Volume 46, Number 1 · January 14, 1999
The Real Marquis
By Robert Darnton
At Home with the Marquis de Sade: A Life
by Francine du Plessix Gray
Simon and Schuster, 491 pp., $27.50
Sade: A Biographical Essay
by Laurence L. Bongie
University of Chicago Press, 336 pp., $29.00
A few years ago a sharp-eyed researcher spotted a curious dossier about an eighteenth-century traffic jam. The streets of Paris often clogged with gridlock under the Old Regime, because carriages drove on either side of the road and got stuck in face-offs, unable to back up, owing to the vehicles behind them and the difficulty of putting horses into reverse. The result was road rage. In one particularly nasty incident at the Place des Victoires in 1766, a furious nobleman leaped out of his carriage, drew his sword, and buried it in the belly of the horse attached to the carriage blocking his. He was the marquis de Sade.[1]
Review, 7375 words
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