Dangerous Liaisons
by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos(1782)
Novelc. 400 pages
“It is not enough to do good, one must do it the right way.”
One great work, every day
by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos(1782)
“It is not enough to do good, one must do it the right way.”
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos(1782)
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.