The Marquis De Sade: A Life

Neil Schaeffer presents here a wholly original, compellingly human portrait of the "divine Marquis," the enigmatic legend whose name is synonymous with brutal perversion and cruelty. Against a magnificently embroidered backdrop of eighteenth-century France, he shows us Sade's incredible life of sexual appetite, adherence to Enlightenment principles, imprisonment, scandal, and above all inexhaustible imagination. Based on a decade of research and utilizing work never before published in English, The Marquis de Sade is a definitive work that confronts nearly two hundred years of myth to reveal a Promethean figure of astonishing complexity.

His immortality may be of a scandalous variety, but the fascination still exerted by Donatien Alphonse Fran?ois de Sade (1740-1814) is evidenced in this, the third biography of the man to appear in a scant six months. Francine du Plessix Gray (At Home with the Marquis de Sade) and Laurence Bongie (Sade: A Biographical Essay) take arguably more original approaches, but American academic Neil Schaeffer's thorough, carefully researched and argued book is more likely to appeal to the general reader who knows little of Sade beyond the perversion to which he gave his name. In fact, Schaeffer contends, the marquis was hardly a textbook sadist: he liked to be beaten at least as much as he enjoyed inflicting pain, which was a pastime he pursued primarily in his books' scatological fantasies. The author generally attempts to temper Sade's dreadful reputation, placing his escapades with prostitutes and menservants in the European tradition of aristocratic libertinism and pointing up the witty irony as well as the obscenities in works like The 120 Days of Sodom ("the most radical novel ever written"). It's not exactly a pretty picture, but Schaeffer makes a plausible case that the man imprisoned by both royal and revolutionary regimes posed more danger through his unfettered imaginings than through anything he actually did. --Wendy Smith