Students of eigtheenth-century culture and the French Enlightenment will welcome these first translations into English of Duclos's only two novels. They offer a unique view of French society by the one author permitted his franc parler - blunt speaking - by Louis XV. Readers of the time were grateful, too, for the novels: they satisfied the public's growing interest in the private lives of their contemporaries. The books sold well throughout the century, were admired by writers as different as Montesquieu and Rousseau, and inspired later novelists like Diderot, Laclos, and de Sade.

Madame de Luz (1741) and The Confessions (1742) clearly invite comparisons with Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses, published some forty years later. Laclos writes with more elegance and his epistolary form allows greater dramatic effect; on the other hand, though Duclos avoids frankly erotic scenes (albeit erotic enough), he covers a very much larger social spectrum and offers far more subtle and penetrating insights, almost at times proto-Proustian, into the mysteries of sexual relationships; the bluntness of his style is admirably adapted to his constant use of vigorously pungent epigrams. It is clearly high time to allow the English reader to enjoy these outstanding examples of the French libertine novel.

About the translator: In addition to translating Zola and editing Baudelaire, Douglas Parmée is the translator of Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses in an Oxford University Press Classics edition.