Abstract
For the last few years, the bookshops of the Boulevard Saint-Germain have had a volume in their windows with an alluring label: "le plus audacieux roman de notre littérature." If you pick it up, you discover that it is a new edition of Choderlos de Laclos' novel, Les Liaisons dangereuses, first published in 1782. The most audacious novel! At first glance, the phrase looks like a shameless attempt to sell a book on the strength of a pornographic cover. For at least a century and a half, French literature has been periodically jolted by “audacious” novels, some of which have even got their authors into the police courts. Yet a romance contemporary with Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, composed seven years before the Revolution, is now advertised as surpassing all the rest for daring.
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