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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Dangerous Liaisons," Pierre Choderlos de Laclos masterfully weaves a narrative that intricately explores the perilous dance of seduction, manipulation, and the intricacies of human relationships in 18th-century France. The epistolary format allows for a rich interplay of voices, as letters between characters reveal their covert intentions, moral dilemmas, and the societal constraints of their aristocratic milieu. The wit and psychological depth present in Laclos's prose not only critique the decadence of his contemporaries but also resonate as a timeless exploration of love and betrayal, situating the novel firmly within the literary traditions of realism and baroque irony. Laclos, a former military officer and a man of the Enlightenment, was profoundly aware of the shifting social order of his time, which likely influenced his portrayal of the volatile dynamics of courtly life. His experiences with the complexities of human behavior and the duplicitous nature of relationships shed light on the motivations behind the characters' actions. The provocative themes of power and sexuality in "Dangerous Liaisons" reflect his insights into the human psyche, as well as the moral ambiguities facing society during the period. Highly recommended for readers interested in psychological drama and social commentary, "Dangerous Liaisons" presents a captivating and thought-provoking exploration of treachery and desire. Its influence on subsequent literature and culture, including adaptations in film and theater, underscores its enduring relevance. Engaging with this classic will not only enrich one's understanding of Romantic literature but also provoke contemplation about the complexities of human interaction. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Dangerous Liaisons
Table of Contents
Introduction
In a world where letters are weapons, two aristocrats turn seduction into strategy and expose how desire, vanity, and power can unmake both individuals and the society that crowns them.
Dangerous Liaisons endures as a classic because it captures, with chilling clarity, the theater of manners in which reputation is currency and intimacy a calculated move. Its elegance of style, tightly controlled structure, and unblinking psychological insight give the novel a precision that has inspired admiration and unease for centuries. The book belongs to that small class of works that reveal their age while transcending it: it portrays a specific aristocratic milieu yet crystallizes universal patterns of manipulation and self-deception. As a result, it has catalyzed vigorous critical debate, generated countless adaptations, and remained a touchstone for studies of power and desire.
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, a French officer and man of letters, composed this epistolary novel in the final decades of the eighteenth century; it was first published in 1782. Set in pre-revolutionary France, the narrative unfolds through letters exchanged among members of the aristocracy, whose polished surfaces conceal competing ambitions. The book’s design uses the immediacy of written correspondence to stage conflicts of motive and mask. Without revealing outcomes, it is enough to note that the author arranges a moral and social laboratory, inviting readers to observe how charm, rhetoric, and calculation interact when social codes are rigid and appearances rule.
At its center stand the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, libertine strategists who collaborate and compete through an intricate correspondence. They devise schemes that enlist, tempt, and unsettle others in their circle, including a sheltered young woman newly introduced to society and an esteemed lady renowned for her piety. The premise is not merely a sequence of seductions; it is an experiment in control, testing how far wit and charisma can direct the feelings of others. The immediate stakes are reputations and marriages, yet the larger contest is for superiority in a world governed by performance.
The epistolary form is not a gimmick but the engine of the book’s meaning. Each letter bears the writer’s style, self-image, and blind spots, so that truth emerges obliquely from converging and clashing perspectives. The arrangement of the correspondence demands that readers weigh tone, timing, and rhetoric as carefully as events. The implied editorial frame, with dates and shifting correspondents, emphasizes how documents can both reveal and mislead. In this way, the novel anticipates modern concerns about voice, narration, and reliability, while remaining rooted in the practices of salon culture, private writing, and the social choreography of the Ancien Régime.
Power, pleasure, and language are the primary instruments explored here. The novel examines how desire can be manufactured, how persuasion shades into coercion, and how gendered expectations channel both. Education, reputation, and surveillance shape every move; characters learn to read others and to write themselves into plausible roles. Virtue and libertinage are not abstract categories but lived strategies that carry risks, protections, and costs. The book’s moral terrain is complex, refusing easy moralizing while exposing the corrosions that follow when empathy yields to vanity. By anatomizing motives rather than pronouncing judgments, it enlists the reader’s conscience as an active participant.
As a late flowering of the epistolary tradition, Dangerous Liaisons both inherits and overturns earlier models of sentimental correspondence. Where some predecessors aimed at exemplary feeling, this novel applies forensic pressure to sentiment itself, revealing its susceptibility to performance and control. The result is an unnerving clarity about manipulation that subsequent writers have either echoed or resisted. Its structural sophistication—counterpointed letters, delayed revelations, and rhetorical feints—has made it a benchmark for narrative design. Critics across generations have recognized in it a decisive advance in psychological realism, a sharpened understanding of how social scripts discipline desire, and a cool audacity of tone.
The book’s influence extends beyond the page. Its portraits of calculated seduction have informed plays, films, and television adaptations that reimagine the central duel of minds in new settings and eras. Writers have studied its strategies for unreliable narration, while dramatists and directors have found in its dialogues a natural architecture for performance. Its teaching life is equally substantial: it anchors university courses on the Enlightenment, the novel, and gender studies, prompting students to grapple with persuasion, consent, and agency. That continual afterlife testifies to a work whose questions are not exhausted by the specifics of its historical moment.
Composed on the eve of profound political change, the novel captures the brittle opulence and anxieties of the late Ancien Régime. Relationships are negotiated through salons, letters, and carefully managed encounters, where a rumor can undo a future. The economy of esteem dominates: inheritance, marriage, and rank are secured not only by law but by opinion. The text thus serves as a record of how power circulates through civility, wit, and insinuation rather than open force. While it does not predict events beyond its scope, it distills a social order in which control of appearances becomes both shield and snare.
Laclos crafts this world with a precise ear for nuance and an architect’s sense of balance. He places contrasting temperaments in proximity and lets their letters spark, refract, and collide. Careful attention to pacing produces a crescendo of pressures without sensationalism, and the prose’s restraint heightens the tension between what is said and what is meant. Rather than sermonize, the narrative demonstrates, allowing readers to observe the methods by which people justify themselves and instrumentalize others. In doing so, it proposes literature as an ethical technology: a space where motives are tested and the consequences of rhetoric become legible.
Reading Dangerous Liaisons is to occupy the vantage point of confidant and detective at once. We are addressed intimately by those who seek to persuade, and we must constantly assess competing claims, silences, and self-descriptions. The effect is both seductive and unsettling: one admires agility of mind even as one recoils from its uses. The letters train us to attend to subtext, to ask who benefits, and to notice how a style can tilt a situation. That apprenticeship in critical reading remains one of the book’s gifts, leaving us more alert to the moral stakes that attend eloquence.
For contemporary audiences, the novel’s relevance is unmistakable. In an age saturated with mediated self-presentation—messages, profiles, curated disclosures—the spectacle of crafted persona and strategic intimacy feels newly immediate. Themes of consent, reputation, and the power of language to harm or heal continue to resonate across personal, professional, and public spheres. Dangerous Liaisons endures because it combines narrative pleasure with unsparing insight, inviting readers to enjoy its elegance while confronting the ethics of that enjoyment. It remains a classic not simply for historical interest, but because it clarifies how we use one another, and how we might resist.
Synopsis
Dangerous Liaisons is an epistolary novel set in late eighteenth-century French high society. It unfolds entirely through letters exchanged among aristocrats whose reputations are both armor and weapon. At its center are the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, former lovers turned strategic rivals who treat seduction as a game of wit, patience, and power. Their correspondence frames the narrative, while letters from secondary characters reveal blind spots, private hopes, and gossip. The story begins after a period of quiet, when Merteuil and Valmont reconnect and measure their influence. Each hopes to prove mastery over desire and social opinion through calculated intrigues.
Merteuil proposes a first test: revenge against a man who once slighted her, the Comte de Gercourt. His bride-to-be, the recently convent-educated Cécile de Volanges, is inexperienced and closely watched. If her innocence is compromised before marriage, Gercourt’s pride will suffer. Merteuil suggests Valmont undertake the seduction, but he initially refuses, preferring a challenge that flatters his vanity. He has set his sights on Madame de Tourvel, a married, devout woman celebrated for virtue. The marquise, amused, turns the rivalry into wagers and conditions, encouraging daring while insisting on secrecy. Their letters record tactics, boundaries, and shifting stakes.
Valmont establishes himself at his aunt Madame de Rosemonde’s country house, where Madame de Tourvel is a guest. He cultivates a courteous image and tests the margins of propriety. Tourvel is wary yet obligated to polite conversation; her replies emphasize faith and moral constancy. To advance his cause, Valmont performs an ostentatiously charitable act, arranging assistance for an impoverished family and ensuring news reaches Tourvel. He reports each step to Merteuil, who dissects tone, timing, and credibility. The game blends conquest with theater, and the letter form lets readers watch intent, hesitation, and rationalization accumulate.
Meanwhile, Cécile reenters society under her mother’s supervision and meets the Chevalier Danceny, her music teacher. Their mutual attraction is chaste, earnest, and constrained by etiquette. Merteuil presents herself as Cécile’s confidante, teaching her to navigate secrecy, conceal emotion, and compose guarded letters. Madame de Volanges, concerned with status and alliances, discourages any attachment that might jeopardize the arranged marriage to Gercourt. Through intermediaries and delays, the couple’s notes breed confusion and dependency. Across these exchanges, the novel juxtaposes innocence and calculation, showing how social pressures turn affection into negotiation and how mentors can shape desire while appearing to protect it.
Valmont’s pursuit of Tourvel becomes the novel’s moral axis. He oscillates between tactical feints and moments that suggest genuine feeling. Tourvel’s letters register mounting distress as admiration, gratitude, and fear collide with conscience. Merteuil, reading from afar, keeps score and tightens the rules of the wager, requiring proofs and deadlines that inflame vanity. Reports of small victories are offset by reversals, refusals, and renewed vows of resistance. The narrative pace quickens through alternating perspectives, letting readers witness how argument, flattery, guilt, and patience can erode resolve without disclosing the eventual outcome of the contest.
In parallel, Cécile’s vulnerability becomes a fulcrum for multiple designs. Merteuil orchestrates meetings, redirects letters, and counsels duplicity that Cécile mistakes for liberation. Danceny, though sincere, is drawn into strategies beyond his experience, learning to plead, doubt, and demand through the epistolary code. As boundaries blur, the young woman’s health and spirits fluctuate, hinting at compromises tactfully veiled by the text’s decorum. Reputation—both shield and snare—draws every participant into calculation. Valmont’s proximity to this subplot entangles the two games, creating collisions of loyalty and ambition that sharpen risks while maintaining uncertainty about who, if anyone, remains in control.
The correspondence also opens a window into Merteuil’s self-fashioning. In confessional letters to Valmont, she outlines the discipline through which she constructed a flawless public image: studied restraint, selective generosity, and the concealment of motives beneath perfect manners. She explains how knowledge of men’s expectations arms her against them, turning dependence into leverage. This credo clarifies how performance sustains power in a culture that punishes transgression unevenly. As rivalries intensify, jealousy and pride color exchanges between the two libertines, and their pact grows unstable. Small slights harden into principles demanding satisfaction.
Near the climax, the traffic of letters accelerates, and control begins to slip. Notes are intercepted, copied, or read aloud; confidences migrate between salons; gossip attaches names to behaviors once cloaked in ambiguity. Confrontations follow: private pleadings turn public, challenges are issued, and some characters retreat while others double down. The novel escalates without revealing its last turns, emphasizing the social stakes of exposure in a world that treats reputation as destiny. Emotions once treated as instruments flare into consequences. The elegant machinery of intrigue grinds against bodies and futures, preparing outcomes shaped by honor, shame, and calculation.
By tracing intersecting seductions through letters, Dangerous Liaisons examines power, desire, and hypocrisy in the late ancien régime. The epistolary form foregrounds perspective, showing how language fashions reality and how self-justification disguises harm as sophistication. The book’s central message is not romantic or moralizing; it presents a system where wit and appearances confer authority until they meet limits imposed by conscience, chance, or social judgment. Without disclosing final resolutions, the narrative suggests that manipulation carries costs no strategy fully manages. The result is a precise anatomy of influence, revealing how private games can destabilize public order and personal identity.
Historical Context
Dangerous Liaisons is set in the final decade of the Ancien Régime, chiefly in Paris and its elite suburbs, with occasional retreats to provincial châteaux. The narrative space is the aristocratic world of hôtel particuliers in the Faubourg Saint‑Germain, theatre boxes at the Comédie‑Française and the Opéra, and the intimate salons where wit, reputation, and patronage circulate as currencies. Chronologically, the action belongs to the late 1770s and early 1780s, under Louis XVI, though its mores were shaped by the earlier reign of Louis XV. The postal system, hired carriages, and servants knit this milieu together, enabling rapid letter exchanges and clandestine meetings that structure the plot’s intrigues.
The book’s geography maps power through social institutions: convents that educate daughters of nobles, legal chambers where guardians arrange marriages, and urban pleasure sites such as masked balls and gambling rooms. Parisian life propagated by salons—hosted by influential women—creates a stage where public display and private maneuver constantly intersect. Beyond the capital, estates provide settings of seclusion for seduction and revenge. The time is one of etiquette and surveillance: reputations can be destroyed by gossip or a printed libelle, yet preserved by patronage. The result is a society finely calibrated by birth, credit, and ceremony, whose fragile order the novel dissects through letter‑borne schemes.
Under the Ancien Régime, society was stratified into orders—clergy, nobility, and the Third Estate—with political theatre centered at Versailles. Louis XV (1715–1774) and Louis XVI (1774–1792) presided over a court where venality of offices, elaborate etiquette, and distance from productive work fostered an idle elite. The noblesse d’épée and noblesse de robe maneuvered for honors and pensions. This structure sustained a culture of display and private privilege. The novel’s libertine protagonists inhabit precisely this echelon: their leisure, access to servants, and networks of kin and favor are historically plausible products of a system that rewarded wit and lineage over civic virtue or labor.
Aristocratic libertinage, which crystallized during the Régence (1715–1723) under Philippe d’Orléans and flourished under Louis XV, formed the social environment most decisive for Dangerous Liaisons. Courtly sexuality was interwoven with politics: royal mistresses, from Madame de Pompadour (favorite from 1745 to 1764) to Madame du Barry (1769–1774), mediated patronage, while the Parc‑aux‑Cerfs symbolized the crown’s private appetite. At the same time, Paris saw a proliferation of petites maisons—intimate pleasure houses—and an urban economy of salons, gambling, and masked entertainments that allowed supervised transgression. A clandestine press of libelles chronicled and amplified scandal, undermining moral authority while feeding the public’s appetite for secrets. Libertinage also drew intellectual sheen from fashionable skepticism about clerical authority and moral casuistry, even as the police sought to regulate prostitution and pornography. This culture privileged reputation, control of narrative, and skill at managing desire, all crystallized in practices of letter writing and strategic rumor. Laclos transposes these patterns into his plot: seduction is a form of power brokerage; sexual conquest confers symbolic capital; and the calculated exchange of letters becomes a weapon finer than the sword. The marquise de Merteuil and the vicomte de Valmont embody a world in which private vice and public consequence are inseparable, mirroring an aristocracy accustomed to masking domination as gallantry. By staging revenge as a courtly game and virtue as a social performance vulnerable to exposure, the novel dramatizes the structural features of libertinage as a historical phenomenon rather than merely personal immorality.
Salon sociability, anchored by hostesses such as Madame Geoffrin, Madame du Deffand, and Julie de Lespinasse in the 1750s–1770s, organized elite conversation, patronage, and opinion formation. These gatherings linked nobles and men of letters, regulated by codes of wit and politesse. Epistolary exchange extended the salon beyond rooms into a daily republic of letters, preserved in carefully curated correspondence. The novel mirrors this infrastructure: letters function as social capital, circulating judgments that can exalt or ruin. Laclos’s interest in women’s strategic agency echoes the period’s female arbiters of taste; he later advocated women’s education in a 1783 treatise, situating his critique within contemporary debates on gendered power.
Marriage and family law under the Coutume de Paris and the Code Louis (1667) privileged paternal authority, dowry negotiations, and alliances among lineages. Royal and ecclesiastical rules (including the 1556 ordinance against clandestine marriages) made parental consent decisive for minors, while convents doubled as schools and places of respectable seclusion. Lettres de cachet allowed families to request the king’s warrant to confine troublesome relatives without trial; the case of Honoré‑Gabriel de Mirabeau, imprisoned at Vincennes in 1777 at his father’s behest, was notorious. The novel reflects these mechanisms: Cécile’s convent education, arranged betrothal, and the threat of reputational internment are historically grounded instruments of control.
The political conflict between the crown and the sovereign courts culminated in the Maupeou coup of 1771, when Chancellor René de Maupeou dissolved the Parlement of Paris and exiled magistrates to break their resistance to fiscal and judicial reforms. A new court system was imposed, only for Louis XVI to recall the old parlements in 1774. This crisis publicized questions of law, privilege, and accountability. The novel echoes the moral rhetoric of opposition circles: characters cloak private designs in the language of public virtue, showcasing how juridical ideals could be instrumentalized. The spectacle of authority weakened by scandal and reversal forms the work’s political backdrop.
Censorship and surveillance were institutional facts. The royal privilege system licensed books, while the Cabinet noir intercepted and read suspect correspondence; the lieutenant general of police—Antoine de Sartine (1759–1774), then Jean‑Charles‑Pierre Lenoir (1774–1785)—managed urban order, including the police des mœurs. Pornographic libelles and political pamphlets nevertheless circulated widely, fueling a market for secrets. The novel’s epistolary architecture emerges from this world: letters are both intimate and perilously public, vulnerable to copying, interception, and gossip. Characters’ anxiety over manuscripts and messengers reflects contemporary fears that a paper trail could be fatal in a society where reputation was policed as rigorously as crime.
The Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) devastated French prestige: defeats in North America (Quebec 1759; Montreal 1760) and India (fall of Pondicherry 1761) culminated in the Treaty of Paris (1763), ceding Canada and confirming losses. The army’s shortcomings sharpened debates on merit versus birth. Artillery, reformed by Jean‑Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval from 1765, prized technical skill, offering advancement to competent officers. Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, born in 1741, was an artillery officer shaped by this meritocratic ethos; his long garrison periods exposed him to the idleness and intrigues of peacetime postings. The novel’s strategic mindset and cool instrumentality echo a military logic applied to social combat.
France’s Atlantic defenses and naval infrastructure framed Laclos’s writing circumstances. The Rochefort arsenal, founded in 1666, anchored a network of coastal fortifications that included Île‑d’Aix, where Laclos was stationed between 1779 and 1782. Administrative routine, engineering works, and relative isolation marked such posts. Contemporary naval ministers—Sartine (1774–1780) and the Marquis de Castries (1780–1787)—pursued modernization as war with Britain loomed. It was in this environment that Laclos composed Dangerous Liaisons, leveraging enforced leisure and proximity to postal routes to craft an intricate epistolary plot. The contrast between martial bureaucracy and erotic intrigue heightens the novel’s sense of calculated, bureaucratized manipulation.
The American War of Independence drew France into open conflict with Britain in 1778, crowned by the Franco‑American victory at Yorktown in 1781 and the Treaty of Paris in 1783. The intervention restored some military honor but cost over a billion livres, adding heavily to the crown’s debt. Paris in 1782, the year of the novel’s publication, pulsed with war news, officers’ returns, and patriotic celebrations. The book’s portrayal of aristocrats spending lavishly, gaming, and pursuing pleasure reads against a backdrop of national sacrifice and fiscal strain, sharpening its contrast between public grandeur and private irresponsibility in a society heading toward crisis.
Fiscal reform efforts exposed structural impasses. Anne‑Robert‑Jacques Turgot (1774–1776) abolished the corvée and sought free grain trade but fell to court opposition. Jacques Necker (1777–1781) popularized transparency with the Compte rendu au roi, masking deficits to sustain credit. Charles‑Alexandre de Calonne (1783–1787) proposed a universal land tax, only to be blocked by the Assembly of Notables in 1787; Archbishop Brienne briefly succeeded and failed. By 1788, interest on the debt consumed more than half of royal revenue. The novel’s relentless depiction of self‑interest, short‑term calculation, and elite resistance to constraint resonates with the political economy that made reform impossible without social revolution.
The expulsion of the Jesuits from France in 1764 under the ministry of Choiseul, followed by the papal suppression of the order in 1773, reshaped education and confession. Jesuit colleges were replaced by secular or Jansenist‑leaning institutions; women’s schooling remained largely in the hands of orders like the Ursulines and Visitandines. Confessional practice emphasized moral rigor in some circles and casuistic flexibility in others. The novel’s devout Présidente de Tourvel and the convent‑educated Cécile inhabit this post‑Jesuit landscape, where piety coexists uneasily with fashionable worldliness. Their vulnerability to manipulation underscores how institutional shifts did not dissolve hierarchical authority over women.
Parisian entertainments and semi‑public spaces fostered encounters central to libertine plots. The Comédie‑Française, the Opéra, and masked balls at the Opéra provided sanctioned anonymity and display. The Palais‑Royal, refurbished and commercialized by Louis‑Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, from 1781, opened arcades of shops, cafés, and gambling rooms that invited a mixed public and freer speech under princely protection. Such venues were known for assignations and rumor exchange. The novel’s scenes of theatre‑going, box‑visiting, and promenading align with these sites, while Laclos’s later service to the Duke of Orléans in 1789 connects the author to the very urban spaces where politics and pleasure entwined.
Dueling, officially prohibited since early royal edicts such as Richelieu’s 1626 ban and reinforced by later ordinances, remained a resilient code of aristocratic honor in the eighteenth century. Despite penalties, authorities often turned a blind eye when social equals contested reputation with blades. In 1769, Louis XV renewed prohibitions, yet the practice persisted in Paris and garrison towns. The climactic duel between Danceny and Valmont reflects this culture: slander, seduction, and betrayal demanded satisfaction beyond courts. The event situates the novel squarely within an honor economy where legal order is subordinated to reputation, and lethal violence polices the same social boundaries that letters manipulate.
By anatomizing how seduction, marriage, and reputation function as instruments of domination, the book offers a social critique of the Ancien Régime’s gendered and class hierarchies. Guardians arrange alliances to consolidate fortune; widows like Merteuil exploit the narrow legal window of female autonomy to contest male control, exposing the system’s double standards. Convent education and pious discourse, stripped of effective protection, become rhetorical veneers. The relentless calculation in letters reveals that virtue is a social performance vulnerable to coercion, and that law, religion, and custom frequently serve family interest rather than justice. The work thus indicts structural, not merely personal, corruption.
Politically, the novel demystifies elite power by showing private vice as the hidden engine of public order. Its libertine games mirror court patronage, parlementary moral posturing, and fiscal obstructionism: in each case, short‑term advantage undermines collective stability. The omnipresence of surveillance, from servants to the Cabinet noir, anticipates the collapse of trust between rulers and ruled. Allusions to dueling, lettres de cachet, and salon arbitration expose a polity where arbitrary force and social capital prevail over due process. Published amid war and mounting debt, the book reads as a pre‑Revolutionary x‑ray of privilege, illuminating why a society built on secrecy and impunity was nearing rupture.
Author Biography
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos was a French novelist and career army officer active from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. He is best known for Les Liaisons dangereuses, an epistolary novel that became a landmark of French literature for its cool dissection of power, desire, and social hypocrisy under the ancien régime. Laclos balanced military duty with literary ambition, writing in a period shaped by Enlightenment debates and, later, revolutionary upheaval. His reputation rests on the precision of his psychological observation and on a singular capacity to fuse moral inquiry with narrative art, making him a pivotal figure in the evolution of the modern novel.
Born in northern France and educated for the artillery, Laclos benefited from the rigorous scientific training that characterized the royal military schools of his time. This formation fostered a disciplined prose style and a taste for structural clarity that informed his literary work. He wrote within an environment steeped in Enlightenment questioning and the fashionable culture of letters and salons. The epistolary tradition—shaped by authors such as Samuel Richardson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau—along with the libertine fiction of writers like Crébillon fils, provided models and foils for Laclos’s project, which sought to test the moral and social boundaries of his age through a meticulous exchange of letters.
Laclos pursued a steady career in the artillery, serving in garrisons and coastal postings where administrative competence and technical expertise were prized. A period stationed off the Atlantic coast, including time on the Île-d’Aix, afforded him uninterrupted stretches to read, draft, and revise. He experimented with verse and occasional pieces, but increasingly gravitated toward the epistolary form for its realism and capacity to stage competing viewpoints. Even as he fulfilled his duties as an officer, he cultivated a writer’s detachment, observing the codes, duplicities, and rituals of elite society—material he would later transmute into fiction without relying on private confidences or direct personal exposures.
Les Liaisons dangereuses appeared in the early 1780s and quickly became a succès de scandale. Presented as a dossier of letters, the novel offered a chilling anatomy of manipulation and self-fashioning among aristocrats, while maintaining the ambiguity and restraint that characterize Enlightenment moral fiction. Contemporary readers praised its psychological acuity and elegant construction, even as many condemned what they took to be an invitation to vice. The work’s editorial framing devices, with warnings about its lessons, underscored Laclos’s claim to moral purpose. Multiple editions followed in rapid succession, and the novel entered the European canon as one of the era’s most unsettling and accomplished narratives.
Beyond the novel, Laclos wrote essays and occasional prose that engaged pressing social questions. Notably, he argued for improved education for women, articulating positions that aligned with strands of Enlightenment thought about citizenship and instruction. He also produced journalism and political writing, particularly as public life in France accelerated toward upheaval. These interventions connect with the themes of his fiction: the social uses of knowledge, the mechanisms of influence, and the constraints imposed by rank and gender. While none of these texts rivaled the fame of Les Liaisons dangereuses, they clarify his sustained interest in the moral architecture of institutions and in reform framed by reason.
As the monarchy faltered and revolution transformed France, Laclos’s career broadened from regimental responsibilities to political-administrative roles, including service to the household of the duc d’Orléans. He navigated changing regimes with care, contributing to pamphleteering and organizational tasks while maintaining his professional identity in artillery. After the most turbulent phases had passed, he returned to more conventional military service and held responsible posts. In the later 1790s and early 1800s, he served in campaigns that took him to Italy, where he continued to apply his technical expertise. Throughout, he remained a public figure defined by duty, discipline, and an intellectual’s interest in institutions.
Laclos died in southern Italy in the early nineteenth century while still in service, closing a life that moved between barracks, administrative offices, and the writing desk. His legacy rests overwhelmingly on Les Liaisons dangereuses, now read as a keystone of eighteenth-century prose: a novel of letters that exposes social performance and the fragile ethics of privilege without didactic simplification. Scholars study its narrative design, its engagement with Enlightenment debates, and its influence on later psychological fiction. Adapted repeatedly for stage and screen, it continues to provoke arguments about gender, power, and responsibility, ensuring that Laclos’s singular contribution remains central to discussions of modern narrative art.
Dangerous Liaisons
VOL. I.
PREFACE.
This Work, or rather Collection, which the Public will, perhaps, still find too voluminous, contains but a small part of the correspondence from which it is extracted. Being appointed to arrange it by the persons in whose possession it was, and who, I knew, intended it for publication, I asked, for my sole recompence, the liberty to reject every thing that appeared to me useless, and I have endeavoured to preserve only the letters which appeared necessary to illustrate the events, or to unfold the characters. If to this inconsiderable share in the work be added an arrangement of those letters which I have preserved, with a strict attention to dates, and some short annotations, calculated, for the most part, to point out some citations, or to explain some retrenchments I have made, the Public will see the extent of my labours, and the part I have taken in this publication.
I have also changed, or suppressed, the names of the personages, and if, among those I have substituted, any resemblance may be found which might give offence, I beg it may be looked on as an unintentional error.
I proposed farther alterations, as to purity of style and diction, in both which many faults will be found. I could also have wished to have been authorised to shorten some long letters, several of which treat separately, and almost without transition, of objects totally foreign to one another. This liberty, in which I was not indulged, would not have been sufficient to give merit to the work, but would have corrected part of its defects.
It was objected to me, that the intention was to publish the letters themselves, and not a work compiled from the letters; that it would be as distant from probability as truth, that eight or ten persons, who were concerned in this correspondence, should have wrote with equal purity of style:—And on my representing that there was not one which did not abound with essential faults, and was not very open to criticism, I was answered, that every reasonable reader would undoubtedly expect to find faults in a collection of letters of private persons, since among all those hitherto published by authors of the highest reputation, and even some academicians, there are none totally exempt from censure. Those reasons have not convinced me; and I am still of opinion they are easier to give than likely to obtain assent; but I had not my option, and submitted, reserving only the liberty of entering my protest, and declaring my dissent, as I now do.
As to the merit of this work, perhaps it does not become me to touch upon it; my opinion neither can, or ought, to influence any one. However, as some wish to know something of a book before they take it in hand, those who are so disposed will proceed with this preface—the rest will do better to pass on to the work itself.
Though inclined to publish those letters, I am yet far from thinking they will meet success; and let not this sincere declaration be construed into the affected modesty of an author: for I declare, with the same frankness, that if I had thought this collection an unworthy offering to the Public, it should not have taken up any part of my time.—Let us try to reconcile this apparent contradiction.
The merit of a work consists in its utility, or its agreeableness, and even in both, when it admits of both. But success, which is not always the criterion of merit, often arises more from a choice of subject than the execution, more from the aggregate of the objects presented than the manner of treating them: such a collection as the title announces this to be, being the letters of a whole circle, and containing a diversity of interests, is not likely to fix the attention of the reader. Besides, the sentiments they contain being feigned or dissembled, can only excite an interest of curiosity, always infinitely inferior to that of sentiment, and less disposed to indulgence, as well as more apt to be struck with defects in the narrative, as they are constantly in opposition to the only desire curiosity seeks to gratify. These defects are, perhaps, partly compensated by the quality of the work; I mean the variety of style—A merit which an author seldom attains, but which here presents itself, and prevents, at least, a dull uniformity. Perhaps merit may also be allowed to many observations, either new or little known, which are interspersed through those letters: and this, to pass the most favourable judgment on them, will be found to constitute their best pretension to pleasing.
The utility of the work, which will, perhaps, be more strongly contested, appears more easy to establish: it is at least useful to morality, to lay open the means used by the wicked to seduce the innocent; and those letters will efficaciously concur for so salutary a purpose. There will also be found in them the proof and example of two important truths, which one would be apt to think unknown, seeing how little they are practised: the one, that every woman who admits a bad man to her society, ends with becoming his victi[1q]m; the other, that every mother is at least imprudent, that suffers any but herself to gain possession of her daughter's confidence.
Young persons, of both sexes, may also here learn, that the friendship so readily held out to them by people of bad morals, is ever a dangerous snare, equally fatal to their happiness and virtue; yet, abuse or evil always unhappily confining too nearly on good, appears so much to be dreaded in this respect, that far from recommending the perusal of works of this kind to youth, I think it of the utmost importance to keep all such very far from their reach. The time when productions of the nature of the present may be no longer dangerous, but begin to be useful, was fixed by a lady of great good understanding. "I think," said she to me, after having read the manuscript of this correspondence, "I should render my daughter an essential service in putting this book in her hands on her wedding-day." Should all mothers think thus, I shall congratulate myself on having published it.
Yet I shall leave this flattering supposition at a distance; and I still think this collection will please but few.—Men and women of depraved minds will take an interest in discountenancing a work that may injure them; and as they are never wasting in ingenuity, they may bring over the whole class of rigorists, who will be alarmed at the picture we have dared to present of profligacy.
The pretenders to free thinking will take no concern in the fate of a devout woman, whom, for that reason, they will not fail to pronounce weak, whilst the devotee will be displeased to see virtue sink under misfortune, and will complain that religion does not sufficiently display its power. On the other hand, persons of a delicate taste will be disgusted with the simplicity and defective style of many of the letters, whilst the generality of readers, led away with the idea that every thing that appears in print is a work of labour, will think he sees in some of the other letters the laboured style of an author sufficiently apparent, notwithstanding the disguise he has assumed.
To conclude; it will be pretty generally said, that a thing is little worth out of its place; and that if the too correct style of authors takes off from the gracefulness of miscellaneous letters, negligences in these become real faults, and make them insupportable when consigned to the press.
I sincerely own that those reproaches may have some foundation. I believe also, I might possibly be able to answer them, even without exceeding the length of a preface: but it is clear, that were I to attempt to answer every thing, I could do nothing else; and that if I had deemed it requisite to do so, I should at once have suppressed both preface and book.
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EXTRACT FROM THE CORRESPONDENCE ON WHAT CONCERNS THE HAPPINESS OF MAN AND SOCIETY.
[No. III.]
THE UTILITY OF NOVELS.
THE NOVEL OF DANGEROUS CONNECTIONS.
Are novels useful, or are they prejudicial to the morals? is a question long agitated, and not yet resolved; for the reasons on both sides are equally plausible. Undoubtedly Richardson[1], who is read and cited every where, though prolix and diffuse, has not a little contributed to the practice of pure morality; and yet, on the other hand, what mischiefs have been produced by the immense multitude of novels of all sorts with which France and all Europe have been overrun for some years past; and, as if the evil done by these temporary plagues was not sufficiently accomplished during their short existence, it is prolonged by reviving them in eternal collections. A novel, the morality of which is equivocal, is a very dangerous poison; a novel that only possesses mediocrity, is at best useless. Even a good novel is but aliment for a child, or some weak being, to whom morality unadorned is a disgusting object. Hence we may conclude, that every thinking man will take care to banish this kind of works from his library.
He will then likewise proscribe that novel, now so much prized, called Dangerous Connections, or Letters collected in a Society, and published for the Instruction of other Societies.
After having read a few pages of this work, one is almost led to think this title a piece of pleasantry; the letters of Madame de Merteuil, and of the Viscount de Valmont, published truly for the instruction of society. Is it in order to form people to the detestable art of seduction, or to inspire them with a horror of it? and yet this work has been censured, and approved; has had all the honours of war, while so many other useful works are like the manes of the ancients, to whom a sepulchre was denied, and who were forced to wander upon the gloomy banks of the Styx, and admitted only by stealth. O cæcas hominum mentes!
I am far from a wish to calumniate the author, who, I am assured, is a military man of the highest character for wit and good conduct; but his work, which seems to have a moral end in view, is in reality very dangerous. It has been said to be a picture of the manners of a certain class in society; and, if it was not a resemblance, where would be its utility? Must monsters be created to cause in us an aversion of ordinary vices? If it is true, it ought to have been concealed; there are shocking nudities which our minds revolt at rather than receive any instruction from. The veil that covers the Tiberiuses and the Messalinas, ought not to be wholly lifted up.
Young men will find in this novel easy means of seduction; young women will here see portraits of embellished vice; and old libertines will be amused by the exploits of Valmont. But what a monster is Valmont, if such a character exists; and those who know that class of society, assure us, they have met with many such. If there really are such beings, ought not their society to be avoided carefully? It is a forest filled with robbers: to enter it we should be well armed. It is a road full of great precipices, to avoid falling into which, we must be very circumspect.
What a character is the Marchioness de Merteuil! Sometimes she is a Medea, sometimes a Messalina. Read the tenth letter: vice is to be drawn; but should it be drawn in such seducing colours? Are there many young people who will prefer the character of a virtuous man to the brilliant and lively one of the profligate Valmont? Are there many who will not blush at the awkwardness of Cecilia? And when one blushes at being ridiculed, they are not very far from the vice that exempts them from it. In France, ridicule is too much dreaded; they would rather be vicious; and this book will rather assist that taste.
The style of romances may serve to lead us to the knowledge of the morals of ages and nations. Thus the country, which has lately produced the natural and moving Henrietta of Gerstenfeld, is far from the state of depravity of Paris and London. I form my opinion from the book. In the last age the French novels were full of gallantry and virtuous love, because then they were gallant and respectful. In this age, they have substituted wit to love, and the novels are stuffed with an unintelligible jargon of metaphysics. Of this they grew tired, and libertinism succeeded to it. From thence so many licentious romances. The immense quantity that are produced is a complete proof of the corruption of the age; the rapidity with which they are bought, the rage with which they are devoured, farther prove this depravation.
Doing justice to the zeal that seems to animate the author of those observations, we may be permitted, I hope, to make some farther remarks on the manner he has presented his? Before we begin to examine the degree of moral utility contained in the novel of Dangerous Connections, the author of the correspondence first begs leave to ask whether novels in general are useful or prejudicial to morals? This method is the most prudent; but is it not singular, that, acknowledging the indecision of this question, because the reasons for and against are equally seducing, he is still so bold to condemn, indiscriminately, all novels, without assigning any new reasons in justification of this definitive sentence? On the contrary, the author asserts, Richardson's novels have been useful to morality, to preserve them in their purity and in the same breath advises all thinking men to banish them from their libraries! Are the consequences suitable to the premises? Is not that confounding the genus with the species? But if it was even true, that the best novel is only food for infancy, or a weak being, for whom unadorned morality is a terrifying object, would the author's decision be the more justifiable? I will not determine; but I would ask what he means by those thinking men, for whom unadorned morality is not terrifying? It would be, perhaps, those declaiming misanthropes, who censure and despise every thing that does not bear a resemblance to their savage and austere way of thinking? I have sometimes had a good opinion of their understanding, but been ever diffident of their hearts; were we to attend to them, we should also banish from our libraries the divine poem of Telemachus, which is the first of novels, which modest qualification does not hinder it from being, if one may venture to call it, the first of our books; not only by the grandeur of the business it treats, but also by the manner in which it is treated. We should also banish from our libraries even the works of the Correspondence, the morality of which is become very interesting, by an ornamented, pure and elegant style; if, notwithstanding those qualities, this work has its opposers, would it find many readers if it was divested of them? God forbid I should ever intend making a general apology for all novels! that would be the idea of a Demoniac[2]; I only mean to justify useful novels. If any one makes a bad use of this kind of writing, I most willingly acquiesce in their condemnation. Let us now examine whether the author of Dangerous Connections deserves to suffer.
What is a novel? A correct picture of morals put in motion.—What should be the aim of a novel? To blend instruction with amusement.—When the morals of the actors are corrupt, is it allowable, with deference to decency, to draw them in their proper shades and colours? Undoubtedly it is; but with the greatest caution, lest by giving vice, whose contagion must be dreaded, its true, though seducing and agreeable aspect, without resisting, diminishing, or rendering useless, the effect it may produce by the contrast of gentleness, peace, and happiness, which virtue secures. The author of the Errors of the Heart and Mind, and the other of the Confessions of the Count of ——, have gone wide of this mark; yet their characters are drawn after nature; the Meilcourts are still the ornament of the Bon Ton societies. But should irregularities be drawn without inflicting their punishment? Should vice, with impunity, applaud its infamous triumphs? Should innocence weep without being avenged? Certainly not. Those novels deserve the severest censure of the author of the Correspondence; those are the books which should be carefully concealed from the busy curiosity of young people. Let any one take the trouble to compare the works I have now quoted, and similar ones, with the novel of Dangerous Connections, shall we not always feel a certain aversion, a kind of antipathy for Valmont and the Marchioness de Merteuil, notwithstanding the brilliant cast he has given two performers. Let some attention be paid to the skill with which he has contrasted them in the gentle, sensible, and generous Madame de Rosemonde; how moving, how unaffected her virtue. The following letter, wrote to the victim of the profligate Valmont, is, in my opinion, alone sufficient to counterbalance, at least, the impression this same Valmont, and the infamous accomplice in his crimes, could make.
LETTER CXXX.
Madame de Rosemonde, to the Presidente de Tourvel.
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"Why, my lovely dear, will you no longer be my daughter? Why do you seem to announce that our correspondence is to cease?1 Is it to punish me for not guessing at what was improbable; or do you suspect me of creating you affliction designedly? I know your heart too well, to imagine you would entertain such an opinion of mine.—The distress your letter plunges me in is much less on my own account than yours. Oh! my young friend, with grief I tell you, you are too worthy of being beloved ever to be happy in love. Where is there a truly delicate and sensible woman, who has not met unhappiness where she expected bliss? Do men know how to rate the women they possess?
"Not but many of them are virtuous in their addresses, and constant in their affections—but even among those, how few that know how to put themselves in unison with our hearts. I do not imagine, my dear child, their affection is like ours. They experience the same transport often with more violence, but they are strangers to that uneasy officiousness, that delicate solicitude, that produces in us those continual tender cares, whose sole aim is the beloved object. Man enjoys the happiness he feels, woman that she gives.
"This difference, so essential, and so seldom observed, influences, in a very sensible manner, the totality of their respective conduct. The pleasure of the one is to gratify desires; but that of the other is to create them. To know to please is in man the means of success; and in woman it is success itself.
"And do not imagine the exceptions, be they more or less numerous, that may be quoted, can be successfully opposed to those general truths, which the voice of the public has guarantied, with the only distinction as to men of infidelity from inconstancy; a distinction of which they avail themselves, and of which they should be ashamed; which never has been adopted by any of our sex but those of abandoned characters, who are a scandal to us, and to whom all methods are acceptable which they think may deliver them from the painful sensation of their own meanness.
"I thought, my lovely dear, those reflections might be of use to you, in order to oppose the chimerical ideas of perfect happiness, with which love never fails to amuse our imagination. Deceitful hope! to which we are still attached, even when we find ourselves under the necessity of abandoning it—whose loss multiplies and irritates our already too real sorrows, inseparable from an ardent passion. This task of alleviating your trouble, or diminishing their number, is the only one I will or can now fulfil. In disorders which are without remedy, no other advice can be given, than as to the regimen to be observed. The only thing I wish you to remember is, that to pity is not to blame a patient. Alas! who are we, that we dare blame one another? Let us leave the right of judging to the Searcher of hearts; and I will even venture to believe, that in his paternal sight, a crowd of virtues may compensate a single weakness.
"But I conjure you, above all things, my dear friend, to guard against violent resolutions, which are less the effects of fortitude than despondency: do not forget, that although you have made another possessor of your existence (to use your own expression) you had it not in your power to deprive your friends of the share they were before possessed of, and which they will always claim.
"Adieu, my dear child! Think sometimes on your tender mother; and be assured you always will be, above every thing, the dearest object of her thoughts.
"Castle of ——."
If the openness of the little Volanges, or her ignorance, should seem ridiculous to those of her own age, the unhappy consequences that resulted from it, will be an useful lesson to mothers to be cautious in what hands they intrust the education of their children. But can a young girl, who has once imbibed this bad education, avoid the consequences I mention, without any other guide but her timidity and absolute ignorance of vice? Is it in a corrupt world, in which she is just entering, that she will receive the fatal knowledge? Does not the author of the Correspondence himself say, "To enter it, we should be well armed; it is a road full of precipices: to avoid falling into which, we must be very circumspect." This is all well—But if, unfortunately, I am blind, or without a guide, who is to restore me sight, or lead me? I conclude, then, that a young person, who would be pleased, at first, with the brilliant character of the Marchioness de Merteuil, would soon change her opinion, and not be tempted to imitate her, when she would see the dreadful and examplary punishment inflicted on this guilty woman. She will shudder at the thought of the miseries to which one single fault condemned Cecilia Volanges. Valmont perishing in the bloom of life, by a violent death, loaded with the contempt and disgrace of all men of worth, disowned even by the wicked, will deter all those, whose vanity and a desire to shine might induce them to copy such a character, from attempting to imitate him.
(By the ABBÉ KENTZINGER.)
1 See Letter cxxviii.
LETTER I.
CECILIA VOLANGES to SOPHIA CARNAY, at the Convent of the Ursulines of ——.
* * * * *
You see, my dear friend, I keep my word, and that dress does not totally take up all my time; I shall ever have some left for you. In this single day I have seen more finery of attire, than in the four years we have spent together; and I believe the haughty Tanville1 will be more mortified at my first visit, when I shall certainly desire to see her, than she used to be every time she came to see us in fiochi[3]. Mamma advises with me in every thing; she behaves to me no longer as a boarder in a convent. I have a chamber-maid to myself; a chamber and a closet of my own, and a very pretty scrutoire, of which I keep the key, and where I can lock up every thing. My Mamma has told me, I must be with her every morning at her levee; that it would be sufficient to have my head dressed by dinner, because we should always be alone, and that then she would each day tell me what time I should come to her apartment in the evening. The remainder of my time is at my own disposal; I have my harpsichord, my drawings, and books, just as in the convent, only that the mother abbess is not here to scold. And I may always be idle, if I please: but as I have not my dear Sophy to chat and laugh with, I am as well pleased with some occupation. It is not yet five, and I am not to go to Mamma till seven: what a deal of time, if I had any thing to tell you! but nothing has been yet mentioned to me of any consequence: and if it were not for the preparation I see making, and the number of women employed for me, I should be apt to think they have no notion of my nuptials, and that it was one of old Josephine's2 tales. Yet Mamma having so often told me, that a young lady should remain in a convent, until she was on the point of marriage, and having now brought me home, I am apt to think Josephine right.
A coach has just stopped at our door, and Mamma has sent for me. If it should be my intended!—I am not dressed, and am all in agitation; my heart flutters. I asked my maid, if she knew who was with my Mamma? "Why," says she, laughing, "it is Mr. C——." I really believe it is he. I will certainly return and write you the whole; however, that's his name. I must not make them wait. Adieu, for a moment!
How you will laugh at your poor Cecilia, my dear Sophy! I'm quite ashamed! But you would have been deceived as well as I. On entering Mamma's room, I saw a gentleman in black, standing close by her, I saluted him as well as I could, and remained motionless. You may guess, I examined him from head to foot. "Madam," said he to Mamma, "this is a most charming young lady, and I am extremely sensible of your goodness." So positive a declaration made me tremble all over; and not being able to support me, I threw myself in an armed chair, quite red and disconcerted. In an instant he was at my knees, and then you may judge how poor Cecilia's head was bewildered; I instantly started up and shrieked, just as on the day of the great thunder. Mamma burst out laughing, saying, "Well, what's the matter? Sit down, and give Mr. —— your foot." Thus, my dear friend, Mr. —— turns out to be my shoemaker. You can't conceive how much I was ashamed; happily, there was no one but Mamma present. I am, however, resolved when I am married he shall not be my shoemaker. Well! am I not now much the wiser? Farewell! it is almost six, and my maid says it is time to dress. Adieu! my dear Sophy; I love you as much as I did at the convent.
P. S. I don't know whom to send with this, and shall wait till Josephine calls.
Paris, Aug. 3, 17—.
1 A boarder in the same convent.
2 Josephine was the portress of the convent.
