At Home With the Marquis De Sade: A Life - Hardcover

Gray, Francine Du Plessix

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684800071 ISBN 13: 9780684800073

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1998

Synopsis

Drawing on thousands of pages of correspondence, a biographer brings to life not only one of the most perplexing figures in Western history, but the lives of the two women who ultimately dedicated themselves to his protection. 25,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

"Deranged, but extremely courteous." That was the verdict on the honourable army discharge of Donatien Alphonse François de Sade and it's vindicated--and how--by Francine du Plessix Gray's new domestic biography of the world's most famous and least understood sex maniac. Sade today tends to get caricatured as either monster or philosopher, but Gray's Sade is very much a man of his upbringing: of a dysfunctional family of the debauched French aristocracy in political crisis.

While one might ask why Sade (rather than any other dysfunctional debauched French aristocrat) became the man he was, Gray argues convincingly that it was the two women closest to him who produced Sade the writer, author of Justine and 120 Days of Sodom: his mother-in-law incarcerating him and forcing him to write, his wife acting as adoring but critical audience. Sade here is a loner, forever onstage to an audience, whether real or imagined. Gray sketches in skilfully the complex political situation which has seen Sade demonised both as the worst excesses of the French aristocracy and the worst excesses of the Terror which decimated it. At Home With the Marquis de Sade is a racy read, but never prurient: even when indulging questionable pet theories, Gray's razor-sharp intelligence shines through.--Alan Stewart

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0684800071
• ISBN 13: 9780684800073
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 491