by Steven Moore
That’s a shocking way to end a novel at a time when readers not only expected a moral but expected it to be spoon-fed to them, not left to decipher for themselves. It raises a host of unanswerable questions, such as those asked by the protagonist of Milan Kundera’s Slowness (1993), an extraordinary critifiction written around No Tomorrow:
What Madame de T. did with him—was that routine for her, or was it a rare, even thoroughly unique adventure? Was her heart touched, or is it still intact? Has her night of love made her jealous of the Comtesse? . . . But how did he really feel? And how will he feel as he leaves the château? What will he be thinking about? The pleasure he experienced, or his reputation as a ludicrous whelp? Will he feel like the victor or the vanquished? Happy or unhappy?
In other words: is it possible to live in pleasure and for pleasure and be happy? Can the ideal of hedonism be realized? (chap. 45)
The hedonistic experience leaves Mme de T— feeling blissful, the narrator feeling baffled and used, but their feelings are not the only ones to be considered; even more relevant are the reader’s feelings. Like an experienced libertine, Denon seduces the reader with expert “stagecraft” (as Kundera calls it), atmospheric imagery regarding the moon, and sensuous details. The actual act of fornication is over in a blink; the emphasis is on “the preliminary pleasures” (17). As in Bastide’s Little House, foreplay and the idea of sex take prominence over the physical act, which is behind the novelette’s mischievous epigraph: “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life”—though the astheticization of sex is hardly what Paul meant in his second letter to the Corinthians (3:6). One might also ask whether No Tomorrow predicts the future in store for amoral, double-timing French aristocrats like M. and Mme de T— come the Revolution, though perhaps only a sansculotte would ask that. To ask pesky questions is perhaps to miss the point; sex doesn’t have to be meaningful and art doesn’t have to be moral. Better to ask was it good for you than is it good for you, and No Tomorrow was very good for this pushover.
Even more questions are left unanswered in the greatest libertine novel of the 18th century, the notorious Dangerous Liaisons (Les Liaisons dangereuses, 1782) by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (1741–1803). What are we to think of a novel whose alluring, intelligent protagonists flaunt conventional morality and destroy people around them? How much sympathy should we feel for their less intelligent, drearily conventional victims? How do we warm up to its icy ironies? How much trust can we put in a novel comprised of letters that turn out to be not the unmediated expression of a character’s feelings (the appeal of epistolary novels) but, more often than not, fictions intended to manipulate their recipients, rhetorical ploys rather than true confessions?
Dangerous Liaisons excels both as a gripping narrative and as a metacommentary on novels. Revenge propels the lurid plot: the Marquise de Merteuil—a haughty young widow who is either the villainess or the heroine of the novel, depending on your standards—is insulted to learn that a lover named Gercourt who recently left her plans to marry a 15-year-old fresh from the convent named Cécile. Merteuil enlists the help of an ex-lover named Valmont—an experienced libertine and the only man she ever really cared for—to deflower Cécile and expose her and Gercourt to public humiliation after their marriage. Valmont demurs, partly because seducing Cécile sounds like child’s play, but largely because he has a greater challenge in Madame de Tourvel, the pious, 22-year-old wife of a man conveniently out of town for a while. In one of many deliberate parallels to Rousseau’s Julie, Cécile is being courted by her 20-year-old music tutor, the Chevalier Danceny (a decent guy but not an advantageous match according to her mother). Valmont befriends him and later Merteuil beds him as part of their revenge plot, but otherwise Valmont ignores Merteuil’s repeated requests for help, to her growing annoyance, fueled by her growing jealousy of Tourvel. But when Valmont learns Cécile’s mother has been bad-mouthing him, he seeks his own revenge by raping the girl, which only endears her to him, and thereafter the teen enjoys fucking him while still pining for her music tutor. After superhuman efforts to resist Valmont’s Pepé Le Pew persistence, Tourvel finally succumbs, which pushes her toward a fatal nervous breakdown. After Valmont learns Merteuil has interfered with his relationship with Tourvel (whom he unexpectedly comes to love), they declare war, but he picked the wrong marquise to mess with, for she tells Danceny what Valmont has been doing with his sweetheart, which leads to a duel where the tutor fatally wounds Valmont, who has just enough time to turn over to him all of Merteuil’s incriminating letters, which he makes public. Concluding with a heavy sense of horror evoking Greek tragedy, Valmont dies, Tourvel dies, Cécile takes religious vows (thus breaking off her engagement), Danceny goes into hiding, and Merteuil—her revenge achieved but her reputation ruined and her face disfigured by an attack of smallpox—leaves Paris for Holland, no doubt to begin a new round of dangerous liaisons.
“I resolved to write a work which should stand out from the ordinary,” Laclos claimed,207 beginning with the ordinary reader response to a novel’s protagonist. The first letter we read is from Cécile to a convent chum, filled with childish excitement at the prospect of marriage, but any expectation this will be the ordinary story of ordinary obstacles on the path to the wedding chapel is dashed by the second letter, in which Merteuil writes Valmont to dish up her plans for revenge. Immediately the reader’s instinct to side with a novel’s protagonist is confused: do we concern ourselves with Cécile and the threat against her insipid innocence, or do we get in the carriage with those far more interesting people? Who do we root for, Team Cécile-Danceny or Team Marteuil-Valmont? If the former, how does that change when we learn how avidly Cécile liaisons with Valmont and Danceny with Merteuil? If the latter, how evil are you, exactly? Few readers rooted for Lovelace to overcome Clarissa in Richardson’s novel—Laclos’s other model after Julie—but I’m guessing more than a few took guilty pleasure in seeing Valmont bag both pretty little Cécile and the redoubtable Tourvel. Valmont seduces them, Laclos seduces us.
Merteuil’s case is even more complicated: a textbook villainess during the first half of the novel—scheming, arrogant, hypocritical, dishonest; in fine, a haughty bitch with no redeeming qualities—she checks our hisses after we read her long, autobiographical letter in the middle (no. 81), in which she tells Valmont that her principles “are not, like those of other women, discovered by chance, accepted uncritically or followed out of habit. They are the fruit of my deepest reflection,” and she goes on to explain how from an early age she learned “to observe and reflect”; she paid “scant attention” to what adults “were so anxious to tell me, but I thought long and hard about what they were trying to hide from me.” In the spirit of the Enlightenment, she developed a desire for knowledge greater than her desire for pleasure, and educated herself: “In novels I studied manners; in the philosophers, opinions”; widowed at an early age, she refused many offers to remarry, she writes Valmont later, “purely so that no one should have the right to criticize my actions. It was not even for fear of not being able to do what I wish, for I should always have ended up doing that; but it was because it would have annoyed me that anyone had the right to complain about it” (152). Fiercely independent, refusing “to accept the servility that society imposes on women,”208 allowing no man to make a fool of her, the Marquise de Merteuil has many qualities of a feminist icon, for she’s easily the smartest and most clear-eyed woman in the novel, perhaps in all of 18th-century French fiction. Unfortunately she uses her intelligence for cruel intentions—she’s “a hundred times worse” than Valmont (6)—but the conflicted reader notes that the author allows her to escape at the end, damaged but still standing, and not every reader is sorry that he did so.
Merteuil and Valmont represent the deterioration of the libertine tradition into perversion; they are only a few years away from turning into Sade’s sex monsters. For Hylas in d’Urfé’s Astrea, libertinism was a joyful if irresponsible activity, and it continued to be so in the n
ovels of Sorel and Subligny; with the Duc de Nemours in The Princess de Clèves, the libertine becomes a more threatening figure, though still capable of love for the woman he stalks. He becomes more selfish and violent in Challe’s Illustrious French Lovers, and is exposed in Crébillon’s serious novels as an amoral opportunist, a role now played by older women as well as by men. This predatory figure stalks the pages of Duclos and the pornographic novels of the period, is redeemed somewhat in Thérèse the Philosopher, and even recovers a little of Hylas’s freewheeling attitude in The French Adventurer before relapsing into cunning calculation in The Little House and in Restif’s novels. Yet all of these figures, up to and including Madame de T— in No Tomorrow, use sex for pleasure; in Dangerous Liaisons, sex is used primarily for revenge, humiliation, and punishment. For Valmont and especially for Merteuil, sex is a weapon, a means of gaining control rather than giving or taking pleasure, a crime committed in cold blood rather than a release of hot-blooded passion. Though there has always been execrable people like them (that is, they are not necessarily symbolic of the corrupt ancien régime), Laclos was the first to feature them so prominently in a French novel, and to make them as alluring as they are repulsive.
Laclos was a well-read man, aware of the libertine tradition in literature—Valmont is modeled on Crébillon’s Versac,209 and Merteuil preps for an assignation by reading a little of The Sofa, Julie, and two of La Fontaine’s erotic tales, not to excite herself but “to establish in my mind the various tones I wished to adopt” (10)—and other French novels since the time of Astrea (alluded to in letter 51). One senses this army officer wanted to take Valmont-like revenge against the womanly genre, insofar as women were both the protagonists and the readers of most novels then. Undoubtedly speaking for the author, Valmont complains at one point of having nothing to read but “a modern novel which would be tedious even for a convent girl” (79);210 like Voltaire, Laclos set out to write something an intelligent man could read without embarrassment. He mocks the respect shown in conventional novels for virtue, religion, morality, and the sanctity of marriage—Merteuil quips “if she had been his wife of ten years she could not have hated him more” (38)—and in Valmont’s letters to Tourvel he parodies the rhetoric of romance so closely that it will be difficult to take such rhetoric seriously hereafter, and casts doubt on the sincerity of those novelists who used it in the past. Merteuil, who hates to be criticized but who freely criticizes Valmont at every opportunity, points out the shortcomings of both Valmont’s letter to Tourvel and of novels in general:
Moreover, one thing you have failed to notice, much to my astonishment, is that there is nothing so difficult in the matter of love as to write what one does not feel—write convincingly, I mean. You may use the same words, but you do not put them in the same order, or rather, you do arrange them in a certain order and that is sufficient to damn you. Re-read your letter. There is an order in it which exposes you at every sentence. I am sure your Présidente [Tourvel] is unsophisticated enough not to notice. But what of that? The effect is none the less a failure. That is the problem with novels. The author works himself up into a passion but it leaves the reader cold. Héloïse is the only one I should make an exception of. (33)
But even Rousseau’s Héloïse (i.e., Julie) seems to be slighted elsewhere in the novel, as is Clarissa, and the entire passage can be read as Laclos’s rebuke to his predecessors. (More advice to novelists from Merteuil, which Casanova could have used: “You should attempt to talk less about what you think and more about what the person you are writing to will wish to hear” [105].) His most outrageous parody of romantic rhetoric occurs in letter 48, in which Valmont pens Tourvel a pining letter of romantic longing on the naked buttocks of a courtesan between bouts, a hilarious masterpiece of double entendres. (I now suspect St. Preux wrote at least one of his love letters to Julie on the creamy bottom of a Swiss miss.) Responding to Merteuil’s criticism, Valmont later tells her, “I took a lot of trouble with my letter, and tried to reproduce the impression of disorder, the only thing that can depict feeling. Anyway, I reasoned as badly as I knew how; for without talking nonsense, one cannot expresses one’s love. And that is why, in my view, women are better than men at writing love letters” (70). After he seduces Cécile, Valmont writes passionate love letters to Danceny for her, “imitating her nonsense the best I could. . . . The girl was delighted, she said, to find she could write so well” (115). But when Danceny uses the same romantic rhetoric in a letter to Merteuil, she lets him have it: “My friend, when you write to me, let it be to tell me what you think and feel, and not to send me what I can read, without your help, more or less well expressed in the latest fashionable novel” (121). Similarly, after listening to Danceny’s romantic troubles, Valmont snips, “Lovers’ complaints are only worth listening to when there is a recitative or a grand aria” (59). Dangerous Liaisons rapes the epistolary romance and leaves it disgraced; I’m surprised any novelist had the temerity to write another one after reading it.
Valmont and Merteuil self-consciously imitate novelists as they develop their revenge scenarios; comparing Danceny to d’Urfé’s Celadon, they cast him as “our fine romantic hero” (57), tell Cécile that she “would make a marvellous character in a novel” (105), and take pleasure in their clever plotting: “I like novel and intricate ways of going about things,” Laclos says in Valmont’s voice (70). As a young girl Merteuil studied novels to learn manners, and realized that all she needed to succeed in the world was to “combine the talents of an actor with the wit of a writer” (81); she manipulates others as a novelist does his characters, but takes care not to leave any written traces, boasting to Valmont that if he had ever tried to betray her in his own words in the past, he would have had only “a series of unlikely facts which, had you recounted them, would have seemed like a badly structured novel” (81). Ironically, this is one of the letters that Danceny uses to ruin her at the end.211
Before that, Danceny (and the common reader of epistolary novels) was naïve enough to believe “a letter is the portrait of the soul. It does not possess, as pictures do, that cold, static quality which is so alien to love. It reflects our every emotion” (150). However, Laclos shows that letters are contrived constructions, often filtered through rhetorical models that can easily be counterfeited and that, more often than not, cloak rather than reveal the soul. While courting Tourvel by mail, Valmont writes a number of boilerplate love letters in advance that he can later post as needed. Even the more sincere letter-writers in Laclos’s novel—Danceny, Tourvel, Cécile’s mother, Valmont’s aunt—hide their true feelings, show surprising naïveté, or parrot conventional pieties. For Valmont and Merteuil, letters are staged performances in which they try to top each other during their increasingly tense rivalry, which finally escalates into a war of words. As Lloyd Free puts it, they “do combat through words, the careful verbal record of their sexual victories. They perceive the letter as a potent art form and its principal weapon,” and as rival authors “they combat each other precisely through artful recapitulation of the real events” (26). Recall that Laclos was an artillery officer, and not surprisingly war imagery permeates the novel.
Of course all these letters are artful contrivances in that Laclos invented them, calling into question the sincerity of “letters” (i.e., literature) in general, though his first readers found them so convincing that they were sure the book was a roman à clef, a fiction encouraged by Laclos’s introduction in which he claims (again imitating Rousseau’s Julie) that it was edited down from a larger collection of letters in his possession. In that introduction, a masterpiece of smirking insincerity, he suggests that mothers give Dangerous Liaisons to their daughters on their wedding day; others were not amused, and in 1824 the Laclos-intolerant cour royale of Paris ordered the novel to be burned like a heretic.
Though the court would disagree, Oscar Wilde submits, “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all”
(preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray). Dangerous Liaisons is extremely well written: as Mylne points out (234–36), its letters are better motivated than those in most epistolary novels, take advantage of the dramatic possibilities of precise dating, change styles to reflect the different correspondents, and reveal greater psychological depths. The novel pushes realism to a new level: there is talk of contraception and menstrual cycles, a miserable scene in which poor people are turned out of their home for failing to pay the rent, and a bitchy tone that had not been heard in fiction before this. (See especially Valmont’s early letter to Merteuil where he teases her about her promiscuity [4]; this is the way drag queens talk.) Laclos stumbles at the end by inflicting smallpox on Merteuil—too heavy handed in its symbolism, too unctuous a concession to conventional morality—but otherwise the novel is impeccable, arguably the greatest French novel before Madame Bovary.