‘All’s fair in love and war’ is a phrase that may occur to us when we read this novel, and it characterizes Merteuil’s own attitude. ‘The battle of the sexes’ is a concept we are all familiar with; men and women have always struggled to assert themselves, one sex against the other, to defend themselves, attack or outdo each other by trickery or cunning, persuasion or force. The struggle, the fighting, is no doubt one of the aspects we enjoy about Laclos’s novel. His main characters are, despite their reprehensible morality, intelligent and glamorous, even sympathetic, and we may admire them without wishing to emulate them. Readers’ expectations in Laclos’s day were that the wicked would be punished and the virtuous, rewarded. But in Laclos love is not triumphant and virtue does not win out, and this is something that greatly shocked many of his contemporaries. There is very little of what we might think of as ‘real’ love in the book, except perhaps that of the Présidente. Rousseau, who in Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) postulated a reconciliation between passion and virtue, is completely contradicted by Laclos. The young love of Cécile and the Chevalier Danceny is corrupted and dismissed by Valmont and Merteuil before it has the chance to assert its own better self. In that debased society love is viewed as a failing, a weakness, and something to be avoided at all costs. Valmont is ridiculed by Merteuil when it seems he might be falling in love with the Présidente. Despite her protestations of indifference, Merteuil is insanely jealous of her, just as Valmont is jealous of Danceny, and to that extent we may assume his feelings (and perhaps even hers) are engaged to no small extent. But whatever he feels, it certainly does not prevent him indulging his sexuality with the prostitute Émilie or Cécile or various countesses, or throwing the Présidente over completely as soon as he perceives he may be the object of society’s ridicule.
The epistolary novel was an obvious form for Laclos to choose. It was by far the most popular kind of fiction in the eighteenth century, two of whose most celebrated novels, Richardson’s Clarissa and Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Hélïse, were composed in this style. Laclos was writing more than thirty years after Richardson and twenty years after Rousseau, and although he surpasses them both in literary technique, their influence is manifest in various contexts throughout the novel.
Each of those novels tells a fascinating story, and Les Liaisons dangereuses resembles them in that respect. There are three strands to the plot. Will the Marquise de Merteuil manage to avenge herself by corrupting Cécile and marrying her to Gercourt? Will the Vicomte de Valmont succeed in seducing the Présidente, who is apparently inaccessible? Will the relationship between Merteuil and Valmont be strong enough to withstand the divergence of their projects and the jealousies aroused by their relationships with other people? The structure of the novel is strict. There are four parts. The first fifty letters end with the apparent triumph of virtue as the Présidente escapes from Valmont’s clutches; the second section ends with the victory of Merteuil over her would-be lover, Monsieur de Prévan; the third seems to reproduce the movement of the first in leading us up to a scene of seduction (or, more properly, rape); and the fourth brings about the dénouement with its catastrophe for all the major characters.
The letters do not simply tell a story, however; each one is itself actually an incident in the plot and gives rise to the next, and we, like the characters, are drawn into the story as though into the expertly spun threads of a spider’s web. As Patricia Duncker says, ‘Epistolary novels…reveal and navigate the ebb and flow of personal feelings and sentiments.’5 Laclos excels in the genre, achieving greater variety and richness than any of his predecessors. He keeps several correspondences going simultaneously, constantly providing the reader with another point of view. Often there is a symmetry in the letters, which adds a further ironic dimension: Merteuil receives letters on two successive days (Letters 25 and 27), one from Valmont enclosing the Présidente’s and one from Cécile saying she will forward Danceny’s. Both women are in similar situations: how to react to a pressing suitor? Both ask for sympathy. Merteuil herself, using her literary powers, writes different accounts of the trick she has played on Prévan, according to whether she is writing to Valmont or to Madame de Volanges (Letters 86 and 87). There are four different versions of Valmont’s charitable trip to the village (Letters 21, 22 and 23). We have the view of Valmont, the Présidente, Madame de Rosemonde (Valmont’s aunt, and, in a later letter, Madame de Volanges; but we are the only ones who, as the novel’s readers, are privy to all these accounts. The individual letter may be written to one person alone, but we are ourselves its ultimate addressee. And we see where it fits among the rest.
A letter is a chameleon-like entity. It may in turn be an auto-portrait, a weapon against an enemy, an instrument of mediation or manipulation, an internal monologue, a personal diary, an unconscious revelation of character, a threat or an instrument of ridicule; letters can be sincere, like those of the naive Cécile, Rosemonde or Madame de Volanges; or full of Machiavellian cunning and cynicism, like those of Merteuil. They can be full of double entendres, as when Valmont, while writing passionate words of love to the Présidente, uses Émilie’s bottom as a desk. They can be hidden, torn up, kissed, enclosed with other letters, copied out, returned, dictated or left unread. Danceny exclaims that the letter is the portrait of the soul, and describes to Merteuil the pleasure he takes in writing to her (Letter 150). It is a way of making love to her, the visible metaphor of desire. She, however, has already told us that she is aware of the risk in committing such feelings to paper in her letters: ‘so sweet, but so dangerous to write’ (Letter 81). So many women, she says (and we the readers appreciate the irony of this assertion) do not see in their present lover their future enemy. Letters are the tangible proof of the liaisons which take place in the novel and they are, finally, what causes the downfall of the principal characters. They are also, of course, what constitutes the novel itself.
Laclos uses the device of the auto-portrait letter to reveal and give substance to his characters. Nowhere is this more evident than in Letter 81 where he allows the formidable Merteuil, writing to Valmont, to give us an account of her upbringing and education and a searching analysis of her own character. This remarkable letter demonstrates Merteuil’s sharp intelligence, and not only gives us her assessment of the relative merits of men and women (and of course Valmont in particular, to whom she rightly believes herself superior), but also tells us how she has formed her own philosophy and created her own character since adolescence. In Laclos’s time young women generally had little or no knowledge of the facts of life; girls of a certain class, like Cécile, were kept locked up in their convents, and only emerged to be married off to a husband likely to be chosen solely for his financial assets.
Against this background Merteuil stands out as an example of emancipated womanhood. She is a self-made woman, her own creation, her own masterpiece, her own oeuvre. At the same time she is also a woman of the Enlightenment in her desire to observe, to know, to judge for herself, and a woman of the times in her risk-taking and her denunciation of privilege. She has deliberately educated herself by studying the philosophes, the novelists and the thinkers of the age. She describes how she has seen the necessity of combining the talents of an actor with the talents of a writer: she is also a great reader; throughout her correspondence she refers to other works such as Le Sopha, by Crébillon fils (1745), and the tales of La Fontaine (1668–94), and, especially, La Nouvelle Héloïse, which she admires. She is indeed herself a novelist manqué, and we can sometimes hear the voice of Laclos in her letters. In her two or three letters about her affair with Prévan she adapts the narrative according to the person she is addressing. When she criticizes the style of other letter-writers – Valmont, Cécile, Danceny – she seems to be echoing Laclos in the Preface when he speaks of the ‘over-simple style riddled with mistakes of several of these letters’. Merteuil practises a morality which is objectively revolutionary, and might justifiably be called feminist, despite the fact that her so
lidarity with women does not go so far as to support Cécile or the Présidente in their struggle against Valmont. Quite the opposite, in fact. She refers to Cécile and Danceny as ‘our pupils’, and indeed she, quite as much as Valmont, is educating them both in the arts of sexual depravity. She writes a letter to Cécile in which she lightly teases her about her lack of worldliness; she teaches her the ways of the world, how to survive in the corrupt aristocratic society of pre-revolutionary France (though this in the end causes Cécile’s ruin). She refuses to be put down by any man (or any woman either). She is entirely clear-sighted about Valmont’s dealings with women: ‘You are never the lover or friend of a woman, but always her tyrant or slave’ (Letter 141). Her independence of thought and deed is admirable. She refuses to enter the convent as is expected of her after the death of her husband. She manipulates the opposite sex mercilessly, including her father confessor, and constantly asserts her moral right and her freedom to do exactly what she wants.
Laclos was certainly fascinated by this ‘monster’ of a modern woman that he created. The year after the publication of Dangerous Liaisons he wrote the first of three treatises in which he takes up the cause of the education and emancipation of women, observing that his novel is sufficient proof that he has greatly concerned himself with the cause of women’s rights and clarifying his views on women’s position in society:
Let me tell you that one cannot escape from slavery except by means of a great revolution…As long as your fate is ruled over by men it will be correct to assert and easy to demonstrate that there is no way that women’s education will be improved.
Wherever slavery exists there can be no education. In all societies women are enslaved…It is the role of education to develop the faculties of the mind, the role of slavery to suppress them…Where there is no freedom there is no morality and where there is no morality there is no education.6
Laclos wrote this in 1783, and it was not until 1945 that women in France were enfranchised. Many countries have been much slower to achieve even this. In many so-called democratic societies we know that women’s education is still not taken as seriously as men’s, girls are frequently sacrificed to the needs of society, their education cut short, and many an atrocity is committed against them.
This novel is almost classical in its attention to the unities of time and place. The letters are written between the months of August and January and mainly from one or other of the chateaux in which their aristocratic writers reside. It is a novel of interiors. Laclos is not interested in the external natural world, but in the analysis of manners and sentiments, and in most of the novel’s scenes there is an interplay of these within four walls. An exception to this is Valmont’s visit to a nearby village to perform his ostentatious charitable act towards the exploited peasants; but this is treated by Laclos, as it is in the film by Stephen Frears (1988), in a comic fashion, and descriptions of the natural environment play no part in it.
Valmont’s battles, apart from the last one, take place in the drawing room or the bedroom and are always planned with meticulous care. Though he is not Merteuil’s equal in intelligence or in his total grasp of the situation, he does possess an enormous amount of cunning and shows alarming forethought in his seduction techniques. The letter to Cécile in which he details how she may take possession of the key to the bedroom is typical of his forward planning in such matters (Letter 84). His character, as Laclos reminds us at various points – and rather overtly in Letter 107 when Valmont’s valet, Azolan, reports on the Présidente’s actions – is based on that of the libertine Lovelace, Richardson’s hero in Clarissa, which was translated, and adapted, into French as Clarissa Harlowe by the Abbé Prévost in 1751. Prévost refined the original, converting its relative earthiness into something more moral and intellectual, in order to avoid giving offence to his public.
Questions are still asked, inevitably, about the novel’s morality, although in our permissive age it may not be the sexual mores so much as other aspects of the novel which tend to shock: Valmont’s callous treatment of Cécile, for example, after her miscarriage, or the whole idea of the mariage de raison7 where women’s feelings and interests are dismissed as unimportant. But perhaps the main reason why the novel was, and might still be, thought immoral, is that it is essentially ambivalent towards the issue of good and evil. Laclos appears to be saying that virtue will not necessarily lead to happiness, nor wicked behaviour to punishment. The Présidente dies, but Merteuil, though disfigured, goes off to Holland at the end of the novel, presumably to pursue her adventures there. So are the wicked not wicked enough? Has Laclos made them too glamorous, too sympathetic? Are we supposed to excuse Merteuil’s behaviour when we know how she has reached that point in her philosophy? Do we not admire Valmont’s attitude towards Danceny after the duel, and when he dies do we not have a sense, as we do at the end of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, that life has suddenly lost its savour? The author, who surely knew that rather more of a clear moralistic viewpoint might have been expected of him, leaves us with many questions unanswered, and with a feeling of unease, a sense of danger unresolved.
This variety of possible interpretations is a part of the novel’s force. Are these characters in charge of their own actions, or are they, as Camus thought, being fatally led to their inevitable and ultimate ruin? Or we may think, when we remember the direction taken by Laclos in later life, that he believed in Madame de Rosemonde’s pronouncement on happiness in Letter 171 that ‘if we knew what our true happiness consists in, we should never seek it outside the limits prescribed by the law and religion’. But we must beware of trying to match a fiction to a biography.
Dangerous Liaisons is a truly eighteenth-century novel, very much of its age, and yet it exceeds its age. For that reason it is still convincing now. We may think it odd in our own electronic society, where letter-writing as a literary art is almost extinct, that we enjoy a novel which consists of a collection of letters. But the large number of adaptations and versions on stage and screen testifies to the book’s continuing popularity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (see Appendix 2). Frears’s film, already mentioned, was based on Christopher Hampton’s play, produced in Stratford in 1985. An opera was performed in San Francisco in 1994; the Northern Ballet staged a production in 2004 with music by Vivaldi; a film called Cruel Intentions, in which the novel was transposed into present-day New York society, came out in 1999; and the Korean film Untold Scandal (2003) is proof, were any still needed, that Laclos has the power to cross continents and centuries.
So why do we still read and need Dangerous Liaisons? We may cite the universal and timeless appeal of the novel’s characters: manipulative risk-takers such as Merteuil and Valmont do still exist, as do their victims. The ideas and issues that concerned Laclos concern us too in the twenty-first century. Duelling may have gone out of fashion but revenge killings still occur. Questions of rape and seduction are raised almost daily in our media; we debate the emancipation of women; and the manifestations of the eternal sexual triangle never cease to occupy us, whether in television soaps, in serious literature or in our daily lives. But one of the main reasons for this novel’s lasting popularity must surely be its many-sidedness, the multiplicity of views it offers on complex issues and relations. We can ask more of a literary work than that it should confirm us in our way of thinking. The reading mind asks to be opened up, not shut down. This openness to different viewpoints is inherent in the epistolary form, which Laclos exploits to the full, creating something intriguing and disturbing in equal measure. The ‘variety of styles’, the avoidance of ‘the boredom of uniformity’ that he rightly prided himself on in his preface, make the book enjoyable; but in that variety lies also its seriousness. Its variety makes us think, it unsettles us. Such books live longest.
André Gide rightly points out (in his Preface to Dowson’s translation in the edition of 1940) that although it may be difficult to disregard the moral viewpoint when judging this book, ‘moral conside
rations have little or nothing to do with artistic excellence’, and he notes that ‘a book’s qualities of form are often the last to gain recognition, for they are the qualities that are most hidden; but they are at the same time the very qualities which ensure the book’s survival…What the author wanted to say…matters a good deal less than how he says it.’
Laclos was reported to have said: ‘I resolved to write a work which should stand out from the ordinary and which would still cause a stir and echo through the world after I have left it.’8 Dangerous Liaisons is undoubtedly still echoing.
NOTES
1. Charles Baudelaire, ‘Notes sur Les Liaisons dangereuses’, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1976, vol. 2, p. 639.
2. See Pocket Classiques, ed. Francis Marmande, 1989, pp. x and xxv.
3. Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633–1707) was a French military engineer who revolutionized the art of siege craft and defensive fortifications, and whose systems became the focus of military studies across Europe.
4. The Jacobins were the most famous political group of the French Revolution, became identified with extreme egalitarianism and violence, and led the revolutionary government from mid 1793 to mid 1794. Danton (1759–94) and Robespierre (1758–94), who both belonged to this group, became leading figures in the new regime. Danton became Minister of Justice and Robespierre was in charge of the Revolutionary Tribunal. Both were executed.
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