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LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES

Introduction

Dangerous Liaisons, by Pierre-Ambroise-François Choderlos de Laclos, was first published in Paris in 1782, seven years before the fall of the Ancien Régime and the beginning of the civil war now known as the French Revolution. It can be seen as the quintessential expression of the excesses and evils of that ridiculously wealthy, and soon-to-be-headless, minority of the population of 18th-century France, the aristocracy. But it is also a chronicle of the timeless difficulties of sex and love, an unrelentingly realistic portrayal of the desires that are beyond the control of all men and women.

The never-ending quest for power and pleasure in Dangerous Liaisons certainly helps the reader understand why the aristocracy was heading for unhappy end, but it also helps to explain why the novel had to be written in the epistolary form (in letters). In the world of high society of the time, the letter was the primary form of literature, and probably the only kind of literature most women would ever be able to compose. Thus the letter was a hot commodity and a familiar form. And, although Dangerous Liaisons was conceived in the traditional epistolary form and inherited its tone from the sentimental novels of literature written in France and England from 1750–1800, it is completely untraditional in its treatment of multiple, realistic characters.

At the time of its publication, Dangerous Liaisons was so shocking and exciting to Parisian society that the first edition sold out in under a week. Subsequent editions flew off the shelves in even less time. However, any respectable young lady who wished to read about the adventures of the Vicomte de Valmont or the machinations of the Marquise de Merteuil had to lock herself in her bedroom to even open the novel without fear of a scandal. All of Paris nevertheless found some secret way to enjoy Laclos's tale of intrigue: Marie Antoinette's personal copy was discovered in her library, long after she herself had paid a permanent visit to the Guillotine, bound in an unmarked wrapper. As for Laclos, he was referred to everywhere as "that monster." It was said of the author at the time of the book's publication that, "Because he has portrayed monsters, people will have it that he is one."

But even after the society in which it takes place had long since disappeared, Dangerous Liaisons continued to earn a reputation as a work of intentional and corrupting immorality. Parisian authorities even went so far as to ban the book in 1824. Perhaps the tradition of suppressing this novel began because it does contain something of real danger. A dark pessimism resides in its faultlessly composed letters. Behind the impeccable conception and execution of the book lurks a real doubt about the capacity of human beings to love one another with sincerity. However, in the past two decades Dangerous Liaisons, depressing undercurrents and all, has been popular with the sunny studios of Hollywood, CA. The 1988 movie of the same name corseted Glenn Close, Uma Thurman, and Michelle Pfeiffer, and allowed audiences to see what John Malkovich and Keanu Reeves look like in stockings and very tight sateen breeches. And, for those who prefer the high-school version, there is always 1999's Cruel Intentions. One warning of possible danger: do not watch either movie expecting to see the whole, unabridged plot of the novel.

The Context

Pierre-Ambroise-François Choderlos de Laclos was born in Amiens, France on October 18, 1741, to a respectable family. At age eighteen, he entered the military as an artilleryman and spent some twenty years in service. He wrote light verse and a comic opera produced in 1777, Ernestine. In 1779 he was sent to the island of Aix to supervise the construction of a fort. It was here that he composed Dangerous Liaisons. In 1781 he returned to Paris to supervise the printing and publication of his novel, which appeared in 1782 to great acclaim and scandal. In 1786 Laclos married Solanges Duperre, whom he had impregnated some two years earlier, and thus acted on better morals than those of most of his characters in Dangerous Liaisons. During the French Revolution, Laclos was imprisoned twice, though he was released on both occasions. In 1800 he joined Napoleon's army. He was killed in service in Italy in 1803. Any fame Laclos enjoys today is due entirely to Dangerous Liaisons, his one great, diabolic masterpiece. Readers will agree that, in this case, one is enough. Some readers might think one was, in fact, more than enough.

The epistolary novel grew in prominence throughout the 18th century until it finally arrived at the pen of Choderlos de Laclos. Richardson's Clarissa in England and Rousseau's La Nouvelle Heloïse in France, both epistolary novels, had been extremely well-received. Their themes of education, romance, and the definition of the female self were repeated in Laclos's own work, but with a twist. Laclos learned from the error of Richardon and Rousseau's ways in that he did not create a novel written from a single perspective, that and he did not use the letters of his Dangerous Liaisons solely to report the events of the novel. The diary-like epistles of Clarissa and La Nouvelle Heloïse certainly kept the plot moving along, but they were extremely flat. There seemed to be no motivation behind these letters. To combat this lack of depth, Laclos wrote a kind of drama in letters, where multiple personages vied and schemed with, and against, each other through what they wrote. It is the portrait of the end of an era, an extremely rarified society gasps its last breaths on the pages of Dangerous Liaisons. It is the most extreme kind of epistolary novel one can imagine, a novel that could not be written except in letters, and it seems the last possible book of its kind. Its plot and its characters so perfectly motivate its own form that the result is terrifying and seamless.

However, what is perhaps more important is that all this writing was going on against a background of a stirring revolution, or seven years before the beginning of the French Revolution. Written so close to a time of civil war, Dangerous Liaisons is itself extremely concerned with conflict and military strategy, even if only in the realm of romance and personal relationships. Choderlos himself was a military officer at the time of writing the novel. As a soldier, Choderlos was something of an outsider to the society he described. This was the society of the aristocracy, a society which, whether it knew it or not at the time, had its back up against the wall. Its excesses, monetary and otherwise, had progressed to the point where they could go no farther; fashion, no longer a pastime, had become a profession in itself.

The publication of Dangerous Liaisons produced a scandal, not only because it described the long success in society of two seemingly depraved individuals who lacked any trace of morals, but because it was seen as a roman à clef. This is to say that readers of Dangerous Liaisons claimed to be able to find certain keys in Choderlos de Laclos's descriptions of his personages which linked them to actual individuals in society. The preface to the novel that describes how the letters were taken from an actual correspondence did nothing to dispel this belief. It is interesting that the issue of authenticity or sincerity of intentions is so frequently in question in the novel, since its own authenticity was frequently the topic of discussion in Parisian society. One can only be sure that Laclos hoped to make a splash by writing a novel so clearly designed to titillate, amuse, and criticize.

Despite its banning in 1824, Dangerous Liaisons has risen through the ages as one of the most famous accounts in the French language of affairs of the heart. Though it is without a doubt the product of its time, produced by societal pressures, it is also an account of the limitations of inter-personal relationships that no one has yet managed to escape entirely.

Summary

In a pair of sumptuous drawingrooms, one in a Parisian mansion, the other in a chateau on a luxurious estate in the countryside surrounding Paris, two aristocrats are very bored. The Marquise de Merteuil decides, therefore, to construct a little intrigue for her own amusement and the amusement of her former lover, the Vicomte de Valmont. The Marquise is aware that a young girl of good family, Cécile Volanges, has only just left the convent so that she can be married to the Comte de Gercourt. Now, the Marquise has a bone to pick with this particular Comte, and so she suggests to the Vicomte that he seduce and debauch Cécile to create a scandal and humiliate Gercourt. Valmont accepts the Marquise's proposal somewhat coolly, since he already has his eyes on another prey, the highly religious Présidente de Tourvel, the chaste wife of a member of Parliament. But, never one to refuse a challenge, Valmont suggests that he and the Marquise enter into a slightly different bet: if he can obtain written proof that he has slept with the Présidente, the Marquise must yield herself to him.

Meanwhile, Cécile has been presented to society, and in society she meets the charming and gentle Chevalier Danceny. Danceny becomes Cécile's music teacher and slowly, with a little coaxing from the Marquise de Merteuil, the two young people fall in love. During this time, Valmont is out in the country on his aunt's estate, trying to turn the Présidente de Tourvel's head. He has very little luck in this department despite his use of every known trick in the book. Then, as coincidence would have, Cécile's mother, Madame Volanges, who corresponds regularly with the Présidente de Tourvel, happens to say some rather unflattering things about Valmont in a letter which Valmont just happens to steal and read. And thus it is that Valmont resolves to seduce the little Volanges as revenge for her mother's only too accurate trash-talk.

Cécile's "seduction" would be more accurately termed "rape," but the girl is persuaded to enter into a bizarre student-teacher relationship with Valmont, so that for a while she is being courted by Danceny and "loved" nightly by Valmont. During his time as Cécile's teacher, Valmont is also able to win the heart of the Présidente de Tourvel.

However, the Marquise de Merteuil is not so easily pleased. Rather than encourage the Vicomte de Valmont to meet the conditions of their original agreement, she mocks him for having fallen in love with the Présidente de Tourvel. Valmont's pride does not withstand these attacks very well, and to avoid compromising his reputation as a good-for-nothing gigolo, he leaves the Présidente cold, with no explanation. Cécile fares no better, after a particularly rough night in Valmont's room, she miscarries his child.

Now things are really looking bad for everyone involved. The Présidente de Tourvel removes herself to a convent where she proceeds to die of grief and shame. Merteuil and Valmont are never able to reconcile their little snit and can only agree to go to war with one another. Danceny learns that Valmont seduced Cécile and challenges him to a duel; and Danceny wins the duel. Valmont hands over his correspondence with the Marquise to Danceny on his deathbed; all of society learns of her schemes and machinations. The Marquise is forced to flee town and, like a wicked old witch, is never heard from again. Full of regret for her activities with Valmont, Cécile returns to the convent from whence she came, with the intention of becoming a nun.

The Characters

The Marquise de Merteuil

The Marquise de Merteuil is a self-described, self-made woman. She writes that she is her own creator. As a young girl Merteuil refused to let fate or society describe her, and began to compose herself. After her husband died, she set about educating herself and creating a reputation. Since then, she has remained at the top of the heap through careful manipulation, never once letting her guard down.
The Marquise is not particularly interested in love, nor does she seem to believe that love exists except as that capacity men and women have to enslave each other. Though she admits that it is possible that she and the Vicomte de Valmont once loved each other, she seems to have no interest in renewing that affair even when the opportunity presents itself.
As a letter writer, she is shrewd, with a particular gift for lifting phrases out of other people's letters and using their words as if they were her own. This nasty side of her self-protective instinct is reflected in her downfall. The disease that disfigures her has an interesting result: other people's true opinions of her are, metaphorically, written on her face.

The Vicomte de Valmont -

Like the Marquise de Merteuil, the Vicomte de Valmont is in it for the game. Or at least, he professes to be, and he styles himself as a player, without any belief or trust in love.
Valmont employs a repetition, or parody, of other writers' styles throughout his writing. As he seduces her, the Présidente de Tourvel's religious tones begin to appear in his letters. The Vicomte adopts the Présidente's language in order to convince her, but this also tends to alter what he says. Therefore, he must subvert Tourvel's religious motifs to his own purpose with parody, just as he must subvert her religious convictions.
But Valmont's pride is also his downfall. So impressed by his former immunity to love, he cannot admit to himself that he has found a source of happiness in the Présidente de Tourvel. He is unable to allow himself to see that the game is over, and so he sacrifices the Présidente to the dictates of intrigue, and ruins himself as he has ruined so many women before.

The Présidente de Tourvel

- Religious motifs surround Tourvel. She is often described as praying, or as having the air of prayer about her. Her letters are also full of religious imagery. She seems to take everything she does, and her motivations for what she does, to heart. After Valmont leaves her, the metaphor of lost faith and lost chastity casts itself over Tourvel's entire physical being, so that the sadness and regret she feels in her mind becomes manifest in her body. Just as Cécile decides to become a nun and wear a veil to repent for her adultery with Valmont, the Présidente must let her body die to expiate her misdeeds.

Important Quotes

Explanation:
In Letter Thirty-three, the Marquise de Merteuil comments on Valmont's seduction-strategy against the Présidente de Tourvel. She criticizes him for choosing to write to the Présidente instead of employing some other method. Valmont's writing, she says, will eventually reveal his true emotions.This quote is especially important because it encapsulates one of the most important themes of Dangerous Liaisons, that of sincerity. As we know, the Marquise and the Vicomte are never intentionally sincere. Their concern is always whether they have the upper hand. There is no such thing as sincerity in their version of love. One might even claim that there is such thing as love where they are concerned, except if love is a combat zone, instead of an emotion. Love is an opportunity for competition, not togetherness. Therefore, if one writes of love, one must appear sincere only to lure the other person in, but one must remain insincere, so as not to be taken in oneself. This contradiction produces the difficulty of which the Marquise wants to warn Valmont.

Explanation:
Letter Fifty-one, from the Marquise de Merteuil to the Vicomte de Valmont, contains the Marquise's latest strategies for the seduction of Cécile and the Présidente de Tourvel. Here she is describing an incident in which she accidentally offended a group of old ladies and subsequently had to spend a good deal of time complimenting them to prevent them from ruining her reputation with gossip.This quotation touches on the theme of education in Dangerous Liaisons. Here, education does not take place in schools; rather it occurs in drawing rooms and at the opera. An older, experienced woman takes a younger woman in hand and introduces her to society. The older woman's particular place in society assures the younger woman a place. An older woman can teach a younger woman to be independent, to live on a good reputation and a good fortune without a husband. Essentially, an older woman can teach a younger woman how to live in society while, at the same time, breaking all of society's stated rules.

Explanation:
Here, in Letter Fifty-six, the Présidente de Tourvel is explaining her perspective on Valmont's version of happiness: specifically, happiness in love or in passion. The difference she perceives in their perspectives on happiness is yet another proof, in her opinion, of why she and the Vicomte are incompatible.The Présidente uses a metaphor of weather, a manifestation of nature to explain how love appears to her. Man's lack of control over nature is similar to Tourvel's sense of helplessness in the face of her own passions. The storm far out at sea, terrifying even if you are on the shore, is like love seen at a distance. To be in the boat, or in love, would be unbearable.

Explanation:
In Letter Ninety-nine, the Vicomte de Valmont explains to the Marquise de Merteuil that his struggle with the Présidente de Tourvel has now begun to be a dispute over words. Where she says, "friendship," he says, "love." The Vicomte's hope is that eventually the Présidente's sympathy and honesty will force her to love him, in sympathy with his own tragic love for her, and that eventually she will be forced to admit this love. Tourvel's characteristic sympathy and honesty are produced by the "ascetic virtue" which Valmont ascribes to her. Whether he is just bragging about the cleverness of his strategy for the benefit of the Marquise de Merteuil is another question, but the irony of the situation is clear. According to Valmont, if Tourvel had been a well-traveled coquette, it would have been much more difficult for him to win her over. The Présidente's religious convictions only render her all the more vulnerable to seduction.

Explanation:
In Letter One Hundred and Thirty, Madame de Rosemonde attempts to instruct the Présidente de Tourvel on the differences between men and women. The most important difference between the two sexes seems to be the way in which they experience happiness, and, according to Madame de Rosemonde, a woman can only be happy by making a man happy. Conversely, a man can only be made happy by a woman, but the woman's happiness does not seem to be necessary for him to be happy. This is a warning to Tourvel as her affair progresses with the Vicomte de Valmont. Despite the seemingly unique way in which they became lovers, there are certain characteristics of the two sexes that remain.

Explanation:
In Letter One Hundred and Thirty-one, the Marquise de Merteuil writes to the Vicomte de Valmont to ask him to give up their plan for a reunion, since they cannot ever be honest to each other or happy together. But even though this is a kind of break-up letter from the Marquise, she makes an unusual show of optimism about relationships along the way. Judging from the majority of the Marquise's actions, one would assume that the only thing in life she is interested in is pleasure. However, this quotation shows that she believes that love exists, and that she believes that love is the one force that can grant a permanent truce between the embattled sexes.

About the Letters

The Epistolary Novel

The epistolary novel had grown in prominence throughout the 18th century until it arrived at the pen of Choderlos de Laclos. Richardson's Clarissa in England and Rousseau's La Nouvelle Heloïse in France, both epistolary novels, had been extremely well received. Their themes of education, romance, and the definition of the female self were repeated in Laclos's own work, but with a twist.

The Originality of Laclos

Laclos learned from the error of Richardon and Rousseau's ways in that he did not create a novel written from a single perspective, and he did not use the letters of his Dangerous Liaisons solely to report events. The diary-like epistles of Clarissa and La Nouvelle Heloïse certainly kept the plot moving along, but they were extremely flat. There seemed to be no motivation behind these letters.

To combat this lack of depth, Laclos wrote a kind of drama in letters, where multiple personages vied and schemed with, and against, each other through what they wrote. It is the portrait of the end of an era: an extremely rarified society gasps its last breaths on the pages of Dangerous Liaisons. It is the most extreme kind of epistolary novel one can imagine, a novel that could not be written except in letters, and it seems the last possible book of its kind. Its plot and its characters so perfectly motivate its own form that the result is terrifying and seamless.

The Meaning of the Letter

The situations in Dangerous Liaisons are arranged so that only letters can communicate them. It is not so much what the characters claim to have been doing in their letters, but how they make these claims, which furthers the plot. Each letter has a purpose: it must convey some desire on the part of one of the characters, since no one would bother writing if he or she did not want something. This is evident in each letter that, at the very least, has the desire to be read written into it.

The masters of letter-writing are Merteuil and Valmont, who are able to anticipate how a reader will respond to what is written, and so, are able to write into the letter an understanding of how the letter will be read. For example, letter XLVII written by Valmont while in bed with a courtesan, goes to Tourvel by way of Merteuil. We can imagine how Merteuil, who knows where it was composed, will notice sexual references that will pass right by the Présidente. The double entendre, where what is read ("heard") depends on who is reading, is a favorite ploy of these aristocratic writers: its exclusivity, its power to determine who will be able to read it, is somehow very pleasing to them.

The idea of "the game" is also extremely important to the writers of Dangerous Liaisons. They must feel, first, that something is at stake, and second, that they are completing against each other. The psychology of Dangerous Liaisons is extremely realistic and extremely dense—revolutionary for the time. Games of sexual conquest and tests of mental dexterity must replace military conquest, since the aristocracy of the time no longer participated in the actual military

Another problem in understanding the novel is the conflict of words with "the thing itself." Why experience love when you can write about it? Why be physically close to someone else when you can be intimate with them in a letter? Peter Brooks, in "Words and 'the Thing'" notes that in many parts of the book, desire seems to be trapped in writing, especially for the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte. So, does love exist in these pages beyond the word "love"? The first response is probably to deny that "love" is just another four-letter word, but the novel seems to be asking repeatedly whether this has not in fact always the case throughout the history of literature. Love is just a word, and the other words of the novel must rally around it to explain it and to define its place among them.

More than an act of speech, the letter is a tool, a weapon. The letter does not only record reality, it creates it. What is obscene and to some, horrifying and dangerous, is when there is no difference between the act of love and the act of writing about it.