DANGEROUS LIAISONS
PIERRE AMBROISE FRANÇOIS CHODERLOS DE LACLOS was born in 1741, in Amiens. His family was respectable but not distinguished, and at eighteen he entered the army and spent the next twenty years in various garrison towns, and reached the rank of capitaine-commandant without ever seeing battle. He cut a dash in provincial society, however, and in his spare time wrote light verse, some of which was published. He wrote the libretto for Ernestine, a comic opera, which was produced in Paris in 1777, but was not received well. In 1779 he was sent to the island of Aix, off La Rochelle, where Les Liaisons Dangereuses was conceived and written. Comte Alexandre de Tilly recalls him saying: ‘I resolved to write…a book which would continue to cause a stir and echo through the world after I have left it’, which it certainly did. He went to Paris in 1781 to supervise the publishing of his book, and overstayed his leave and was promptly ordered back to his regiment. He married Marie-Solange Duperré in 1786 and proved to be an exemplary husband and father. He left the army in 1788, entering politics, and was imprisoned twice during the Reign of Terror, but returned to the army as a general under Napoleon in 1800. He died in Italy in 1803. Laclos also wrote a treatise on the education of women and on Vauban. Towards the end of his life he was considering writing another one to show that true happiness could only be attained in family life.
HELEN CONSTANTINE was born in Cornwall and educated at Truro High School and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she read French and Latin. She was Head of Languages at Bartholomew School, Eynsham, until 2000, when she gave up teaching and became a full-time translator. She has translated Mademoiselle de Maupin by Gautier, also for Penguin. She has recently published a volume of translated stories, Paris Tales, for Oxford University Press, and is co-editor of the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation. She is married to the poet David Constantine and has a daughter and son, and one grandson.
CHODERLOS DE LACLOS
Dangerous Liaisons
Translated with an Introduction and Notes
by HELEN CONSTANTINE
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in 1782
Published in Penguin Classics 2007
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This translation and editorial material copyright © Helen Constantine, 2007
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EISBN: 978–0–141–90047–6
Contents
Chronology
Introduction
Further Reading
Translator’s Note
Dangerous Liaisons
Appendix 1: Additional Letters
Appendix 2: Selected Adaptations of Dangerous Liaisons
Notes
Chronology
1741 18 October: born in Amiens, Pierre Ambroise François, second son of Jean Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos, secretary to the quartermaster general of Picardy, and Marie-Catherine Gallois.
1745 Crébillon fils’s licentious novel Le Sopha.
1748 Montesquieu’s political treatise L’Esprit des lois (The Spirit of Laws).
1751 The family moves to Paris and settles in the Marais.
First volume of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, an important organ of radical and revolutionary opinion.
1752 Clarissa Harlowe, Abbé Prévost’s translation of Clarissa (1747) by Samuel Richardson.
1756 Birth of Mozart. The Seven Years War begins.
1759 Laclos becomes a cadet in the artillery at La Fère in the Aisne.
Rousseau: Lettre à d’Alembert. Birth of Robespierre and Danton.
Voltaire: Candide; Sterne: Tristram Shandy.
1761–2 Rousseau: Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761); Émile and Le Contrat Social (both 1762).
1762 Takes up post as Second Lieutenant in La Rochelle.
1763 Posted to Toul, in the Lorraine region.
1765 The regiment is garrisoned in Strasbourg. Possible initiation into freemasonry. Becomes First Lieutenant.
1766 Birth of Madame de Staël.
1767 Publishes ‘À Mademoiselle de Saint-S…’, in L’Almanach des Muses.
1768 Birth of Chateaubriand. France acquires Corsica.
1769 Garrisoned in Grenoble.
Birth of Napoleon Bonaparte.
1770 Publishes some verses, ‘L’É pître à Margot’, in L’Occasion et le moment.
Birth of Hegel, Beethoven, Wordsworth and Hölderlin.
1771 Becomes a commissioned officer, rank of Captain.
1772 Promoted to Adjutant.
1774 More verses published in L’Almanach des Muses, which then circulate in Paris.
Death of Louis XV. Goethe: Werther.
1775 Garrisoned in Besançon.
Famine in Paris. Beaumarchais: Le Barbier de Séville.
1776 Werther translation published.
1777 Stages a comic opera, Ernestine, adapted from a novel by Madame Riccoboni.
1778 Given the overall responsibility of fortifying the island of Aix.
Begins work on Dangerous Liaisons and asks for leave of absence.
1781 Finishes Dangerous Liaisons in Paris.
1782 Dangerous Liaisons published by Durand in April. 2,000 copies are printed, then reprinted two weeks later. It is a resounding success. Ordered to rejoin his company in Brest.
1783 Writes an essay on women’s education: Des Femmes et de leur éducation (published 1803). Starts a liaison in La Rochelle with Marie-Solange Duperré.
1784 Birth of their son.
1785 Elected member of the Academy at La Rochelle.
1786 Publication of his Lettre à Messieurs de l’Académie Française sur l’Éloge de Vauban (Letter to the Academy on the Praise of Vauban), which causes a scandal. Marriage with Marie-Solange, the mother of his child.
Mozart: The Marriage of Figaro.
1787 Proposes his Projet de numérotage des rues de Paris (Street-numbering Project for Paris), on which the present system for numbering the Paris streets is based.
Mozart: Don Giovanni.
1788 Enters the service of the Duke of Orleans. Birth of a daughter.
1789 Storming of the Bastille, Declaration of the Rights of Man.
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October: May have been involved in the riots at Versailles. Leaves for London with the Duke of Orleans.
Mozart: Così fan tutte.
1790 Returns to France, active in the Club des Jacobins.
1791 Proposes the Regency of the Duke of Orleans.
1792 Reintegrated into the army.
1793 Successive arrests, incarceration and threats of execution. Execution of Louis XVI. The Terror begins.
1794 Escapes execution and is freed from prison.
1795 Writes De la guerre et de la paix (On War and Peace) for the government and another essay about women’s education. Birth of third child. The Directoire.
De Sade: La philosophie dans le boudoir (Philosophy in the Bedroom).
1796 Banking projects.
1797 Possibility of his entering the diplomatic service.
De Sade: Justine.
1799 Unsuccessful request to be reintegrated into the artillery.
Death of Beaumarchais. Birth of Balzac.
1800 Reintegrated into artillery as Brigadier General. Settles in Strasbourg. Takes part in first combats on the Rhine and then in Italy.
Beethoven’s first symphony.
1802 Inspector General of the Artillery. Birth of Victor Hugo.
1803 Appointed Commander of the Artillery in Naples but falls ill with dysentery on the way there. Dies in Taranto 5 September.
Beethoven: Eroica symphony.
1824 The cour royale de Paris orders Dangerous Liaisons to be destroyed.
Introduction
Baudelaire noted, after reading this book in 1856: ‘If this book burns, it can only be as ice burns.’1 The fire that burns in Laclos’s novel is an ‘icy fire’. The poet’s application of this Petrarchan idea to Dangerous Liaisons illustrates both the passion and the coldness we feel there is in these letters. The passion is undeniable: love, sensuality, jealousy and despair abound here; lives are played with, ruined and lost. The Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil scheme and manipulate, they analyse and calculate, their language is ironic, detached, mannered, ‘polite’ and cool. The author’s management of his characters and their deeds is as calculating, clever and ironic as Merteuil herself. Perhaps that is what Baudelaire meant: the passionate life is coldly dissected. A game is played out according to the rules and mores of a social class which Rousseau, the Romantics and many of the Revolutionaries thought incapable of real feeling and fit only for destruction. The ice Baudelaire alludes to may be not just narrative tone, language and techniques, but also the want of heart in those manipulators and their social class.
There was no doubt in Baudelaire’s mind that this was a novel which had helped bring about the French Revolution. He calls it an ‘historical book’ and an ‘essentially French book’, and comments that the Revolution was created by ‘des voluptueux’, by which he means that it was the depraved sensuality of the aristocracy which excited the violent reaction of the people. Critics such as Michel Butor and Roger Vailland have more recently corroborated this view, calling the book a bombshell destined to serve as a weapon for the up-and-coming bourgeoisie against the privileged class, the aristocracy.2 As a satire of an excessively wealthy and corrupt society and a moribund monarchy, which was manifestly by 1782, the year of its publication, on the point of collapsing, it is one of the very few novels which may claim, with its ‘icy fire’, to have contributed to a huge shift in the course of history.
Whether or not we believe Laclos’s main aim in writing Dangerous Liaisons to have been political, it is most certainly a novel which holds the mirror up to contemporary society and shows it its ugly reflection. Not, of course, the whole of society, for the nobility were a minority, but within the parameters of that aristocracy the picture is a convincing one. Indeed when it was published most people thought it a roman-à-clef, and immediately tried to identify the characters. It was even rumoured that these were real letters from living persons which Laclos had stolen while on garrison in Grenoble. But such a reading is beside the point. Simply, most writers of fiction, and Laclos was no exception, do not work in that way; they may use people as models, and take from them certain traits of character or situations, real or possible, but on the whole, not just for reasons of discretion but more because of the demands of the fiction itself, they are unlikely to commit an exact portrait of any particular person to paper.
Laclos himself addresses the issue in his two tongue-in-cheek prefaces, first claiming that it is ‘nothing but a novel’ and saying, with heavy irony, that of course this so-called picture of the times must in fact be of a previous age, since in this century of Enlightenment we are all now honourable men and ‘modest and retiring’ women; and then in the second, teasing his readers and, of course, attracting more publicity in so doing, by pretending that he has ‘suppressed or changed the names’ of the – we are to suppose – real characters in the letters.
As is well known, all publicity is good publicity, and the inevitable happened. The first edition, as well as subsequent ones, sold out within days and the book rapidly became a succès de scandale in Paris. There were twenty reprintings in the first year. People soon discovered who its author was, and he himself, like his two main characters, became in the public mind, with no justification at all, a ‘monster of depravity’. The reaction of most society women to Laclos’s book was similar to that of his friend Madame Riccoboni, who blamed him for giving other people a damaging impression of the morals of the nation in the character of Madame de Merteuil. No doubt partly because of the book’s title, it was considered dangerous and was read in secret, behind locked doors. Marie-Antoinette had a copy in her library. But it was also considered dangerous because, although Merteuil and Valmont are certainly monsters, they possess many admirable qualities and Laclos’s treatment of them is certainly not wholly unsympathetic. In 1824 the cour royale de Paris ordered the novel to be destroyed.
Its author, meanwhile, deemed to have brought the name of the army into disrepute, was sent back to his regiment. For it may surprise us to learn that Laclos was no effete member of a dying aristocracy but a devoted husband and father and in his professional life an outstanding soldier and military engineer.
Born in 1741 in Amiens into a recently ennobled family (it was then they added the ‘de Laclos’), Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos was sent to military school and joined the artillery – the preferred choice of the untitled classes. As luck would have it, he qualified for the army when the war with England ended and thirty years of peace began; and so instead of seeing action this brilliant and doubtless frustrated soldier was posted to various garrisons. These included Grenoble, for six years, and there he kept notes on various local notabilities and will certainly have used them to write the novel he began in 1778, when he was stationed on the Île d’Aix, off the coast of La Rochelle, and completed when he was on leave in Paris in 1781. After the publication of the book his leave was cut short and, back in La Rochelle, he took up the cause of the education of women in earnest and began a liaison with a woman half his age named Marie-Solange Duperré. At the relatively advanced age of forty-four he asked for her hand in marriage, and the couple, now with a small child, did indeed marry, against the wishes of her family, and remained devoted to each other for the rest of their lives.
In the same year, Laclos attacked the reputation of Vauban3 as a builder of fortifications and soon after that proposed a new system for renumbering the streets of Paris. As the Revolution approached he appears to have become the right-hand man of the Duke of Orleans, also known as Philippe Égalité, who would become Regent if Louis XVI stepped down and then, so the intention was, make Laclos his First Minister. When this did not happen, Laclos’s career took oddly different directions. He was said to have been involved in the March of the Women on Versailles in October 1789 and shortly afterwards he accompanied the Duke of Orleans to London and from there for several months conducted a vast correspondence which had as its aim the creation of a new and lasting peace in Europe.
He returned to France in July 1790, joined the Jacobins4 and became an editor of one of their newspapers. He was a constitutional monarchist until 1791, then a republican. He distanced himself from the Jacobins and lived quietly until recalled by Danton to military service in 1792 (the Duke of Orleans was guillotined in 1793). After organizing the repulse of the Coalition Forces at Valmy in September 1792, he was arrested the following year (for his moderate opinions) and threatened with execution, but survived Robespierre’s Terror and was released from prison in 1794. Appointed by Napoleon as Inspector General of artillery in 1800, he carried out his duties assiduously, as well as looking after his wife and family till the end. He died of dysentery in Taranto, on his way to Naples, where he had been sent with the Napoleonic army in 1803.
Given Laclos’s military background, it is not surprising that his novel is permeated with the imagery of war. The association of love and war in literature is very old indeed. Laclos continues and enlivens that tradition in his novel. The plot consists of moves and counter-moves between the two principal characters, who behave as though they were conducting a military campaign. Valmont views his seduction of Madame de Tourvel (the Présidente) in terms of tactics, rules, methods and strategies; he aims at victory and, finally, glory. Even his charm is a charm offensive, designed to seduce. The libertine, like the soldier, having achieved his objective, takes possession of the territory, and then abandons it. That is what Valmont does when he seduces both Tourvel and Cécile Volanges. In his account of the seduction of the latter to Merteuil (Letter 96), he uses the language of military aggression to describe their relative sexual positions: Cécile defends herself against his kiss, which was a ‘false attack’, designed to leave ‘all the rest’ undefended; thereupon Valmont changes his tactics and ‘takes up position’. In his account of the seduction of the Présidente to Merteuil he refers to ‘the true principles of this war, which, as we have often observed, so closely resembles the other’ (Letter 125). He urges Merteuil to view him as a great general: ‘Judge me as you would a Turenne or a Friedrich’, though his battleground is not the Rhine or the coast of Normandy, but the drawing room, the boudoir and the alcove. It is nevertheless Madame de Merteuil who, after being his lover and partner in crime, becomes Valmont’s real enemy. She is the one who sends back his letter of attempted reconciliation with the chilling words scrawled across it: ‘Very well then, war!’ (Letter 153). It is she who is in possession of the information which can lead to his downfall, and who directs and controls the campaign which will eventually cause his demise.
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