At Home with the Marquis de Sade: A Life

In this account of the scandalous life & violent times of the Marquis de Sade, novelist, essayist & biographer Francine du Plessix Gray resurrects his relationship with his family-- his devoted wife, iron-willed mother-in-law & three children. Gray draws on thousands of pages of letters exchanged by the spouses, few of which have been published in English, to explore in historical & psychological detail what it was like to be the Marquise de Sade, a decorous, upright woman married throughout the decades preceding the French Revolution to one of the most maverick spirits of recent times. Donatien Alphonse Francois, Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), the flamboyant aristocrat whose name has come to connote sexual cruelty, has been called "the freest spirit who ever lived", "the most lucid hero of Western thought" & "a Professor Emeritus of crime". Yet in the vast literature inspired by the marquis' fictional & real-life libertinism, relatively little attention has been given the two women who were closest to him: Renee-Pelagie de Sade, his adoring wife for more than a quarter of a century, & his powerful mother-in-law, Madame de Montreuil. Gray brings to life these two remarkable women & their complex relationship with Sade as they dedicated themselves, each in her own way, to protecting him from the law, curbing his excesses & ultimately confining him.
After years of indulging a variety of sexual aberrations, experiences he used in novels such as "Justine, Philosophy in the Boudoir" & "The 120 Days of Sodom", Sade was imprisoned on the basis of an arrest warrant issued by Louis XVI at his mother-in-law's instigation. Throughout his 13 years in jail, Madame de Sade was his principal solace & his only lifeline to reality. Few spouses seemed more ill-matched than the profligate nobleman & his homespun wife, but the two enjoyed bonds of affection & conspiracy. Madame de Sade remained passionately in love with her husband throughout the first 26 years of their marriage; she accepted his many liaisons with actresses, courtesans & whores of all varieties; hid her husband's traces from the police & may even have participated in his orgies. It was only upon the onset of the French Revolution, when Sade was finally freed, that Pelagie made a sudden about-face from her decades of devotion.
In the course of telling this remarkable story, Gray vividly recreates the extravagant hedonism of late 18th-century France; the ensuing terror of the French Revolution, when her protagonists lived in fear of imminent destruction; & the oppression of the Napoleonic regime under which Sade spent his last decade. The 74-year span of Sade's life, the entire panorama of his milieu & of his times, are brought to life in these pages. Книга «At Home with the Marquis de Sade: A Life» автора Франсин дю Плесси Грей оценена посетителями КнигоГид, и её читательский рейтинг составил 0.00 из 10.
Для бесплатного просмотра предоставляются: аннотация, публикация, отзывы, а также файлы для скачивания.