Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

Born Pierre Ambroise Francois Choderlos de Laclos on October 18, 1741, in Amiens, in northern France, the son of a minor provincial official, Laclos entered the military at eighteen and spent most of his career as an artillery officer in various garrison towns, enduring decades of boredom and thwarted ambition in the peacetime army. It was during these idle postings, particularly on the island of Aix, off the Atlantic coast, that he conceived and wrote the only work for which he is remembered: Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), an epistolary novel of aristocratic seduction and psychological warfare that scandalized France upon publication. The book, told entirely in letters exchanged between the predatory Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, was denounced as immoral; Napoleon reportedly kept a copy annotated in the margins. Laclos had intended to "write a work which departed from the ordinary, which made a noise, and which would remain on earth after his death", and he succeeded beyond all expectation. The novel's clinical dissection of desire and manipulation made it one of the masterpieces of eighteenth-century fiction. During the French Revolution, Laclos served as secretary to the Duke of Orleans, was imprisoned twice under the Terror, and narrowly escaped the guillotine. He later joined Napoleon's army as a brigadier general and was sent to command artillery in southern Italy. He died of dysentery and malaria on September 5, 1803, in the former convent of St. Francis at Taranto, far from Paris and literary fame, at the age of sixty-one.

In 1786 Laclos published an essay for an Academy prize that ridiculed the fortress system of Vauban, the untouchable saint of French military engineering. The army closed ranks against the insult. The officer who had dreamed of remaking French fortification found his engineering career finished, and was returned to routine garrison work.