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One of the earliest incidents in the French Revolution was the Storming of the Bastille, in which as I recall there were three prisoners at the time, one of them the Marquis de Sade, who was released as a hero or pet of the revolution.

No, the Marquis had already been moved to a different prison. Of the three prisoners freed, IIRC, two were there for having defaulted on debts and the other was a mental case consigned to the Bastille by his family. All in all, it wasn't much of a prison break.

De Sade was never a hero of the revolution.

I don't know where I got the idea he was released from the Bastille. Probably some fictionalized version.

Here's what a capsule biography says:

On July 2 1789, he reportedly shouted out of his cell to the crowd outside, "They are killing the prisoners here!", causing somewhat of a riot. Two days later, he was transferred to the insane asylum at Charenton-Saint-Maurice (now Saint-Maurice, Val-de-Marne) near Paris. (The storming of the Bastille, marking the beginning of the French Revolution, happened on July 14.) He was released from Charenton in 1790 and his wife obtained a divorce soon after.