Now there is nothing coarse about Laclos’s ‘libertinage’ which is cerebral rather than physical. Eroticism is reduced to a secret game which can only be won by players who ignore the commonly accepted rules of decency and honesty. Manipulation replaces fair dealing, sex is power and love a form of weakness. But does Les Liaisons dangereuses criticize or promote such attitudes? Is freedom to be achieved by abandoning the moral ideals and social constraints which stand in the way of personal gratification? Or does true self-fulfilment lie in subordinating the self, respecting the feelings of others, and accepting the rules of civilized conduct? Most ‘libertine’ novelists set themselves the task of pushing back the frontiers, of demolishing the old taboos, in the name of freedom. It may be that the bishops Laclos met in Italy believed that he had denounced the immorality he describes. Yet most of his contemporaries read the book as though it were a user’s manual for aspiring seducers, a view endorsed after 1789 by those who were convinced that what Merteuil and Valmont had done for sex, Laclos, the ‘monster of intrigue’, had acted out in politics.
Situating Laclos in the ‘libertine’ tradition amply confirms our impression that Les Liaisons dangereuses says rather more than it appears to. Yet it does not give us the key to the novel. Laclos never provided a satisfactory explanation of what he had set out to do or what he had achieved. True, in his letters to Mme Riccoboni he claimed that the reaction of readers showed that he had succeeded in rousing ‘the healthy indignation of the public’ against sexual predators like Valmont and Merteuil. But there, it could equally be said that, like his protagonists, Laclos did not much care for losing and would have used any means to win the argument. And if he never disowned his novel, it is far from clear what he kept faith with.
But he had certainly every reason to be pleased with his performance as the author of a work which even his sternest critics have admired unreservedly. Les Liaisons dangereuses is an epistolary novel, and belongs to another eighteenth-century tradition which did not survive much beyond 1800. Tales told in letters were immensely popular in an age of correspondence: the two most influential novels of the period, La Nouvelle Héloïse and Clarissa, were both written in epistolary form. But neither Rousseau nor Richardson was alive to the dramatic possibilities of the genre. They allow their correspondents to analyse their feelings in tedious detail and expatiate, at inordinate length, on moral and social questions. The tension drops and the voice of the author intrudes. Laclos never allows the pace to slacken and he is as firm with his correspondents as a sergeant drilling recruits. They march to his orders.
He removes himself almost entirely from the conduct of events and maintains only a minimum presence as the selfeffacing ‘editor’ of a supposedly authentic correspondence. He does not address the reader and is completely hidden by his characters, each of whom has a distinctive voice. Cécile is immediately recognizable by the skittishness of her style and the inaccuracy of her grammar, which is so clumsy that Mme de Merteuil feels obliged to give her a few much-needed lessons. Danceny’s youth and inexperience are detectable in his first letters which borrow pompously from the eloquent poets he admires; only when he has been disillusioned by events does he find a voice of his own. Mme de Tourvel’s letters invariably begin defensively and end defiantly. Mme de Volanges clucks and fusses, Mme de Rosemonde is wearily resigned, and Azolan’s sullen snobbishness is made all too clear in the way he expresses himself. And although both seducers are on the same side, they write in quite different inks: Valmont’s letters are full of male condescension and self-satisfied banter while Merteuil has a sharper ear and a steelier manner. To others, they write pastiche—Valmont posing to Mme de Tourvel as the contrite lover, or Mme de Merteuil reading suitable pages by Crébillon fils and La Fontaine in letter 10 so that she can strike the right note with her Chevalier. Yet their style does betray something of their natures: Valmont is given to using military images to describe the ‘tactics’ which will enable him to notch up another ‘conquest’, while Mme de Merteuil favours metaphors drawn from the theatre: she plays ‘roles’ and wears ‘masks’.
Indeed, the whole novel is highly theatrical. Not only are situations stage-managed and roles played to the hilt, the letters are monologues which form a dialogue of sorts, but with this difference: the written word is more effective than any conversational exchange. It allows time to reflect, to react, and to regroup: policy replaces spontaneity and the struggle is removed to terrain which favours those who practise finely contrived deceit. Of course, not all the characters weigh their words as carefully as Valmont and Merteuil, but all read and ponder the letters which are written to them, Cécile fondly perusing Danceny’s notes, say, or Mme de Tourvel agonizing over Valmont’s. Laclos orchestrates this dialogue with the precision of an engineer. He gave considerable thought to the order in which letters should be placed. Thus Mme de Tourvel’s letter 22 originally preceded Valmont’s account of how he planned his philanthropic rescue of the family threatened with eviction: by putting it afterwards, her gullibility and Valmont’s cynicism emerge much more forcefully. Laclos’s irony is fierce, and it is always dramatic.
He organizes the letters in such a way that the reader acquires a three-dimensional view of character and incident. In letter 145, Mme de Merteuil informs Valmont that she does not know when she will be in Paris, while in the next, she tells Danceny she will arrive the following day—and the implications for her relationship with Valmont are clear. The three accounts of how Mme de Tourvel sees Valmont in a carriage with Émilie (letters 135, 137, 138) show how events are interpreted—and misinterpreted. For letters contain only the truth which their reader finds in them. When Valmont, losing patience, returns to Paris and a night with Émilie, he keeps up the pressure on Mme de Tourvel. The result is letter 48, which is read by Émilie, who laughs; by Mme de Tourvel, who will be moved by his despair; and by Mme de Merteuil, who is invited to admire his skill. But the letters are not merely a vehicle for irony but hinges on which the plot hangs. Mme de Tourvel’s fate is sealed by a terse note, and Mme de Merteuil’s social persona, carefully cultivated in the privacy of her correspondence, cannot survive the light of exposure.
Laclos’s handling of the epistolary form is responsible for some of the most memorable moments in the novel. The arrangement of the letters generates drama, irony, and a generous measure of black comedy. Their distribution and juxtaposition make character and event stand out in sharp relief and provide the pivots on which the action is articulated. Laclos controls his material with the technical skills of the professional engineer that he was. He is also a master of illusion who shows that few things are what they seem and that the words people speak, like the roles they play, are elements of a performance designed both consciously and unconsciously to replace spontaneity with artifice. But the engineer who plans and the puppeteer who pulls the strings remain frustratingly invisible. By removing himself so completely from the world he creates, he denies us any opportunity of hearing his own voice and consequently any way of knowing, or even of sensing, where his own loyalties lie. He is a supremely absent author who abandons his creation to the reader.
Not surprisingly, Laclos’s readers are left staring at a puzzle and cannot even agree about what happens in Les Liaisons dangereuses. Most are convinced that Valmont loves Mme de Tourvel and is loved by Mme de Merteuil. It is through jealousy, then, that Mme de Merteuil shames him into ending his affair with the Présidente. Valmont despairs, is mortally wounded in the duel and, as he dies, provides Danceny with the means to ruin the Marquise. But others take a different view. They argue that Valmont does not love Mme de Tourvel any more than Mme de Merteuil loves him. The climax is the logical outcome of the dangerous game they play: their mutual annihilation is as predictable as the harm done to casual bystanders like Mme de Tourvel and Cécile.
Nor is there any agreement about the death of Valmont. Is it really plausible that he, who is omnicompetent and must surely be one of the finest swordsmen in France, should die
at the hands of the callow, harp-playing Danceny? Of course, a lucky thrust cannot be ruled out, but the probabilities would suggest that Valmont allows himself to be killed, that his death is therefore an honourable form of suicide, and that he allows himself to die because he cannot live without the woman he has wronged. Support for this view is drawn from a note, mentioned by Mme de Volanges in letter 154 but suppressed by the ‘editor’ (it survives in the manuscript), in which Valmont makes a despairing attempt to rescue the dying Mme de Tourvel: the knowledge that he loves her will surely heal the wound which he so callously inflicted. But others interpret it, on the contrary, as yet another move in his battle with Merteuil. He plunged a dagger into Mme de Tourvel’s heart, he says, and only he can pluck it out again. Pulling her back from the very jaws of death would be his finest hour, a triumph which would eclipse the Marquise’s greatest exploits and restore his superior status in their partnership. And so against those who believe that Valmont has a better side to his nature and exchanges games for True Love, are ranged those who reject the possibility that a rake can ever reform: Valmont is a burnt-out case, a man who has spent too much time denying his feelings to be capable of feeling anything except the exultation of triumph and the anger of defeat.
Readers are no less divided about the ending of the book. Some view it as hurried, as though Laclos had suddenly lost interest. With Valmont gone, Mme de Merteuil is brought low with unseemly haste: she suffers public humiliation in the foyer of the Comédie-Italienne, financial ruin, and physical disfigurement. Now, while the first of her punishments is the outcome of the publication of her letters, the supplementary punishments appear, to say the least, arbitrary. The lawsuit has no roots in the plot and the attack of smallpox, though statistically plausible (about two-thirds of the population were likely to catch it, it has been estimated), seems gratuitous and may have been designed to allow Laclos to place his splendid comment that Merteuil now wears her soul upon her face. But many accept that the denouement, from the death of Valmont to the flight of Merteuil, emerges logically from the nature of their relationship, and find nothing arbitrary or gratuitous in the way Laclos brings down the final curtain.
If Les Liaisons dangereuses wears the smile of the Mona Lisa, that smile was put there by Laclos. The ambiguity begins even before events start to unfold. The ‘Editor’s Preface’ states that the correspondence we are about to read is authentic and makes the standard eighteenth-century case for moral usefulness. Yet the ‘Publisher’s Foreword’ denies both claims: what we are about to read is a novel which is unlikely to produce any moral effect whatsoever. Both were written by Laclos, and both are heavily ironic. By the time the first letter reaches us, the author has locked himself inside his stoutly defended novel and never reappears. How should we read Les Liaisons dangereuses?
In the last thirty years or so, a great deal of ingenuity has been expended on Laclos’s secret novel and a number of interpretations have been advanced. Readers make different assumptions and set out from different starting-points. Some believe Les Liaisons dangereuses should be approached in eighteenth-century terms, set in its historical context and judged as the product of a specific literary and philosophical tradition. Others insist that the text escapes the narrow confines of its epoch and should not be subjected to antiquarian standards but considered in the light of modern cultural values and ideologies: Laclos is a suitable case for analysis by Freudians, Marxists, feminists, and exponents of various breeds of philosophy and divers brands of critical theory. Another broad division is formed by those who tackle the novel as a self-contained artefact, without reference to what is known of its author’s life: the meaning of the text will emerge from its autonomous logic, economy, and architecture. Against them are ranged those who insist, on the contrary, that books have authors and see no reason why Laclos’s biography and opinions should not be used to illuminate his book. A range of answers is now available but they have not, either singly or collectively, quite succeeded in wiping that enigmatic smile from Laclos’s face.
To begin with, the possibility that Laclos was not a novelist at all but the ‘editor’ of a genuine correspondence has never quite been laid to rest. Models for his characters have been suggested, never convincingly, but hope is now fading that a secret family archive in Savoy will one day disgorge the original letters. Les Liaisons dangereuses is a roman à clef only in the general sense that novelists feed their own experience into the characters and situations they invent. In spite of what his contemporaries believed (a minor poet named d’Anceny publicly claimed to be the original of Cécile’s admirer), it is an epistolary novel and not a collection of epistles.
More interesting have been the many attempts to tease a political message from the book which is universally accepted as an accurate picture of high society in the last years of the ancien régime. But Laclos does not give blanket coverage, and while there are glimpses of the world that lies outside Mme de Rosemonde’s house and Mme de Volanges’s salon—the appearance of the occasional shoe-maker or priest helps to focus the foreground against a wider setting—all we are actually given is a snapshot of a small and intimate circle composed mainly of women. Adult male figures are noticeable only by their absence: we never meet Gercourt or Monsieur de Tourvel or any of the standard financiers and churchmen who normally drew the heaviest satirical fire. If the atmosphere is claustrophobic, the social net is correspondingly small and makes it difficult to sustain the view that Laclos is in some way criticizing society at large.
Yet this is precisely what has been many times proposed. It has been argued that Laclos, who was denied promotion because he lacked the requisite noble quarterings, finally turned in frustration on those who barred his route to professional advancement. His novel was therefore the revenge of a man thwarted in his ambition. The Marxist view widens the argument to suggest that the victimization of Mme de Tourvel, a bourgeoise, by the aristocratic Valmont and Merteuil expresses the class struggle waged in a decadent society ripe for revolution. This view rests on the erroneous assumption that a clear distinction existed between the upper-middle classes and the old aristocracy. On the contrary, generations of intermarriage had blurred the old class divisions to the point where they had virtually disappeared. Azolan may be reluctant to wear the Tourvel livery which he regards as beneath his dignity, but his reservations are not shared by his betters: not even Mme de Merteuil, who makes unflattering remarks about Mme de Tourvel’s appearance, ever remotely suggests that she has risen above her station. And even if it is allowed that Laclos had no cause to like the aristocratic circle he so graphically describes, it would be quite wrong to see him in any sort of democratic light: the fate of the family Valmont so cynically rescues generates no social comment whatever. Nor are there any impertinent servants (a staple of the comedy of manners from Molière to Beaumarchais) to state the case for social justice or intimate that the world of Mme de Volanges or Mme de Rosemonde had in some way run its course and was due for a revolutionary change. Indeed, their world may be characterized by complacency, but only Valmont and Merteuil are shown to be wicked.
In fact, the impression many readers have that Laclos is in some way attacking society stems less from his picture of one small corner of the aristocratic world than from the way his two scheming protagonists abuse their privileges. It is they who are at fault, not the system. Only in one area does Laclos generalize from the particular. He takes marked exception to the way in which society treats women. Not only does the narrow education received by Cécile and Mme de Tourvel leave them ill-prepared to deal with the likes of Valmont, but their social horizons are dominated by the marriages which are arranged for them, as even Mme de Volanges eventually concedes. Laclos is consistent in his criticism of convents and the mariage de raison. Even Mme de Merteuil, who was privately educated and deliberately remains a widow, is marked by the pressures which lead her to overcompensate. Letter 81, in which she explains to what lengths she has been driven to preserve her feminine identit
y, is a fierce and compellingly stated defence of the way in which she has moulded her image, and it recalls the case for ‘natural woman’ made by Laclos’s essays on female education. If Les Liaisons dangereuses is not an outright satirical or political novel, then might we perhaps agree that it is an early feminist text?
Alas, few feminist critics acknowledge it as such. Mme de Merteuil may in some respects be a liberated woman, born to avenge her sex. But she is hardly an advertisement for female emancipation. She shows no solidarity with her sisters in bondage and deceives them with as little compunction as she dupes Danceny, Prévan, Belleroche, and even Valmont himself. Moreover, Laclos’s feminist sympathies become suspect when his treatment of the Marquise is set against his greater sympathy for the Vicomte. Never quite as ruthless as Merteuil, Valmont is granted something approaching an honourable death in a masculine passage of arms. Furthermore, as he lies dying, he recruits Danceny to the male cause: now that war has been declared, his true loyalties resurface. It is a matter of honour that Prévan’s good name be restored and his rehabilitation can be achieved only by the destruction of the expendable Merteuil. This in itself is a measure of the limits of Laclos’s feminism, but there is more. If Valmont is in a sense redeemed in death, Merteuil is hounded without mercy and punished comprehensively, even vindictively. It is as though Laclos, finally wearying of this brawling woman, at last breaks cover, rejoins the men, and restores the dominant masculine order. At bottom, he is no more sympathetic to women than Lord Chesterfield who regarded women ‘as children of a larger growth’, or Dumas père who equated Milady with evil, or Zola who was simply afraid of the female sex.
The argument about the degree of Laclos’s feminism has largely displaced the venerable view of Les Liaisons dangereuses as an acutely observed skirmish in the eternal War of the Sexes. According to this older and simpler reading, Laclos shows with considerable finesse that the relationship between men and women is never more than an armed truce which invariably breaks down because each sex operates quite different functional systems. This interpretation is still perfectly valid but it has been further upstaged by attempts to insert Laclos, not unreasonably, into the history of Don Juanism: after all, Les Liaisons dangereuses predates Mozart’s Don Giovanni by only five years. While most ‘libertine’ writers had used sex to discredit conventional morality, some had taken the further step of arguing that since morality is based on the teaching of the Church, then the libertarian argument was not with society but with God. Laclos gives us two Don Juans, one in petticoats and one in breeches. But whereas Merteuil merely despises religion, Valmont brandishes his fist at heaven in true Donnish fashion. He does not set out simply to vanquish Mme de Tourvel or even to cuckold her dullard husband: his triumph will be complete only when he has made her, of her own free will, love him more than the God she worships (letter 6). His ambition is thus blasphemous, for he lays claim to the power of the Almighty. A cheap trick turns him into the ‘image of God’ in the eyes of the family he saves (letter 21); it costs him no more to perjure himself before God to Father Anselme (letter 120). Valmont takes on God, as Don Juan takes on the Commendatore. In choosing pride over humility, he tests the power of free will against the laws of heaven. Thus Laclos, a lifelong rationalist, is projected into the realm of metaphysics, and his novel shows, not a social or political conscience, but a concern for the spirit.
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