aristocracy

In the glittering aristocratic world of late 18th-century France, a dangerous and captivating web of seduction, deceit, and manipulation was spun by the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont. Their game started when the Marquise desired revenge on her ex-lover, Comte de Bastide, who was about to marry the innocent and virtuous Cecile de Volanges. She enlisted the Vicomte, a notorious womanizer, to deflower Cecile before her wedding night in a debilitating blow to Comte’s pride.

In a small, isolated village at the foot of Mount Etna, lived an old man named Fabrizio. He was the last surviving member of the Salina family, a once great line of Sicilian nobility that fell from grace after the revolution. Fabrizio had spent most of his life in seclusion, trapped in the past by the fading grandeur of his ancestral mansion.