Pierre-Ambroise-François Choderlos de Laclos published his famous epistolary novel in 1782, in which he vehemently criticized the degenerate mores of aristocratic society just before the outbreak of the French Revolution. The unrestrained seducer Viscount de Valmont and his no less cynical former mistress, the Marquise de Merteuil, arrange a deeply immoral experiment: Valmont uses all his cunning means to seduce two young, unsuspecting ladies from the best society for the sole purpose of ruining them socially.