Crimes of Love by Marquis de Sade

Author:Marquis de Sade
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7206-1811-2
Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers

Footnotes

* A cannon-ball would need twenty-five years to cover the same distance. But all that belongs to the system of Newton, who, as everyone knows, finds many opponents today. For, if we know nothing, we must at least appear to know more than those who preceded us. – Author’s note

* Sade is referring to the expulsion of the Moors in 1492. – M.C.

Lorenza and Antonio

An Italian Story

Sade set this nouvelle in sixteenth-century Italy during the rivalry between the Strozzi and powerful Medici families in Tuscany. The narrator indicates that the Strozzis might have been more successful if certain members of the family had behaved better. Carlo Strozzi, the villain of this piece, was, Sade wrote near the beginning of this story, less concerned with the affairs of government than with his violent passions, taking advantage of the vast credit enjoyed by his family to indulge them with more impunity’. He had been married twice and was suspected of having caused the death of both wives. By the first he had had a son, Antonio, now aged twenty, the hope of the Strozzi family for the future. His character was good and he resisted his father’s attempts to corrupt him. Carlo wanted him to give up aspirations for political or military fame and devote himself to enjoyment, but this did not interest the young man. Carlo’s elder brother, Luigi, the head of the family, was a widower without children and wished to see Antonio married. It was decided to unite him to the thirteen-year-old Lorenza, heiress to the Pazzi family, also enemies of the Medicis. The young people were already in love but the marriage had to be postponed until Lorenza reached the marriageable age of fourteen. Since her parents were dead, it was decided that in the meantime she would live in the care of Carlo, her future father-in-law, while Antonio was away in the army. The separation was painful, and Lorenza’s wish to accompany her betrothed had to be refused.

My plot summaries in the narrative that follows are printed in italic within square brackets. – M.C.

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