Les Liaisons dangereuses Reading Order

Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons, 1782) by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos is the greatest epistolary novel in French literature — and arguably the most brilliantly constructed: a novel entirely in letters between libertine nobles, in which the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont compete to see who can destroy the most virtue, using love as a weapon of social warfare. The 175 letters are arranged with the precision of a chess game: Valmont pursues the devout Présidente de Tourvel and the innocent Cécile de Volanges simultaneously; Merteuil plots the corruption of Cécile's intended husband Danceny; the whole structure escalates toward a catastrophe that is both morally satisfying and genuinely devastating. Laclos was an artillery officer who published one novel and nothing else of literary significance; the precision of Les Liaisons dangereuses may owe something to military thinking about logistics and strategy. The novel is a study in the mechanics of seduction, manipulation, and the uses of language as a weapon — every letter is also a performance, addressed to one person while secretly intended for another. The question of whether Laclos is condemning or celebrating his libertines has been debated ever since: the novel's ending punishes them both, but the voice of Merteuil in her letters is so intelligent, so coldly analytical, so funny in its contempt for human weakness, that many readers find her the most compelling figure in eighteenth-century fiction.