Intent on leading a life of virtue, our heroine of the piece sets out to make her way in France. What befalls her is anything but virtuous. One after the other, at the hands of brigands and harlots, mad monks and rabid dogs, corrupt Justices, and vile Governors, she suffers indignities incomparable to any a young woman could ever imagine. So outraged was Napolean by the dissemination of this work, that he ordered the immediate arrest and imprisonment of the Marquis de Sade. Altogether visceral and poetic, de Sade's vision of libertinage takes the reader on an uncompromising tale of excess and its destructive nature.