Paris, 18 September 17**
LETTER 81
The Marquise de Merteuil to the Vicomte de Valmont
How pitiful your fears are, and how thoroughly they prove my superiority over you! And you want to teach me, to guide me? Oh my poor Valmont, what a distance there still is between us! No, all the vanity of your sex would not suffice to close the gap separating us. Because you yourself would not be able to carry out my plans, you say they are impossible! You are a weak and vain man; how ill it becomes you to try to assess my methods or weigh up my resources! Truly, Vicomte, your advice has put me in a bad humour, I can tell you.
That, in order to disguise the quite extraordinary ineptitude of your dealings with your Présidente, you boast about momentarily disconcerting this timid woman who is in love with you as though you have won some kind of victory, I can accept; that you have managed to obtain a look, one single look, I can smile at and allow; that, in spite of yourself, you feel how little your conduct is worth, and hoped to divert my attention by telling me about your superhuman efforts to bring together two children who are both longing to see one another, and who, it should be said in passing, owe the ardour of their desire to me alone, I even grant you as well; and, finally, that these remarkable achievements authorize you to lecture to me that it is better to use one’s time in executing these projects than in relating them – this vanity does me no harm either, and so I forgive you. But that you can believe I need your wisdom, or that I shall go astray if I do not defer to your advice, or that I must sacrifice to it my pleasures or my fancies – really, Vicomte, you are becoming too conceited about the confidence I am willing to place in you!
What have you ever done that I have not outdone a thousand times? You have seduced, even ruined, numerous women. But what problems did you have to conquer? What obstacles did you have to overcome?23 So where is the real merit in that? A handsome face, the result of pure chance. Nice manners, which can almost always be acquired with a little practice. Wit, certainly, but prattle will do instead at a pinch. A certain admirable boldness that one might attribute solely to the ease of your first conquests. And, if I am not greatly mistaken, that is all. For as far as celebrity goes, you will not ask me, I suppose, to believe that your talent for creating and seizing the opportunity for scandal counts for very much.
As for wisdom, sensibility, name me one woman, not counting myself, who does not possess more of that than you? Huh! Your Présidente is leading you like a child.
Believe me, Vicomte, one rarely acquires the qualities one can do without. As you fight without any risk, you do not have to take precautions. For you men defeat is only one victory less. In this unequal contest we are lucky not to lose, and you are unlucky not to win. If I were to grant you as many talents as we have, we should still surpass you by far through our continual need to make use of them!
Supposing I grant that you put as much skill into victory as we do into defence or surrender, you must at least agree that that skill becomes useless after you have achieved success. Occupied solely with your new pleasure, you deliver yourselves up to it unreservedly, without hesitation. Whether it lasts or not is of small consequence to you.
In fact, to talk the jargon of love, those reciprocal promises given and received can be made or broken at will by you alone. We are fortunate if you, contenting yourselves with our total, humiliating submission, decide in your unpredictable way upon secrecy rather than scandal, and do not turn yesterday’s idol into tomorrow’s victim!
But if the unfortunate woman is the first to feel the weight of her chains, what risks she has to run in her attempts to escape or simply lighten them! It is only in fear and trembling that she tries to rid herself of the man her heart struggles to reject. If he insists on remaining, what she once granted to love becomes a tribute to fear.
Her arms still open though her heart is closed.
Caution obliges her to skilfully untie these same bonds that you would simply have torn apart. She is at the mercy of her enemy, and if he is ungenerous she is without resources. And how may men be expected to show generosity when they, although sometimes praised for this quality, are never thought any the less of if they show none?
I am sure you will not deny these truths that are so obvious they have become banal. Since, then, you have seen me controlling events and opinions; making these formidable men the playthings of my caprices or fantasies; depriving some of the will, others of the power to harm me; since, then, according to the impulse of the moment, I have been able to attach or reject as suitors
These unthroned tyrants now become my slaves*
and, in the midst of these frequent vicissitudes, kept my reputation pure; have you not perforce come to the conclusion that, born to avenge my sex and conquer yours, I have succeeded in inventing strategies for doing so that before me were quite unheard of?
So keep your advice and your fears for those silly women who say they are women ‘of feeling’; who fondly believe that Nature has placed their senses in their heads; who, without ever thinking about it, invariably confuse love with the lover; who foolishly imagine that the only source of pleasure is the man with whom they have sought it, and, like all truly superstitious people, accord to the priest the respect and the faith which is due to the Deity alone.
Keep your fears too for those women, more vain than prudent, who cannot bear the thought of being abandoned when needs be.
Tremble, above all, for those women whose minds are active while their bodies are idle; you call them ‘sensitive’ women – who fall in love so easily and overpoweringly. They feel they have to, even when they take no pleasure in it. And, abandoning themselves unreservedly to their seething imagination, they give birth to letters full of tenderness, but fraught with danger, and are not afraid to confide these proofs of their weakness to the object of their love. They are imprudent creatures, for in their present lover they fail to perceive their future enemy.
But I, what have I in common with these empty-headed women? When have you ever seen me break the rules I have laid down for myself or betray my principles? I say my principles, and I use that word advisedly. For they are not, like those of other women, discovered by chance, accepted uncritically or followed out of habit. They are the fruit of my deepest reflections. I have created them, and I can say that I am what I have created.24
When I entered society I was still a young girl, condemned by my status to silence and inaction, and I took advantage of this opportunity to observe and reflect. They were under the impression that I was scatterbrained and woolly-headed; I was indeed paying scant attention to what they were so anxious to tell me, but I thought long and hard about what they were trying to hide from me.
This useful curiosity, while it increased my knowledge, also taught me to dissemble. I was often forced to hide the objects of my attention from the eyes of the people around me, but I tried to direct my own wherever I wished. From that time on I managed to put on at will that air of detachment you have so often admired. Encouraged by this first success, I learned then to control the various expressions on my face. If I was feeling unhappy, I practised adopting a look of serenity or even joy. I even went so far as to deliberately cause myself pain in order to make an attempt at the simultaneous expression of pleasure. I laboured, with as much care and even more difficulty, to suppress the symptoms of an unexpected joy. And that is how I have been able to exercise over my physiognomy the power that you have on occasions found so astonishing.
I was still very young and almost completely lacking seriousness, but I had only my thoughts to call my own and was indignant if anyone tried to wrest them from me or surprise me against my will. Armed with these first weapons, I practised using them. No longer content with remaining enigmatic, I amused myself taking on different personas, and once I was sure of my bodily gestures I set myself to study my speech. I determined both according to circumstance, or even just according to my fancy. From that moment on my thoughts were for my benefit and mine alone, and
I only revealed to others what I found it useful to reveal.
This work on my self focused my interest on facial expressions and the nature of their physiognomy. And through this my eye has become sharper, though experience has taught me not to trust it totally. But all in all it has rarely let me down.
At not quite fifteen I already possessed the talents to which a great many of our political figures owe their reputation, and yet I was still only learning the first elements of the science I intended to master.
As you may guess, in common with all young girls I was trying to find out about love and its pleasures. But never having been in the convent, not having a best friend, and watched over continually by a vigilant mother, my notions about it were of the vaguest and I was unable to clarify them. My own nature, on which I have since then most certainly had reason only to congratulate myself, offered me no clue at that time. You might almost have thought it was silently working towards perfecting what it had begun. Only my head was in a whirl. I did not desire to enjoy these pleasures, I just wished to know. This desire for knowledge suggested to me the means of acquiring it.
I felt that the only man I could talk to about this matter without compromise was my confessor. So I took my decision. I got over my slight feeling of shame. And, laying claim to a sin I had not committed, I accused myself of having done all that women do. That was what I said. But even as I said it I truthfully had no idea what I was talking about. My hopes were not completely dashed nor entirely fulfilled; the fear of betraying myself prevented me from further explanation. But the priest made it out to be such a big sin that I came to the conclusion the pleasure must be exquisite. And after the desire for knowledge came the desire for gratification.
Who knows where this desire might have led me? With my total lack of experience at that time, perhaps one single occasion would have been my ruin. Luckily for me, my mother announced only a few days later that I was to be married. Straight away my curiosity was quelled by the certainty that I should soon know everything; I was a virgin when I landed in the arms of Monsieur de Merteuil.
I waited confidently for the moment of enlightenment, and I had to remind myself to show embarrassment and fear. That first night, generally considered ‘cruel’ or ‘sweet’, offered me only an opportunity for experience. Pain or pleasure, I observed it all precisely and viewed these different sensations simply as facts to be collected and meditated upon.
I soon acquired a taste for this sort of study. But, sticking to my principles, and with a perhaps instinctive feeling that the one person I should not confide in was my husband, I resolved to appear to him to be indifferent to things I felt quite keenly. This apparent frigidity was subsequently the unshakeable foundation of his blind trust in me. On further reflection I then also indulged in the sort of harebrained behaviour to be expected at my age. And he never thought me more like a child than when I was most flagrantly deceiving him.
However, I confess I allowed myself at first to be drawn into the social whirl, and I gave myself up utterly to futile distractions. But after a few months, Monsieur de Merteuil having carried me off to his gloomy country house, the fear of boredom revived my interest in study. And, finding myself surrounded only by people so remote from me as to put me above all suspicion, I took advantage of it to widen my experience. It was then that, more than at any other time, I was convinced that love, which people pretend is the cause of our pleasures, is at most only an excuse for them.
Monsieur de Merteuil’s illness came to interrupt these agreeable occupations. I had to accompany him to Town where he went to seek treatment. He died, as you know, a short time afterwards. And although, all in all, I had no reason to complain about him, I appreciated just as keenly the value of the freedom my widowhood was about to afford me, and I promised myself I would make the most of it.
My mother thought I would enter the convent, or come back and live with her. I refused to do either. And the only concession I made to decency was to go back to the same house in the country, where I still had some observations to make.
I backed them up with some reading. But do not imagine it was all the sort of reading that you have in mind. In novels I studied manners; in the philosophers, opinions; I even tried to find out from the strictest moralists what they demanded of us, to be certain of what it was possible to do, what it was best to think and how one must appear to be. Once focused upon these three, only the last presented a few difficulties in practice; these I hoped to overcome, and I pondered how this might be done.
I began to tire of my country pleasures, which were not varied enough for my active mind. I felt the need for a flirtation that would reconcile me to love. Not that I might truly feel it, but that I might inspire it and feign it. Although I had been told and had read that one could not feign this feeling, I saw that to achieve it all I need do was combine the talents of an actor with the wit of a writer. I practised these two genres, perhaps with some success. But instead of striving for vain applause in the theatre I resolved to use for my own happiness what so many others have sacrificed to vanity.
A year went by in these different occupations. My period of mourning over, I emerged and returned to town full of great projects. The first obstacle I encountered took me by surprise.
The long period of austere retreat had given me a veneer of prudishness which frightened away our most eligible men. They kept their distance, abandoning me to a host of bores who all were asking my hand in marriage. My problem was not how to refuse them. But several of these refusals displeased my family, and I was wasting time in domestic squabbles, a time I had promised myself I was going to pass in far more pleasant occupations. So, in order to attract some and repel others, I was obliged to flag up a few misdemeanours, and take as many pains to harm my reputation as I had thought I would need to preserve it. I easily succeeded, as you can guess. But, not being carried away by passion, I did only what I thought necessary, and measured out my doses of flightiness with great care.
As soon as I had achieved my goal I retraced my steps and laid the honour of my reformed character at the feet of some of those women who, being devoid of charm, have to rely on merits and virtue alone. This was a move which was worth a great deal more to me than I had hoped for. The grateful duennas appointed themselves my apologists. And their blind enthusiasm for what they called their ‘handiwork’ was carried to the point where, at the least suggestion of any remark made about me, the whole battalion of prudes would cry ‘scandal’ and ‘slander’. The same means also earned me the support of those women who did have pretensions, for they, being persuaded that I was renouncing my pursuit of the same career as themselves, singled me out as an object for praise every time they wanted to prove they did not speak ill of everyone.
In the meantime my aforementioned conduct had brought me lovers. And, in order to operate between them and my loyal protectors, I showed myself to be a sensitive but fastidious woman, whose excessive delicacy was her defence against passion.
And so I began to display on the stage of life the talents I had acquired. My first objective was to acquire the reputation of being invincible. To achieve this, I pretended to receive only the homage of men I did not like. I made use of them to gain credit for resisting, while I abandoned myself fearlessly to the lover of my choice. But the shyness I affected never permitted him to accompany me in society, and so everyone’s attention was always fixed upon the suitors who were unhappy.
You know how quickly I take decisions: that is because I have observed that it is nearly always preliminary planning that betrays a woman’s secret. Whatever one does, one’s manner is never the same after as it is before success. This difference never escapes the close observer, and I have found it is less dangerous to make a wrong choice than to have my reasons for making it exposed. I further gain by this in that I remove the likely assumptions by which alone we may be judged.
These precautions, along with that of never writing things down and never providing any proof of my defea
t, might seem excessive, but to me they have never seemed enough. In exploring deep in my own heart I have studied the hearts of others. And I have perceived that there is no one without a secret which it is in his interest never to reveal: a truth which they seem to have understood better in ancient times than they do now, and of which the story of Samson is perhaps just a clever allegory. A latter-day Delilah, I have always used my powers, as she did, to discover this important secret.25 Ha! How many modern Samsons have had their hair held to my scissors! They are the ones I have stopped being afraid of. They are the only ones I have sometimes allowed myself to humiliate. More subtle tactics with the rest have guaranteed their discretion: artfully causing them to be unfaithful to me, so as not to appear fickle myself, a pretence of friendship, an apparent trust, a few generous gestures, the notion they all flatter themselves with that they have been my one and only lover. Finally, when these means have failed, I have been able to foresee the break-up of the affair and quash in advance by means of smears and ridicule any credence these dangerous men may have obtained.
What I am telling you now you have seen me constantly putting into practice; and yet you question my prudence! Well, just remember the time when you started paying court to me. Never had anyone’s attentions flattered me so much. I desired you before I set eyes upon you. Seduced by your reputation, it seemed to me that I needed to have you before I could account myself a success. I was longing to cross swords with you. It is the only one of my desires which has ever momentarily had power over me. Yet had you wished to ruin me, what means would you have found? Empty words that left no trace and which your own reputation would have helped to render suspect, and a series of unlikely facts which, had you recounted them, would have seemed like a badly structured novel. I have since, it is true, told you all my secrets. But you know what our common interests are, and whether, of the two of us, I am the one who should be taxed with lack of prudence.*
Dangerous Liaisons Page 21