Stranded and alone on a desert island during a cruise, a spoiled rich woman and a deckhand fall in love and make a date to reunite after their rescue.

A nobleman with a literary flair, the Marquis de Sade lives in a madhouse where a beautiful laundry maid smuggles his erotic stories to a printer, defying orders from the asylum’s resident priest. The titillating passages whip all of France into a sexual frenzy, until a fiercely conservative doctor tries to put an end to the fun.