Dangerous Liaisons

by Choderlos De Laclos

  5. Introduction to Mademoiselle de Maupin, Théophile Gautier, trans. H. Constantine, Penguin, 2005, p. xvi.

  6. Discours sur la question proposée par l’Académie de Châlons-sur-Marne, in Des Femmes et de leur éducation (1803). Edition des Mille et Une Nuits, Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2000, p. 10.

  7. Marriages at the time were generally arranged for the financial benefit of both parties: they were marriages of convenience.

  8. Laclos’s words as reported by the Comte Alexandre de Tilly (1764–1816) in his historical memoir of morals at the end of the eighteenth century. Mémoires du comte Alexandre de Tilly: pour servir à l’histoire des Moeurs de la fin du 18e. siècle (1830), edited and introduced by Christian Melchior-Bonnet, Mercure de France, Paris, 1986, p. 246.

  Further Reading

  Aldington, Richard, Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Dangerous Acquaintances), translated with an Introduction, with wood engravings by Raymond Hawthorn, The Folio Society, London, 1962. Aldington’s introduction to Laclos and his interpretation of the novel in its eighteenth-century context are particularly enlightening.

  Baudelaire, Charles, ‘Notes sur Les Liaisons dangereuses’, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, 1976, vol. 2, pp. 638–40.

  Bertaud, Michel, Choderlos de Laclos, Fayard, Paris, 2003. (At the time of writing, there are no biographies of Laclos in English.)

  Byrne, Patrick W., Les Liaisons Dangereuses: A Study of Motive and Moral, Glasgow University French and German Publications, 1989. This study focuses on the psychological and social aspects of the novel.

  Coward, David, Laclos Studies, 1968–82, in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, No. 219, Oxford, 1983, pp. 289–328. An assessement of critical works on Laclos up to today.

  Davies, Simon, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Critical Guides to French Texts, Grant and Cutler, London, 1987. A useful introduction to the novel.

  Sol, Antoinette Marie, Textual Promiscuities, Bucknell University and London Associated University Presses, 2002. Examines the relationship between Dangerous Liaisons and women’s writing.

  Thelander, Dorothy R., Laclos and the Epistolary Novel, Librairie Droz, Geneva, 1963. A competent general survey of the letter-writing genre.

  Thody, Philip, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Glasgow Introductory Guides to French Literature 19, 1991. Makes interesting comparisons with the film and play adaptations (see Appendix 2).

  Translator’s Note

  Les Liaisons dangereuses, published in French in 1782, was almost immediately translated into German (1783) and English (1784). To Laclos’s text in English, translated (anonymously) as Dangerous Connections, or Letters collected in a Society and published for the Instruction of other Societies, was appended an Extract from the Correspondence of what concerns the Happiness of Man and Society. The Utility of Novels: The Novel of Dangerous Connections, by the Abbé Kentzinger. There was a Russian translation in 1804 by A. I. Evand, but the novel was later banned by the Czar. It was not published in Spanish until 1822. In Italy it was read in the original French but not published in Italian until 1914. It was on the Vatican’s list of proscribed books until that list was discontinued in 1966.

  Laclos’s novel has appeared in English as Dangerous Connections (1784), Dangerous Acquaintances (Ernest Dowson, 360 copies privately printed in 1898, with illustrations by Monnet, Fragonard and Gérard; also Richard Aldington, 1924), or simply with its original title: Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Douglas Parmée, 1995; P. W. K. Stone, 1961). Dangerous Liaisons, which we might think an obvious translation, given the sexual connotations of the words and the sexual nature of the many liaisons in the book, seems not to have been used until now for a book title.

  One of the most interesting things about this novel is that after its enormous success in France in 1782 and the first translations it was banned in many countries as well as in France, and so was virtually unknown until the twentieth century. Sir Edmund Gosse, reviewing it in the Sunday Times on 4 January 1925, said Aldington had introduced it to a British public for the first time, which indicates how little it was known before then. The nineteenth-century Biographie Universelle had spoken of it as ‘a picture of the most odious immorality’, and a reviewer in the Weekly Westminster, writing about an edition privately printed in New York as recently as 1933, calls it ‘a profoundly immoral book’. This remained the usual view; but Gosse’s verdict indicated a shift in public opinion: ‘An age which has tolerated the brutality of La garçonne1 and the foul chaos of Ulysses must not make itself ridiculous by throwing stones at Les Liaisons dangereuses.’ In his preface to the re-issue of Dowson (by Nonesuch 1940, printed, interestingly enough, in France), André Gide says it ‘has but very recently gained the freedom of respectable bookshops’ and that its renown has remained clandestine, like the course of an underground river’. It may be a sign of the times that I am, as far as I know, the first female translator of this ‘dangerous’ novel.

  I am indebted to P. W. K. Stone, who translated Laclos for Penguin in 1961; also to Richard Aldington. The text I have used for my translation is that of the Livres de Poche ‘Classiques’, edited by Michel Delon, based on Laurent Versini’s edition of Laclos’s Oeuvres complètes, Paris, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1979.

  I was fortunate to be able to spend some time in Paris while working on my translation and am most grateful to the Institut Français and the Centre du Livre for making this possible. I am grateful, too, to friends and relatives for their encouragement and, most of all, to my husband, David Constantine, for his generous and invaluable help and advice.

  All notes with an asterisk are in Laclos’s original text. All numbered notes are the translator’s.

  Helen Constantine, Oxford, February 2006

  NOTE

  1. A scandalous novel by Victor Marguerite (1866–1922) about the exploits of a young woman, first published in 1922.

  Dangerous Liaisons

  Or a Collection of Letters from One

  Social Class and Published for the

  Instruction of Others

  ‘I have seen the mores of my times and have published these letters’

  J.-J. Rousseau, Preface to Julie to La Nouvelle Héloïse1

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  We believe it is our duty to warn the public that despite the title of this work and what the editor says about it in his preface, we do not guarantee its authenticity as a collection of letters, and in fact have compelling reasons to believe it is simply a novel.

  Moreover, it seems to us that the author, despite his attempts at verisimilitude, has himself most clumsily destroyed every semblance of truth by setting the events he is describing in the present day. In fact, several characters he puts on his stage have such vicious habits that it is impossible to imagine they can have lived in our age, in this age of philosophy, in which the light of reason has spread everywhere and made us all, as we know, into honourable men, and modest and retiring women.

  Our opinion, then, is that if the adventures related in this work have any basis in truth, they can only have happened in another time and place. And we attach much blame to the author who, apparently beguiled by the hope of attracting more interest in his story by locating it more exactly in his own age and his own country, has dared to represent in our own costume and customs a way of life which is alien to us.

  To preserve, as far as possible, the over-credulous reader from being taken unawares in this respect, we shall sustain our opinion with an argument that we offer with confidence, since it seems to us incontrovertible and unassailable. It is that, though undoubtedly the same causes would not fail to produce the same effects, we never see young girls today with an income of sixty thousand livres2 taking the veil, nor any Présidente who is young and pretty dying of a broken heart.

  EDITOR’S PREFACE

  This work, or rather, collection of letters, which may perhaps still be thought too weighty, contains nevertheless only a very small portion of the correspondence
which made up their total number. Charged with putting them in order by the people with whom they were deposited, and who, I knew, intended them to be made public, I asked nothing for my pains except permission to cut anything which in my opinion might not be to the purpose. And in fact I have tried to conserve only those letters which seemed necessary either to the understanding of the events or to the development of the characters. If one adds to this not very arduous task that of placing such letters as I have allowed to survive in the right order – and I have almost always arranged them chronologically – and finally some short and occasional notes, whose sole purpose, for the most part, is to indicate the origin of a few quotations or explain the cuts that I have taken the liberty of making, my entire contribution to this work will be known. My aims did not go beyond that.*

  I had proposed more significant changes, almost all relating to the purity of the diction or style, with which one will often find fault. I should also have liked to be authorized to abridge certain letters that were too long; in several of them matters that have nothing to do with one another are discussed separately and almost without any transition between them. This idea was not approved. Of course, it probably would not have in itself sufficed to confer any merit upon the work, but it would at least have removed some of its faults.

  Objections were raised that the intention was to publish the letters themselves and not a literary work based upon these letters; that it would have been as much contrary to all probability as truth if all of the eight or ten people who contributed to this correspondence had written with equal correctness. And upon my contention that that was very far from being the case, and there was not a single one who had not made serious mistakes, which would be certain to meet with criticism, I was told that all reasonable readers would surely expect to find mistakes in a collection of letters exchanged between private individuals, since in all those published up till now by various esteemed writers, and even by some members of the Academy, not one could be found that was totally without mistakes. These arguments did not convince me, and I found them, as I still do, easier to expound than to accept. But I did not have the final say, and accordingly I submitted. I have reserved the right to protest about it and declare, as I do now, that I was not of that view.

  As to whether the work has any merit, perhaps it is not up to me to offer an opinion, since it neither can nor should influence anyone else’s. However, those who, before beginning to read, prefer to know more or less what to expect would do well, in my view, to read on. Others will do better to move straight on to the text itself; they know enough about it already.

  What I can say first and foremost is that if, as I concede, I am convinced I should publish these letters, I am none the less far from hopeful of success. And please do not suppose this sincerity to be false modesty on my part. For I declare with the same frankness that if this collection had not seemed worthy of being offered to the public, I should not have concerned myself with it. Let us try to reconcile this apparent contradiction.

  The merit of a work lies in its usefulness or in its capacity for giving pleasure, sometimes both, when it has both to offer. But its success, which is not always proof of its merit, often derives more from the choice of subject than from its execution, from the totality of the material presented rather than the manner in which it is treated. Now in this collection, which contains, as its title proclaims, the letters of a whole class of society, this makes for a diversity of interests which weakens the reader’s own. Moreover, since nearly all the feelings expressed in it are false or feigned, the only interest they excite is that of curiosity, which is always far inferior to that of sentiment and which disposes the reader to be far less indulgent and far more attentive to errors of detail, so thwarting the author in his one real objective.

  These faults are perhaps to some extent redeemed by a quality inherent in the nature of the work: the variety of styles. This is a quality which an author achieves only with difficulty, but which came about quite naturally in this case and at least spares the reader the boredom of uniformity. Some might also take into account the fair number of observations, either new or not well-known, which are scattered throughout these letters. I think these too are all one may expect in the way of pleasure, even from the most sympathetic standpoint.

  The usefulness of the work, which will be perhaps even more disputed, seems to me to be easier to establish. It seems to me at least that it is doing a service to society to unveil the strategies used by the immoral to corrupt the moral, and I believe these letters will make an effective contribution to this end. In them are also to be found the proof and the example of two important truths which one might suppose to be unacknowledged, seeing how little they are practised. One, that any woman who consents to receive into her circle of friends an unprincipled man ends up by becoming his victim; the other, that any mother who allows her daughter to confide in anyone but herself is at the very least lacking in prudence. Young people of both sexes might also learn from it that the friendship that immoral persons seem to grant them so easily is only ever a dangerous trap, and as fatal to their happiness as to their virtue. Morever, it seems to me that the harm which may so often follow closely upon the benefits is greatly to be feared in this case and, far from advising young people to read this book, I believe it is important to keep all such books out of their way. The age when this one may cease to be dangerous, and become useful, seems to me to have been very well understood, for her own sex, by a good mother who is not only intelligent but also sensible. ‘I should believe,’ she told me, after reading the manuscript of this correspondence, ‘I was doing my daughter a great service if I gave it to her on her wedding day.’ If all mothers thought like that, I should congratulate myself on publishing it for ever more.

  But even supposing we were to accept this favourable opinion, it still seems to me that this collection must please few people. Depraved men and women will have an interest in condemning a literary work which may harm them. And as they are not lacking in cunning, perhaps they will be clever enough to win over to their side the puritans, who will be alarmed by this picture of corruption so fearlessly presented.

  Those who consider themselves intellectuals will not be interested in a devout woman, whom they will regard as lacking in wit because of her devoutness; whereas the religious will be angry at the fall of a virtuous woman and will complain that religion is portrayed in a very feeble light.

  From another point of view, people of fastidious taste will be disgusted by the over-simple style riddled with errors in several of these letters; whereas the majority of readers, mistakenly supposing that everything that appears in print has been laboured over, will think they detect in other letters the exertions of an author visible through the characters to whom he gives a voice.

  Finally it will be said, in general perhaps, that everything is only of value in its proper place. And if ordinarily letters in society are deprived of all grace by the authors’ overly cautious style, the smallest omission becomes a real mistake and is insupportable when they are put into print.

  I freely admit that all of these criticisms may be well-founded. I also believe that it would be possible to answer them, even without exceeding the length of a preface. But it has to be realized that if it were necessary to answer for everything, the book itself would be unable to answer for anything. And if I had judged that to be the case, I should have suppressed both book and preface.

  PART ONE

  LETTER 1

  Cécile Volanges to Sophie Carnay at the Ursuline convent of…

  As you see, my dear Sophie, I am as good as my word, and not spending all my time on frills and furbelows; I shall always have time for you. All the same, I have seen more finery in one single day than in the whole of the four years we spent together; and I do believe the high-and-mighty Tanville* will be more humiliated at my first visit to the convent – for I shall be sure to ask for her – than she doubtless supposed we were by all those visits she used to
pay us, en grande toilette.1 Mamma asks my opinion about everything; she treats me less like a little schoolgirl than she used to. I have my own maid; I have a room and closet at my disposal, and I am writing this at the prettiest little secrétaire;2 I have a key to it and can lock away whatever I wish. Mamma has said that I should go and see her every day when she rises; that I do not need to have my hair dressed until dinner, because we shall always be alone; and that she will tell me each day what time I must join her in the afternoon. The remainder of the time is my own and I have my harp, my drawing and my books, just as I had in the convent; except Mother Perpétue is not there to scold me and if I choose to fritter my time away, that is my affair: but as my Sophie is not there to giggle and chatter with, I may as well keep busy.

  It is not yet five o’clock; I am not to see Mamma until seven: there is plenty of time to write, if I only had something to tell! But they have not yet breathed a word. And were it not for all the obvious preparations and all the women who keep coming in to do things for me, I should believe no one had the least notion of marrying me, and that it was simply another piece of our dear Joséphine’s nonsense.† But Mamma has told me so often that a young lady should stay in the convent until she marries that, now she has taken me out, I think Joséphine must be right.

  A carriage has just pulled up outside the door and Mamma has sent word for me to come to her rooms immediately. Could it be him? I am not dressed, my hand is shaking and my heart is thumping. I have asked my maid if she knows who is with my mother. She said: ‘It’s Monsieur C—, for certain,’ and laughed. Oh! I think it must be him! I promise to come back and tell you what happens. That is his name, anyway. I must not keep him waiting. Farewell, for a little while.