Dangerous Liaisons is probably the most celebrated epistolary novel of all time. Here we will introduce this fantastic work by presenting its author, plot, and characters.
The origin of Dangerous Liaisons, a jaded gunner
To begin with a brief introduction to this fundamental piece of French literature of the XNUMXth century, we must explore a little the biography of the curious name that gave rise to it. Who was Pierre Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos?
Born in 1741 into a bourgeois family ennobled at least nominally by state work, the Frenchman Choderlos de Laclos understood from an early age that his opportunities for upward social mobility lay almost exclusively in the military sphere.
Therefore, he focused on building his professional destiny from the artillery, the typical branch of personalities that prevailed by personal talent instead of lineage and the perfect place for promotion in the context of the Seven Years War. He also the ideal place to acquire the most eclectic knowledge of his time, from mathematics to engineering and geography.
All seemed to be doing well on their way up the social order, demonstrating their brilliance on multiple occasions during their training and already preparing for crucial military missions against the English in India.
But a beneficial event occurred for most French sectors and extremely detrimental to the military career of young Laclos: the peace pact between the French and English was signed, culminating the great war that was supposed to give him professional bellows.
The word that can define the existence of the future author is boredom. A peace of almost thirty years confined Laclos to routine activities in irrelevant garrisons on a war level. Not even the independence declared by the North American colonies, which involved France in defense of the insurgents, provided him with a profitable conflict scenario: he was immediately positioned on an Atlantic islet that no one bothered to attack.
Boredom can spur the desire for greatness, as is well known. And the inactive Laclos promised himself to dedicate himself completely to his failed literary career, until producing a work that would leave the world reverberating after his physical departure.
The deed allowed him a rich escape from the aimless coexistence with rustic soldiers for more than five years. It soon gave it an unprecedented popular success in France as well, the novel becoming the center of a scandalous entertainment collective.
The institutional consequences did not wait either. The Minister of War did not like the cunning work and forced Laclos to return from Paris, where he was supervising the printing of the book, to join his garrison again, in something very similar to an arrest. The reason for the controversy was clear. Laclos was a son of bourgeois who was in charge of crudely portraying the debauchery of the noble class. Such daring was to attract triumph and punishment alike.
It is inevitable to think that there was something in the thoughts of artilleryman Pierre that unconsciously sought war, the warlike conflict that he wanted for his progress and did not obtain. There was in him an enthusiasm to collide with the elevated environment in front of him beyond measure.
Perhaps this is why, because of these unsatisfied desires for war, the brutal sharpness of Dangerous Liaisons and its terrible plea against the Lord of Bauvan, mythical fortifier of the French State, can be explained.
Laclos characterized the hero as a poor designer and wasteful of resources, recklessly directing the communication to the Minister of War himself, who had already applied punitive measures. The result was obvious. The author had to leave the army and flee to borderlands. Maybe it was what he was looking for.
From this moment on, the Frenchman fully involved himself with the complicated political intrigue of revolutionary times. Laclos quickly went from championing the ambitions of the Duke of Orléans, who offered him work and shelter, to becoming, through Danton, the increasingly paranoid political commissar of the nascent revolution. Laclos regularly reported on the behavior of suspicious military men, with the same brutal acuity shown in his novels.
After being about to be a victim of the same terror machinery with which he worked, Laclos finally managed to meet the war episode. He had not only already coordinated the efforts for the crucial battle of Valmy, he would also lead the experiments to produce the first heavy howitzer to penetrate fortifications and join the Bonapartist offensives against the rest of Europe.
In an irony that would not have clashed with his literary production, he could not have died in battle, but of dysentery, in Italy. Despite the fact that he was given a funerary monument, the Bourbon restoration would destroy it and there would not be a single remnant of the man who wanted to leave the world resounding with his name.
His work, forgotten for more than a century, would be resurrected well into the XNUMXth century in critical editions of literary curiosities.
The epistolary novel, a peculiar genre with a long history
One of the reasons for the enduring popularity and lasting influence of Dangerous Liaisons is its exquisite treatment of the epistolary novel. The entire novel is narrated in this format, without a traditional omniscient narrator or a first-person narrator imposing a single voice. Instead, we have a series of hundreds of letters that the characters write to one another, through which they gradually reveal the plot's events.
The genre was not new for 1782. The British Samuel Richardson had explored it forty years earlier in his novels Pamela and Clarissa, both examples of a moralistic novel with an emphasis on good female behavior. Ten years earlier, Goethe used the epistolary novel to represent within romanticism the progressive despair of the suicidal Werther. And twenty years before, Rousseau wrote pedagogical and sentimental epistles in La Nouvelle Eloísa, a clear inspiration for Laclos, although with an inverted morality.
The eighteenth century was in fact the great century of the epistolary novel, with hundreds of them written, which would give rise in the following century to attempts within the Gothic aesthetic, such as Dracula. But the work of Choderlos de Laclos exhibits a structural complexity, psychological penetration, and subtlety of characterization that took the genre to a new stage of possibility.
The following video presents a fairly comprehensive list of the most famous epistolary novels of all time. At the top of the list is, of course, Dangerous Liaisons . Laclos continues to resonate around the world, even in the 21st century.
Dangerous Liaisons, plot and characters
The plot of Dangerous Liaisons is distributed in 175 cards that tell the actions and vicissitudes of five main characters, the Marquise de Merteuil, the Vicomte de Valmont, Madame de Tourvel, Cécile Volanges and the Chevalier Danceny.
To be exact, the plot is based on what the pair of demonic libertines Valmont and Merteuil do to the other characters, innocent victims of their intrigues and seductions. The pair of accomplices maintain a relationship of unresolved erotic tension too close to mutual hatred, but functional for most of the novel to cause harm to their selected prey.
In a way, the villains are complementary. If Valmont can freely appear in society as an unrepentant seducer, thus having a more impulsive and extroverted behavior, Merteuil must accommodate the traditional demands assigned to her sex, being more secretive and calculating in her dark dealings. Valmont is a magnificent devourer, executor of brief undertakings. Merteuil a sharp planner, cold and with long-standing grudges.
Both characters and talents are put into action by an idea of revenge. The Marquise writes to the Viscount to encourage him to seduce Cécile, a fifteen-year-old girl who has just left the convent and is about to marry the Count of Gercourt. This is a former lover of Merteuil who, according to her version, had treated her with disrespect.
The marchioness then tries by all means to make the count end up receiving a disgraced woman as his wife. As a reward for her efforts, she offers Valmont her body in case he succeeds.
The viscount refuses at first, not out of ethics, but because he has a tight schedule. Valmont is already trying to seduce Madame de Tourvel, a virtuous young married woman awaiting the return of her husband from a long journey, at the castle of the libertine's elderly aunt, Madame de Rosemonde.
The Viscount makes significant progress with Tourvel, displaying a superficial charm of grand declarations of love and convincing her that she could reform him to live a moral existence. But there is a major obstacle to the final delivery: Madame de Volanges continually warns the young married woman of Valmont's disreputable reputation.
So Valmont decides to take revenge on the busybody and participate in the original plan proposed by Merteuil, the seduction of his daughter Cécile de Volanges. The Marquise, for her part, had already started with her own manipulations, seducing the music teacher Danceny and later convincing him to maintain relations with the girl from Volanges.
Valmont is therefore reduced in the first instance to a messenger and facilitator of the young couple's meetings, while Merteuil makes sure to ensure that they share the same spaces, advising Madame de Volanges to take Cécile to Madame de Rosemond's home, where they meet. find also Madame de Tourvel.
If you find yourself gasping in confusion at these entanglements, don't worry, that is the intention of Choderlos of Laclos. Let's sum it up this way: the two initially independent plans of seduction, the mounted hunt on the married and virtuous woman and the calculated disgrace of the young woman coming from the convent, have become one, in one space. Valmont plays on two fronts and immediately enters Cécile's room under the pretense of transmitting messages from Danceny, managing to sleep with her.
Cécile's conquest is particularly twisted. It is not enough to take advantage of her innocence, it is necessary for the two cruel nobles to make her disappear. Cécile is not only an erotic toy, she is also the subject of a thorough teaching on debauchery, according to which adultery and promiscuity are common and sensible options for a married woman.
Meanwhile, Valmont continues to make progress with Madame de Tourvel, fleeing from the castle where they all lived together, to take refuge in her residence. His health is impaired by his guilty passion for the viscount. He also pretends to suffer from her love sickness and forces a new encounter with her, in which he threatens to commit suicide if not reciprocated. The virtuous yields definitively, falling into her arms.
Valmont goes to request his trophy by letter, the delivery also from the Marquise de Merteuil. The latter, reluctant to dominate and somewhat jealous, maliciously demands that the viscount make a break with Tourvel and maintain relations with Cécile, as proof that there is no love for the married Madame. Valmont, considering romantic love humiliating, proudly agrees to the request and breaks with Tourvel by epistle. The broken woman takes refuge in a convent.
Tourvel is not the only one to start suffering the worst injuries from the manipulation inflicted on them. In one of her numerous encounters with Valmont, Cécile suffers a miscarriage. Everyone must feign a passing illness, perhaps curable with a visit from the Chevalier Danceny. Merteuil, traveling through the provinces, offers the only answer to the fact that Valmont tries again to impregnate the girl from Volanges. An illegitimate baby would make his revenge against the Comte de Gercourt even more exquisite.
After trying, perhaps with some remorse, to communicate with the fainting Tourvel in the convent without success, Valmont impulsively demands Merteuil's physical delivery, immediately. The relationship between the two, which has been deteriorating letter after letter, reaches its lowest and most vulnerable point. The Marquise, after evading the Viscount through her studied romance with Danceny, declares war on him.
The two former accomplices attack each other with viperous enthusiasm, and unsurprisingly, destruction ensues twice as fast as the other characters. Valmont plays first, convincing Cécile to write Danceny a love letter requesting her presence, separating the knight from Merteuil. The Marquise responds with a low and fatal blow: she reveals Valmont's deceptions to Danceny. The ensuing duel is inevitable.
Danceny takes up the challenge with the mettle she has lacked throughout the novel, and Valmont, the terror of honest women throughout France, falls to her sword. With his dying breath, the Viscount also launches one last murderous chess move, pointing out to Danceny the bundle of incriminating letters exchanged with Merteuil.
Thus, while the seducer dies, the marquise's reputation is also irreversibly damaged, being repudiated in all public places, losing her fortune in one lawsuit after another and with her beauty vanished by the ravages of smallpox.
The two seduced women also have a dark destiny. Madame de Tourvel dies exhausted with a shattered psyche after receiving the news of Valmont's death. Cécile de Volanges returns to the convent where she wishes she had never left. And Danceny leaves everything to go to the island of Malta, far from intrigues.
How then have we been able to access the collection of letters that make up the novel? Thanks to Madame de Rosemond, who, grieving the murder of her nephew Valmont, accepted the letters preserved and circulated by Danceny as proof of her right to defy. Rosemond decides to keep the entire collection of letters secret, in an attempt to erase all traces of the tragic scandal. Thus, our entire experience as readers becomes a grand act of voyeurism into the passionate unfolding of dangerous friendships.
This novel has been considered as a political artifact, a cultural germ of the revolution that would be imposed on France just a decade later. A play in which proud nobles parade their miseries while demure bourgeois, like Tourvel, suffer its effects.
However, it is also a work where the changing psychology of the characters masterfully seeps through their arrogant statements. Where romantic sentimentality makes its way, despite itself, between minds steeled by cynicism and playful seduction gradually transforms into a tragic fall. Where the erotic space where we all betray ourselves is described.
This concludes our article on Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. If you found this text about this great French author interesting, you'll surely be interested in this other one about the great Stendhal, who was heavily influenced by Laclos's work when writing his classic The Red and the Black . Follow the link!
