1999, Penguin Books

Scant attention has been paid to the women closest to the Marquis de Sade: Renee-Pelagie de Sade, his adoring wife, and his powerful mother-in-law, Madanme de Montreuil. Now, in a groundbreaking account of the scandalous life and the violent times of the Marquis de Sade, Francine du Plessix Gray brings to life these women and their complex relation to Sade as they dedicated themselves to protecting him from the law, curbing his excesses, and ultimately confining him. With immediacy, irony, and verve, At Home with the Marquis de Sade also conjures up the extravagant hedonism of late-eighteenth-century France, the ensuing terror of the French revolution, and the oppression of the Napoleonic regime under which Sade spent his last decade.

"In Gray's boldly imaginative retelling, Madame de Sade - the long-suffering spouse of history's most infamous rake - becomes a praiseworthy enabler of greatness."
-The New York Times Book Review

"Vivid, stylistially fluid, discriminating, and historically informed."
-The New York Times

"A splendid, scholarly page-turner of a biography."
-The Hartford Courant

Gray "gives us a Sade for the 1990s...that may especially appeal to women, because it puts them at the heart of it and celebrates the quiet heroism of their attempts to save him from himself."
-Los Angeles Times

"A gripping tale...this book beautifully explains the nature of obsession, both sexual and social. It is relevant at the dawn of the twenty-first century despite it's framework of late eighteenth-century lives."
-Chicago Sun-Times

"Not the first full-length biography of Sade, but it is most likely to remain the best...What Gray has done is give coherence and direction to Sade's outrageously eventful life."
-Chicago Tribune

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