Les Liaisons Dangereuses

by Pierre Choderlos De Laclos

  In a decade accustomed to violent death of men great and small, the passing of Laclos the soldier was little remarked. Laclos the novelist left more definite traces, though he was not remembered with advantage. During his lifetime, his unsavoury reputation had been reinforced by his image as a dark, revolutionary conspirator and his novel had been kept alive by the many pirated editions which had continued to appear. Plays based on its characters had been staged and novelists exploited its notoriety by including the words ‘Danger’ or ‘Liaison’ in their titles. By 1800, however, the Laclos vogue was more or less over. When the conservative order was restored after the fall of Napoleon, Laclos was identified as one of the dangerous rakes and revolutionaries who had brought down the ancien régime. Les Liaisons dangereuses was banned by a Paris court in 1823 ‘for outrage to public morality’ and among Romantic writers, only Stendhal held it in any esteem. Laclos’s name continued to be associated with ‘systematic licentiousness’ and ‘the most odious immorality’ and, in 1865, the courts which had prosecuted Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal extended the same treatment to Les Liaisons dangereuses. In Great Britain, its author was unknown to all but Francophiles like Swinburne, and Ernest Dowson’s translation, the first in over a century, was privately printed when it appeared in 1898.

  But by the end of the century, Laclos was beginning to find defenders on both sides of the Channel who looked beyond the ‘second-rate Machiavelli’ and ‘consummate immoralist’ of academic criticism. His Essays on Women, his verse, and his correspondence were published and they showed a new side to him. He found an influential champion in Paul Bourget, while the publication in 1903 of Baudelaire’s enthusiastic notes for a study of Les Liaisons dangereuses added considerably to his stature. His biography was written and, after the horrors of the Great War had taught Europe to look on human nature with a cooler eye, Laclos seemed to articulate very modern concerns. The Surrealists saw him as a paler version of Sade the Liberator; André Gide included Les Liaisons dangereuses in his list of the ten greatest French novels; and André Malraux, novelist and man of action, saw in Laclos a triumphant demonstration of the ‘eroticization of the human will’. The English began to discover him at about the same time, in spite of the arch pronouncements of the critic George Saintsbury who called Valmont and Merteuil ‘prosaic and suburban’ and relegated Les Liaisons dangereuses to an ‘outhouse’ of his History of the French Novel (1917). Laclos was admired by writers as different as Arnold Bennett, Virginia Woolf, and Aldous Huxley, and Richard Aldington’s translation, first published in 1924, made him available at last to a wider Anglo-Saxon audience.

  Yet the rehabilitation of Laclos proceeded slowly and his rise to greatness since 1945 provides an interesting lesson in the making of literary reputations. The nineteenth century, for all its doubts, had expressed broad confidence in social and moral values which, if properly managed, could yet make men good. In such an age, a writer like Laclos, who showed such scant belief in the prospect of human goodness, spoke with a discordant and disturbing voice. But by 1920 the war had destroyed the old world order and Marx and Freud were shaking the established verities by showing that social justice and the distribution of power were unrelated, and that behaviour is the product of subconscious motivation, most of it far from admirable. In this new intellectual climate, Laclos appeared more honest than scandalous. Subsequently, the Nazi terror and the Holocaust revealed new depths to which the human spirit could sink, and in their aftermath, which brought the cold war, the threat of global destruction, the increased use of torture, and the apparently unstoppable rise of new dictators, it became increasingly difficult to argue that the health of societies could be maintained on the basis of the old ethical values which seemed irksome, ineffective, and irrelevant. Attempts were still made to hold the old moral pass. In 1957, exactly one hundred years after the prosecution of Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du mal, a new edition of Sade was banned. In 1960 Roger Vadim’s screen version of Les Liaisons dangereuses was challenged in the courts and, though his film was granted a certificate, it was denied an export licence, a ruling which would have delighted Mme Riccoboni.

  By this time, the literary critics had ensured for Laclos a measure of intellectual and artistic respectability. But their efforts were much less significant in promoting his cause than was the liberalization of attitudes which took place in the 1960s. Thus when Vadim’s film was shown on network television in 1974, it caused no outcry among the French who were by then accustomed to material so explicit that the government introduced measures to limit the growing sexploitation of screens small and large. In this new, more liberal climate, Laclos’s novel finally dislodged Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse as the greatest of eighteenth-century French novels, and it became widely available in many forms: unexpurgated, bound or paper-covered, annotated or left to speak for itself. ‘Classic’ status was confirmed when Laclos became a prescribed author for French university students. And, more significantly, Laclos passed an essential modern test: it was discovered that his book transferred well to other media.

  The stage adaptation of Les Liaisons dangereuses by Paul Achard in 1952 and Vadim’s film had merely paved the way. In 1974 Claude Prey turned Laclos’s novel into an ‘epistolary opera’, with recitatives doing duty for the exchange of letters, and two years later Vadim extracted from the book a second film entitled Une Femme fidèle, set in 1826, which proved much less stylish and went unnoticed. In the same year Alberto Cesare Alberti freely transposed the text for the stage as Amor di guerra, guerra d’amore, which makes use of the characters (including Laclos himself) to dissect the relationship between men and women which is seen as sexual warfare. In Germany, Rudolf Fleck’s play Gefährliche Liebschaften (1979) was followed by Heiner Müller’s Quartett (1981), which again cast Laclos’s characters in roles designed to convey an avant-garde and highly personal view of the war of the sexes. But it was Christopher Hampton’s stage version, first performed at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1985, which turned Laclos into an unlikely star, even in Paris. The process was completed by a film, Dangerous Liaisons (1989), directed by Stephen Frears from Hampton’s script, which pleased both reviewers and the general public. Milos Forman’s Valmont (1991), though less well received, served to maintain the momentum. After a decade of exposure to unaccustomed limelight, Laclos has taken his place alongside Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo (and ahead of even Racine and Balzac) in the ranks of classic French authors who travel well.

  But on what passport does the revamped Laclos travel? It is rare that adaptations and continuations, like fakes and forgeries, do not show their age sooner or later. The postface added to the German translation of 1798 follows Mme de Merteuil to Holland where she reforms and devotes herself to the pursuit of Virtue, a projection of her character which tells us more about the reaction against eighteenth-century libertinism than about Les Liaisons dangereuses. Attempts to modernize Laclos invariably repaint his face in colours which fade, in some cases rather badly. Vadim’s first film now seems rooted in its period. His Valmont and Merteuil belong to the international set and they stalk their prey in the swinging Paris and fashionable skiresorts of 1960, but their cynicism now seems as dated as the jazz on the soundtrack. Alberti made Laclos rather more aphoristic and systematic than he was, while Müller shows, with an explicitness of language quite foreign to Les Liaisons dangereuses, the squalor that lies at the heart of desire. Even Hampton’s brilliantly executed play ends with an evocation of tumbrels which imposes a political reading: the decadent behaviour we have observed is a prelude to the destruction of a society ripe for the revolution to come. On the other hand, his film restores Laclos’s ending and leaves the ambiguities intact: indeed, Dangerous Liaisons is by far the most faithful in letter and spirit of all attempts to re-create the novel. In comparison, Forman’s Valmont is an altogether jokier affair which sacrifices the subtleties to the requirements of drama and action. Laclos’s modern mouthpieces must, of course, be jud
ged on their own merits, for they do not pretend to be faithful translators or guardians of the sacred memory. Nevertheless, Laclos has been reprocessed many times, gaining here, losing there, but always manicured to suit the taste of passing fashions. Laclos in the 1990s is a manufactured product, all style, gloss, and cynicism.

  But while Laclos might seem to cast a strikingly modern eye on manners and morals, he was very much a product of the French Enlightenment which, in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, meant the often uncomfortable fusion of the barbed wit of Voltaire and the soaring, passionate idealism of Rousseau. It involved speaking of Vice and Virtue and assuming that men of goodwill were committed to the Happiness both of society and, increasingly, of the individual. For those who had lost their faith in the God of the Roman Catholic Church, the philosophic movement provided a comfortable substitute: through the application of Reason to social and moral problems, mankind could set its feet upon the road of Progress at the end of which lay the Ideal City where Ignorance, Poverty, Superstition, and Injustice would be finally vanquished. In 1789 many felt that the promised land was nigh. Like his contemporaries, Laclos thought in words that began with capital letters.

  But unlike Rousseau, whom he admired greatly, Laclos was not given to making confidences. He was a very private man and, though much in the public eye, made no attempt to correct his public image as a monster of depravity and political manipulation. He had allies and enemies, but no friend to speak unambiguously in his defence. His actions provide no clear endorsement of his character, and little of what he wrote for publication both before and after Les Liaisons dangereuses yields reliable glimpses of the man. ‘Cold’, ‘taciturn’, and ‘methodical’, Laclos remained tightly buttoned inside his soldier’s tunic and grew no more visibly human when he exchanged his uniform for the no less concealing black frock-coat in which he picked his way through the Revolution.

  Fortunately, letters he wrote to his wife from prison and from his tours of duty have survived and they reveal him in warmer colours. He proves to have been surprisingly uxorious. He sent his wife a lock of his hair to remember him by and when she confessed she had grown stout in his absence, he rejoiced with heavy good humour: the more there was of her, he said, the better. He worried about his children’s health and recommended walks in the country, though he issued stern warnings against venturing into woodland after sunset when emanations of carbonic gas reach dangerous levels. If his children were to occupy an honourable place in society, they should certainly receive a solid formal education. Yet a Feeling Heart was more desirable than a well-stocked, well-trained Mind. True contentment was ultimately the product of ‘the Affections’. So convinced was he that Love yields the only riches worth having that, towards the end of his life, he considered writing another novel which would show that ‘there is no Happiness outside the family’. He faced disappointment and adversity with resignation and did not believe that there was a Divine Plan: in his tidy world-order, death was no more than the cessation of life. But he did take highly moral attitudes. He despised the self-seeking leaders of successive regimes and based his own conduct on stern principles of Duty and Service.

  He was a methodical man of fastidious, even ponderous inclinations: he was not above correcting his wife’s spelling. He had little visual sense: as a traveller, he was much more interested in his Affections than in Views. He was unimpressed by the Alps which left all true Rousseauists gasping at Nature’s finest handiwork. Nor did he care much for man-made beauty: the palazzi of Milan and Genoa in which he was billeted were uncomfortable and draughty and he would have much preferred something less gorgeous and more sensible.

  Laclos’s letters show him to have been disappointingly dull, a conforming, methodical, and very upright man. Although the first of his letters to his wife were written more than a decade after Les Liaisons dangereuses, it is clear that the man who had courted Marie-Soulange had not been turned by the Revolution into a political schemer or a sour cynic. He never disowned his political writings but on the contrary stood by his principles which reflect far more earnest idealism than opportunism. Nor did he ever regret having written his novel, though it had harmed his reputation. He rarely mentions it, though he did make a point of noting rather proudly that two Italian bishops, on separate occasions, had commended it as a moral work and well suited to the instruction of the young. His stray comments on writers and writing also suggest that he had not changed his opinion, expressed in his review of Fanny Burney’s Cecilia in 1784, that while the duty of the novelist is to observe, feel, and describe, a feeling heart is far more important in an author than all the talent in the world. Nor does he seem any less attached to an argument which he had used in his correspondence with Mme Riccoboni and which he illustrated with the example of Tartuffe. At the end of Act IV of Molière’s play, Tartuffe has succeeded in his ambition to gain control over Orgon, his family, and his property. Legally, he is unassailable, for he has taken care that all the necessary papers are in order. But this does not prevent his being a rogue and Molière, in the last Act, ensures that right prevails. Tartuffe, then, is not punished by law but by a higher authority.

  I make this remark because it seems to me that the rights of the moral writer, whether he be playwright or novelist, begin at the point where the law is powerless to intervene. Once they have formed a society, citizens are entitled to see that justice is done only in the case of misdemeanours which the government has decided do not fall within its jurisdiction. This public justice consists of heaping ridicule on those who have faults and indignation on those who have vices.

  Tartuffe is punished not for what we have seen him do but for what he is. Laclos believed that this is precisely what he had achieved in his novel: he had mobilized the ‘healthy indignation of the public’ by drawing attention to those who, like Valmont and Merteuil, exploit the no man’s land between what is legal and what is right.

  Such an argument is clearly a reflection of the moralizing tendency of all Enlightenment literature which required vice to be punished and virtue rewarded. If Laclos was a man of his times, then his novel is no less the product of a specific literary convention.

  By its tone and subject-matter, Les Liaisons dangereuses belongs to the ‘libertine’ tradition of fiction. In common parlance, ‘libertinage’ meant no more than sexual depravity. It was the term adopted by the police to categorize offences which ‘outraged public morality’. It was also widely used to describe the notorious debauches of aristocrats like the Duke de Richelieu, who once burned down a house in pursuit of an amour, or the Prince de Conti, who boasted a collection of 2,000 rings, each a token of an abandoned mistress. But in 1782 ‘libertinage’ still retained something of its old sense of ‘free-thought’ which, around 1700, had meant the revolt of a group of radical intellectuals against the Church and established morality. By the 1730s the ‘freethinkers’ had been absorbed by the more generalized rational spirit of the Enlightenment, but not entirely. The word had attached itself to the spectacular rakes of the Regency (1715–23) which spawned a new social type, the roué, of which Valmont, according to Mme de Merteuil, is a worthy exemplar (letter 2). But ‘libertinage’ survived happily in the novel where it raised opposition to the civil and ecclesiastical Establishment and promoted the cause of liberty (implicit in ‘libertinage’) in the specific context of sexual mores. The ‘libertine’ novel, therefore, formed one strand of the philosophical novel. Its uniqueness lay in its exploitation of the shock value of eroticism.

  Of course, some novelists simply seized on the tradition to peddle cheap pornography. But others, from Crébillon fils in the 1730s to Sade in the 1790s, used it to call into question accepted social and ethical standards. At a time when it was dangerous to criticize Church and state openly, ‘libertine’ literature constituted a useful form of contestation which, because it dealt boldly with the private relationships on which public values were based, contained the threat of anarchy. This means that the first rumblings of t
he Revolution to come were sexual, not overtly political. ‘Libertinage’, therefore, meant far more than sleaze. Its purpose was to provoke and disturb. Some authors drew back from the brink. Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), which caused a sensation when it was published in France, pressed the libertine tradition into the service of Virtue: the cynical Lovelace ends up a Rake reformed by Love. But if in the case of Clarissa (which Mme de Tourvel is reported as reading in letter 107 and Laclos considered to be ‘a masterpiece’) the theme of seduction was turned into an instrument for promoting morality, most ‘libertine’ novelists continued to explore the implications of freewheeling eroticism in a variety of bolder registers, precious, satirical, philosophical, and gross. The pornographers merely showed pictures and were happy to titillate. But the elegant libertins dealt in ideas, were highly verbal, and sought to persuade. But all, though ostensibly concerned with sex, were subversive agents of change and their scabrous tales acts of sabotage.