THE FOLIO SOCIETY

‘If this book burns, it burns as only ice can burn’
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

‘I resolved to write a book that would be quite outside the ordinary trend, that would cause a sensation and echo across the world after I left it.’ So Laclos wrote of his first and only novel, and there can be no doubt that he succeeded à merveille. The first edition sold out within days, all Paris read the scandalous book, and a copy was even to be found in Marie-Antoinette’s private library. It retained its heady odour of mingled popularity and outrage well into our own times where television, film, theatre and even ballet adaptations have kept it firmly in the public eye.

Considered shocking at the time because no authorial intervention condemns the amorality of the characters, it is now widely acknowledged as one of the greatest of epistolary novels. Les Liaisons Dangereuses depicts a decadent and corrupt aristocracy which, just seven years after the book was published, would fall under the shadow of the guillotine. Each letter reveals more and more of the wicked, but irresistibly glamorous machinations of the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont as they pursue their paths of professional intrigue and seduction. ‘Conquest is our destiny, ’ Valmont writes in his first letter, proposing his next victim – the beautiful and pious Présidente de Tourvel. But Madame de Merteuil has another in mind, hoping to gain revenge on an old lover if Valmont corrupts his young fiancée, Cécile Volanges. Uncaring of those who face social ruin or whose hearts are broken, they spin ever more involved schemes. But, with so much at stake, there is a danger that even the arch-manipulators may become entangled by their own deceit.

Lucy Weller’s witty, saucy and occasionally unsettling collages are perfectly matched to Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Cécile, Danceny, Valmont, the Présidente de Tourvel and Madame de Merteuil herself appear as never before in this fine edition of one of the greatest – and most notorious – works in French literature.