Dangerous Liaisons
by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Summary
The Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, former lovers and the two most intelligent people in their world, conduct warfare by seduction and correspondence. Merteuil wants the young convent bred Cecile de Volanges corrupted before her arranged marriage; Valmont has a project of his own, the conquest of the famously virtuous and married Madame de Tourvel, and Merteuil offers herself as the prize if he can produce written proof. The campaign is run entirely in letters, theirs and their victims', and the reader is placed in the uncomfortable position of admiring the machinery while watching it destroy people. Then Valmont makes the one error the game does not allow: he falls in love with his target. Merteuil's jealousy turns the partnership into a war, and the ending distributes ruin with an exactness the two schemers would admire, a fatal duel, letters made public, a lost eye and a lost reputation, a death of grief in a convent.
The epistolary form is not a period quaintness here; it is the weapon. Every letter is written to manipulate its recipient, so the truth exists only in the gaps between versions, and Laclos trusts you to triangulate. It is elegant, cold and gripping, closer to a thriller than anything else written in its century.
Laclos was a career artillery officer with no previous literary reputation. The novel appeared in four volumes in March 1782 and was an immediate scandal and an immediate success, read avidly by the same society it dissected; Marie Antoinette owned a copy.
Historical Context & Significance
Contemporaries read it as scandal rather than prophecy, and its first audiences included the aristocrats it anatomised. Only later did it come to look like an autopsy of the French nobility performed seven years before the Revolution, a class with nothing left to do but play games with each other's lives. Andre Malraux judged it the first work in European literature whose actions are driven by ideology, and the novel is also a deliberate answer to Richardson: where Pamela's letters reveal a heart, these letters are all instruments.
Its stage and screen afterlife has been exceptional. Christopher Hampton's 1985 stage adaptation reached Broadway in 1987 with Alan Rickman as Valmont, and Stephen Frears's 1988 film with Glenn Close and John Malkovich earned multiple Academy Award nominations; Cruel Intentions moved the plot to a Manhattan prep school in 1999 and found it fit perfectly.