Volume 40, Number 15 · September 23, 1993
The Human Comedy of the Divine Marquis
By John Weightman
Sade: A Biography
by Maurice Lever, translated by Arthur Goldhammer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 626 pp., $35.00
Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome, the most extreme of Donatien Aldonse de Sade's surviving works, is not yet, so far as I know, prescribed reading for students of eighteenth-century French literature, but soon it may well be, since the status of its once-reviled author has undergone a striking change during the last half century. From being almost totally banned, the Divine Marquis—so called, it appears, because some of his early clandestine admirers believed in the religious intensity of his satanism—has moved to the position of a late-recognized classic. As recently as 1957, Jean-Jacques Pauvert was prosecuted for publishing his works; in 1990, Les Cent Vingt Journées was peacefully reissued in volume one of the Pléiade edition of Sade texts now being brought out by Gallimard, and admission to the Pléiade series is the usual sign of literary consecration. In presenting Sade, the editor of the volume, Michel Delon, adopts a respectful, even reverent, tone, and Jean Deprun contributes an essay entitled 'Sade philosophe,' which purports to take the Marquis seriously as a thinker.
Review, 4893 words
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