, crowds of increasingly restive Parisians were in the habit of gathering underneath its walls. Sade quickly saw that the present unrest offered his best chance of freedom in 13 years and, improvising a megaphone from a long metal funnel that he used to empty his slops into the moat, he bellowed to the throngs below that the guards were about to cut the prisoners' throats. This provocative act immediately got Sade moved to the lunatic asylum at Charenton, a few miles south of Paris, where he could do no more harm. Ten days after the funnel incident, however, the citizens of Paris took his advice and invaded the fortress, murdering the governor.

When he was released from prison, he managed to find work for a time with the Revolutionary government in several official positions, despite being an aristocrat. He eventually fell out of favor when he spoke against the death penalty and was imprisoned again for another year, barely managing to escape from being guillotined due to a clerical error. His name appeared on a list of men to be executed one day, but when he was called, he didn't say 'here!' (ici!), and was marked down as having disappeared. He also wrote his three most famous obscene works during this period: Philosophy in the Bedroom, Justine, and Juliette. Like Cleland, he was totally bankrupt, and had been forced to sell his castle in Lacoste just to support himself; he hoped that the obscene novels would sell enough to support him, and perhaps they did for a time, as Justine became a bestseller.

Justine unfortunately came to the attention of Napoleon's secret police and then Napoleon himself. In 1801, after several years of freedom, Sade was arrested yet again on the orders of Napoleon, who found Juliette the “abominable” work of a “depraved imagination,” and soon ended up in Charenton, an insane asylum—he would spend his days in in Charenton until his death in 1814.