The Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, former lovers, compete in seduction as a form of war. Laclos published this epistolary novel in 1782, scandalizing France. The libertine philosophy is presented with such brilliance that readers have always been half-seduced by it, even as the destruction piles up. The letters perform the manipulations they describe; the characters are monsters and also somehow sympathetic. The novel invented the cruel games that subsequent literature has been playing ever since.