In many respects, Pierre-Ambroise-François Choderlos de Laclos (1741–1803) is the perfect author: he wrote, at around the age of forty, one piece of fiction, which was not merely a masterpiece, but the supreme example of its genre, the epistolary novel; and then troubled the public no further.
Fortunately the obscurity from which, during his lifetime, this astonishing tour de force delivered him only briefly, has remained sufficiently deep to preserve his enigma. But those few facts which are known about him combine to throw an intriguing light on his vigorously classical novel.
A career soldier in an unusually extended period of peace, Laclos volunteered to serve in the American War of Independence, but lacked the means necessary to a campaign officer at the time. Instead, he was posted to a drab island in the Bay of Biscay and put in charge of its fortification. It was from here, bored and disappointed, that he wrote, famously, to a friend, announcing his intention to write something ‘out of the ordinary, eyecatching, something that would resound around the world even after I had left it’. Few artists can have fulfilled their predictions so satisfactorily.
The novel caused an immediate and continuing sensation, and in its wake Laclos addressed himself to two other pieces of work: a treatise on women’s education, unpublished in his lifetime; and a blistering demolition of one of France’s military sacred cows, the tactician Maréchal de Vauban, which caused such offence that he was immediately rewarded with a series of particularly dreary provincial postings.
In the Revolution he was a Jacobin, not prominent but assiduous, a friend of Danton and the associate and secretary of the Duc d’Orléans, the king’s liberal cousin, known as Philippe-Égalité. Inevitably during the Terror he was jailed twice and escaped execution, which he clearly expected, only narrowly and for reasons which have remained obscure. It took some time for him to be accepted back into the army, but eventually at the turn of the century he was made a general by Napoleon. The result, however, of this final success, was that only a few weeks after arriving in Taranto in Southern Italy to take up a new command, he died of dysentery and malaria. His last letter was a dignified but urgent appeal to Napoleon, asking for support for his wife and three children.
Geometrician, inventor, military strategist, feminist, revolutionary, devoted husband and father: all of these qualities, some initially surprising in the author of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, others less so, make their contribution towards a way of looking at this extraordinary and meteoric work: without, however, exhausting the pleasures of its rare mystery and merciless intelligence.
Christopher Hampton