Douglas Parmee is Retired Fellow of Queen's College, Cambridge. This new translation gives Laclos a modern voice, and readers will be able to judge whether the novel is as 'diabolical' and 'infamous' as its critics have claimed, or whether it has much to tell us about a world we still inhabit. In the ensuing battle there can be no winners, and the innocent suffer with the guilty. And they play this game with such wit and style that it is impossible not to admire them, until they discover mysterious rules that they cannot understand. Its prime movers, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil-gifted, wealthy, and bored-form an unholy alliance and turn seduction into a game. The complex moral ambiguities of seduction and revenge make Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) one of the most scandalous and controversial novels in European literature.
