Marie-Madeleine MASSON DE PLISSAY

arie-Madeleine Masson de Plissay was born in Cadiz, Spain, the daughter of Jean Masson de Plissay, comte de Morangis, a merchant established in Cadiz and secretary to the king. On 22 August 1740 she married in Paris Claude-René Cordier de Launay de Montreuil, seigneur-baron of Échauffour and a president at the cour des aides of Paris, with whom she had several children, including Renée-Pélagie, born in 1741. Through her husband's office she became known as "la présidente de Montreuil" and occupied a prominent position within the Parisian robe nobility of the 1760s-1790s. On 17 May 1763, at the church of Saint-Roch in Paris, her eldest daughter Renée-Pélagie married Donatien Alphonse François, comte and later marquis de Sade. This marriage closely tied the Masson de Plissay-Montreuil family to the scandals that would mark the future writer's career. Following several notorious affairs, including those involving Jeanne Testard in 1763 and Marseille in 1772, the présidente de Montreuil sought, avowedly to protect her daughter, her grandchildren and the family's reputation, several royal lettres de cachet against her son-in-law, leading to his prolonged imprisonment at Vincennes and then the Bastille from 1778 to 1789. Her correspondence, notably the letters exchanged with the family's Provençal lawyer Gaufridy and with the abbé de Sade, the marquis's uncle, constitutes a documentary source of major importance for Sade's biographers, particularly for reconstructing the events of the 1760s and 1770s. Several of these autograph letters were preserved in family archives before being dispersed or sold, and are cited or partly reproduced in scholarly works devoted to the marquis de Sade and his family. She died in Paris. Her historical figure inspired the character of Madame de Montreuil in the play Madame de Sade by the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, first staged in 1965.