SOURCE: “A Wicked Old Trouper,” in Spectator, April 3, 1999, p. 35.

In the following review, Johnson offers a favorable assessment of At Home with the Marquis de Sade.

In 1912 a well-known man-about-town, a certain Armand de Rochefort, was invited to a special theatrical performance at Charenton, just outside Paris. This was a centre for the healing of the insane which was much favoured by aristocratic families who needed to put their relatives into care. During the pre-theatre dinner Rochefort was very impressed by an elderly man sitting near to him who had the venerable air that imposed respect and whose conversation was marked by a spiritual verve and richness of wit. But when he learned that ‘this amiable man’ was the Marquis de Sade, he fled from his presence. He knew him as the author of a wretched novel ‘in which all the deliriums of crime were presented under the...