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is only to set up the next sequence of horrors, when the utterly debauched young Marquis orders Sophie to poison his mother, to get hold of her money. Although Sophie betrays the plot to her benefactress, the Marquis still manages to murder his mother by other means. He then takes his revenge on Sophie by taking her to the tree where he had earlier threatened to hang her and flogging her within an inch of her life, before leaving her for dead. She crawls to the home of a doctor, who takes her in and heals her wounds. But even he is strangely cold and rough in his manner, and she eventually discovers he has imprisoned a 12-year old girl in his cellar, on whom he plans to carry out a horribly painful and ultimately fatal series of medical experiments. Sophie releases her and the girl runs away. But the doctor and his accomplice revenge themselves on Sophie by cutting off two of her toes, pulling out two of her teeth, branding her with a red-iron iron which imprints her skin with the mark of a convicted prostitute and casting her penniless out into the countryside.

Then follows the longest and most bizarre episode of the whole story. Desperate for somewhere to rest, Sophie is directed to a lonely monastery where she is told there is a small community of particularly holy monks. Arriving at sundown, to the sound of the angelus bell, she is welcomed in, profoundly grateful to have found such a haven from all her nightmarish ordeals. The kindly abbot Father Raphael hears her confession, establishing that there is no one in the world who knows she is there. He then leads her to a room where she sees three middle-aged monks, three beautiful teenage girls and an equally beautiful 30-year old woman all in an advanced state of undress. At inordinate length, we hear how Sophie's own clothes are removed and she is placed in the middle of the room, for the four monks to subject her to every kind of sexual indignity, culminating in Father Raphael himself, a relative of the Pope, exercising his rank by violently removing her virginity. Leaving Sophie moaning with pain and humiliation, the monks then turn their attention to the other girls, before returning to put Sophie through the sexual nightmare again. Finally she is entrusted to the older woman, Omphale, and they are marched off to be locked in for the night.

Sophie discovers, largely from the kindly Omphale, that she has landed up in the worst hell imaginable. The four monks are complete sexual and violent monsters, who treat the girls they have trapped into their prison, all beautiful and from respectable families, simply as objects to gratify their unwearying lust and cruelty. This has been going on for years. From time to time a girl vanishes, almost certainly murdered, to be replaced by others. The author revels for page after page in describing his totally improbable fantasies, of men supposedly capable of indulging in every kind of depravity and violent perversion for days and nights on end. Except for an incident where the monks dress up one girl as the Virgin Mary in order to rape her, and then celebrate Communion using her naked body as an altar, he does not describe these perversions in any detail, but conveys them simply by innuendo and suggestion, with epithets such as `filthy', `lascivious', `lecherous', `foul', `impure'. But eventually he faces the problem of how to extricate his heroine from this absurdly over-wrought fantasy prison, in order to save her for yet more horrors. Finally, after Omphale has disappeared to her death, de Sade resorts to a kind of `with one mighty bound Jack was free' solution. Father Raphael is promoted by the Pope to become head of the Order of St Francis and, when a new abbot arrives, he decides to let all the girls go free, so long as they promise not to tell anyone what has been going on.

In fact, with this episode, de Sade has reached the climax of his fantasy, but remorselessly his narrative continues. Sophie is released with a tiny amount of money, and is almost immediately robbed of it by an old woman whom she tries to help on the