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Abstract: Sade’s novel Justine tells the story of a young orphan girl Justine, also called Thérèse, who has been wandering around and constantly harassed by some truly nasty men. She is virtuous and they are not, and thus she must suffer. Her tormentors are men of lust and desire, and obviously happy and successful. In the course of the story, Sade presents a series of scandalous theses which he illustrates and defends in his novel. The virtuous never learn and thus they suffer, unlike the persons whose desires are natural and uninhibited. I further argue that Sade’s starting point is a well-known philosophical scandal, metaphysical optimism, and he intends to refute it by means of other scandals that are inherent in what I call the calculus of desire. In this paper, I tell the story of these various scandals