Just as Laclos’ characters play games with other people (and with each other), Laclos plays games with the reader. This includes the framing device of an “editor” who presents the book as a collection of actual letters, supplied by the heirs of Valmont’s old aunt Madame de Rosemonde–and who supplies a moralistic preface and footnotes–and a “publisher,” who seems to be at loggerheads with the “editor” and warns that the whole thing may be “just a novel.”

There’s also a lot of mystification about when the events take place. The letters are all dated 17**, between August of one year and January of the next. The “editor” occasionally hints that the letters are not recent. Thus, the footnote to letter 6, in which Valmont makes a somewhat smutty pun about Mme de Tourvel having to cross a small stream (“Every prude is afraid to jump across the ditch,” an expression that means something like “take the leap” and is sometimes used to refer to “crossing the line” in a sexual sense), notes that “one recognizes the bad habit of punning which has advanced so far since then.” Another footnote, to the Marquise de Merteuil’s use of the word rouerie (“rakery”), note that “These words roué and rouerie, which are now fortunately starting to fall into disuse in polite society, were widely in use in the era when these letters were written.”

But here’s a curious detail: In her superb annotations in the 2011 French edition of Liaisons (Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), Oxford scholar Catriona Seth writes (p. 831) that while roué goes back to 1720 or so, rouerie was actually of very recent coinage in Laclos’ time: its first usage is only spotted in 1777, i.e. five years before the novel’s publication.

Meanwhile, the clearly tongue-in-cheek “Publisher’s Note” speculates that if the story is real, it obviously happened very long ago and the “editor” updated it with modern references to make it more relatable. After all, the “publisher” reasons, “some of the characters he depicts have such bad morals that it is impossible to believe they lived in this century－this century of philosophy in which the spread of enlightenment everywhere has, as everyone knows, made all men so honest and all women so modest and reserved.” Obviously, in modern-day online slang, the </sarcasm> tag is meant to follow.

One way to date the setting is by looking at the literary references that abound in the Valmont/Merteuil letters, which extend to 1765 with a quote from Pierre-Laurent de Belloy’s The Siege of Calais－a play that remained hugely popular until the French Revolution. It is also worth noting that Rousseau’s New Héloïse (1761) and Émile (1763) are both referenced by Merteuil and Valmont the way one would reference established and familiar books, not novelties.

Another clue, perhaps, can be found in the references to warfare in Corsica－which plays a minor part in the plot: The Comte de Gercourt, the marquise’s ex-lover against whom she seeks revenge by ensuring that his virgin bride Cécile de Volanges is not a virgin by the time she makes it to the altar, is detained on that island. In Letter 9, dated August 11, Cécile’s mother, Mme de Volanges, writes that “his regiment is headed to Corsica, and since military operations are still going on, it will be impossible for him to return until winter.” Corsica, previously an independent republic, was conquered by France in 1768-69, with the Corsican army suffering a final defeat on May 8-9, 1769; but guerrilla warfare continued for months, and Corsica was not formally annexed until March 1770. Should we then conclude that the action of Liaisons takes place in August 1769-January 1770? Maybe. But notably, a letter from Gercourt to Mme de Volanges dated October 10 states that “everything should be quiet in this country” and that he will be heading home (except for a six-week delay for a tour of Italy). That seems too early, since Corsica was not fully pacified until early 1770. One intriguing possibility is that Liaisons is set even later, at some unspecified time after 1770, since periodic insurrections and outbreaks of guerrilla war in Corsica continued to take place.

Another interesting side note: on several occasions, Laclos gives the days of the week for certain dates. October 28 (the day Valmont “conquers” Mme de Tourvel) is a Thursday; so is December 16, the day Mme de Merteuil gets booed at the theater. October 8 or 9 can be calculated as a Saturday (in Letter 110, Valmont mentions that the letter Merteuil sent Cécile urging her to resume a sexual relationship with him “took three days to produce a full effect” and that she approached him on Saturday; Merteuil’s letter to Cécile, Letter 105, is dated October 4 and would have been delivered to Rosemonde’s château either October 5 or 6). September 24, the day Mme de Merteuil has her tryst with Valmont’s rival libertine Prévan, is a Friday. All these dates are consistent in that they all fit the same calendar year: in a year where October 28 is a Thursday, December 16 will also fall on a Thursday, October 9 on a Saturday, and September 24 on a Friday.

Since Liaisons definitely takes place post-1765, it’s interesting to note that the only two years between 1765 and 1782 that fit those dates are 1773 and 1779. (Obviously, we don’t know how pedantic Laclos intended to be about dates. But he was pedantic enough to make them match!)

Another interesting tidbit: according to Catriona Seth, in Laclos’ manuscript of Liaisons several of the letters have the year as “177-“, while two early letters are dated “1780.” Was Laclos trying to decide whether to use a specific year? Was 1780 the year he started working on the manuscript?

Notably, the Hampton play Les Liaisons Dangereuses is set circa 1785. In the final scene in which Madame de Merteuil, Madame de Rosemonde and Madame de Volanges are playing cards, Merteuil (who, in this version, is neither unmasked before society nor disfigured by smallpox) says, “A new year tomorrow and more than halfway through the eighties already. I used to be afraid of growing old, but now I trust in God and accept. I dare say we would not be wrong to look forward to whatever the nineties may bring.” Then, as the lights fade, we briefly see a silhouette of the guillotine against the wall. The symbolism－these decadent aristos will get their due come the Revolution－is obvious, but the mention of the eighties and nineties is also intended to be a contemporary reference: the play was written in 1985.

This scene is absent from the film (which, like the novel, ends in Merteuil’s disgrace but leaves out the disfigurement by smallpox); however, Merteuil’s sarcastic line to Valmont taunting him about the slowness of his progress with Madame de Tourvel－”The century is drawing to a close”－also suggests we’re somewhere in the 1780s. And two Liaisons sequels focusing on Merteuil’s fate, A Factory of Cunning by Philippa Stockley and L’hiver de beauté (“Beauty’s Winter”) by Christiane Baroche, are set in the mid-1780s, suggesting that the action of the original story takes place around the time the novel is published, in 1782.

(In my own forthcoming reworking/sequel, The Game of Love and Terror, I move the action of the novel to the late summer/fall of 1783. It quite obviously couldn’t have been set then, but it may not be that far from Laclos’ intended setting.)

If the novel is actually meant to be set fairly close to the time of its publication (e.g. in the late 1770s or early 1780s), it opens up possibilities for intriguing and ironic interpretations of certain lines. Thus, in Letter 96, Valmont speaks of “restoring to man his inalienable rights” (droits imprescriptibles) in the facetious context of his battle-of-the-sexes rivalry with Merteuil－who has just bested him, sort of, by spectacularly taking down Prévan, his rival and doppelgänger. (I’ll have more on the Prévan subplot and its significance in a later post.) If this is post-1776, Valmont may be quoting the Declaration of Independence; the American Revolution, let’s not forget, not only enjoyed the support of the French Crown but was hugely popular with the liberal French aristocracy, and translations of the Declaration were in wide circulation. To turn its idea of man’s inalienable rights into a glib declaration of male sexual entitlement would be a very Valmont move－all the more jarring since he reclaims those “inalienable rights” by deflowering the teenage Cécile in a creepy combination of coercion and seduction.

And there are all sorts of other fascinating possibilities. For instance, does the threat of suicide that Valmont uses to finally obtain Mme de Tourvel’s surrender (recounted in Letter 125) obliquely refer to Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, extremely popular all over Europe in the 1770s and widely rumored to have inspired a rash of suicides driven by unhappy romantic love?