Two aristocrats wage war through seduction, using letters as weapons and other people's hearts as terrain. Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, a military officer who spent his career writing about fortifications, published this epistolary novel in 1782 and scandalized France with a portrait of its ruling class so precise it read as indictment. The Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont are brilliant, cruel, and aware their games will destroy the innocent; that awareness is the source of their pleasure. Every letter is a performance, every confession a strategy. Laclos constructed the novel with the elegance of a siege plan, and its conclusion falls with the inevitability of a fortress breached from within. Vice pays its own bill at last.