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    Dangerous Liaisons
    Dangerous Liaisons
    Dangerous Liaisons
    Ebook788 pages11 hours

    Dangerous Liaisons

    By Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

    4/5

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    In this famous story of seduction, two highly intelligent but amoral French aristocrats plot the downfall of a respectable young married woman and a fifteen year old girl who has only just emerged from the convent.  The letters these two conspirators exchange are remarkably frank in describing how they manage to achieve their ends and, at the same time, reveal nuances of character which make it impossible to dismiss either of them as simply evil.  

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWordsworth Editions
    Release dateOct 1, 2014
    ISBN9781848706095
    Author

    Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

    Pierre Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos, né à Amiens le 18 octobre 1741 et mort à Tarente, le 5 septembre 1803, est un officier de carrière qui a traversé la Révolution française et a beaucoup écrit sur des sujets très divers, mais qui est surtout connu comme l'auteur du roman épistolaire Les Liaisons dangereuses.

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    Reviews for Dangerous Liaisons

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    • 4/5
      In letter form, two rich bored French nobles (one female, one male) seduce and ruin whoever takes their fancy. It was very shocking for its time, especially as it was thought to be about real people. Mostly entertaining but I feel it gets very bogged down and dull in the middle section. A rare case when the movie was better.
    • 4/5
      Deliciously decadent novel of intrigue and bad influence, in a sparkling new translation. Thoroughly enjoyable.
    • 4/5
      What a pleasant surprise this book was. Although written in the late 1770s as an epistolary novel, an almost extinct structural device, the content was impressively dateless. The translation by Helen Constantine probably helped this effect - although not excessively modernised, the clear, concise text was probably more readable than the original French.The plot centres on two aristocrats playing cat and mouse with the lives and loves of others. The story plays on the capriciousness of the two evil characters, and the more normal responses of those around them. I found myself absorbed in the story and finding it sadly believable.I was impressed by the skill of the author to create a plot that moved along smoothly within the confines of the epistolary structure. The book was inspired by an earlier English novel "Clarissa" but it seems that this one is the one with greater depth in the psychology. In the end, the author uses great skill to bring the threads together, despatch all the main characters, and make a good end to the long tale. I recently read that Jane Austen attempted an epistolary novel, but gave up half way through - it is clearly a difficult structure to carry off successfully.Read March 2016
    • 4/5
      Had this book since watching Cruel Intentions (this book was source material). An enjoyable though disturbing read.
    • 5/5
      What can I say about such a classic?The story revolves around two friends/ex-lovers who entertain themselves with the game of seduction. Set in Paris in the 1700s, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil write to each other about their daily activities and their schemes for ruination and destruction.Despite the fact that it's written in the florid language of the 18th century, it's a quick read, though a bit heavy. You'll have to sift through different meanings of words, especially since there are so many! Despite the fact that the two main characters are in no way "good people," you'll want to know what happens to them, good or bad. You'll want to know if Valmont succeeds, and hear another tale of Merteuil's. I recommend it for everyone, even if the subject matter isn't universally liked.
    • 3/5
      It is difficult to know where to begin with this review. A convoluted story, told in epistolary form, of sex and revenge in 18th century France. It is the story of two people's malicious games that they play and it how it affects the innocent. The Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil make a bet: if the Vicomte can seduce the married Madame de Tourvel, then the Marquise will sleep with him. Along the way each sleep with numerous others by design and for the purpose of hurt. There is even the rape of a 15 year old girl; although French society doesn’t see it as such at the time. The just (?) desserts at the end, where they turn on each other, is the best part! This book is 448 pages long, about 200 pages too long!
    • 5/5
      What a delightful, intriguing, naughty little book. This story tells the tale of the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquis de Merteuil, two bored aristocrats who decide to amuse themselves through seduction and deceit. As printed on the back of the Oxford World's Classics edition: "In the ensuing vicious battle there can be no victors, an the innocent will suffer with the guilty."A bit of a warning, this book is not for those uncomfortable with sexual acts. Laclos's novel has been called, perhaps a bit rightly, a manual in seduction. There are so many affairs going on and people going around behind other people's back that sometimes, a character chart would have been helpful. To give you just a taste of what I'm talking about, here are the main storylines: The Vicomte de Valmont is a notorious womanizer. He has now set his eyes on a judge's wife, Madame de Tourvel, a very pious woman. While attempting to seduce her, he takes as his ward fifteen year old Cecile Volanges. She's young, pretty, and totally naive after having been raised in a convent. She's also in love with Chevalier Danceny, a twenty year old poet and musician, and he's in love with her. It's a very innocent sort of romance.The Marquis de Merteuil, one of Valmont's old flames, hates the Comte de Gercourt. Merteuil, who goes around with men as much as Valmont does with women, is angry at Gercourt for basically dumping her. Gercourt is engaged to Cecile. In order to get revenge on Gercourt, Merteuil tries to convince Valmont to seduce her as well. Meanwhile, she starts to seduce Danceny.Valmont initially doesn't want to, claiming it would be too easy. However, when Madame de Volanges, Cecile's mother, warns Tourvel of his reputation with the ladies (i.e. love 'em and leave 'em), Valmont decides to get revenge on the mother through the daughter.This is pretty much how the entire book goes. I, for one, loved it. Laclos provides us with a view of the French aristocracy in the 1700s. This book is his protest against the corruption he was witness to. He also addresses some serious issues, such as women's rights. There is one slightly disturbing rape scene in the book where the one who's doing the raping convinces his female victim that she is helpless. He's in her room at night. Were anyone to spot them, her reputation would be ruined and he would get a slap on the wrist. Laclos's skill as a writer is evident as he manages to show the reader these very serious issues through the letters flippant and artificial tone. All in all, I'd definitely recommend this book. If you're not sure, perhaps try watching the movie Cruel Intentions. It was based off of Les Liaisons Dangereuses.
    • 5/5
      Excellent! Scrumptious characters all...ending is a bit rushed, though.
    • 4/5
      First of all, the epistolary format is used masterfully by Mr. de Laclos. Each character has their own way of speaking, of language used, of expressions included. The reader gets a real feel for the characters to where one almost doesn't need the headings to know who is talking. Secondly, the overall story left me discouraged. So many lives destroyed because of the selfish and evil actions of Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil. Truly, though they were clever and intellectual and witty, they were such unattractive characters, particularly as the story went on and lives began to be greatly impacted. I'm not sure that I fully appreciated this tragedy when I read this book as a young person.
    • 4/5
      This is a novel told in letters featuring two of the greatest manipulators ever created, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil. They are a couple of the idle rich in pre-revolutionary France who pass their time in having affairs in a cold-blooded way, to exert power, getting at least as much pleasure out of being cruel to people and subsequently ruining them, as they do in the actual pleasures of the flesh. Their prey? One is a fifteen year old virgin fresh out of the convent, Cecile Volanges, who has been engaged to be married to an older man. Another is a prim and proper married woman, a “prude”, Madame de Tourvel. Valmont seeks to conquer both with direction and assistance from the Marquise, who also has her sights on Danceny, a young man who has fallen in love with Cecile. Valmont wants to mold Cecile to his fantasies, doing whatever he wants with her, and with such vigor that she will remember him for the rest of her life as her best lover, thus “spoiling her”. However in conquering Madame de Tourvel, he seeks something far worse - he wants to get her to fall in love with him and to submit to him, even though she has been warned about his reputation. Madame de Merteuil, for her part, seeks to control the action of both Valmont and the young innocents, as well as have affairs in ways with men that lead to them disgraced in society, and her reputation unsullied. They are reptilian allies in pure evil, but while the Marquise condones Valmont’s attempts with Cecile, knowing it’s only physical, she is jealous of Madame de Tourvel, knowing the connection is admiration bordering on love (to the extent Valmont is capable of such an emotion), and because Tourvel is truly rare in her virtue as she holds out. There is thus a tension between the two which lurks in the background for most of the book, and at some point they must clash.“Les Liaisons Dangereuses” is one of those “morality tales” in that lessons can be derived, but at the same time, it was meant to shock and titillate. In 1782 it was considered pornography and banned, no doubt spurred along with those editions which had been lasciviously illustrated (sadly, this Barnes & Noble Classics is not :p). To the modern reader it’s pretty tame; the sex is only alluded to indirectly, though it may be more powerful as a result. The book is really about power and seduction in those who are evil, and true love and duty in those who are good, which, while seeming simplistic, held my interest throughout. I found the format of letters to be effective as it allowed emotions to unfold, different perspectives on the same events, and showed the outright two-facedness of the manipulators to be revealed in ways that you might find “delicious”, to use the cliché that seems so fitting here. The letters only get a little slow in repetitiveness in a couple of sections, and I thought the pace was good, though it is a pretty lengthy book. It makes me want to go watch the 1988 Academy Award winning movie of the same name. I was also unaware that the 1999 movie Cruel Intentions was based on the same characters, but it makes sense now.Quotes:On love, this from Danceny to Cecile:“And what have I to tell you, that my eyes, my embarrassment, my conduct and even my silence have not told you already? And why should you take offense at a sentiment to which you have given birth? Emanating from you, it is doubtless worthy to be offered to you; if it is ardent as my soul, it is pure as your own. Shall it be a crime to have known how to appreciate your charming face, your seductive talents, your enchanting graces, and that touching candor which adds inestimable value to qualities already so precious?”On love, or an affair, denied, from Tourvel to Valmont: “Loved and esteemed by a husband whom I both love and respect, my duty and my pleasure are centered in the same object. I am happy, I must be so. If pleasures more keen exist, I do not desire them; I would not know them. Can there be any that are sweeter than that of being at peace with oneself, of knowing only days that are serene, of sleeping without trouble and awaking without remorse? What you call happiness is but a tumult of the senses, a tempest of passions of which the mere view from the shore is terrible. Ah! why confront these tempests? How dare embark upon a sea covered with the debris of so many thousand shipwrecks? And with whom? No Monsieur, I stay on the shore; I cherish the bonds which unite me to it. I would not break them if I could; were I not held by them, I should hasten to procure them.”Later:“Do not think that absence will ever alter my sentiments for you: how shall I ever succeed in overcoming them, when I have no longer the courage to combat them? You see, I tell you all; I fear less to confess my weakness than to succumb to it; but that control which I have lost over my feelings I shall retain over my actions; yes, I shall retain it, I am resolved, be it at the cost of my life.”On the passionless, this in a letter from Merteuil to Valmont:“What a disgrace if you fail! and how little glory even if you succeed! I say more; expect no pleasure from it. Is there ever any with your prudes? I mean those in good faith. Reserved in the very midst of pleasure, they give you but a half enjoyment. That utter self-abandonment, that delirium of joy, where pleasure is purified by excess, those good things of love are not known to them. I warn you: in the happiest supposition, your Presidente will think she has done everything for you, if she treats you as her husband; and in the most tender of conjugal tete-a-tetes you are always two.”
    • 5/5
      Very compelling. Can you trust either of these characters in their plot? Great read even though written in 1782.
    • 5/5
      Well, a masterpiece is a masterpiece. This was the book that showed me the beauty of the epistolary literature.Before I used to think that letters were boring. Let the author prove you wrong on this one. It was instant love from the second letter. I read the opening lines "ma tres cher viconte" and shuddered with pleasure.
    • 4/5
      Incredibly good tale of two 18th century ruthless ex-lovers who enjoy nothing more than a good seduction. The book is told in a series of letters between the pair-- Valmont and Merteuil as they put a plan into action to seduce a convent girl as a way to get back at another of Merteuil's former lovers. Despite the heavy language and somewhat familiar feel (since so many movies have stolen from the plot,) the book is a compelling and easy read.
    • 5/5
      Forget the movie and the play, the original book is stunning -- one of the best I have ever read in my life. I recommend it as highly as possible. The writing and plotting is beyond brilliant, each letter (it's a novel entirely composed of letters), has at least two, if not three or four, ways in which it can be understood. It's an orgy of meaning and of course an orgy in the more ordinary sense of the word as well. It's recognized as a chilling look at the worst of human nature -- I'd also argue it's a subtle and remarkable account of the nature and fragility of human good.
    • 4/5
      I don't know if this has occurred to anyone else, but all the machinations and pretenses ended up reminding me of the idea of courtly love -- of Andreas Capellanus' The Art of Courtly Love. Obviously the context is very different, and there is a consciousness of wickedness that isn't there with the medieval form of courtly love. But even so, the comparison was just so obvious to me.It's a very well put together piece of work, and I appreciate its ambiguities as well -- the translation and accompanying notes are very good. It is, of course, full of horrible people, but I think anyone who knows anything about the book knows that in advance.
    • 4/5
      Sublieme opbouw met spiegel-effecten en parallellen. Ultieme corrumpering van het woord: illustratie van de macht van het woord en de taal; Bij Valmont en Mme de Merteuil draait het uiteindelijk om macht, niet zozeer om verleiding.Nieuwigheid is niet de libertijnse graaf (al bekend van Lovelace in Richardsons Clarissa Harlow 1748), wel libertijnse vrouw!
    • 5/5
      Definitely the best epistolary book I have ever read and probably one of the best books displaying the double morale in the eighteenth century Paris.Monsieur de Laclos masters the style, creating two hero-villain characters whom, although monsters without scruples, one can't help to admire. They are playful, amusing, witty and skillful in the art of deception. They are also vain, prideful creatures who seek their own pleasure without caring for the outcome of their poor victims.Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont are incredibly wealthy and deadly bored . So they play dangerous games for entertainment, imposing challenges to each other, seducing young virgins, making adulteress out of prude virtuous women, taking revenge of formers lovers... and they succeed in doing all the mischief they want without being discovered. What's more, they are honourable and well received in society.Imagine their mirth when they accomplish every evil scheme they propose while they become their victims' only friends and saviours.But apart from the elaborated style and the amusing display of strategic tactics which thread the story, one can't miss the allusion to the thin line of what's morally right or wrong. Is "what is socially accepted" the true and only way?Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont are not exemplary models of sincerity or frankness, but they challenge the imposed rules somehow, they outwit hypocrisy, the problem is that they only do it to achieve only their own pleasure, corrupting their souls and everyone who dare to trust in them.In my opinion, it's incredible that a novel written more than 180 years ago, might still stir deep emotions in those who can invest a moment of their time to think about the possible reasons that led a man like M. de Laclos to write this controversial story.Don't take this novel only as a mere diverting reading, it's much more than that. It's about recognising that each of us has some of the Vicomte or of the Marquise in us, we are vain and proud and think ourselves superiors to the rest. That's why I value this work, because it reminds us of what wretched creatures we humans can become.
    • 5/5
      Dangerous Liaisons, the classic French story of how the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont use sex to destroy the innocent, humiliate their enemies and also to amuse themselves. Fantastic twist and seriously good plot turns.

      Film adaptations include the marvelous period piece with Glen Close and John Malcovitch and also the modern adaptation Cruel Intentions with Buffy the Vampire slayer which is ok.

      Get the book for free at the internet archive where it's listed under the title, "Dangerous connections, a series of letters."
    • 5/5
      This is one of my top 3 favorite books. One of the best epistolary novels ever written, it chronicles the adventures of two courtiers, le ViComte Valmont and Marquise de Merteuil and their manipulative adventures in the world of courtly "love." Spurned by her lover, Merteuil wants to corrupt his finace by having someone take her virginity. Meanwhile, Valmont is insistant of seducing the young and beautiful Mme de Tourvel, a devoted wife. When these two devious seducers make a bet regarding Valmont's success in seducing Tourvel, amorous hell breaks loose, leading to the corruption of more than one innocent. It's a juicy read, full of beautiful people, beautiful language and an adundance of intrigue!
    • 5/5
      “Les liaisons dangereuses” tells the shocking story of two friends who amuse themselves by pursuing sexual relationships for the sole purpose of gaining power and destroying the character of their victims. Using an epistolary style that implicates the reader in making him read about events that would better have stayed private, the novel poses a great moral question: is it truly possible to be the victim of romantic manipulation, or is innocence of the dangers of trusting a stranger just as grave a fault? As the character Madame de Volanges explains, "I see the wicked punished in all this; but I find no consolation in it for their unfortunate victims." There are critics who agree with me that the novel is sometimes a bit heavy and that Laclos could have suppressed a few repetitive passages, but in general I found that the big questions of the novel were worth the slightly difficult work of reading.The Barnes and Noble edition of this book contains biographical information on the life of Laclos and his times, footnotes glossing difficult vocabulary, endnotes explaining historical and literary references cited throughout the novel, two letters excised from the original manuscript, a summary of film adaptations of the work, a set of critical comments and questions to guide further discussion, and a bibliography of additional sources pertaining to the text.
    • 3/5
      It had a very slow start, but the psychopath-ness of Merteuil and Valmont is still shocking and horrible (though the rest of the book hasn't aged as well). The footnotes of this edition were either unneeded or not present, plus if it's a translation why not just use the footnote version?
    • 5/5
      Dangerous Liaisons is another book on the 1001 list, and one that rightfully deserves to be there, IMHO. It is an epistolary novel (a novel composed all of letters), which is one of my favourite forms (Austen's Lady Susan, Shelley's Frankenstein). Written in the late 1700s, Dangerous Liaisons is the correspondance of a group of French aristocrats who have an awful lot of time on their hands. What they spend their time doing is surprisingly interesting.The plot has two major storylines:1. The Vicomte de Valmont, a notorious womanizer, has set his sights on the virtuous Madame de Tourvel, a married woman known for her good character. Valmont's plan is to seduce Tourvel and then ruin her reputation. Why? Because it's fun.2. The Marquise de Merteuil, Valmont's ex-lover and main correspondant, as well as fellow evil-doer, sets her sights on young Cecile Volanges, a fifteen year old girl who arranged marriage to Gercourt is impending. Gercourt used to be the lover of Merteuil, but he left her for another woman. Thus, Merteuil plans to ruin Cecile, and thus embarrass Gercourt.Add to this Danceny, the man Cecile really loves; Cecile's overbearing mother; and Valmont's well-meaning aunt, and you have a cast of characters who just might deserve the fate Valmont and Merteuil hope to bring to fruition.Of course, complications arise, conquests are gained, and - shock - someone might actually show some real emotions!Dangerous Liaisons was quite the ride. If you enjoy Classic Literature, give this one a go. I was surprised at how scandalous it was, and enjoyed it for every juicy moment.
    • 2/5
      I really enjoyed the introduction to the book and background on its history and author. I give that 4 stars. The letters themselves/characters are kind of bland and boring as far as people go. I can't say I find it very clever or titillating. The only person of interest is the young Cécile de Volanges. I usually don't feel a need to skim her letters.
    • 5/5
      une langue magnifique, un livre sur la psychologie humaine, et une certaine "élite sociale" qui a payé sa coupure totale avec la société francaise par sa disparition. historique et intemporel.
    • 5/5
      Thrilling and neatly written, with vivid characters. The rules and morals of eighteenth century aristocracy are manipulated and broken by the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, and every move is recorded in their delicious correspondence. As always, it's the antagonists who prove the most fascinating and attractive, though Madame de Tourvel and Cecile are just as believable in their innocence. Beautiful style and creative narrative maintain this book as a classic.
    • 5/5
      It's a rare thing to find a Great Work of Literature which is both fun to read and (ultimately) morally edifying. Laclos has a real talent for creating characters so terrifically evil that you can't help admire them, at least a little. Then of course, when you see how tragically it all ends up, it's hard not to feel a little culpable for throwing your sympathies with the wrong folk. Which, one supposes, is exactly what this brilliant author intends.
    • 3/5
      I read the audio production by audible, it was well done but it is abbreviated. But a very good dramatic presentation with multiple narrators.
    • 5/5
      An absolutely magnificent novel! To think that it was published in 1782, seven years before the French Revolution. Liberté, égalité, fraternité! It has thus been argued that the novel caught a doomed aristocracy amidst decadent and libertine ways that would soon be its undoing. The gift the novel's main characters display for casuistry, calumny, prevarication and cynical self-involvement takes the breath away even now. I've read it twice then bought this gorgeous Folio Society edition to commemorate past readings and carry me through future ones. A stunning novel. A book for real readers.
    • 5/5
      7/20 Just read it. It's good for you. And by good, I mean...well...not good precisely, since the entire novel is devoid of any kind of morality, but the story is brilliant, the writing is brilliant, and the portrayal of manipulation is just brilliant. A book to make you wonder what love us, and if we are capable of doing anything but use others to our own ends, it can be read either as pure entertainment, or as a more serious read - either way, you will enjoy it. And laugh. A lot. And be highly disturbed. It's hard to know who to root for, but that's part of what makes it fun. The relationship between Valmont and Meurteuille is fascinating, and the mystery of the two central characters keeps us reading. The bad are punished, but so are the good, and in the end, there are no straight answers - just the taste of corruption and laviciousness in our mouth. Again. Brilliant. If you read french, read it in french. It's much better that way.
    • 4/5
      I appreciate the literary significance of this epistolary novel, and I'm glad I finished it, but it was a struggle. The first 2 parts of the book I found to be boring, but I enjoyed parts 3 and 4. These aristocrat characters live in France right before the revolution. They are connected by various unhealthy love connections and clearly have too much time on their hands. The overarching theme of the book is good vs. evil. Smaller themes center on desire and war (i.e. the battle of various sexual exploits). I do recommend reading this book because of its literary weight, but it’s not an easy read.

    Book preview

    Dangerous Liaisons - Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

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    Introduction

    Laclos, or Pierre-Ambroise-François Choderlos de Laclos, to give him his extravagantly full name, was born in Amiens in October 1741. His parents sent him to a military academy so that he could become an army officer. After graduating, he chose the artillery rather than the cavalry or infantry, probably because this was the section of the army where there was less prejudice against young men from families which, like his own, had only recently bought themselves into the nobility. He took his profession seriously, becoming a specialist in ballistics and an enthusiast for the latest improvements in fortification. Despite seeing no action, he moved steadily up the officer ranks, spending most of his time in garrisons on the French border. From 1769 to 1775, for example, he was in Grenoble which, long before Savoy became French, was much more on a border than is the case now. The town had a reputation for loose living amongst its upper classes and it was in those social circles where unmarried army officers were made welcome that Laclos may well have learnt, or merely observed, the rituals of courtship and seduction which play such an important role in Dangerous Liaisons. Stendhal, who was born in Grenoble in 1783 and brought up there, recalled knowing an old lady who was confidently thought by all the locals to have been the model for the Marquise de Merteuil. [1] Although it is possible she was flattered by this attribution, it is more likely that she was not best pleased.

    Most of the actual writing of Dangerous Liaisons took place not in the east but the west of France, on the island of Aix which lies just off the port of La Rochelle (Laclos had been sent there in 1779 to help inspect and reconstruct fortifications principally designed to fend off the English). In 1781 he took leave from the army and went to Paris to oversee the publication of his novel, which came out in the spring of the following year. He was not entirely new to author­ship having previously published some poetry, now deservedly forgotten, and two libretti for comic operas, one of which was never staged while the other was withdrawn after a disastrous first night; but Les Liaisons dangereuses (to give it its French title) was his first novel and, as it happens, his last. He is later reported as having claimed that he had ‘resolved to write a book which would create some stir in the world and continue to do so after he had gone from it’. [2] Both these objectives were achieved. Success was immediate, with a thousand copies sold in the first week, partly because the picture the novel painted of contemporary aristocratic society was so damning, and such an encouragement to the seething resentment with social arrangements which was beginning to infiltrate all levels of French life. There was also the fact that readers could play at detecting real-life originals of the characters. Dangerous Liaisons was one of those books which come to be regarded as scandalous and which everyone therefore wants to read. In the 1820s, during the conservative reaction that followed Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, it achieved the distinction of being condemned as dangerous by the French authorities and an order went out for all existing copies to be destroyed. All this suggests is that it was still being read, and it has been read ever since, firmly establishing itself as one of the best French novels of the eighteenth, or any other century, and enjoying a rich, extended life in the cinema. [3]

    Dangerous Liaisons has become a classic despite being that strange creature, an epistolary novel. For many writers nowadays, to tell your story exclusively through letters would be like going on to the tennis court with one arm tied behind your back. It means that none of the action can be described directly and that information which is essential to its understanding has to be ‘let slip’ by one or other of the letter writers. Now that the ‘omniscient narrator’ is not so much in fashion, it perhaps matters less that there can be no central point of view to guide the reader’s sympathies; but it may often prove difficult to establish context in an epistolary novel because that involves details of dress, physical appearance and setting with which individual letter writers are all too familiar, and have no obvious motive for communicating to others.

    The way these and other disadvantages can be turned into strengths by a writer as skilful as Laclos will be obvious enough but, if he chose the epistolary form, it was in part because there had been at least two immensely popular examples of it published quite recently. The first of these was Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), which had swept through Europe in numerous translations. The libertine or rake figure in Clarissa, Lovelace, unsuccessfully pays court to the pious young heroine and is eventually reduced to raping her, after she has been drugged. Thereafter Clarissa begins the slow decline which leads to her death while Lovelace is later killed in a duel with one of her relatives. The rape apart, there are clear similarities between Lovelace’s behaviour and Valmont’s pursuit in Dangerous Liaisons of the character called La Présidente de Tourvel (presumably because her husband is the president of one of France’s many provincial parliaments). These similarities become especially apparent as both men increasingly fall under their victims’ spell and are seriously challenged by moral values so antithetical to their own.

    The second novel in letters which helped inspire Laclos, and which is itself much indebted to Clarissa, was Rousseau’s Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761). Its story of an impoverished tutor’s love for his aristocratic young pupil was valued for such fervid expressions of intense feelings that many have since come to regard it as a precursor of Romanticism. Laclos was an admirer of Rousseau’s political and religious thinking and also of this novel. His biographer tells us that he knew several of its passages by heart and would recite them with tears in his eyes. [4] Versions of the kind of high-flown sentiments La Nouvelle Héloïse contains can be found in the Chevalier Danceny’s letters after he has fallen in love with Cécile Volanges, the fifteen-year-old who has just emerged from the convent and is about to be married off by her mother to a man more than twice her age. But they are also present in Valmont’s to Tourvel. Because these latter show how relatively easy it is for a clever and eloquent individual to feign deep feeling, and what a perfect command Valmont has of the idiom employed by Rousseau’s often unhappy lovers, they suggest that in Dangerous Liaisons Laclos might have been as much concerned with satire or parody of La Nouvelle Héloïse as with any lessons he could learn from it.

    Lessons he did however learn, as he did from Clarissa, on how to handle the epistolary novel, although there were no doubt other writers, less well known, to whom he was beholden (the novelist usually referred to as Crébillon fils for one). [5] He is more economical than his two major predecessors, rarely including a letter which does not in some way advance the plot – as Richard Aldington aptly remarked, ‘the intrigue and situation are developed with the forethought and care of a man skilled in tactics, a man accustomed to neglect no possibility’ [6] – and he is at least as artful as they are in varying the interest of his work by switching from one set of characters to another. Laclos also takes full advantage of the opportunities the form allows for viewing the same episode or situation from different points of view, and he accepts with relish the ironies which often result. A typical example is Tourvel’s early assertion that a man capable of ‘so persistent a friendship for a woman so estimable’ as the Marquise de Merteuil ‘cannot be a libertine beyond salvation’ (p. 50). The effect here is simple but Laclos’s ironies take many forms and evoke very different responses. It is hard not to admire Valmont’s ingenuity when, in bed with a courtesan and leaning his paper against her naked back, he writes a love letter to Tourvel in which almost every expression has a double meaning (Letter 48). As both his old aunt and Tourvel attribute his pallor and fatigue to disappointed love, when it is in fact a consequence of excessive copulation with Cécile, one response might be something close to a guffaw; but the reader’s feelings are likely to be quite different on hearing these two congratulate themselves on a religious conversion when we know it is just one more ruse. Then the effect can be as uncomfortable as those sometimes experienced in watching Othello since, in both cases, there is a painful tension as we wait and hope for the victims of outrageous deception to be disabused. For Cécile to have begun by calling Merteuil ‘my very dear friend’ (p.75) and Danceny to have convinced her that Valmont is working in their common interest, are equivalents of hearing Othello refer to ‘honest Iago’.

    The quality of an epistolary novel depends heavily on how carefully the characters are distinguished one from the other in the way they write. Laclos discriminates very well between the naivety and near-childishness of Cécile’s early letters and Danceny’s youthful ingenuousness. Tourvel is given great dignity and reserve, although with many reminders that she is still a young woman (only twenty-two). In the middle part of the novel, the strength of her piety and respectability can make her seem a trifle dull but, after she has fled from Valmont’s company, her language has a genuine eloquence so that she becomes, in her misery, ecstatic happiness and then remorse, a character of tragic proportions. Cécile’s mother, Madame de Volanges, is convincingly shown to be a decent but conventional person so that the only possible figure in the novel who is weakly characterised is Valmont’s aunt, Madame de Rosemonde. She is someone whose advanced age has supposedly given her great wisdom; but that does not help her to see through her nephew or criticise him until the moment when she can do no other. That the soft spot she has for him is also unrealistically blind might well make a reader feel that it is here that the demands of Laclos’s form, the need he has of Rosemonde to help explain what happens in the final part of his novel, have become intrusive: that she is in danger of dwindling into a device. Yet in a work where irony is so pervasive it may be that it was Laclos’s deliberate intention to comment mockingly on what T. S. Eliot calls, in a similar mocking spirit, ‘the gifts reserved for age’. One aspect of those gifts which seems nevertheless quite genuine is Rosemonde’s ability to articulate clearly to Tourvel the double standard of her period - as well as of several others, before and after – and note that the distinction between the venial error of infidelity (sleeping with someone else) and the much more serious matter of inconstancy is ‘for men alone’ (p. 313).

    All, or nearly all, the minor characters in Dangerous Liaisons write their letters in a way which constantly reveals who they are, but that is also true of the two major ones, even though they are both accomplished hypocrites, continually involved in deception and saying what they do not mean. Valmont is a Don Giovanni figure, intelligent, daring, eloquent and (one assumes) handsome. In only the second letter she writes, Tourvel defends him from Madame de Volanges’s criticism by saying that all the time she has been in his company he has not pronounced ‘one of those phrases which all men permit themselves, without having, like him, what is required to justify them’ (p. 49). The ‘like him’ is a sufficient indication of how strongly she is already attracted, and that attraction is confirmed when she decides to have her servant spy on him when he is no longer in her presence. Valmont clearly has great charm yet there are aspects of his personality which can only be described as pathological. When his will is thwarted, for example, he responds with the violent anger of a spoilt child and there is a strong element of cruelty in his nature that Tourvel’s resistance of him incites. ‘Ah, let her surrender, but let her first fight,’ he says at one point to Merteuil; ‘let her, without having strength to conquer, have enough to resist; let her relish at her leisure the sentiment of her weakness and be constrained to confess her defeat! Let us leave it to the obscure poacher to kill at a bound the stag he has surprised; your true hunter will give it a run (p. 70). Later – again of course to Merteuil – he says he wants to make Tourvel feel the ‘value of each of the sacrifices she shall make me; not to lead her too swiftly for remorse not to follow her; to let her virtue expire in a slow agony; to concentrate her, unceasingly, upon the heartbreaking spectacle’ (p. 155). These are not the physical torments which delighted Laclos’s contemporary, the Marquis de Sade; but they represent their psychological equivalents.

    Valmont is a vain man and this means that he is dependent on what other people think. It is clear from the way he warns Merteuil about Prévan, a practised seducer very much in his own mould, that it matters a great deal to him to be and remain top dog. When the real feelings he has begun to have for Tourvel are intensified after she has finally surrendered to him – and it is part of the subtle way Laclos manipulates the sending, receiving and hoarding of letters in this book that the one which might indicate the extent and depth of these feelings is declared missing – Merteuil is able to bring him to heel by reminding him of his reputation as someone who has seen through the fallacies of ‘love’ and is far too savvy to expose himself to the vulnerability and powerlessness it often implies. This is also the idea he has of himself and it turns out to be more important than any possible satisfactions which might result from acknow­ledging fully that Tourvel has reached depths in his nature he did not know were there.

    Valmont is a complex figure but his partner in crime is even more so. After Merteuil has described how she has tricked and humiliated Prévan, while at the same time making sure she slept with him, Valmont talks of his seduction of Cécile, observing that ‘whereas you, wielding skilfully the weapons of your sex, triumph by subtilty, I, rendering his imprescriptible rights to man, subjugated by authority’ (pp. 223–4). This is hardly something to boast about given that Cécile is so young – in our time Valmont would be liable to criminal prosecution – and so lacking in knowledge of the world that she fails to realise her seduction by Valmont has been preceded by a lesbian episode with Merteuil, or even understand (we later learn) where babies come from. But in any event when Valmont is facing the far stiffer challenge of Tourvel, all his charm and shrewdness are not enough without bribing her servants, intercepting her letters, pretending that he has returned to the Church so that he can employ a priest as a go-between, and implying that he will kill himself if she does not yield. These are tricks at least as underhand as any to which Merteuil resorts. If she uses those she does employ with more skill, it is because – as she explains in the remarkable letter in which she describes her own background (Letter 81) – the relative powerlessness of women in her society make deception more necessary, and there­fore more frequently practised.

    What her autobiographical letter reveals is that, although she was not convent educated, her position was very similar to Cécile’s, or any other young girl of her class. Taught nothing about the ways of the world, she was ready to be disposed of in marriage like a chattel. The difference was an insatiable curiosity which led her to confess to her priest that she had ‘done all that women do’ so that he might enlighten her as to what precisely that was. What she quickly learned was the importance for someone in her weak position of self-control and she approaches her wedding night in a spirit of clinical observation. Once married, and taken, after a few months in Paris, back to her husband’s dreary and yet conveniently isolated estate, she finds herself free to indulge in sexual experimentation with other men and discover, as she neatly puts it, that ‘love, which they vaunt to us as the cause of our pleasures, is, at the most, only the pretext for them’ (p. 188). After her husband’s death – the practice of marrying young girls to much older men guaranteed that there would be a fair number of widows and gave to some women a little of that economic power the rest of their sex otherwise lacked – Merteuil is able to retain her reputation as a respectable woman while indulging in as many affairs as she likes. She is proud of the way she has managed this and demonstrates the kind of cool intelligence it requires in the letter she writes to Madame de Volanges (Letter 104), persuading her that she ought not to abandon the plan for marrying her daughter to the Count de Gercourt. There she shrewdly defines the romantic love Cécile and Danceny enjoy as a case of mutual delusion, each party adorning the other with virtues and accomplishments they do not possess; and then makes her analysis the basis for an argument in favour of arranged marriage, for after all there are dangers when the illusions on which a love marriage is based are shattered:

    It is then that the least faults appear shocking and unendurable, by the contrast which they form with the idea of perfection which had seduced us. Each one of the couple believes, however, that only the other has changed, and that he has always the same value as that which, in a mistaken moment, had been attributed to him. The charm which he no longer experiences he is astonished at no longer producing; he is humiliated at this: wounded vanity embitters the mind, augments injuries, causes ill-humour, begets hate; and frivolous pleasures are paid for finally by long misery.

    As the reference to ‘frivolous pleasures’ in the last phrase of this paragraph suggests, Merteuil is here once more playing a role, for her own sinister purposes; but what she says is none the less impressively acute.

    It is because Gercourt once left her for another woman, and had been fond of saying that, when he married, he would guarantee his wife’s purity by taking her straight from the convent, that Merteuil wants a deflowered and corrupted Cécile to be married to him. This is sufficient indication of the way her character has been warped by all the efforts she has to make to control her own destiny. These have made her not only vengeful but lacking in empathy. How Cécile might be damaged by the scheme she and Valmont pursue never bothers her for a moment: conscious though she may be of the unfairness with which women in her society are treated, she has no notion of a sisterhood. When all her attention is focused on negotiating successfully the difficult path she has chosen to tread, she does not have much time for the feelings of others. How difficult that path is in comparison with Valmont’s is illustrated by the different relation in which they each stand to the question of reputation. This is all-important in a world where there is no worse fate than being excluded from fashionable society and having to live permanently on one’s estates. Valmont is anxious to continue to be regarded as a man whom women can never resist, however loyal they might be. Delays or minor setbacks are not very important to him because he is confident of being able to recover from them. Merteuil, on the other hand, has the reputation of someone who, in her widowhood, has remained irreproachable. One single false move on her part would destroy it irrevocably.

    Merteuil’s claim that the greater difficulties of her life have made her more astute than Valmont seems vindicated by the way she emerges as the dominant partner in the relationship. The two have been lovers in the past and presumably discovered a similarity in outlook that has led them to remain close after they have amicably decided to go their separate sexual ways. When you spend your life saying what you do not mean, it is important to have someone to whom you can talk frankly. They keep each other informed of their activities and one of the many triumphs of the novel is the way it emerges that, although on one level they are keen to suggest that it is a matter of indifference whom the other sleeps with, sex being no more that a pleasurable incidental, on another, they often experience spurts of jealousy. Proud as he is of his sexual athleticism, for example, Valmont betrays anxiety that Belleroche (Merteuil’s current lover) might give her more physical satisfaction than he did; and he is seriously disturbed when she begins thinking of taking up with Danceny. If she does in fact do that, it is partly in retaliation at Valmont’s accounts of the pleasure he has had sleeping with Cécile, and on the principle that if he can seduce someone who is under the impression of being deeply in love with another young person, so can she. But it is Valmont’s growing attachment to a woman whose principles are as directly antagonistic to her own as Tourvel’s which really unsettles her, especially when he appears to have disproved her belief that all prudes make poor lovers, because with them pleasure is never ‘purified by its excess’ (p. 37).

    Laclos is keen to make clear that, in spite of her behaviour on her wedding night, Merteuil is in no way frigid. But as she reiterates to Valmont in her autobiographical letter, she prides herself on not being one of those women who ‘persist in confounding love with the lover; who, in their mad illusion, believe that he with whom they pursued pleasure is its sole depositary; and, truly superstitious, show the priest the respect and faith which is only due to the Divinity’ (p. 185). That is as much as to say that she wants to divorce sex from feeling, or sympathy. Yet as her own behaviour tends to indicate, this is not as easy as it might sound. For civilised human beings who have progressed well beyond a state of nature, who are not so sexually frustrated that all they are in search of is release, or who do not regard intercourse largely as an exercise of power (as Valmont appears to), feelings of the sympathetic kind are hard to keep out of the equation. Merteuil may despise the love Cécile and Danceny believe they enjoy but is later to admit that what she and Valmont felt for each other could be described by that word (p. 315); and she seems to imply that sex between them had functioned as a seal of intimacy and trust. The idea that he could be intimate in that way with others does not please her, as she reveals when Valmont presses her to keep the terms of the bargain the two of them have struck.

    The terms of this bargain are that when he can show her proof of Tourvel’s seduction, she will reward him with her own physical favours, for old times’ sake, as it were. Yet by the time the proof is there, she has been made aware that Valmont has developed strong feelings for Tourvel and is still finding pleasure in his contacts with Cécile and is therefore wary of becoming a humiliating third choice: ‘I may sometimes have had the pretension to replace in my single person a whole seraglio; but it has never suited me to make a part of one’ (p. 307). In a particularly cynical paragraph, she observes that the love which, contrary to her previous assertions, is in fact necessary to satisfactory sex may not be shared equally. That would be irksome if ‘one had not discovered that it happily suffices if it exists only on one side’:

    The difficulty has thus been rendered less by one half, even without much being lost thereby; in fact, the one derives pleasure from the happiness of loving, the other from that of pleasing, which is a little less keen indeed, but to which is added the pleasure of deceiving; that sets up an equilibrium, and everything is arranged.

    The question between her and Valmont is who will deceive the other, who will be the other’s dupe. That latter role is one she is determined not to play and she has every reason to be suspicious having observed from the sidelines how Valmont behaves when, as is now her case with him, he encounters resistance. The two of them, she suggests, are like two card sharpers who decide not to play a game together because they are familiar with each other’s tricks. What appears to make a further sexual relationship a bad idea, in her view, is that the trust which once underpinned their relationship is no longer there. Yet Valmont is so annoyed by her failure to keep the terms of the bargain they had agreed, and also so disturbed by what seems to be her preference for Danceny over himself, that he persuades the young man to break an arrangement he has with Merteuil in order to spend his time with Cécile. The crudely mocking note Valmont then sends to Merteuil makes her forget her usual self-control and act in a fashion that quickly destroys them both. It is a matter of ‘when thieves fall out’, and proves the common sense of the two card-sharpers.

    There is good reason to think that although Merteuil can show more justification for her behaviour than Valmont, she is punished more harshly. That will seem a strange claim to make when nothing seems more harsh than losing one’s life; but the duel leading to Valmont’s death is one in which he might just as well have killed Danceny, and there is no humiliation involved (on the contrary, he cuts a heroic figure). The scene in which Merteuil is ostracised at the Opera is wonderfully described, and she suffers the further indignity of losing all her money (it has been made clear previously that her spotless reputation, and good looks, would always be a factor in winning the court case on which her fortune depends). That she has then ignominiously to flee the country with jewels that are no longer hers would seem punishment enough without the addition of the smallpox which takes away one of her eyes and is reported to have left her hideously deformed. Now her soul is visible in her face, says one of the fashionable crowd in a remark that reminds one of Wilde’s picture of Dorian Gray.

    In one way it is absurd to complain about what a novelist does with his or her characters. But the suggestion that there may be something wrong here, that we are dealing with a case where a writer has not let the narrative run its natural course but put, as D. H. Lawrence once expressed it, a ‘thumb in the scale’, [7] tilting the balance against the logic of events in order to satisfy criteria of public morality, can be supported by what happens to Prévan. He is the man notorious or rather celebrated for having seduced three women in the same night, and then betrayed them to their husbands or lovers so that one has to go back to the country while the two others retreat to convents. This is a story on a par with Valmont’s account of how he was able to sleep with a certain countess while her husband occupied the room on one side of hers, and her lover a room on the other. One can imagine both going down well in the officers’ mess. Prévan’s ambition to enhance his reputation as a pre-eminent ladies’ man, to challenge Valmont for the position of the leading stud of the herd, makes him try to seduce Merteuil who both outwits and humiliates him so that he is forced to leave Paris and resign from his position in the army. In the scene at the Opera when Merteuil is cold-shouldered, he is also present and finds himself surrounded by well-wishers. While she is hissed, he is applauded. Later we learn that he has been reinstated in his regiment. Many readers might feel that the way he was treated by Merteuil was no more than he deserved, and that for Laclos to make his rehabilitation coincide with her disgrace shows a lack of authorial balance. They may conjecture that since Merteuil undoubtedly represents the most triumphantly original aspect of Dangerous Liaisons, and removes any possible danger of Laclos being regarded as a mere imitator of Richardson or Rousseau, there was a moment at the end of the novel when, looking back in astonishment at what he had achieved, her creator lost his nerve. And yet in a work where irony is always present, it may be that Prévan’s re-emergence is offered as just one more indication of the corruption and injustice of the society of the time.

    The way Laclos’s life and career developed after the publication of Dangerous Liaisons certainly suggests that he was not especially content with that society. In 1788 he left the army to enter the service of the Duke of Orleans, and, when the Revolution broke out shortly after­wards, became an enthusiastic supporter of revolutionary principles, joining the Jacobin camp along with his new employer. Philippe Egalité, as the Duke chose to be called, was guillotined during the Terror and Laclos, deeply embroiled as he was in revolutionary politics, narrowly escaped the same fate (he was imprisoned twice and spent thirteen months in jail on the second occasion). After the fall of Robespierre, he tried to have himself re-integrated into the army but found instead a niche in the civil administration. When, however, Napoleon came to power at the turn of the century, he was at last made a general and it was in that capacity that he found himself in Italy in 1803. He died there from what is believed to have been a combination of malaria and dysentery. Had he lived, his name might have gone down in history as one of those French generals who helped to establish the Napoleonic Empire. As it is, he is still best known as the author of Dangerous Liaisons, which is just as good, if not better.

    Notes to the Introduction

    1. See ‘Vie de Henry Brulard’ in Oeuvres Intimes, edited by Henri Martineau, Paris, Pléiade, 1955, p. 59.

    2. Jean-Paul Bertrand, Choderlos de Laclos, Paris, Fayard, 2003, p. 71

    3. In 1989 Milos Forman directed a cinematic version of the novel entitled Valmont. The 1988 film, directed by Stephen Frears and with Glen Close, John Malkovich and Michelle Pfeiffer in the leading roles, is much better known. The attempt by Roger Kumble, in 1999, to transfer the action of Dangerous Liaisons to an American-high-school setting is called Cruel Intentions.

    4. Bertrand, p. 26

    5. Claude-Prosper Crébillon habitually had fils attached to his name because he had a famous father. The novel which is likely to have had most influence on Laclos was entitled Les Égarements du coeur and de l’esprit (1736), although it is not epistolary.

    6. See Aldingtion’s Introduction to his own translation of Les Liaisons dangereuses, Routledge and Sons, 1924, p. 27,

    7. ‘Morality and the Novel’, in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, edited by Edward M. McDonald, Heinemann, 1961, p. 528

    A note on the translation

    This English version of Les Liaisons dangereuses is by Ernest Dowson who died in 1900 at the age of only thirty-two. There are some lapses of attention. ‘Foster-sister’ (p. 191), for example, is hardly a satisfactory rendering of ‘une soeur de lait’, when the sense is that Merteuil’s wet nurse was her maid’s mother; and ‘a facile woman’ for ‘une femme facile’ (p. 256) is a strange way of referring to a woman of easy virtue. Very occasionally Dowson employs a word which has gone completely out of fashion – ‘budget’, for instance, on p. 94 – but in general his somewhat formal vocabulary (see ‘imprescriptible’ on p. 13 above) gives an appropriate ‘period’ flavour to his translation. A friend of Wilde, he is particularly good at rendering the elegant, epigrammatic terseness of the best eighteenth-century French prose and, as a poet, he has a fine ear which makes him able to write English that reads naturally and well. The title Dowson gave to his translation was in fact Dangerous Acquaintances, which is a slightly more accurate rendering of the French but does not have the advantage of being as familiar, and instantly recognisable, as the one which has been adopted here.

    The footnotes in this edition are Laclos’s own and, like the Publisher’s Note and Editor’s Preface, clearly part and parcel of the whole elaborate fictional enterprise. The Endnotes are mine.

    Most of the recent work on Laclos is in French but there is an English guide to Les Liaisons dangereuses by Philip Thody (Edward Arnold, Studies in French Literature, No. 14, 1970) and another by Simon Davies (London, Grant and Cutler, 1987). More recently James Fowler has published The Libertine’s Nemesis (Legenda, 2011), which contains some very useful information on the novel and its relation to the work of Crébillon fils, Richardson and de Sade. For anyone who would like to see how a modern novelist handles a modified version of the epistolary form, there is much instruction and even more enjoyment in Michael Irwin’s The Skull and the Nightingale (HarperCollins, 2013).

    David Ellis

    Dangerous Liaisons

    The Characters in Epistolary Order

    Cécile Volanges

    Sophie Carnay

    The Marquise de Merteuil

    The Vicomte de Valmont

    The Présidente de Tourvel

    Madame de Volanges

    The Chevalier Danceny

    The Maréchale de —

    Azolan

    Madame de Rosemonde

    The Comte de Gercourt

    The Père Anselme

    M. Bertrand

    Anonymous

    Publisher’s Note to the First Edition (1784)

    We think it our duty to warn the public that, in spite of the title of this work and of what the Editor says of it in his Preface, we do not guarantee the authenticity of this narrative, and have even strong reasons for believing that it is but a romance. It seems to us, moreover, that the author, who yet seems to have sought after verisimilitude, has himself destroyed that, and maladroitly, owing to the period which he has chosen in which to place these adventures. Certainly, several of the personages whom he brings on his stage have morals so sorry that it were impossible to believe that they lived in our century, in this century of philosophy, where the light shed on all sides has rendered, as everyone knows, all men so honourable, all women so modest and reserved.

    Our opinion is, therefore, that if the adventures related in this work possess a foundation of truth they could not have occurred save in other places and in other times, and we must censure our author, who, seduced apparently by his hope of being more diverting by treating rather of his own age and country, has dared to clothe in our customs and our costumes a state of morals so remote from us.

    To preserve the too credulous reader, at least so far as it lies with us, from all surprise in this matter, we will support our opinion with an argument which we proffer to him in all confidence, because it seems to us victorious and unanswerable; it is that, undoubtedly, like causes should not fail to produce like effects, and that, nevertheless, we do not hear today of young ladies with incomes of sixty thousand livres turning nuns, nor of young and pretty dame-presidents dying of grief.

    Editor’s Preface to the First Edition (1784)

    This work, or rather this compilation, which the public will, perhaps, still find too voluminous, contains, however, but a very small portion of the letters which composed the correspondence whence it is extracted. Charged with the care of setting it in order by the persons into whose hands it had come, and whom I knew to have the intention of publishing it, I asked, for reward of my pains, no more than the permission to prune it of all that appeared to me useless; and I have, in fact, endeavoured to preserve only the letters which seemed to me necessary, whether for the right understanding of events or the development of the characters. If there be added to this light labour that of arranging in order the letters I have let remain, an order in which I have almost invariably followed that of the dates, and finally some brief and rare notes, which, for the most part, have no other object than that of indicating the source of certain quotations, or of explaining certain abridgement which I have permitted myself, the share which I have had in this work will have been told. My mission was of no wider range.*

    [footnote: I must also state that I have suppressed or altered all the names of persons which occur in these letters; and if, among those I have substituted for them, any is to be found which belongs to a real person, this arises solely from error on my part, and no conclusion is to be drawn therefrom.]

    I had proposed alterations more considerable, and almost all in respect of diction or style, against which will be found many offences. I should have wished to be authorised to cut down certain too lengthy letters, of which several treat separately, and almost without transition, of matters quite extraneous to one another. This task, which has not been permitted me, would doubtless not have sufficed to give merit to the work, but it would, at least, have freed it from a portion of its defects.

    It has been objected to me that it was the letters themselves which it was desirable to make public, not merely a work made after those letters; that it would be as great an offence against verisimilitude as against truth, if all the eight or ten persons who participated in this correspondence had written with an equal purity. And to my representations that, far from that, there was not one of them, on the contrary, who had not committed grave faults which would not fail to excite criticism, I was answered that any reasonable reader would be certainly prepared to meet with faults in a compilation of letters written by private individuals, since in all those hitherto published by sundry esteemed authors, and even by certain academicians, none has proved quite free of this reproach. These reasons have not persuaded me, and I found them, as I find them still, easier to give than to accept; but I was not my own master, and I gave way. Only, I reserved to myself the right of protest, and of declaring that I was not of that opinion: it is this protest I make here.

    As for any degree of merit the work may have, perhaps it is not for me to discuss this, for my opinion neither ought to nor can influence that of anyone else. Yet those persons who, before they begin a book, like to know more or less what to expect, those persons, I say, can continue to read this preface; others had better pass straight to the work itself; they know enough about it already.

    What I must say at the outset is that, if my advice has been, as I admit, to publish these letters, I am nevertheless far from hoping for their success: and let not this sincerity on my part be taken for the feigned modesty of an author; for I declare with equal frankness that, if this compilation had not seemed to me worthy of being offered to the public, I would not have meddled with it. Let us try to reconcile these apparent contradictions.

    The deserts of a work are composed of its utility or of its charm, and even of both these, when it is susceptible of them: but success, which is not always a proof of merit, often depends more on the choice of a subject than on its execution, on the sum of the objects which it presents rather than on the manner in which they are treated. Now this compilation containing, as its title announces, the letters of a whole society, it is dominated by a diversity of interest which weakens that of the reader. Nay more, almost all the sentiments therein expressed being feigned or dissimulated, they but excite an interest of curiosity which is ever inferior to that of sentiment, which less inclines the mind for indulgence, and which permits a perception of the errors contained in the details that is all the more keen in that these are continually opposed to the only desire which one would have satisfied.

    These blemishes are, perhaps, redeemed, in part, by a quality which is implied in the very nature of the work: it is the variety of the styles, a merit which an author attains with difficulty, but which here occurs of itself, and at least prevents the tedium of uniformity. Many persons will also be able to count for something a considerable number of observations, either new or little known, which are scattered through these letters. That is all, I fear, that one can hope for in the matter of charm, judging them even with the utmost favour.

    The utility of the work, which, perhaps, will be even more contested, yet seems to me easier to establish. It seems to me, at any rate, that it is to render a service to morals, to unveil the methods employed by those whose own are bad in corrupting those whose conduct is good; and I believe that these letters will effectually attain this end. There will also be found the proof and example of two important verities which one might believe unknown, for that they are so rarely practised: the one, that every woman who consents to admit a man of loose morals to her society ends by becoming his victim; the other, that a mother is, to say the least, imprudent who allows any other than herself to possess the confidence of her daughter. Young people of either sex might also learn from these pages that the friendship which persons of evil character appear to grant them so readily is never aught else but a dangerous snare, as fatal to their happiness as to their virtue. Abuse, however, always so near a neighbour to what is good, seems to me here too greatly to be feared; and far from commending this work for the perusal of youth, it seems to me most important to deter it from all such reading. The time when it may cease to be perilous and become useful seems to me to have been defined, for her sex, by a good mother, who has not only wit but good sense: I should deem, she said to me, after having read the manuscript of this correspondence, that I was doing a service to my daughter if I gave her this book on the day of her marriage. If all mothers of families think thus, I shall congratulate myself on having published it.

    But if, again, we put this favourable supposition on one side, I continue to think that this collection can please very few. Men and women who are depraved will have an interest in decrying a work calculated to injure them; and, as they are not lacking in skill, perhaps they will have sufficient to bring to their side the austere, who will be alarmed at the picture of bad morals which we have not feared to exhibit.

    The would-be free-thinkers will not be interested in a God-fearing woman whom for that very reason they will regard as a ninny; while pious people will be angry at seeing virtue defeated and will complain that religion is not made to seem more powerful.

    On the other hand, persons of delicate taste will be disgusted by the too simple and too faulty style of many of these letters; while the mass of readers, led away with the idea that everything they see in print is the fruit of labour, will think that they are beholding in certain others the elaborate method of an author concealing himself behind the person whom he causes to speak.

    Lastly, it will perhaps be pretty generally said that everything is good in its own place; and that, although, as a rule, the too polished style of the authors detracts from the charm of the letters of society, the carelessness of the present ones becomes a real fault and makes them insufferable when sent to the printer’s.

    I sincerely admit that all these reproaches may be well founded: I think also that I should be able to reply to them without exceeding the length permissible to a preface. But it must be plain that, to make it necessary to reply to all, the book itself should be unable to reply to any; and that, had I been of this opinion, I would have suppressed at once the preface and the book.

    Letter 1

    Cécile Volanges to Sophie Carnay,

    at the Ursulines of —

    You see, my dear friend, that I keep my word to you, and that bonnets and frills do not take up all my time; there will always be some left for you. However, I have seen more adornments in this one single day than in all the four years we passed together; and I think that the superb Tanville [footnote: a pupil at the same convent] will have more vexation at my first visit, when I shall certainly ask to see her, than she has ever fancied that she afforded us when she used to come and see us in fiocchi. [1] Mamma has consulted me in everything; she treats me much less as a schoolgirl than of old. I have a waiting-maid of my own; I have a room and a closet at my disposition; and I write this to you at a very pretty desk, of which I have the key, and where I can lock up all that I wish. Mamma has told me that I am to see her every day when she rises, that I need not have my hair dressed before dinner, because we shall always be alone, and that then she will tell me every day when I am to see her in the afternoon. The rest of the time is at my disposal, and I have my harp, my drawing, and books as at the convent, only there is no Mother Perpétue here to scold me, and it is nothing to anybody but myself if I choose to do nothing at all. But as I have not my Sophie here to chat and laugh with, I would just as soon occupy myself.

    It is not yet five o’clock; I have not to go and join Mamma until seven: there’s time enough, if I had anything to tell you! But as yet they have not spoken to me of anything, and were it not for the preparations I see being made, and the number

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