Sade's Wife The Woman behind the Marquis by Margaret Crosland, Peter Owen $280 PROACTIVE accomplice in her husband's endless days of Sodom, or little-woman martyr resigned to her fate: will the real woman behind the Marquis de Sade ever stand up? She was probably a few parts of the former to a great deal of the latter, but the unglamorous truth is also that she was a rather boring girl whom marriage to the embodiment of depravity made slightly more interesting.
They married each other because they were told to. The engagement, of which the 22-year-old de Sade was quite ignorant, took place in his absence while he was away in Provence with his real amnorata, Laure de Lauris.
The union was a classic case of blue breadline blood drinking up a transfusion of new money; for the rest of his life, de Sade inveighed against the system of arranged marriages.
The main problem with writing about Renee-Pelagie is that nobody knows very much about her. She began married life as a complete ingenue but became reconciled to the regular fixture of her husband's irregular sexual exploits with a suspicious alacrity that should really have been a main focus of this book.
Generally the worse de Sade behaved the more she loved him: her letters are dripping with ardently servile professions of adoration.
She battled constantly to override royal commands and her monstrously domineering mother to bail her husband out of whichever Paris or Provence prison inevitably contained him after being shopped by his 'victims', whom she also paid off royally.