Dangerous Liaisons (Les Liaisons dangereuses)
The 18th century's great novel of sexual politics. A love story embedded in a game of manipulation, where the manipulators discover too late that they've been playing for real stakes. Valmont's love for Madame de Tourvel is his first honest feeling, and it destroys him; Merteuil's fate follows the same logic. The darkest and most honest book on this list about the relationship between love and power.
Letters are a slow weapon. You must accept pages of preening from Valmont before each plot advance, and the cynicism, brilliant for two hundred pages, grows airless by four hundred. Then Laclos loses his nerve: smallpox and a duel arrive like a censor's note, punishing everyone so the eighteenth century could pretend it read a moral book.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
