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 to write a work that should depart from the trodden path, make a stir, and reverberate on this earth after my demise,” confided Laclos, adding for good measure that certain characters and events in his novel were based on actual persons (indicated with tantalizing discretion), and on circumstances with which he himself was directly or indirectly acquainted. Tilly, surprised by his companion’s unaccustomed eloquence, added a footnote to stress that he remembered what Laclos had said as if it were yesterday.

Deliberate, lucid, far-seeing, Laclos (as reported by Tilly) sounds as if working in fulfillment of a plan of campaign. He certainly achieved all three of the declared aims. While adopting the form of the story-in- letters employed by writers he most admired—Samuel Richardson in Clarissaand Richardson’s