The Marquise de Gange

Book excerpt: '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.