At Home with the Marquis de Sade By Francine du Plessix Gray Chatto & Windus 495pp, £20 in UK
There are few better illustrations than the Marquis de Sade of just how ancien was the an- cien regime. Although a great body of myths has grown up around his name, the reality of the man is far more difficult for a modern sensibility to comprehend than the most outlandish of the propositions - and positions - which his work presents to our appalled inspection. As Simone de Beauvoir splendidly put it, Sade's "perverse bucolics have the grim austerity of a nudist colony", yet in their fascination with freedom and control, power and submission, as well as their harsh aristocratic humour, his books are at once primordial and revolutionary, the products of a nobleman fiercely proud of his ancient lineage and of the singularity of what Francine du Plessix Gray calls his "grandiose, archaic self".
The year 1789 divides the modern age absolutely, and it was not chance but the logic of history that allowed Sade, one of the pivotal figures of that age, to survive the holocaust in which so many members of his own class perished - Gray describes him, accurately, as "the consummate survival artist". Citizen Sade threw himself into the Revolution with characteristic gusto while remaining at heart a feudal lord, contemptuous equally of the mob and of the "crowd of leeches" who had infested the court of Versailles. Yet neither his noble blood nor his revolutionary fervour prevented him, in 1790, from joining the irredeemably bourgeois Society of Authors and declaring himself a professional writer. He was nothing if not shrewd.
Donatien Alphonse Francois, Marquis de Sade, came of a long line of Provencal lords who claimed descent not only from Laure de Noves, the 13th-century model for the Laura of Petrarch's sonnets, but from one of the three Magi. The family made its fortune in textiles, and owned a number of estates and castles in the Vaucluse region of Provence, including the magnificent chateau of La Coste, scene of some of the most notorious of the Marquis' real-life "perverse bucolics". Donatien's father, the Comte de Sade, was a diplomat and "one of the more illustrious rakes of Louis XV's reign". He had a deep aversion to his son, who returned the compliment by far outstripping his father in debauchery. Donatien was also unlucky with his mother, a glacially remote personage who seems hardly to have registered the existence of her son. Of far more influence on the young Sade was a clutch of Wodehousean aunts, and, in particular, his uncle the Abbe. This worldly cleric, nicknamed "the sybarite of Saumane", friend of Voltaire and a social luminary in Paris and Avignon, lived a high old life within the medieval fortifications of his chateau in Provence, maintaining erotic relations with a large number of women from all classes. It was under this worthy's tutelage that Donatien passed much of his youth. With a family such as this, who would need bad companions?
The Sade fortunes dipped sharply when the merrily bisexual Comte, having already forged some unwise alliances among the powerful at court, was arrested by the vice squad for making a pass at a young man in the Tuileries Gardens. Gray emphasises that the conduct of the Sades, father, son and uncle, must be measured against the morals of the time. At the highest levels of society, Regency France was an ongoing orgy. As the Regent's mother remarked, "I'm amazed that France is not totally drowned, like Sodom and Gomorrah." It was within this degenerated world that the Marquis de Sade devised his depravities, real and imagined, and against the hypocrisy of which he rebelled.
In 1755, at the age of 15 Sade, a lieutenant in the king's light cavalry, found himself in battle against the English at Port Mahon in Minorca. Seven years later, the document honourably discharging him from the army described him as "Deranged, but extremely courageous". Although "deranged" here refers to his dissolute habits, the characterisation is admirably concise and accurate. After some years of raucous and frequently scandalous adventures in Parisian society, he was married off to Renee-Pelagie de Montreuil, daughter of a wealthy Paris judge. Pelagie was spirited, plain, capable and doggedly loyal, and on more than one occasion was to prove her spouse's saviour.
And if ever a man had need of a saviour, it was Sade. The first serious scrape he got himself into was at Easter 1768, when he lured an indigent young woman, Rose Keller, to a little cottage at Arceuil, outside Paris, and subjected her to a variety of sexual assaults, including whipping with a cat-o'-nine-tails. When the girl complained to the police, it looked as if Sade would end up in prison; this was a surprise and a shock to him, for was he not an aristocrat, and were not penniless young women fair game for a great lord such as he?
Sade's orgies, the most amazing of which were staged - it is the mot juste - at La Coste, and which were to land him in jail for some 13 years, were, like his books, masterpieces of ritual stylisation, the object of which was not so much erotic pleasure as the exercise of absolute control. Sade was a voluptuary of power. At the same time, his books, and his life, exemplify the essentially infantile nature of male sexuality, even, or especially, at its most "sadistic". He simply could not see why those in authority should feel compelled to take away his toys.
Enter Mme de Montreuil, known as La Presidente, Sade's formidable mother-in-law. At the outset she was charmed by the noble if wayward Donatien, and worked diligently through her husband's contacts in legal circles to save the young man from prison. Later, however, his charm wore off, and she set herself to getting him put away for good. In the years to 1789, Sade spent very long stretches behind bars, and was in the Bastille when the Revolution broke out - from his cell window he addressed the mob in the street below, employing as megaphone a long metal funnel normally used for urinating through into the moat - although he was transferred to the asylum at Charenton shortly before the storming of the prison. What a scene was missed there: the liberated Marquis de Sade being carried shoulder-high through the revolution-maddened streets of Paris.
After his release, Pelagie, who had supported him through all the long vicissitudes of their life together, decided that she wanted no more of him, and sought a separation and, subsequently, a divorce. Sade, who had genuinely loved his wife, once again showed his aristocratic froideur by taking up straight away with another woman, Constance Quesnet, who was to be his devoted partner for the rest of his life.
Now a writer and a man of some importance in the revolutionary regime, Sade found himself, no doubt to his amusement, once again a kind of noble. He was elected president of his district, a position of considerable power, and was called on to deliver the oration at the funeral of the assassinated Jean-Paul Marat, a grand occasion complete with music and incense, in which thousands of citizens dressed as ancient Romans marched in solemn procession (one recalls the incident when that other great survivor, Talleyrand, was taking part in one of these people's pageants and, meeting his friend Lafayette, begged him out of the corner of his mouth: "Please, don't make me laugh!")
Francine du Plessix Gray has written a lively, perceptive and on the whole sympathetic biography of this strange and complex figure. It is a wonderful story, as racy, tumultuous and sexy as anything by Dumas or Laclos. The gentle irony of her title reflects the emphasis she has placed on the importance of the domestic element in Sade's life, and even in his work. Reading Sade's letters, she tells us, she "soon realized that few writers' destinies have been so powerfully shaped by women, that few lives provide a more eloquent allegory on women's ability to tame men's nomadic sexual energies, to enforce civilization and its attendant discontents". I believe Sade would have enjoyed her book.