Most readers of my generation are familiar with the 1999 Sarah Michelle Gellar/Ryan Phillippe film Cruel Intentions – far fewer have read the source material, Dangerous Liaisons (or Les Liaisons dangereuses, in the original French). This story of “decadence and moral corruption in pre-revolutionary France” was first published in 1782, and my edition has been translated into English with an introduction by Helen Constantine.
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In her introduction, Constantine describes Dangerous Liaisons as a novel where “love is not triumphant and virtue does not win out”. To put it in my own words, if this was an ATIA Reddit post, the result would be a resounding Everyone Sucks Here.
It’s a satire of the excessively wealthy class, an inherently political novel given the state of things in France at the time. Of course, academics argue themselves hoarse now over whether Laclos actually intended to fuel the fire of revolution, or whether we just see it that way in retrospect. Being a bit of a rebel myself, and now having read his depiction of the wealthy and powerful aristocrats and depraved and corrupt narcissists, I like to fall on the side of “yeah, he wanted to burn it all to the ground”. There’s a touch of hypocrisy there, though, because Laclos was the recipient of patronage by France’s most senior aristocrat at the time, Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans. Nothing like biting the hand that feeds you!
As an epistolary novel, Dangerous Liaisons is told through letters, mostly between the two central characters, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont. These two frenemies are former lovers who get their kicks by ruining other people’s lives. Valmont is on a personal mission to seduce the virtuous, married Madame de Tourvel, just to say that he did. Merteuil thinks its a fool’s errand, and would rather he dedicate his energies to her scheme: seducing and ruining the young and innocent Cécile de Volanges, in the hopes of embarrassing her betrothed (a man she once loved who dumped her – it’s petty revenge).
I had to Google a lot of the French titles and a few of the nuances of the 18th century class system, just to keep clear who was who at first. Even then, Dangerous Liaisons has such an intricate plot, with scheming and double crossing and manipulation, that it’s easy to get lost. There’s a cast of very active side characters – Cécile’s mother, Cécile’s lover, Valmont’s aunt, to name a few – who also contribute letters to flesh out the story.
This was the most surprising aspect of Dangerous Liaisons, in my reading of it – the way Laclos used the epistolary form to tell as much about the characters and the story as the letters did themselves. I read up a bit on the history after I finished: prior to Dangerous Liaisons, writers like Samuel Richardson used the epistolary format to reveal the character’s inner thoughts and secrets to the reader, with letters that you could pretty much take at face value. Laclos, on the other hand, used the back-and-forth of letters between varying characters to show the readers how they were deceiving each other. Valmont would write to Merteuil that his schemes were going brilliantly and he couldn’t wait until they were reunited for a special night together, while in another letter simultaneously telling Madame de Tourvel that she was his soulmate and he would die for her. So, as much as the letters of Dangerous Liaisons tell the readers what’s happening, they also tell the reader the characters’ various motivations and personalities, without having to explicitly spell it out.
This method allowed the character of Marquise de Merteuil to really shine, another aspect I loved (and that struck me as unusual, for the time) in Dangerous Liaisons. Her letters reveal that she is inordinately powerful, as a beautiful widow who has refused to remarry – she knows the effect she has on men, and has no shame in exploiting it to get what she wants. It’s only really possible for Laclos to reveal this in the epistolary format, as Merteuil does such a good job of disguising herself in her real-life words and deeds. In standard prose, she would appear to be a very well-behaved and proper lady – in letters, she’s revealed to be a femme fatale.
Of course, Dangerous Liaisons is a rather horny novel, and not just in an anachronistic way (also, it must be said, a little rapey, with Valmont’s various “seductions” playing out in ways that do not pass the test of modern day standards for enthusiastic consent). That’s probably why it was such an immediate success upon publication, with 20 reprints in the first year – #BookTok didn’t invent the smutty best-seller. Constantine’s translation is good, in my opinion (which, as an Anglophone, probably doesn’t count for much); her version of Dangerous Liaisons is maybe a little stuffy compared to works from later periods, but still readable if you’ve got the time and energy to focus on it.
So, if you’re into sexual power games and revealing the seedy under-belly of the upper crust, you should probably read Dangerous Liaisons – maybe just check out a few Wikipedia pages on pre-Revolution French nobility, if you’re not already familiar ahead of time.
My favourite Amazon reviews of Dangerous Liaisons:
- “it was long, it took too long to get to the point–or any point–and it was written in a format that just took all the enjoyment out of reading it. Dracula was written the same way, but Dracula had a clear plot that didn’t require half a book of little tid-bits of nothing for no apparent reason.” – ubu35
- “It was a gift. I didn’t read it” – bclvsjc
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