The Crimes of Love

Marquis de Sade

Translated from the French and with an Introduction by Margaret Crosland

‘Two brief stories of lewd monks, ruttish wives and cuckolds, he added longer and darker intrigues in the fashionable Gothic vein. Published as Les Crimes de l’Amour, they show off Sade’s literary skills to good effect. They survive admirably in Margaret Crosland’s excellent new translation.’ – Times Literary Supplement

The five stories in this extremely popular collection are taken from Les Crimes de l’Amour, originally published in 1800. They contrast with other writings by the Marquis, forming part of a significant genre of their own within the body of his work.

Sade is best known for his sensational books Justine, Juliette and Les Cent Vert (The One Hundred Days of Sodom), yet in his lifetime these and other major works appeared in anonymous or clandestine editions or remain unpublished. Detained in prison and incarcerated in the asylum at Charenton, Sade decided to follow his ‘philosophical’ novel Aline et Valcour with writings more accessible to the general public. He wanted to prove that he was not a mere pornographer but a moralist, like Voltaire and other contemporaries.

In The Crimes of Love Sade contends that love can lead to crime and thence to punishment. Unlike the villains of his major novels, the men and women described in these pages all come to a sticky end. Sade was fascinated by incest but claimed that he did ‘not want to make vice liked.’ The stories also illustrate his love of history and his frustrated passion for drama, while ‘Rodrigo or the Enchanted Tower’ is an intriguing example of this complex writer’s flight into fantasy - his only means of escape from detention.

‘The Crimes of Love is an atypical selection of work from a man whose example we cite as the prototype of sexual cruelty. Perhaps driven by remorse for having once ‘flagellated working-class women’, Sade now becomes a champion (however tarnished) of the female cause, giving women the dominant roles in his fiction and always avenging their lost honour — rape and incest are crimes punishable by death. What is the moral of these delightful stories? Perhaps that even a sadist can feel sad.’ – Financial Times

‘Sadeologists should be fascinated.’ – Daily Telegraph