While numerous bios have detailed the Marquis de Sade's libertine ways, New Yorker contributor Francine du Plessix Gray's is one of the first to focus on his wife, Renee-Pelagie de Montreuil, who discovered her husband's proclivities after their arranged marriage in 1763. At Home With the Marquis De Sade: A Life traces Sade's notorious scandals — his byzantine orgies; his kidnappings, torture, and drugging of women; his decade in prison. Gray interweaves the couple's correspondence, in which De Montreuil proved a devoted, fully cognizant helpmate to her bullying husband (her own disgusted mother, meanwhile, was instrumental in Sade's imprisonment). Gray's bracing account of the marriage ends in 1790, when De Montreuil, wearying of ''psychic battering,'' finally sought a divorce. B
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