'Les Liaisons' features the Vicomte de Valmont, whose name is close to the actual French royal House of Valois. Maybe it was a commissioned 18th Century version of E. de Laclos' patron was the duc D'Orleans, a real political player and the king's brother. I know Choderlos de Laclos 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses' (1782) is an important work, s thinly veiled criticism of pre-revolutionary French nobility and the terminal debauchery that infected and eventually felled the monarchy. As much as I enjoyed the 1988 movie, the cast here is perfect. It's a great story, which I downloaded as an Audible freebie. One might be forgiven for concluding that the moral of the story is that the entire French aristocracy were worthless parasites who deserved the tumbrils soon to come. He has his own conquests in mind, however, and the two of them spar with at first friendly affection as they execute their separate schemes, but the two of them wind up ruining lives, breaking hearts, and eventually, causing more than one death as their rivalry escalates. Sexually rapacious and (deep down) embittered by the double standards that allow men to boast of their conquests while women have to carefully guard their reputations, she enjoys manipulating people and ruining lives, and enlists a friend of hers, the equally amoral playboy Vicomte de Valmont, to deflower the virginal fiancee (played in the movie by a young Uma Thurman) of a lover who just broke up with her. The Marquise de Merteuil (played in the 1988 movie by Glenn Close) is a rich widow who has clawed her way to the top the only way a woman can in her society. It's marvelously acted with all the venom and petty viciousness befitting scheming, amoral aristocrats whose only ambition is sex and the ruination of lives.

This was an abridged full-cast performance, in epistolary form, of the play, which is based on the 1782 novel about French aristocrats engaging in recreational adultery and competitive seduction.

Les Liaisons dangereuses by C. Laclos