Are you really, vicomte, deluding yourself about the feeling that binds you to Mme de Tourvel? If it isn’t love, then love doesn’t exist: you deny it in a hundred ways but prove it in a thousand.

_{The Marquise de Merteuil to the Vicomte de Valmont, Letter 134}

“Does Valmont love Madame de Tourvel?” is one of the big enduring questions of Liaisons scholarship, and one of the novel’s great ambiguities. Does the cold and jaded libertine get caught in his own trap when his faked love for his victim becomes real? Or is Valmont incapable of love, at least as most of us would understand the term? Is whatever he feels simply a glorified ego trip? Does Tourvel remain nothing but his “project,” or even a “chess piece” in his game with Merteuil?

Obviously, the answer is hugely relevant to our understanding of the novel. If Valmont does fall in love—and, as literary critic Peter Brooks argues in his 1969 book, The Novel of Worldliness, briefly experiences something beyond the empty, hedonistic “worldliness” of his social circle, before he recklessly destroys everything—this makes the conclusion, and the novel itself, far more tragic but also more human and in some sense hopeful. If he always remains a libertine with a project, the novel is almost relentlessly dark and cynical (and even Tourvel’s deathbed prayer for Valmont’s soul becomes a joke, since this Valmont clearly has no soul).

The question of love is there from the start

Here’s an interesting detail that I think many readers miss (and that is completely missing from the 1989 film adaptation): The possibility that Valmont is in love with Tourvel is brought up very early on. In his very first letter to Merteuil in which he refuses her “orders” to return to Paris and seduce Cécile because he’s embarked on the conquest of Tourvel, he remarks, “I really must have this woman to save myself from the ridiculous position of falling in love with her, for who knows where thwarted desire could lead!” (Letter 4). In her response (Letter 5), Merteuil mocks Valmont’s pursuit of Tourvel as a “ridiculous whim” and then nastily mocks Tourvel herself: a passably attractive woman, to be sure, but bland-faced, graceless, awkward, badly dressed, and a prude who is certain to be a total dud in bed even if Valmont does manage to coax her there (at best, she’ll grant him the same boring sex she has with her husband). Valmont responds with a passionate defense of Tourvel, half-jokingly asserting that any man who spoke of her that way “would pay with his life” and any other woman but Merteuil would suffer some kind of payback.

In the name of friendship, wait until I’ve had this woman if you want to malign her. Don’t you know that only pleasure has the right to remove love’s blindfold?

But what am I saying? Is Mme de Tourvel in need of any illusion? No, all she needs to be adorable is to be herself.

Letter 6

An enthusiastic and even lyrical paean to Tourvel follows: Sure she may look dowdy in formal attire, but she’s ravishing in the casual morning dress she wears in the countryside on oppressively hot days! Sure her face has no expression when “nothing speaks to her heart,” because she doesn’t have the “lying gaze” or studied smile of the coquette—but if you could only see her “frank and artless merriment” in playful moments, or the way her face lights up with “pure joy and sympathetic kindness” when she is helping some unfortunate! This is also where Valmont rhapsodizes (see earlier post) about being able to feel again and recovering the “charming illusions of youth” next to Tourvel, with whom he doesn’t need sexual possession to be happy.

No wonder Merteuil responds by telling him he’s in love. (“To tell you otherwise would be to deceive you; it would be to hide your illness from you.”) Interestingly, Valmont quickly concedes: “If being unable to live without possessing the object of desire; if giving up all other pleasures for this pursuit and letting it consume all of one’s time and one’s life means being in love, then I am really and truly in love.” This is very different from his later defensiveness about being in love with Tourvel—perhaps because infatuation with a still-unattainable “object of desire” is perfectly acceptable as part of the libertine game.

Hints of real feeling—with a dark side

After that, there are recurring clues that Valmont’s feelings are more real than he generally admits. His first declaration of love is thoroughly calculated—he pretends to blurt out his confession on impulse during a conversation he has carefully set up with his act of charity toward a peasant family—but he also notes that when Tourvel bursts into tears, “fortunately I got so carried away that I too was crying.” (Letter 23) A little later, when he manages to get his hands on Tourvel’s mail and discovers evidence of her feelings for him (his letter which she conspicuously tore up has been carefully put back together, with traces of tears on the paper), he tells Merteuil, “I confess, I yielded to a young man’s impulse and kissed this letter with a surge of emotion to which I thought I was no longer susceptible.” For good measure, he also refers to Tourvel in this passage as “the woman I adore.” (Letter 44)

An even more remarkable passage occurs when Valmont discusses his conversation with Danceny about the latter’s feelings for Cécile and points out that when a man is in love for the first time, he will be less eager to seek sex, and not out of timidity or scruples:

[I]t’s that the heart, surprised by an unfamiliar feeling, pauses, so to speak, at each step to bask in the enchantment it feels, and this enchantment has such a powerful effect on a novice heart as to make it forget all other pleasures. This is so true that a libertine in love—if a libertine can be in love—becomes from that very moment less impatient to obtain possession; and in the end, between Danceny’s behavior with the Volanges girl and my own with the prudish Mme de Tourvel, the difference is only one of degree.

Letter 57

In a 1980 article in the journal Romance Notes (v. 3, No. 2, Spring 1980) arguing that Valmont always remains “a man with a project,” Raymond Lemieux, professor of foreign languages at Sonoma State University in California, highlights the phrase “if a libertine can be in love” as evidence that Valmont himself acknowledges he is not, and cannot be. But for one thing, the disclaimer does acknowledge the possibility of love; for another, it sounds more than anything else like a face-saving way to hedge.

Is Valmont, to some extent, talking himself into being in love by playing the part too well? It’s worth noting he plays it not only for Tourvel herself but also for Danceny, in order to win the young man’s confidence (and advance the agenda of Cécile’s seduction):

I told him so many times that honorable love is the highest good, that a genuine feeling is worth a dozen dalliances, that I myself was at the moment in love and shy, and he finally found my way of thinking so congenial to his own that, charmed by my candor, he told me everything and swore to me a friendship without reserve.

Letter 57

(Doug Parmée and Helen Constantine both garble this passage to suggest that Valmont makes such a convincing spiel to Danceny that he himself starts to feel like “a timid lover” or a “shy young lover.” It’s an interesting idea, and it goes with the more general theme of Valmont falling in love by getting too deeply into his role. But it’s not in the original text.)

Obviously, Valmont’s lyrical effusions about Tourvel don’t change the fact that his pursuit of her has a much darker side, even aside from the manipulation and deception. In a much-discussed passage in Letter 6, Valmont tells Merteuil that he doesn’t want to rid Tourvel of her religious “prejudices” but, rather, to be “by turns the object and the conqueror of her remorse”:

Let her believe in virtue but sacrifice it to me; let her be appalled by her transgressions yet powerless to stop herself; agitated by a myriad terrors, let her only be able to forget them and vanquish them in my arms. Then she can say, with my consent: “I adore you”; she alone of all women will deserve to say it. I will indeed be the god she has chosen.

Some critics see this passage as sadistic; but note that Valmont’s fantasy involves soothing Tourvel’s anguish, as well as causing it. (It’s basically a combination of hurt/comfort—to use a term from fanfiction—and massive ego trip.) Incidentally, this passage in the manuscript originally had another revealing line (found in the “variants” in the 2011 Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition, p. 813): “Ah, don’t accuse me of being a brute; the fleeting pain will only double her pleasures.” (Laclos dropped it, no doubt, because it’s unlikely that Valmont would justify himself to Merteuil on the charge of excessive cruelty.) As with much else, Valmont’s language about Tourvel at that point is riddled with contradictions: he is both plotting her undoing and contemplating “her happiness and my own” (Letter 4).

“I love and hate with equal ardor”

A turning point comes in Letters 99-100. In a key scene, Tourvel nearly capitulates and starts telling Valmont that she loves him; then, she falls at his feet sobbing and begging him to “save her.” “Deeply moved” (as he admits to Merteuil), he lifts her up, carries her to the bed while she seems to go into shock—her body stiffens, and she is shaking violently—and leaves her after “rendering some assistance” (presumably undoing her corset). Valmont’s emotion here seems quite genuine; he even tells Merteuil, hours later, that he is still under its sway and has set out to write to her partly to “force himself” to shake it off. Yet he also quickly segues to smug certainty that, after these “death throes of virtue,” Tourvel’s surrender is imminent—all the more so since, when a recovered but subdued Tourvel reappears in the drawing-room that evening, she gives Valmont very tender looks and impulsively squeezes his hand as she bids him goodnight.

Valmont is not exactly sympathetic here: he’s convinced that his chivalrous self-restraint has earned him enough credit to clinch his victory (what better proof that he really has abandoned his libertine ways and is the respectful admirer he promised to be!); he’s ridiculously self-satisfied, and he is already nagging Merteuil for his prize (“Are you ready?”). But he’s also envisioning Tourvel’s surrender in benign and even tender terms: “I bet she is delighted to be where she is. All the dues have been paid; all that remains is to enjoy the reward. Perhaps, even as I write to you, she is already pondering this sweet thought.”

In the very next letter, Letter 100, the other shoe drops: “My friend, I have been played, betrayed, ruined; I am in despair.” Tourvel has left the château and fled back to Paris in the middle of the night. This sends Valmont into a rage, both frightening and comically over the top, that shows far more wounded vanity and thwarted entitlement than love:

How I will enjoy my revenge! … I will yet see her at my feet, trembling and bathed in tears, crying for mercy in that lying voice of hers; and I will have no mercy.

What is she doing now? what is she thinking? Perhaps she’s congratulating herself on having tricked me and, true to the predilections of her sex, finds this to be the sweetest pleasure of all. …

And to be forced to swallow my resentment! not to dare show anything but tender anguish when my heart is filled with rage! to see myself reduced to pleading yet again with a rebellious woman who has escaped my dominion! Did I have to be humiliated like this? And by whom? by a timid woman with no experience of combat! … And I’m going to tolerate it? My friend, you do not believe that; you do not have such a humiliating opinion of me.

This letter (which alone should refute some commentators’ bizarre idea that Valmont and Merteuil are both creatures of icy intellect!) also reveals the intensity of Valmont’s obsession:

But what fatal power draws me to this woman?  … There is no more happiness for me, no more peace, unless I can possess this woman whom I love and hate with equal ardor. My life will be unbearable until her life is in my hands.

Two weeks later, reassured (by secretly reading Tourvel’s letters to his aunt, Mme de Rosemonde) that his “fair lady” is still passionately in love with him, tormented by guilt, anxiety and longing, and ready to succumb as soon as he can get near her, Valmont is still having some vindictive thoughts about making her suffer and beg for his attention. But this passage also has a particularly interesting line:

I’ll do more; I’ll leave her, and either I don’t know this woman, or I’ll have no successor. She will resist the need for consolation, the habit of pleasure, even the desire for revenge. In the end she will have existed only for me, and whether she’ll have a long or short run, I alone will have opened and shut the gate.

Letter 115

Leave aside the usual grandiosity and posturing, and what stands out is Valmont’s need to spell out that he’ll drop Tourvel at some point. (Note that he doesn’t say, for instance, “And once I leave her, I’m willing to bet I’ll have no successor.”) But isn’t that the presumed conclusion to any libertine adventure? Thus, paradoxically, this very statement implies that not leaving her is a possibility—quite a leap for a man like Valmont.

Tourvel’s undoing, and Valmont’s

In another ten days, when Valmont sends Merteuil his “victory report,” the question of whether he is in love so preoccupies him that he devotes nearly 600 words to it before embarking on his account of the “grand event.”

I am still too full of happiness to be able to appreciate it, but I am astonished at the unfamiliar enchantment I have felt. … Yet it is not love; for in the end, while I may have had moments of weakness with this amazing woman that resembled this pusillanimous passion, I was always able to master them and return to my principles. Even if I’d gotten carried away during yesterday’s scene more than I had  expected (and I believe it did), even if I had for a moment shared in the turmoil and the intoxication I was generating, this passing illusion would be dispelled by now; and yet that enchantment remains. I would even, I admit, find a rather sweet pleasure in surrendering to it if it did not cause me some anxiety. Am I, at my age, to be overpowered like a schoolboy by an involuntary and unfamiliar feeling? No, it must, above all, be resisted and examined.

Letter 125

I am still too full of happiness to be able to appreciate it, but I am astonished at the unfamiliar enchantment I have felt. … Yet it is not love; for in the end, while I may have had moments of weakness with this amazing woman that resembled this pusillanimous passion, I was always able to master them and return to my principles. Even if I’d gotten carried away during yesterday’s scene more than I had expected (and I believe it did), even if I had for a moment shared in the turmoil and the intoxication I was generating, this passing illusion would be dispelled by now; and yet that enchantment remains. I would even, I admit, find a rather sweet pleasure in surrendering to it if it did not cause me some anxiety. Am I, at my age, to be overpowered like a schoolboy by an involuntary and unfamiliar feeling? No, it must, above all, be resisted and examined.

Letter 125

Paradoxically, Valmont’s actual “triumph” over Tourvel is very far from romantic. In fact it’s where we arguably see him at his most chilling: finally the libertine master strategist waging a careful, calculated campaign in which nothing is left to chance. Using Mme de Rosemonde as an unwitting accomplice, he leads Tourvel to believe first that he is literally lovesick with pining for her (in a darkly funny twist, he relies on his nightly sexual marathons with Cécile to look credibly haggard and exhausted), then that he has made some kind of big and mysterious decision. Then he informs Tourvel’s confessor and spiritual advisor, Father Anselme, that he has repented his errors and wants to embrace a life of piety under the priest’s guidance; but first, he has to meet with Tourvel to return her letters and make amends (Letter 120). Besides setting up the meeting Valmont needs, this ploy has the effect of sending Tourvel into a new emotional tailspin: Valmont doesn’t want her anymore. In the 1958 book Les Liaisons dangereuses et la création romanesque chez Laclos [Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Novelistic Creation in Laclos], literary scholar Jean-Luc Seylaz argues that part of the plan is to make Tourvel jealous of God, to whom she believes she is losing Valmont (p. 111). If so, it’s an ironic inversion of Valmont’s earlier fantasies (Letter 6) of stealing Tourvel “from the God she worships.” But it’s also a way to rob Tourvel of faith as a source of strength; and since Valmont intercepts her mail, he is privy to all her thoughts and torments.

When they finally meet, Valmont destroys what’s left of Tourvel’s defenses with an emotional barrage in which he alternates between (fake) paroxysms of despair, hurt and angry outbursts with accusations of cruelty, and contrite, melancholy moments in which he assures her that he wants only her happiness. Then comes (pardon the anachronism) the nuclear option: the reveal that his resolution is not to start a new life of piety and penance, but to end his life if he cannot have her. When he bids her farewell and starts to leave, Tourvel—horrified and genuinely convinced that he is about to do away with himself—finally breaks down, tries to stop him, and collapses into his arms. Valmont’s account is ambiguous on whether she is “only” severely overwrought or actually unconscious when he either leads or carries her to an armchair and completes his “triumph.” (Whether this should be regarded as rape is a question I’ll tackle in another post.)

In all of this, Valmont, by his own account, remains ice-cold, his every move scripted in advance. Indeed, when he falls to his knees and dramatically swears to “possess you or die,” he finds himself frustratingly unable to produce tears—partly due to being “so painstakingly and continuously focused on every single detail.” It’s after the “conquest” that he comes undone. He had believed that, once “degraded by her fall,” Tourvel would become “just an ordinary woman” (Letter 96). But it turns out that the “fallen” Tourvel is all the more “astonishing”: utterly distraught at first, she finds comfort in Valmont’s assurances that she has made him happy, and finally makes the conscious decision to give herself to him unreservedly.

“You’re right,” the tender-hearted woman told me; “I can no longer bear my existence unless it serves to make you happy. I devote myself entirely to your happiness; from this moment I am yours, and you will encounter no refusals or regrets from me.” It was with this candor, naïve or sublime, that she surrendered to me her person and her charms and increased my happiness by sharing it. The intoxication was complete and reciprocal; and for the first time, mine outlasted the pleasure. I left her arms only to kneel at her feet and swear eternal love; and to tell the whole truth, I meant what I said. Finally, even after we parted, the thought of her stayed with me, and I had to make an effort to distract myself.

Letter 125

Is this a poetic moment in which the libertine awakens to True Love? As always with Laclos’ masterpiece, it’s complicated. It’s quite possible to read it as yet another instance of Valmont’s narcissism: what triggers his emotions is Tourvel’s declaration, in quasi-religious language (je m’y consacre toute entière), that she devotes herself completely to him and to his happiness. In a sense he has achieved his early stated purpose of becoming her God.

And yet subsequent letters suggest that this relationship, even if founded on a mass of lies, briefly becomes one in which Valmont transcends his egotism. The details are sketchy, since he becomes more cagey in his confidences to Merteuil (who clearly finds his feelings for Tourvel infuriating); but Tourvel’s letters to Rosemonde provide some fascinating glimpses. Responding to the old woman’s warnings about the danger of expecting happiness from love (all the more impossible since, in Rosemonde’s view, men are not capable of loving unselfishly), Tourvel asks, “Then why would he have become more tender, more eager, now that he has nothing left to gain? … [N]ow that he can surrender without constraint to the impulses of his heart, he seems to know all of my heart’s desires.” Meanwhile, Valmont, trying to justify himself to Merteuil, spins his attachment to Tourvel as an experiment in observing a “rare” woman whose sexuality is governed entirely by her heart—an experiment that just happens to require making her “happy, perfectly happy.”

Another notable detail: at this point, promiscuity for Valmont is not a natural instinct but a deliberate strategy, both to prove (to himself as much to Merteuil) that he is “free” and to fight Tourvel’s hold over him. Informing Merteuil that he has arranged to gain access to Cécile’s room once she and her mother return to Paris, he writes, “Thus, in a few days I will have already weakened the perhaps too-intense effect I have felt by dividing my pleasures; and if a simple division is not enough, I will multiply them.” (Letter 133) It’s for the same reason that, six days later, he abruptly interrupts an evening with Tourvel—precisely because he’s bothered by the pleasure he takes in her company—and goes off to meet the courtesan Émilie at the Opera. (“She could confirm to you that until morning when we parted, no regrets troubled our pleasures,” he brags to Merteuil, protesting a little too much. Merteuil is naturally unconvinced: just because for once he deliberately did something that he had casually done a thousand times before doesn’t mean he’s not in love.)

Of course, complicating things further, Valmont is also trying not only to collect his “reward” from Merteuil but, at this point, to renew their earlier romance. (More about that in my upcoming post on Valmont/Merteuil.) He is clearly hoping that he can have both women; but as we know, it all ends with Merteuil daring Valmont to send Tourvel a devastatingly cruel, contemptuous breakup letter, and with Valmont copying her “epistolary model” and sending it on to Tourvel. “I’m curious, above all, whether you still see this latest action as evidence of love!” he writes to Merteuil, reporting duly on this development. “Oh, it’s there, to be sure, and plenty of it! But for whom?” (Letter 142). Merteuil’s reply is devastating: “Yes, vicomte, you loved Mme de Tourvel very much, and moreover you still love her, you love her madly; but because it amused me to shame you for it, you bravely sacrificed her. You would have sacrificed a thousand rather than endure a joke.” (Letter 145) To this, and to her boast of victory over him, Valmont will make no response.

The letter

But let’s look at what Valmont actually does in sending the letter to Tourvel.

The cruelty is indisputable and shocking: Valmont tells Merteuil he dispatched the letter right away by evening post, not only because this way Tourvel will have all night to ponder it and “collect herself” but because he had promised to write to her that evening, and this is what she’ll get.

What’s remarkable is that the next morning, Valmont actually expects a reply. When he doesn’t get one by afternoon, he goes to present himself at Tourvel’s house (as you would do if you are breaking up with someone). He is told that she’s out and assumes that she’s simply refusing to see him, which doesn’t surprise him; but he thinks that, having been informed of his visit, she’ll have to send a reply as a matter of simple civility. In fact, he’s so impatient to receive it that, after going out to make the rounds of social calls, he goes home early to see if there’s any word from her. When there’s still nothing, he sends his valet to Tourvel’s house to find out what’s going on and learns that she left home that morning to go to a convent.

(Another revealing detail casually turns up in a later paragraph: Valmont mentions that he went out to make those social calls because he was “feeling too restless to stay put.”)

It seems to me that the totality of this account, given to Merteuil in letters 142 and 144, strongly suggests that when Valmont sends the fateful letter to Tourvel, he doesn’t really understand just how devastating, let alone irrevocable, it will be and has no intention of leaving Tourvel permanently. In the back of his mind, he believes that she’ll be hurt and angry, even furious, but he will manage to smooth things over—the way he did before after she discovered his infidelity with Émilie—and get her back. He wants to show Merteuil (and prove to himself) that he can leave Tourvel; but it’s the gesture of a smoker who throws a pack of cigarettes in the trash can to demonstrate that he is not addicted and can quit smoking any time he wants, and then, having proven the point to himself and/or a concerned friend, buys another pack an hour later.

The discovery that Tourvel has fled to a convent changes everything. Valmont’s first response is to brag about how brilliantly this scandal will enhance his reputation and how no other man will ever be able to step into his shoes (“they’ll find that when I make a proper effort, the impression I leave is indelible”). But it is also starting to dawn on him that if no one else will ever have Tourvel, neither will he.

I admit that the path she has taken made flatters my self-regard, but it vexes me that she has found enough strength to separate herself from me so completely. … What! if I wished to approach her again, she might not no longer want it? What am I saying: No longer crave it, no longer see it as her supreme happiness! Is that how one loves? and do you believe, my fair friend, that I should tolerate it? Could I not, for example, and would it not be better to try to bring this woman back to the point of seeing the possibility of a reconciliation, which one always desires as long as one can hope for it? I could try such a step without attaching any importance to it, and therefore without giving you any offense. On the contrary! it would be a simple experiment for us to conduct together, and even if I succeeded, it would be just one more way to repeat at your will a sacrifice that seemed to please you.

Letter 144

On the face of it, this is not only monstrous but almost psychotic: Valmont still seems obsessed with his amour propre and is mulling over an insanely sadistic plan to coax Tourvel into renewing their relationship only to dump her again for Merteuil’s amusement. And yet compare this passage to the rage-filled rant in Letter 100 after Tourvel leaves Rosemonde’s château, which has some strikingly similar wording (“And I’m going to tolerate it? You do not believe that, my friend” [Letter 100]; “And do you believe, my fair friend, that I should tolerate it?” [Letter 144]). The difference in tone and energy is striking. It’s as if Valmont were merely going through the motions of an egocentric tantrum, reenacting its tropes for Merteuil as a cover for what he’s really doing, and what Merteuil quickly discerns (in Letter 145): asking for her permission to get Tourvel back.

He also grows more insistent about collecting his “prize” from Merteuil. In Letter 142, when he is still waiting for Tourvel’s reply, his sole reference to the subject is gracious and gallant: “However, I make no claims and rely solely on your generosity.” By letter 144, his mention of “a sacrifice that seemed to please you” is followed by a courteous but unambiguous reminder: “At present, my fair friend, all that remains is for me to receive my reward for it, and my most ardent wishes are for your return.” (Merteuil is staying at her château in the country.) And then he returns to the subject again at the very end: “Farewell, my fair friend; come back as soon as possible to enjoy your dominion over me, to receive my homage and to give me my reward.”

While waiting—and still unaware that Merteuil is already secretly back and spending her evenings with Danceny—Valmont starts his efforts to reach Tourvel, of whose illness he presumably hears soon after sending his letter to Merteuil. (News in Parisian society travels almost at social-media speed: Valmont’s death in the duel with Danceny is reported that very morning to Mme de Volanges by a doctor who visits Mme de Tourvel at the convent.) He somehow manages to get a letter to her at the convent (probably with the help of her maid Julie, the same one he earlier bribed and blackmailed into stealing her mail); the letter is handed to Tourvel during one of her lucid intervals, but her reaction is to cry out, “From him! Great God! Take it away, take it away” and relapse into violent delirium moments later. (Letter 149, Volanges to Rosemonde) Four days later, already after Merteuil’s “declaration of war,” he makes a last-ditch attempt to reach Tourvel via Volanges:

Here’s one [event] I certainly didn’t expect: a letter I have received from M. de Valmont, who saw fit to choose me as his confidante and even his mediatrix with Mme de Tourvel, for whom he also enclosed another letter with the one to me. I replied to one and sent back the other.

Letter 154

After explaining that she couldn’t have fulfilled Valmont’s request even if she has wanted to, since Tourvel is in constant delirium, Volanges asks Rosemonde, to whom she forwards Valmont’s letter: “But what do you say of this despair of M. de Valmont’s? First of all, is it to be believed, or is he simply trying to deceive everyone to the very end?” Appended to these words is a within-the-story footnote from “the editor”: “Since nothing has been found in the ensuing correspondence that would resolve this question, we have chosen to omit M. de Valmont’s letter.”

Of course, if you cut all the letters containing ambiguities and unresolved questions, Liaisons would be reduced to about ten pages. The “editor’s footnotes” are often laden with irony, and this is perhaps the clearest example. As several scholars have argued (among them Oxford professor Catriona Seth in the recent French TV documentary Les Liaisons Scandaleuses and University of Lausanne professor Biancamaria Fontana in the 2013 French-language study, From the Boudoir to the Revolution: Laclos and Les Liaisons Dangereuses in their century), it is far more likely that Laclos decided to cut Valmont’s letter to Volanges for exactly the opposite reason: that it resolves the question of Valmont’s love for Tourvel too definitively. Be as it may, this letter, included in most editions as an appendix, can be regarded as a legitimate part of the story and as existing within its universe (since it’s mentioned by Volanges). Here it is:

I know you dislike me, Madame; I am also well aware that you have always tried to turn Mme de Tourvel against me. I have no doubt that you feel that way more strongly than ever; I will even concede that you may consider those opinions well-founded. Nonetheless, it is to you that I turn, and I do not hesitate to ask you not only to give Mme de Tourvel the letter I am enclosing for her, but also to get her to read it, to convince her to do so by assuring her of my repentance, my regrets and above all my love. I realize that my request may seem strange to you. It surprises me as well; but despair grasps at any opportunity and does not make calculations. And besides, we have a common interest so great and so dear to us both that it must exclude any other consideration. Mme de Tourvel is dying, Mme de Tourvel is unhappy; she has to be restored to life, health and happiness. That must be our sole objective, the goal to achieve by any means available. If you reject the remedies I offer, you will be responsible for the consequences: her death, your regrets, my eternal despair, it will all be your doing.

I know I have shamefully wronged a woman worthy only of my adoration; I know that my dreadful wrongs alone are the cause of all her sufferings. I do not pretend to deny or excuse my offenses; but you, Madame, beware of becoming an accomplice by preventing me from repairing the damage. I have driven a dagger into your friend’s heart, but only I can remove the blade from the wound, only I know the way to heal it. What does it matter that I am guilty if I can be useful! Save your friend! save her! She needs your help, not your revenge.

Original letter 155 (appendix)

I do wish Laclos had not cut this letter, because it’s a perfect coda to the “It’s not my fault” letter to Tourvel. Valmont now takes responsibility for his actions, even if he immediately tries to shift part of it to Volanges. To be sure, his grudging acknowledgment that Volanges may have reasons to regard her negative opinion of his character as well-founded is a hilarious understatement; and yet it is followed by a brutal self-condemnation. (How different from the self-exculpatory tone of Valmont’s references to his errant past in his early correspondence with Tourvel!) Also striking is the general bluntness of this letter, starting with the opening line: gone are the social niceties, all-important in the “worldly” milieu to which both Valmont and Volanges belong and in which she continues to receive him and he continues to visit while they both heartily detest each other. That Volanges cannot see the sincerity in Valmont’s frantic pleading merely attests once again to her cluelessness.

No mention is made of what happened to Valmont’s letter to Tourvel, or to Volanges’ reply to Valmont, with which she says he “probably won’t be very satisfied.” The most plausible explanation is that both letters are destroyed by Valmont—thrown in the fire, or ripped to shreds—in a fit of helpless anger and frustration. (Volanges’ self-righteous and spiteful reply to Valmont is easy to imagine, but his letter to Tourvel is a tantalizing mystery: How could he possibly explain his lettre de rupture, short of some 18th Century version of “my evil ex-girlfriend hacked into my email”? Does he actually tell the truth, for once, or concoct some elaborate story?)

In a 2001 essay in The Modern Language Review, “Second Thoughts on the Dénouement of ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses,'” University of Glasgow scholar Patrick Byrne (who has come around from a “yes” to a “no” on whether Valmont’s love for Tourvel is sincere) finds damning evidence in Valmont’s lack of further attempts to reach Tourvel: for a man desperately in love, Byrne argues, he gives up much too easily, especially since he has no reason to trust Mme de Volanges’ claims about Tourvel being continuously delirious. But I’m not sure that makes sense. For one, if Valmont regarded Tourvel as an important asset in his game or war with Merteuil (as Byrne suggests), it would not make him any less intent on reclaiming her; one may even argue that the strategist would be more calculating and more persistent, while the man in love would be more likely to sink into despair. Also, Valmont is no doubt getting discouraging reports from other sources. Volanges mentions “bulletins” on Tourvel’s condition that Rosemonde is receiving; I’m not sure how widely those are circulating, but Danceny, at least, has heard that she is gravely ill. It’s also entirely possible that Valmont is getting briefed by his footman who stays in touch with Tourvel’s maid Julie. Finally, we don’t even know that Valmont does not make another desperate attempt to reach Tourvel, perhaps via Julie, in his one remaining day of life after receiving Volanges’ response. Our knowledge of what he does and thinks in his final days is extremely limited since he is no longer sharing information with Merteuil, and there are more missing pieces than clues.

The confidant

One final clue to Valmont’s state of mind can be found in his interaction with Danceny (in whom, remember, he had previously confided about his pursuit of Tourvel and to whom he had represented his feelings for Tourvel as romantic love).

In Letter 144, after telling Merteuil about Tourvel’s flight to the convent and floating his plan to renew relations with her as an “experiment,” he shifts gears and launches into a chatty update on the “adventure” with Cécile de Volanges (probably meant, in large part, to demonstrate to Merteuil that he’s just fine and not in the least consumed by thoughts of Tourvel). He mentions going to Mme de Volanges’ house in the course of his social calls, comments on Cécile’s rapid recovery from her miscarriage, and informs Merteuil that Danceny is allowed to visit once again.

We left together and I got him to talk. You have no idea how this visit affected him. Such joy, such passion, such indescribable transports! Loving grand emotions as I do, I made him lose his head completely by assuring him that in a few days I will arrange an even more intimate meeting with his fair lady.

But what else takes place during this conversation? I think we can reconstruct it from the exchange between Valmont and Danceny when Valmont sets out to lure Danceny away from Merteuil by arranging that “intimate meeting” with Cécile. This is the letter (Letter 155) that ends with Valmont’s words of regret and despair at being separated from Tourvel, his declaration that he would give up half his life to devote the rest to her, and his cri de coeur, “Believe me, only love can make one happy!” However, there is another curious detail two paragraphs earlier. Advising Danceny to leave Merteuil waiting rather than excuse himself from the rendezvous, he adds, “Women are curious and stubborn; anything can be found out; as you know, I myself have just been made an example of this.”

To which Danceny replies, near the end of his letter:

The excess of joy does not prevent me from thinking of your woes and sympathizing. I wish I could be helpful to you somehow! Mme de Tourvel won’t relent, then? It is also said she is quite ill. Good God, I feel so sorry for you! May she recover her health and her kindness at the same time and make you a happy man forever. Those wishes come from friendship; I dare to hope that they will be granted by love.

Letter 157

The inference is clear: at some point prior to this exchange of letters on December 5, Valmont told Danceny that Tourvel broke up with him because he cheated on her and she found out. Most likely, this was in their conversation on November 27; thus, when Valmont regales Merteuil with witty jokes about making Danceny lose his head by promising a meeting with Cécile, it’s likely that he leaves out the part where he was crying to Danceny—not necessarily in a literal sense—that Tourvel left him.

As always, one may wonder about Valmont’s motives: is he merely trying to goad Danceny into opening up? But Danceny doesn’t really need goading; it’s far more plausible that Valmont is using a fake story as a vehicle for his very real anxiety about losing Tourvel. It is also worth noting that even as Valmont boasts to Merteuil of the glory he will reap from his “brilliant rupture” with Tourvel, he is telling Danceny Tourvel left him—an outcome that would be considered a humiliation according to the libertine code. (Valmont himself has previously told Merteuil, in explaining why he sought to placate Tourvel after the episode with Émilie, that it would have been insulting to allow her to leave him.)

Of course, after the December 5 letters, the only conversation Valmont and Danceny will have is in the wake of their duel, when the mortally wounded Valmont gives Danceny Merteuil’s letters. In his Modern Language Review essay, Byrne argues that this scene undercuts or even disproves the notion—which he had once endorsed—that Valmont is genuinely in love with Tourvel. While the dying Valmont in the 1989 Stephen Frears film asks Danceny to deliver his final message of love and contrition to Tourvel, this does not happen in the novel; Byrne asserts that he says nothing about her at all and is preoccupied solely with revenge against Merteuil.

But here’s the thing: we actually don’t know that. The only detailed account of Valmont’s final moments comes from Bertrand, the family retainer who manages the vicomte’s finances and who informs Mme de Rosemonde of his death. According to Bertrand, Valmont handed over “a large stash of papers” (i.e. his correspondence with Merteuil) to Danceny and then “asked to be left alone with him for a moment.” (Letter 163) How long a “moment” that is, we don’t know (Valmont loses consciousness “less than half an hour later”), but there is definitely a conversation between Valmont and Danceny to which we are not privy.

In his letter to Rosemonde (Letter 169), Danceny reveals only that Valmont “expressly charged him” with the task of exposing Merteuil and avenging them both. But does this mean Valmont said nothing about Tourvel? Hardly: if he did, there is no reason for Danceny to mention it to Rosemonde. It’s very unlikely that Danceny knows Rosemonde was aware of the Valmont/Tourvel affair, and Valmont may well have asked him to keep that affair a secret to avoid tarnishing Tourvel’s reputation. For all we know, he could even have asked Danceny to deliver a final message to Tourvel, which remained undelivered because Tourvel died hours later.

The questions remain

Most adaptations of Liaisons show Valmont as unequivocally and genuinely in love with Tourvel; some heavily romanticize the Valmont/Tourvel storyline. The Frears film shows a Valmont preoccupied with thoughts of Tourvel both during the duel and in the moments before his death. The Conrad Susa opera The Dangerous Liaisons turns Valmont’s and Tourvel’s deaths into a sort of Liebestod in which they expire simultaneously on separate halves of the stage, both pouring out their feelings for each other in an apart-but-together lyrical duet.

The novel is much more ambiguous and much less romantic. Even supposing that Valmont has changed near the end of the novel and that his grief and love for Tourvel are entirely real, the very last thing we have from his pen is a bitchy letter to Merteuil, on December 6, taunting her about getting ditched by Danceny. Granted we also have Bertrand’s report on his brave and chivalrous conduct after the duel, when he praises Danceny as a “brave and gallant gentleman,” orders his servants to treat him with respect, and embraces him. (Of course even here one might suggest that he’s putting on an act in order to enlist Danceny as an instrument of his vengeance.) Again: whether he says anything at all about Tourvel, we don’t know, and even if he doesn’t that’s still not proof he doesn’t love her.

I think the totality of the evidence leans toward Valmont’s love for Tourvel being genuine—perhaps from the start—and ultimately having some redemptive value. But can his behavior be interpreted as motivated by strategy in some cases and by ego and vanity in others? I think so; and, far from detracting from the story, the ambiguities make it more fascinating.

But wait until we get to the question of whether Valmont loves Merteuil and whether Merteuil loves him. Stay tuned.