FRE 450 - French Texts - Dr. Mina Soroosh: Home

Set in 18th century France, this is the story of two bored aristocrats and the havoc they wreak when they play dangerous games with people's lives. The beautiful widow Merteuil challenges rakish Valmont to seduce a virtuous young married woman, never suspecting that he would violate his personal credo and fall in love.

Une édition de référence des Liaisons dangereuses de Choderlos de Laclos, spécialement conçue pour la lecture sur les supports numériques. ± J'espère qu'on me comptera pour quelque chose l'aventure de la petite Volanges, dont vous paraissez faire si peu de cas : comme si ce n'était rien, que d'enlever, en une soirée, une jeune fille à son Amant aimé, d'en user ensuite tant qu'on le veut et absolument comme de son bien, et sans plus d'embarras ; d'en obtenir ce qu'on n'ose pas même exiger de toutes les filles dont c'est le métier ; et cela, sans la déranger en rien de son tendre amour ... En.

The complex moral ambiguities of seduction and revenge make Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) one of the most scandalous and controversial novels in European literature.

During the reigns of Louis XV (1723-74) and Louis XVI (1774-92), fashion and furniture were not simply meant to be beautiful but were also intended to arouse, attract, and seduce.  Published in response to the critically acclaimed and hugely popular exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum in the fall of 2004, Dangerous Liaisons focuses on fashion and its interplay with the paintings, furniture, and decorative arts of eighteenth-century France. Featuring beautiful color photographs of the exhibition’s installation, details of the garments, and supplementary historical material, the book demonstrates how the extravagant clothing of the period reiterated the splendor of Rococo and Neoclassical interiors.

Irresistibly charming or shamelessly deceitful, remarkably persuasive or uselessly verbose, everything one loves to hate--or hates to love--about "French lovers" and their self-styled reputation can be traced to eighteenth-century libertine novels.

The scandalous reputation of Laclos's novel, first published in 1782, is based on its chilling portrayal of the mannered decadence and sexual cynicism of the French aristocracy in the last years of the ancien regime. Christopher Hampton has made a masterful adaptation for the stage of the conspiracy to corrupt a young girl barely out of her convent.