Choderlos de Laclos was a French soldier and minor aristocrat who dabbled in literature (before writing Dangerous Liaisons, his greatest literary triumph had been the libretto for a comic opera) and wrote his great epistolary novel as a cool, unsensational expose of the corrupt sexual morality of the pre-Revolutionary upper classes in France. At the heart of the story is the libertine Vicomte de Valmont who plots to seduce the virtuous wife of Monsieur de Tourvel. His female counterpart is the Marquise de Merteuil who, in pursuit of revenge on a former lover, incites Valmont to exercise his powers of sexual persuasion on the innocent young girl her ex-lover is engaged to marry. The narrative, revealed through the characters' correspondence, follows the heartless scheming of Valmont and the Marquise as they entangle those less sophisticated than themselves in their lies and deceit. The epistolary novel, in which the story unfolds through letters, was a popular genre of fiction in the 18th century, both in France and in England where Samuel Richardson, in lengthy works such as Pamela and Clarissa, used the form to narrate tales of virtue staunchly defending itself against vice. Laclos's novel is more cynical, more realistic and less concerned with extracting a moral from its story than anything Richardson ever wrote but the Frenchman employed the genre, and the opportunity it provided to use different narrative voices, with just as much skill. Dangerous Liaisons was his one great triumph in literature. Throughout the dangerous years of the French Revolution, he continued his career as a soldier and he ended his life as a Napoleonic general. His military successes, such as they were, have long been forgotten but his unsentimental portrait of an unscrupulous seducer and his accomplice, rich in psychological insight, lives on.

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