This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
Cécile Volanges has just left the convent, innocent, eager to please, and utterly unprepared for the world she is about to enter. That makes her the perfect instrument for the Marquise de Merteuil, who wants her seduced and ruined before she can marry the man who once jilted the Marquise, and for the Vicomte de Valmont, a practiced libertine who takes on the task less as a favor to his old accomplice than as a diversion from a harder, more interesting conquest: the virtuous, happily married Madame de Tourvel, whose fidelity Valmont has resolved to destroy purely to prove that he can.
Told entirely through the letters its characters write to one another, the novel lets Merteuil and Valmont narrate their own campaign in real time, comparing strategies, gloating over small victories, and gradually revealing, letter by letter, the coldness beneath their wit. Around them, Cécile falls genuinely in love with a young suitor of her own, Madame de Tourvel's resistance cracks by degrees she cannot forgive herself for, and the two conspirators' rivalry with each other proves, in the end, more dangerous to them than any of their victims.
Published anonymously in 1782, Dangerous Liaisons scandalized and fascinated Parisian society in the years before the Revolution, its polished aristocratic voices describing cruelties that readers could not quite believe had been published at all. Laclos, an army officer with no other claim to literary fame, wrote a single novel and produced one of the most formally daring and morally unsparing works of the eighteenth century. This new translation presents the complete novel, read in full.
