SOURCE: “Seductive Monsters: Laclos's Liaisons dangereuses,” The New Criterion, Vol. 12, No. 7, March, 1994, pp. 24-30.

In the essay below, Winegarten links Laclos's political ideology with the themes developed in Les Liaisons dangereuses.

I believe that the sect of Epicurus, introduced into Rome at the end of the republic, contributed greatly to produce a harmful effect on the heart and mind of the Romans.

—Montesquieu

Sometime during the winter of 1789-90, Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos, notorious author of Les Liaisons dangereuses, was impatiently cooling his heels in a London antechamber, because that paragon of dandies, George Prince of Wales, had not yet finished his toilette. So bored was Laclos at this princely levee that, although reputedly a figure of glacial reserve, he unburdened himself to Comte Alexandre de Tilly, no mean roué in his day. The dubious Tilly reported the novelist's words in memoirs published many years later. “I decided...