Dangerous Liaisons/Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

In this famous story of seduction, two highly intelligent but amoral French aristocrats
plot the downfall of a respectable young married woman and a fifteen year old girl
who has only just emerged from the convent. The letters these two conspirators exchange
are remarkably frank in describing how they manage to achieve their ends and, at
the same time, reveal nuances of character which make it impossible to dismiss either
of them as simply evil. Those written by their victims are equally revelatory in
a quite different and subtle way, while the manner in which Laclos handles the epistolary
form in order to ensure that his two protagonists are finally defeated, not by outside
forces, but the fissures in their own relationship, is a triumph of narrative skill.

This novel poses shrewd questions about the relation between love and
sex, and suggests that, in certain sections of eighteenth century French high society,
idleness, boredom and wealth had created individuals whose misfortunes it would
be hard to regret when, only seven years after Dangerous Liaisons was published,
the Revolution broke out. Blurb by David Ellis