I shall be the God whom she will have preferred
Caroline Weber: Libertinage, 6 May 2021
The Last Libertines
by Benedetta Craveri, translated by Aaron Kerner.
NYRB, 620 pp., £32, October 2020,978 1 68137 340 9 Show More
by Benedetta Craveri, translated by Aaron Kerner.
NYRB, 620 pp., £32, October 2020,
“... The revolution,’ Baudelaire wrote in his notes on Les Liaisons dangereuses, ‘was made by voluptuaries.’ He was drawing attention to two paradoxes. One was the role that France’s free-thinking, pleasure-loving aristocrats – the real-life versions of Laclos’s characters – played in instigating this upheaval, undermining the system that upheld their privilege ... ”