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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Lending his name to the term sadism, and synonymous with pornography and sexual perversion, the infamous Marquis de Sade was inarguably mad, bad, and dangerous to know. But the very qualities that were repellent in the man make for fascinating reading in Francine du Plessix Gray's biography, At Home with the Marquis de Sade. The pitfalls of writing about such a scandalous subject are obvious: Sade is so completely associated in the modern mind with extremely degrading sexual escapades that any book about him risks being tarred with the same prurient brush--how does one discuss the Marquis without mentioning such loaded topics as whipping, sodomy, masturbation, blasphemy, or orgies, for example? The answer is, one doesn't; but Gray's focus in this biography is less on Sade's sexuality than on his relationship with the two most influential women in his life: his wife, Pélagie, and his mother-in-law, Madame de Montreuil.
Lending his name to the term sadism, and synonymous with pornography and sexual perversion, the infamous Marquis de Sade was inarguably mad, bad, and dangerous to know. But the very qualities that were repellent in the man make for fascinating reading in Francine du Plessix Gray's biography, At Home with the Marquis de Sade. The pitfalls of writing about such a scandalous subject are obvious: Sade is so completely associated in the modern mind with extremely degrading sexual escapades that any book about him risks being tarred with the same prurient brush--how does one discuss the Marquis without mentioning such loaded topics as whipping, sodomy, masturbation, blasphemy, or orgies, for example? The answer is, one doesn't; but Gray's focus in this biography is less on Sade's sexuality than on his relationship with the two most influential women in his life: his wife, Pélagie, and his mother-in-law, Madame de Montreuil.
It seems even a sadist can love, and in his own way, the Marquis de Sade loved his wife. Even more remarkable is that Pélagie apparently returned his affection devotedly for many years, despite frequent scandals, jailings, and even an affair with her own sister. Gray draws extensively on letters written by Sade, his wife, and his mother-in-law to paint a vibrant picture of an unorthodox marriage, a period of great political upheaval, and a complicated bond between mother and daughter. Gray also places the Marquis's writing in a context that, while forthrightly characterizing it as "the crudest, most repellent fictional dystopia ever limned, the creation of a borderline psychotic whose scatological fantasies have grown all the more deranged in the solitude and rage of his jail cell," also acknowledges its "recklessness and daring" as well as its influence on later writers from Swinburne and Baudelaire to Octavio Paz and Luis Buñuel. Sex, art, religion, and politics--At Home with the Marquis de Sade addresses them all with the intelligence and insight one has come to expect from Francine du Plessix Gray.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
The story of the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) is filled with drama, mystery, political survival, plot twists, unforgettable characters and bizarre eccentricities, sexual and otherwise. Novelist, essayist and biographer du Plessix Gray (Lovers and Tyrants) does a remarkable job in rendering that story in a way that engages both the emotions and the intellect. She separates myth from fact, and where there are gaps, she poses questions that let readers draw their own conclusions. She shows how someone like Sade could have been created: a distant mother, debauched father and cleric uncle, combined with a French society that rivaled the late Roman Empire in hedonism. Through letters, journals and official documents, she follows Sade from a lonely, isolated childhood to Jesuit school, the military, marriage, sexual scandals, financial hardship, media celebrity, outlaw status and incarceration. She also looks at the women who shaped his life: Ren?e-P?lagie, his fanatically loyal wife, and her mother, Madame de Montreuil, who tried her best to separate the couple. This biography is not some titillating list of transgressions but rather a complicated, contradictory life portrayed in full cultural, political and psychological context: Sade as debaucher and victim of French political unrest, libertine and moralizer, loving husband and manipulator, pornographer and chaste writer. Du Plessix Gray unearths the causes of Sade's fears, distrust, fetishes, psychoses and atheismAin short, the failings that made him human. Whether one sees Sade as the ultimate rebel hero or the ultimate monster, du Plessix Gray's thorough, riveting telling makes him irresistible.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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