'It is time to die, Madame: there shall be no mercy for you..!'
It was one of the most shocking crimes of the seventeenth century, and
would provide Sade with the inspiration for the last novel he published.
The beautiful and virtuous Euphrasie, admired by the King himself, falls
in love with the young and handsome Alphonse, Marquis de Gange. Within
the forbidding walls of his castle in Provence, however, sinister forces
are conspiring against the young couple. Alphonse's brothers, the Abbé
and the Chevalier, want Euphrasie for themselves.
Published in English for the first time, The Marquise de Gange is a
neglected Gothic classic by one of the most notorious authors in the
literary canon. Although a departure from his earlier pornographic and
libertine works, beneath the novel's thin veneer of respectability lurks
the same subversive presence of an author plotting against virtue in
distress.