Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

Read or experienced in the theater, tragedy leaves us shaken. We wonder how the world can go on after so much grief. The destruction of Oedipus, Pentheus, Hamlet, or Faustus makes us wonder why fate had to deal with them so brutally. We understand that the Macbeths and Phaedras of tragedy are hideously imperfect individuals guilty of monstrous crimes, but we still find it difficult to balance the idea of justice, human or divine, with the annihilation of these figures and much of the society they inhabit. Even in the case of Romeo and Juliet, any hope for the future or for the redemption of society seems shattered. The ironic possibility that human existence, which we defend tooth and nail and seek to extend by every available means, lacks any significance, that fate toys with us like a cruel child torturing an insect, looms large in our thoughts. At the same time, we wonder if pride, which deludes humans into thinking they are more than human, might not be the source of all our misery.

Pierre-Ambroise-François Choderlos de Laclos (1741-1803) takes these ramifications of tragedy and the ironies of the human condition and inserts them into the world of the novel. The change of genres is all-important, because the novel conceives of human society as a world without end, thus obliterating tragedy’s apocalyptic overtones. The form had begun to take its modern shape during Laclos’s lifetime; it moved in England from the gothic romances of Horace Walpole (1717-1797) and Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), with their ghosts and haunted castles, to the psychological studies of Jane Austen (1775-1817) and Frances (Fanny) Burney (1752-1840), about whose Cecilia; or, Memoirs of an Heiress (1782) Laclos wrote an enthusiastic essay in 1784. The novel mitigates the finality of tragedy by surrounding its characters—much to our relief—with a world that will go on despite the utter destruction of the fascinating lives we have just experienced, no matter how grotesque, heartrending, or happy the characters’ destinies may be. Where the end of dramatic tragedy opens a window onto chaos, the destruction of a novel’s characters, especially in the case of Laclos, opens a door to moral judgment within a social context: Did these characters—who, despite their high rank in society, are psychologically similar to us, their readers—get what they deserved ? Was it some other moral flaw that we are unaware of, or was it pride again that caused them to violate notions of right and wrong that were taken as basic truths by their society?

The 1780s teem with meditations on morality. Laclos publishes Les Liaisons Dangereuses in 1782; Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) paints his Oath of the Horatii, called by one critic a “clarion call to civic virtue and patriotism” (Honour, Neo-Classicism, p. 35; see “For Further Reading”), in 1784; German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) releases Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals in 1785; and Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) stages Don Giovanni, with its telling subtitle L’Empio Punito (“Impiety Punished”), in 1787. In 1789 the long process of the French Revolution begins, with its emphasis on moral rectitude, on the need to root out aristocratic privilege and corruption in order to establish “liberty, equality, and fraternity.”

The real issue for us in the twenty-first century as we experience these literary, philosophic, painterly, musical, and political manifestations of eighteenth-century morality is to identify and define the different kinds of morality each author espouses. That is, Mozart and David look to the past for sources on virtue; they reconfigure stories from another age for their own: Mozart reaches back to seventeenth-century theological speculations on divine grace for his opera, while David finds his example of nationalism in an obscure Roman legend. Kant, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, seeks to postulate a morality free of ties to religion or any other code external to the individual consciousness, while Laclos claims—if we take his epigraph from Rousseau (“I have observed the manners of my times, and I have published these letters”) as a clue to his intentions—that his novel is a response to the moral condition of his time. In this sense, it is important that Laclos, unlike Kant, does allow religion a role in moral redemption—his male villain, the Vicomte de Valmont, receives last rites (p. 391) just before dying, while his female villain, the Marquise de Merteuil, consistently mocks religion (p. 116)—possibly because it is a hint about his basically conservative nature.

Perhaps because it is a quality he personally appears to have lacked, virtue is one of the obsessive themes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), whose influence on European thought during the second half of the eighteenth century was all-pervasive. It is not by chance that Laclos quotes Rousseau’s philosophical novel Julie; ou, la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) in the epigraph to Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Rousseau’s concept of morality derives from two conditions: the artificiality of society and the deformed nature of humans obliged to live in it. For Rousseau, society breeds hypocrisy (we believe one thing but practice another; we appear to be one thing but are really something else). At the same time, we live in a world of artificial inequality (neither inherited social rank nor inherited wealth reflects an individual’s innate abilities) and miserable illusion: We can never attain the ambiguous ideals—beauty, freedom, happiness—language gives us because we can never define these elusive ideas. They correspond to nothing concrete in the real world. Our hopeless pursuit of abstractions in a society arbitrarily composed of haves and have-nots renders us mentally unstable: We cannot behave properly because we live in a fiction we take for reality. If we view Laclos’s principal characters through this Rousseauistic optic, we see that even though they are members of France’s highest classes, they are perverted by their social milieu to the point that even their passions are artificial.

That is, within a society Rousseau considers nothing more than a convention, Laclos’s principal villains are so dehumanized that they forget their essential humanity. They are so far “above” ordinary humans (even those of their own social class) that they ascribe godlike powers to themselves. The Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont are guilty of overweening pride, and it is the author’s intention to bring them to justice. At the same time, in depicting their adventures, their clever machinations, and their utter hypocrisy, Laclos makes vice so seductive that moralizing critics damned his novel and sought to suppress it. The moral revulsion his book inspired continued throughout the nineteenth century, and transformed it into a clandestine classic. Small wonder that so many “private” editions with suggestive illustrations appeared in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including this translation, first published in 1898, by the poet Ernest Dowson (1867-1900); it was reprinted many times with an array of provocative illustrations. The result is a baffling paradox: Laclos intended his novel as a condemnation of immorality; his critics, including judges in an 1824 Parisian court, considered it pornographic and banned it; illustrators rendered it truly pornographic with lascivious pictures. Their confusion is perfectly understandable, because it is often difficult to know if Laclos is a serious moralizer or merely a purveyor of the salacious, like Claude Crébillon (1707-1777), alluded to by Merteuil on page 33, whose licentious novel The Letters of Marquise de M*** (1732) lurks in the background of Laclos’s vastly superior text.

Setting aside any possibility of irony, Laclos’s notion of morality, by the standards of Kant, is old-fashioned and very traditional. If we look back to the author who influenced Laclos most (after Rousseau), Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), we find exactly the same kind of moral vision. In Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), also an epistolary novel, Richardson depicts a young lady, Pamela Andrews, who so successfully defends her virtue against the attacks of a young gentleman that he finally falls in love with and marries her. This is a species of capitalist morality in which we invest our virtue and are rewarded on earth for being good. Richardson’s second novel, Clarissa Harlowe (1747-1748), is the tragic version of Pamela: Clarissa runs off with the man she thinks loves her, Lovelace, and is ultimately drugged and raped by him. She dies of chagrin, and Lovelace is killed by her cousin. Here folly and misconduct are punished—again, in this life.

Morality in Richardson, as in Laclos, is a bank. If we save up our virtue, we will be rewarded, but if we squander it, we will be punished. To Kant, as he says in Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, a moral action is one we commit not because we hope to achieve something (a reward, earthly happiness) but because the action embodies a general, irrefutable principle. We must ask ourselves what would happen if everyone in our situation were to do the same thing, indeed, would have to do the same thing by instinct. Kant rejects external moral codes because he wants us to exercise our free will in making moral decisions.

More traditional, Laclos, like Richardson, suggests that unless we adhere to traditional moral codes we are apt to turn into monsters. It also happens that monsters sometimes do good deeds. Laclos exploits this irony in one of his most memorable episodes. The Vicomte de Valmont, an absolute womanizer, sets his sights on the married, virtuous Présidente de Tourvel. Learning that she is having him followed, Valmont decides to stage an act of charity that will prove to Tourvel that he is a wonderful man. He asks his servant to inform him of a poor family about to be dispossessed for not paying their taxes—he makes sure there are no attractive women in the family so Tourvel will not suspect his charity on that score—and makes it appear to Tourvel’s spy that he is saving the family from disaster.

Valmont, director and actor in this transformation of life into theater, describes the scene as it unfolds after he pays the family’s taxes:

What tears of gratitude poured from the eyes of the aged head of the family.... I was watching this spectacle, when another peasant ... said ... “Let us all fall at the feet of this image of God”; ... I will confess my weakness: my eyes were moistened by tears, and I felt an involuntary but delicious emotion. I am astonished at the pleasure one experiences in doing good; and I should be tempted to believe that what we call virtuous people have not so much merit as they lead us to suppose (pp. 51-52).

Laclos’s irony is manifest: Valmont fools Tourvel, but in perpetrating his fraud, he is moved by his own act of charity, false for him but real to its beneficiaries. He then comments, in an unconsciously Kantian vein, that since he felt pleasure at doing good, so too must many so-called virtuous people. It follows, therefore, that doing good for the sake of feeling this pleasure is not as meritorious as many would like to think.

Robert Rosenblum, in Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art, points out that in 1782, the same year Laclos published Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the English painter Edward Penny exhibited a work at the Royal Academy, London, titled The Generosity of Johnny Pearmain; or, the Widow Costard’s cow and goods, restrained for taxes, are redeemed by the generosity of Johnny Pearmain. Rosenblum notes he was unable to locate “the source of Penny’s story” (p. 59, footnote 31), but it seems reasonable to assume it was part of a popular or folk tradition. In the 1780s, when virtue was fashionable, writers and artists eagerly depicted virtuous acts from any century and involving all social classes. Laclos’s genius is to enfold his version of it in a haze of irony in order to show both Valmont’s susceptibility and his cynicism. Valmont may have been moved by his own bogus virtue, but we readers cannot know if this is a sign that he will ultimately be redeemed. Even his final act of charity—forgiving the man, Danceny, who mortally wounded him in a duel—may be nothing more than a subterfuge to facilitate a posthumous act of revenge.

This incident underscores what is so vexing about Les Liaisons Dangereuses: Even though Laclos’s villains, Valmont and Merteuil, are guilty of overweening pride, there are nuances in their personalities that mitigate their evil. This we often detect in Laclos’s subtle ironies in juxtaposing their letters. That is, if Laclos were writing a traditional statement about virtue in the manner of a morality play, he would make certain that good and evil would be as different as white and black and that some of his characters, especially the principal players, would be redeemed. He does exactly the opposite: His villains are punished, but the only survivor of the Valmont-Merteuil sexual reign of terror, Cécile Volanges, enters a convent, not out of religious zeal but because becoming a nun offers her a way to recover the innocence she had before being seduced. The man she loves, Danceny, also elects celibacy: It is as if both realize that sexuality has made them into fools, that while their calamity is not absolute, it has made them incapable of leading normal lives.

Laclos preaches morality, but his book, at least in the minds of his readers, clearly teeters on the edge of pornography. We see the concrete results of how an ironic reader-author could interpret Les Liaisons Dangereuses—as well as other moralizing literature going all the way back to Samuel Richardson—in the works Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade, better known as Marquis de Sade ( 1740-1814), especially his Justine; or, the Misfortunes of Virtue (1791). Sade’s title mocks Richardson’s “virtue rewarded” and delights in showing that the cruelties that test Pamela, destroy Clarissa, and bring Valmont and Merteuil to catastrophe are in fact very enticing. Where both Richardson and Laclos deploy negative examples in order to make us see the insanity of evil, Sade shows that no matter how hard the preachers try, sexual impropriety in literature is inflammatory.

What kind of society could produce authors as contradictory yet complementary as Laclos and Sade, who are absolute contemporaries? Both reflect French society in the decades immediately preceding the French Revolution of 1789. Eighteenth-century France is set on its course by Louis XIV (1638-1715), who rules between 1643 and 1715. Louis reduces the power of the French nobility (represented here by Valmont and Merteuil), which had been a serious threat to the king and central authority. This conflict was settled by 1653, with Louis’s triumph in the Fronde, the civil wars that embroiled him and the nobility between 1648 and 1653. Louis built (1661-1670) his palace at Versailles and maintained a financially ruinous court to keep his nobles in check. Versailles became a kind of permanent masquerade, with a daily life ritualized to the most minute detail—right down to the red shoes people were expected to wear at court. Valmont and Danceny appear at Versailles (p. 120), because the nobility was obliged to do so (often to their financial distress). But for Danceny being presented at court was the equivalent of a debutante’s “coming out” into society.

In architectural terms, Versailles symbolizes royal power; its antithesis is the nearby Petit Trianon, built (1761-1768) by Louis XV, which expresses nothing but charm. These buildings mark a transition in French culture—one we see dramatically represented in Les Liaisons Dangereuses—from the intellectually and politically charged era of Louis XIV, the baroque, to the rococo, which drains the baroque of ideological (political or religious) vigor while heightening its sensuality. The baroque is rhetorically serious; the rococo is decorative and frivolous.

Louis XIV made France the most powerful nation in Europe. His finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683) overhauled the nation’s administration, and one of the results of his reform appears in Les Liaisons Dangereuses in the figure of Madame de Tourvel, always referred to as the Présidente because her husband is a président, an official representing the central government in the provinces. This explains both his absence and his constant involvement in litigation. The fact that she is always referred to by her title also explains the subtle difference between nobility of blood—Merteuil and Valmont-versus nobility of office, those upstarts the two treat with such contempt.

The France of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the France of either the last years of Louis XV (reigned 1715-1774) or the first years of Louis XVI (reigned 1774-1792; guillotined in 1793), was rich and powerful. Its people, however, were overtaxed. Aristocrats were exempted from most taxes; thus, disparities in wealth were dazzling, and the rich bourgeois or aristocrats were waited on hand and foot by the impoverished masses. Wars, beginning in the 1740s and continuing into the 1750s and early 1760s, were financially disastrous. Support for the American Revolution between 1775 and 1783 was a prelude to ruin. Finally, the French Revolution began in 1789, and France was thrust into violent internal and external conflicts until 1815.

Eighteenth-century France produced a host of geniuses—names like Voltaire (1694-1778), Diderot ( 1713-1784), Condillac (1715-1780), and Condorcet (1743-1794)-but its greatest accomplishment may have been the Encyclopedia (1751-1772), a revolutionary publication that provided rational explanations for all natural and social phenomena and revolutionized the organization of knowledge through alphabetization. The French of the eighteenth century took themselves to be the paragons of intellect, art, fashion, and manners. Their language was the equivalent of what English is today, a language spoken around the world. We see French pride in the novel when Valmont expresses contempt for his mistress Émilie’s newest lover, who speaks “the French of Holland” (p. 106). In this sense, it is no wonder Merteuil and Valmont behave as they do: They could feel superior to anyone in the world.

But it is this belief in their superiority that precipitates their catastrophe in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. They misdirect their energies in order to gratify their egos: Instead of seeking glory on the battlefield or in politics, Valmont and Merteuil use their powers to turn sensuality into a game. And like all games, the sport of seduction as conceived by Valmont and Merteuil has its own rules, even its own playing fields. Laclos, not a sportsman, was a military man, so his use of military metaphors throughout his novel reflects his professional training. But even in this there is irony or at least ambiguity: Why would a serious soldier, the inventor of a hollow projectile for the cannon, the author of treatises on strategy and critiques of fortification systems, seemingly demean his calling by having his villains speak the language of military strategy? He seems to mock himself.

Perhaps the military man, who must play to win in order to survive, influenced the literary man coordinating his characters. That Laclos himself was something of an opportunist is also the case, so the moral ambiguity in his novel may also reflect his ability to see what was ethically “right” and realize at the same time that contingency might foist uncomfortable or morally compromising decisions on an individual at any given moment. For example, Laclos was a member of the lesser nobility (only nobles could be officers in the pre-revolutionary French army), but with the Revolution of 1789, he became secretary to the slippery Philippe Égalité (1747-1793), who sided with the revolutionaries while apparently scheming to have himself named constitutional monarch. Philippe Égalité was guillotined during the Reign of Terror, but by then Laclos had already established ties with the Jacobin Club, the most radical revolutionaries. He somehow survived the Reign of Terror to become an important supporter of Napoléon’s coup against the Directory on 18 Brumaire (November 9, 1799). Napoleon rewarded him with a generalship in 1800. Laclos survived the Revolution and the Terror, and triumphed with the rise of Napoleon. But what was the moral cost?

Valmont and Merteuil do not have to suffer Laclos’s many political shifts; indeed, they are remarkably consistent in their erotic politics. But we should not assume that, because they engage in conquest and seduction, they are any less professional in their strategy than Laclos was when, in 1792, he participated as an artillery officer in the battle of Valmy, the first defensive victory of Revolutionary France against monarchic Prussian invaders. Far less glorious, attacking an enemy unaware that it is at war, Valmont and Merteuil move forward on several fronts simultaneously.

The pretext for this war is revenge: The Marquise de Merteuil has been abandoned by a former lover, the Comte de Gercourt (p. 15). Gercourt then steals a former lover of the Vicomte de Valmont, a lady referred to as the Intendante—that is, the wife of an important officer in the royal quartermaster corps. Merteuil learns that the mother of Cecile Volanges, a sixteen-year-old girl who has just left her convent school, has arranged for her daughter to be married to Gercourt. Merteuil, taking the role of field marshal, recruits Valmont: He will seduce Cecile Volanges and make Gercourt into “the joke of all Paris” (p. 16). Valmont’s credentials as a seducer are impeccable, and the list of his conquests long, so the project is child’s play for him, as he himself says:

In essence, Valmont is a mercenary soldier in the pay of Merteuil. He will carry out her orders even though he has other, more pressing interests—the seduction of the notoriously prudish and faithful Présidente de Tourvel. What he cannot realize is that Merteuil is governed by jealousy and will tolerate no rivals. If Gercourt left her for another woman, then Gercourt must be punished, even if that means destroying a girl’s life. If Valmont falls in love with Tourvel, he must be punished as well, by being commanded to abandon her after seducing her. Merteuil, meanwhile, will proffer examples of her own amorous adventures in order to titillate Valmont and make him jealous. What she does consciously, he does unconsciously by boasting; each succeeds, and disaster ensues. Or, as Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) puts it in notes for an unpublished article on Les Liaisons Dangereuses: L‘amour de la guerre et la guerre de l’amour (“the love of war and the war of love”).

The Marquise de Merteuil is Laclos’s crowning achievement as a novelist, the single creation that enabled a literary dilettante who dabbled in verse and wrote execrable comic operas to attain immortality. Valmont, as Merteuil points out, really has an easy path to success as a Don Juan:

You have seduced, ruined even, very many women: but what difficulties have you had to overcome? ... What merit lies therein that is really your own? A handsome face, the pure result of chance; graces, which habit almost always brings; wit, in truth: but jargon would supply its place at need; a praiseworthy impudence, perhaps due solely to the ease of your first successes; if I am not mistaken, these are your means (p. 182).

Speaking about the importance of reading and the importance of having a teacher who will suit a young woman’s readings to her age and social position, Laclos notes: “In matters of morality as in matters related to the body, foods that are too strong are not appropriate for weak constitutions, and nourishment ingested without pleasure is rarely profitable” (Oeuvres Complètes, p. 448; my translation). This leads him to point out how important novels can be to a young woman’s education: He notes that contemporary philosophy (he is thinking, no doubt, about the Enlightenment) has added nothing to the moral teaching of the ancients, that modern preachers have added nothing to the lessons found in the Gospel. He suggests that even modern history fails in terms of morality because it deals with events and important men without providing any moral instruction:

We must turn to the novel to find what is lacking in history writing.... It may well be that there are none that a young woman could read without falling into some danger, unless she were guided in her reading. Just to mention one example, I would pick the masterpiece of novels: Clarissa. One can’t help esteeming and even respecting the heroine of that novel a great deal. Nevertheless, Clarissa commits perhaps the greatest offense a young woman can commit when she runs away from home with her seducer (pp. 454-455; my translation).

The Marquise de Merteuil is an autodidact, so the absence of a teacher is the first step in her path to moral depravity. She begins by teaching herself to control her facial expressions, turning her body into an instrument she dominates absolutely: “I was not fif teen years old, I possessed already the talents to which the greater part of our politicians owe their reputation” (p. 185). With puberty comes a curiosity about sex, and warnings from her confessor only fan the flames: “The good father represented the ill as so great that I concluded the pleasure to be extreme” (p. 186). Marriage saves her from folly, but even here she exercises self-discipline: “... feeling by instinct perhaps that no one ought to be farther from my confidence than my husband, I resolved to appear the more impassive in his eyes, the more sensible I really was” (p. 186).

Early widowhood and independence give her the opportunity to perfect her hypocrisy. She throws herself into a course of self education, reading philosophers, novelists, and moralists. All her readings do nothing more than train her to be a consummate actress: She knows what society expects of her and presents that face to society. In private, she is a seductress. Her method is simple: She knows everyone has some dark secret, so she makes it her business to discover those of her ex-lovers in order to keep them from sullying her reputation or blackmailing her. She feels herself superior to all women and to all men:

But to pretend that I have been at so much pains, and am not to cull the fruit of them; that, after having raised myself, by my arduous labors, so high above other women, I am to consent to grope along, like them, betwixt imprudence and timidity; that, above all, I should fear any man to such an extent as to see no other salvation than in flight? No, Vicomte, never! I must conquer or perish (p. 191).

Poor Valmont does not understand that Merteuil’s autobiography is a threat. He simply pursues his own course of action, ultimately forcing Merteuil to take action. She tricks a young man she is busy seducing into dueling with and killing Valmont. On his deathbed, Valmont delivers to his murderer, Danceny, all the letters Merteuil and others have sent him. Danceny then becomes the instrument of Valmont’s revenge by revealing all of Merteuil’s subterfuges. But social revenge is not enough for Laclos. He knows Merteuil is capable of surviving even this disaster, so he must engineer her total destruction. This he does first by having her contract smallpox, which destroys her physical beauty, and second by having her lose a lawsuit, which eradicates her fortune. Fleeing her creditors, she escapes to Holland, where she dies in poverty.

Laclos’s moral message is clear: The wages of sin are death. But the ambiguity of the work is perhaps its greatest charm. We cannot read Merteuil’s autobiographical letter without gasping with admiration at her self-creation. At the same time we realize that Merteuil and Valmont, who have played the role of gods in manipulating the passions of others, have simply gone too far. Laclos, like the great tragedians of the past, not only punishes those guilty of pride but smashes them to atoms.

Alfred Mac Adam, Professor at Barnard College-Columbia University, teaches Latin American and comparative literature. He is a translator of Latin American fiction and writes extensively on art. Between 1984 and 2002, Mac Adam was the editor of Review: Latin American Literature and Arts, a publication of the Americas Society. He has written an Introduction and Notes for the Barnes & Noble Classics editions of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine and The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds and of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey.