The Crimes of Love by the Marquis de Sade

This is a collection of what I understand to be the more toned-down writings of the infamous de Sade (in contrast to his apparently terrifying pornographic novels Justine and Juliette, which I would not touch if you paid me). They're quite weird stories, because they're hard to place. They read very much like something by Ann Radcliffe, peopled with compulsively fainting innocent heroines pursued by corrupt villains, but unlike Radcliffe's novels, the terrible things that are threatened actually happen. Every story ends with a little moral, such as 'She died four years later of consumption, a grim and terrible example of the avarice of fathers and the ambition of daughters. May the telling of this tale make the first more just and the second less foolish!' As far as I understand it, these stories are exercises in philosophy (which runs significantly deeper than the neat moral conclusions). From what I know about de Sade's life and other work, it seems strange that he would appear to condemn the villains (among whom he himself would surely have been a star), but many of the philosophical points these villains raise go unanswered and unresolved. At times de Sade seems to be mocking the virtue he pretends to praise, as the predicaments of the heroines seem to repeat endlessly, frequently, and almost farcically. By the time the same heroine gets kidnapped on her way somewhere for the fourth time in succession, you would have thought she might have learned something! I thought the stories were unsettling and creepy, but not particularly thrilling, since rather like watching a horror movie and yawning by the tenth zombie bloodbath, I got very quickly desensitized to all the violence and cruelty.