66
PARTISAN REVIEW
to be part of what might be called the party of the libertines, which was
at least as subversive of the old order as the political dissidents, the
philosophes;
and in his twenties he was already becoming famous for
being infamous, i.e., for dilapidating the family fortune on whores and
riotous living. But to make matters worse he was not really part of any
party at all. And this, as his father once observed to the young man's
uncle (the Abbe de Sade, a priest who lived a relatively discreet but typ–
ically dissolute life in one of the family's chateaux in Provence) was
what most disquieted one about the Marquis. He walked alone. For all
his blond good looks and aristocratic manners, there was something
inward, gloomy, and solitary about him and this struck his father–
himself a notorious rake-as a sinister omen. Already, at the Lycee
Louis-Ie-Grand and during his military service in the king's Light Horse
Cavalry, he had made no friends, frequented only his doting aunts, fam–
ily retainers, and inferiors who did his bidding.
In any event, by
1760
the young Marquis's
libertinage
might well
have seemed to the Count, a disappointed man on the downside of his
own turbulent life, as being out of phase with the spirit of the times.
France-Paris at least, if not Versailles-was becoming a shade more
sedate, not to say bourgeois. The country was "coming down" ftom the
extraordinary excesses of wildness and licentiousness which had
marked the Regency, after the long and relatively straitlaced reign of
Louis XlV. The elder Sade was perennially short of cash, and he and his
brother, the priest, had some brushes with the law (on morals charges)
during this period. Such things were rarely pressed against people of
their rank in the France of the old regime, where sodomy was epidemic,
but police records were kept and miscreants-like Sade's talented
cousin, Mirabeau-were often imprisoned or exiled to their estates, in
order to keep the libertinage of the upper classes in bounds and, as it
were,
entre nous.
The Count's diplomatic career had ended in disrepute
and the Condes (a branch of the Bourbons to whom his wife was
related) were under a bit of a cloud. The prudent thing, obviously, was
to marry the young man off as quickly and richly as possible, before he
got into a really nasty scrape and while the price of their extremely blue
blood was still high. So a marriage was negotiated and concluded, but
it was already too late, since Sade proceeded to get in trouble anyway;
and the upshot was the first episode of the extraordinary soap opera
which the "Sadologists," including the authors under review, have spun
out of Sade's escapades and his passionate involvement with the females
in the family into which he married-his wife, Renee-Pelagie de Mon–
treuil, her mother, and her sister, who each in her manner fell in and out
