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This is a revised and enlarged edition of a book first published in 1934. In the meantime a good deal of new material has been unearthed about the Marquis de Sade and his literary works which makes the new edition very well worthwhile, and it is of the greatest interest in spite of the fact that a very important publication by Gilbert Lély was not available to Mr. Gorer when revising his book, and he was only able to point out in a postscript that some of his conclusions have to be qualified in the light of the new evidence. As possibly Mr. Lély, who has recently been given permission to use the archives of the de Sade family, will publish further important material, some of Mr. Gorer's conclusions may need further revision.
De Sade is usually depicted as a cruel roué, with deep-set eyes and hollow cheeks; in fact, as Mr. Gorer shows us, he was anything but that. According to two independent, official, kind of passport descriptions, he was a short, fat man, 5 ft. 2 in. tall, with thin, greyish-blond hair, a high forehead, a small mouth, round face, pale blue eyes, and average nose and chin. Moreover, poor M. de Sade was an unsuccessful man all his life. He always chose the wrong enemies. Under Louis XVI he was held prisoner in the Bastille, from where he was set free only a few months before it was stormed. During the revolution he was imprisoned in the Picpus, and finally Napoleon put him into a lunatic asylum, the form of concentration camp of that epoch. There he died in 1814, at the age of 74—having spent more than 28 years of his life in various prisons—fat, 'almost blind, suffering from gout and rheumatism in chest and stomach', as he himself wrote in a letter addressed to Napoleon in which he asked for his pardon and release.
Although Mr. Gorer tries to be lenient about his pathological condition, it is obvious that in the first instance de Sade was severely obsessional, completely engrossed in complicated numerical systems, which seem to have dominated