SOURCE: “The Real Marquis,” in New York Review of Books, Vol. XLVI, No. 1, January 14, 1999, pp. 19–24.

In the following review, Darnton classifies At Home with the Marquis de Sade as a negative biography, in that Gray unsympathetically portrays her subject and instead elevates his wife—Renée Pélagie de Montreuil—to the role of heroine of the biography.

1.

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 Victories in 1766, a furious nobleman leaped out of his carriage, drew his sword, and buried it...