Watching the film Marquis (1989) for a second time last night, occasioned by the death of Michel Robin, brought the following dictum to my attention:

… qu’importe à sa main créatrice que cette masse de chair conformant aujourd’hui d’un individu bipède, se produise demain sous la forme de mille insectes différents?…”

This appears to be a variation of Sade’s dictum that a “mass of flesh which today constitutes an individual … may be reproduced tomorrow in the form of a thousand insects”.

In my quest to find the origin of this citation (Justine), I stumbled upon Man into Wolf (1951) by Robert Eisler. That book has a good chapter on Marquis de Sade, and, is in the public domain since this year.