In brief
Two former lovers, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, keep up a correspondence about the people they are ruining. She wants revenge on a man who left her: he is to marry Cécile Volanges, fifteen and just out of the convent, and Merteuil asks Valmont to corrupt the girl first. Valmont has a grander project in hand, the seduction of the devout and faithful Madame de Tourvel. Over five months, in 175 letters, both plots succeed, and then the partnership turns on itself. By the end Valmont is dead in a duel, Tourvel has died of grief, Cécile is a novice in a convent, and Merteuil is disfigured, bankrupt and in flight.
Laclos published it in 1782 as Les Liaisons dangereuses, an artillery officer’s only novel. It is the most exact book ever written about manipulation: how it is planned, how it feels to its victims, and how it destroys the people who practise it. Nothing in it is told by a narrator. Everything we know comes from letters, written by people who are lying to each other and sometimes to themselves.
This page quotes the first English translation, Dangerous Connections, published anonymously in London in 1784. Project Gutenberg’s copy mixes volumes from 1784 and a second edition of 1812, and its catalogue credits the translation to Thomas Moore. The wording is of its time; the letter numbers match the French.
The argument
The title page offers the book as letters “published for the instruction of society”, and it carries an epigraph from Rousseau’s preface to Julie: “I have observed the Manners of the Times, and have wrote those Letters.” Laclos’s claim is that he is showing a real world, the leisured French aristocracy, and that showing it is a moral act. Whether the book teaches seduction or warns against it was argued from the first week, and the novel builds that question into itself: its own fictional editor doubts in the opening note whether the letters are genuine, and its fictional compiler insists they are useful.
What the novel actually argues is darker than either. Merteuil and Valmont treat love as a war of position. Valmont writes in his first letter to her that “conquest is our destiny, and we must follow it” (letter 4), and she sets the terms of their contract like a quartermaster: he may have her as a reward once he has had Tourvel, but “none but written proofs are admitted” (letter 20). Pleasure is secondary to reputation, and reputation is a matter of evidence. The book follows that logic to its end. Both libertines believe that reason can govern feeling, their own and other people’s. Both are wrong. Valmont falls in love with Tourvel and cannot admit it; Merteuil is jealous and cannot forgive it. Their ruin comes not from virtue or from society, which they despise and outwit, but from the one feeling their system could not account for.
The shape of the book
The novel came out in four parts, and the shape is a slow fuse. Part One (letters 1–50) sets the two campaigns going: Merteuil’s call to “Return, my dear Viscount, return!” (letter 2), Valmont’s refusal in favour of Tourvel, his staged act of charity in a village so that her spy will see it (letter 21), and his discovery, through intercepted letters, that Cécile’s mother has been warning Tourvel against him (letter 44). That discovery joins the two plots: he will ruin the daughter to punish the mother.
Part Two (51–87) is Merteuil’s. She betrays Cécile’s innocent romance with the Chevalier Danceny to Madame de Volanges, so that the young lovers will need a go-between (“The incident that gave birth to it is my work, and I think it a master-piece”, letter 63). She writes Valmont her life story (letter 81), and she destroys the rake Prévan, who had boasted he would have her, by luring him into her bedroom and then calling her servants (letter 85). Part Three (88–124) is the double harvest: Valmont gets Cécile’s key and seduces her in a night he reports with clinical amusement (letter 96), while Tourvel, aware that she loves him, flees the house (letter 100). Part Four (125–175) begins with Valmont’s triumph over her and ends in catastrophe.
The turn comes fast. Merteuil mocks Valmont for being in love, and sends him a model letter of dismissal whose every paragraph ends “it is not my fault” (letter 141). He copies it to Tourvel to prove he is still free, and so destroys her. When he then asks Merteuil for the night she promised, she refuses, and his ultimatum comes back with two words written at the bottom: “War, then.” (letter 153). Merteuil promises revenge, Danceny sees the proof of Valmont’s treachery in Valmont’s own hand, and he challenges and kills him. Valmont, dying, gives him a bundle of papers (letter 163). The letters are circulated, and in the novel’s last pages the world reads the woman who had kept her reputation spotless through everything.
The voices
Laclos’s great technical achievement is that each writer has a style, and the style is the character. Cécile writes to her convent friend in breathless, ungrammatical gushes (“Mamma knows all”, letter 61). Danceny writes like a sentimental novel. Tourvel is formal and careful at first, and her letters grow shorter, more broken and more naked until the dictated delirium of letter 161: “I was happy and innocent—I gazed on thee and lost my peace”. Valmont is witty and boastful, and his prose to Merteuil sounds nothing like the pious, wounded prose he writes to Tourvel. Merteuil is the only writer who never loses control of her sentences, until the war.
The form also makes the reader complicit. We read over the shoulders of people who are reading each other’s mail: Valmont blackmails Tourvel’s maid into handing over her mistress’s pockets (letter 44), Valmont dictates Cécile’s letters to Danceny (letter 117), and Valmont writes a love letter to Tourvel using a courtesan’s back as his desk and boasts of it to Merteuil (letter 47). We enjoy the wit of the libertines because we see what their victims cannot, and the book quietly makes us pay for that enjoyment.
Merteuil’s own work
Letter 81 is the centre of the book. Valmont has warned Merteuil that she is taking risks; she answers with an account of how she made herself. Brought into society as a girl and “devoted by my situation to silence and inaction”, she used the silence to watch, to learn to control her face, to study what men wanted and what the world forgave. She married, was widowed, and built a reputation for virtue while taking whatever lovers she chose, always keeping the means to destroy them. Her principles, she says, are not “dealt out by chance” like other women’s: “I have given them existence, and I can call them my own work.” She was, in the most quoted line of the novel, “born to revenge my sex and command yours”.
It is a monstrous letter and a lucid one. In a society that gave a woman no career but marriage and no protection but reputation, Merteuil has seen that reputation is all that is judged, and has made herself its master. Laclos also wrote, in the years after the novel, an unfinished essay on the education of women arguing that they were made what they were by their upbringing. Merteuil is not his spokeswoman, but she is the most intelligent person in the book, and her villainy is a reply to a world that offered her nothing else.
The people
The Vicomte de Valmont
A famous seducer who wants Tourvel because she is hard to get, and gets more than he bargained for. After his victory he writes, puzzled, “Is it possible virtue can augment a woman’s value even at the time of her weakness?” (letter 125), and soon after, “I am not in love” (letter 138), in the tone of a man who is. He sacrifices the woman he loves to his vanity in front of the only person he wants to impress, and his death, forgiving Danceny, is his one unforced act.
Madame de Tourvel
The wife of a magistrate, devout and genuinely good, and the only character whose feelings are not a performance. Her resistance is long and intelligent; she reads Valmont more clearly than anyone except Merteuil. When she yields, it is with her whole self, and when she is thrown away she has nothing left to fall back on.
Cécile and Danceny
The young lovers are the book’s victims of education. Cécile has been taught nothing in the convent and learns everything from her corrupters; Merteuil coaches her in deceit (letter 105) and Valmont gets her pregnant. Danceny, the sentimental knight of Malta, ends as Merteuil’s lover and Valmont’s killer, and leaves for Malta.
The mothers
Madame de Volanges is strict, conventional and wrong about everyone; she trusts Merteuil completely and asks her advice about her daughter (letter 98). Valmont’s old aunt, Madame de Rosemonde, is wiser and kinder, and it is to her that Danceny sends the letters at the end (letter 169). In the fiction she is their keeper, and the book is what she keeps.
What lies outside
Every character is an aristocrat, and none of them works. They move between Paris and a country house, play cards, go to the opera and the Comédie-Italienne, and have nothing to do but write. Seven years after publication the Revolution began, and later readers saw the novel as a portrait of the class it swept away. The book did not read that way at first; royalists enjoyed it, and Marie Antoinette is among its known readers. But its world is closed, idle and self-regarding, and it is hard not to read one of its last scenes, Merteuil hissed from the Italian comedy (letter 173), as the public judging a class as well as a woman.
How it was made
Laclos was born in Amiens in 1741 and spent twenty years as an artillery officer without seeing a battle. He wrote much of the novel while posted to the Île d’Aix, off the Atlantic coast, helping build fortifications against the British. Durand Neveu published it in four volumes on 23 March 1782, and a thousand copies sold within a month; the army sent its author back to his garrison in Brittany. He corresponded with the novelist Madame Riccoboni, who protested that Merteuil was a slander on French women, and he defended the portrait. He later served the Duke of Orléans through the first years of the Revolution, was imprisoned during the Terror and released, and was made a general by Napoleon. He died at Taranto in 1803. He never wrote another novel.
Readers and critics
The book was a scandal and a best-seller, and its reputation as a dangerous book kept it half underground through the nineteenth century. Baudelaire planned an essay on it and left notes, including the remark that if the book burns, it burns the way ice does. In the twentieth century it was recognised as one of the great French novels. André Malraux’s essay on it, often printed as a preface, argued that Merteuil and Valmont were something new in fiction, the first characters in European fiction whose acts are determined by an ideology. Feminist critics have since made Merteuil the centre of the book, and letter 81 one of its essential documents.
Afterlives
Roger Vadim set it in modern Paris in 1959, with Jeanne Moreau and Gérard Philipe. Heiner Müller reduced it to two players in Quartett (1981). Christopher Hampton’s play for the Royal Shakespeare Company (1985), with Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan, became Stephen Frears’s film Dangerous Liaisons (1988), with Glenn Close, John Malkovich and Michelle Pfeiffer, which won Hampton an Oscar for the screenplay. Miloš Forman’s Valmont followed in 1989; Cruel Intentions (1999) moved it to a Manhattan prep school, and Untold Scandal (2003) to Joseon Korea. Each version has to solve the same problem: on screen the letters become scenes, and the book’s real drama, people writing their way into ruin, has to be acted instead of read.
How to read it
- Watch the headings. Who writes to whom, and from where, is half the story. Notes like “Dictated by Valmont” or “Enclosed in the preceding” carry plot.
- Read letter 81 slowly. It is Merteuil’s manifesto, and it explains everything she does before and after.
- Compare the two Valmonts. Read his letters to Tourvel against his reports to Merteuil on the same days.
- Follow Tourvel’s sentences. They are the book’s most honest record of what is being done.
- Try a modern translation too. The 1784 English is vivid but loose; P. W. K. Stone’s or Helen Constantine’s versions for Penguin are closer.
Read next
- Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (1748). The great novel in letters, with Lovelace as Valmont’s ancestor. Tourvel herself takes it down from the library (letter 107).
- Rousseau, Julie, or the New Heloise (1761). The novel of virtuous feeling whose epigraph Laclos borrowed and whose world he inverted.
- Crébillon fils, The Wayward Head and Heart (1736–38). The earlier French libertine novel of education in society.
- Benjamin Constant, Adolphe (1816). A short, cold analysis of a man unable to love or to leave.
- Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Another young woman trapped by a pair of former lovers.