SOURCE: “Taming the Savage Noble,” in Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 283, No. 3, March, 1999, pp. 108–14.

In the following review, Rocca argues that Gray only presents the domesticated and sympathetic sides of Sade in At Home with the Marquis de Sade.

The first time the Marquis de Sade went to prison, in 1763, it was under a royal lettre de cachet signed by Louis XV, on charges of “blasphemy and incitement to sacrilege.” Thirty years later, after the Revolution, the aristocrat nearly went to the guillotine for having “corresponded with enemies of the republic.” Finally, Napoleon's government put him in a mental hospital under a diagnosis of “libertine dementia,” based primarily on his writings: unblinking descriptions—celebrations, really—of cannibalism, coprophagy, necrophilia, the rape and murder of children, and countless other perversions. In all, he spent twenty-eight of his seventy-four years in confinement.

Every generation has had to decide what to do with...