Dangerous Liaisons
The focus
on the book list is shifting towards France and with Choderlos de Laclos’ “Dangerous
Liaisons we are most unusually not in Rousseau territory and that in itself is
a blessing.
This is the
period just before the French Revolution, that period so famous for painted
effeminate men with silly wigs and women in monstrous outfits, both with too
much time on their hands and so little useful activity to spend it on. In France
particularly so. “Dangerous Liaisons” is well and proper lodged in this
environment.
The Vicomte
de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil live and breathe for the games they
play with other people. Their plots are to seduce their marks into scandal and
ruin as if getting some sadistic pleasure from destroying people in the public
eye while getting as much pleasure themselves in the process. In fact, I never
really got the motivations straight. Is it malice or the glee of watching the
morally self-righteous exposed as hypocrites? Or a selfish hunt for pleasure?
The author is never entirely clear on this, which makes it tempting to think
they are simply what “ordinary” people fear from rakes and libertines without
caring too much at understanding their actual motivations. In this way they
become more like boogeymen than real people
Anyway, the
Vicomte and the Marquise keep up a correspondence discussing and cooperating on
their various conquests. Valmont has his eyes set on a prudish woman, Madame de
Tourvel whose husband is away on business while Merteuil wants to turn a 16
year old girl just out of school into her pupil. Cecile de Volanges is a naïve girl
who is engaged to an older officer held up by an engagement on Corsica and
Meteuil wants to use a young nobleman, Danceny, and later Valmont himself, to
corrupt her.
This was
clearly written as an exposé of the depravity of the idle nobility and struggles
with a balance between enjoying the schemes and plots and juiciness of the
affairs, and on the other side the moral codes that strongly disprove of all
these sexual adventures. It is almost as if Laclos does not himself know if he
approves or condemn Valmont and Mertuil. He lets them be successful in their
corruption, deliciously so, but he also punishes them for their flawed
characters. They are both smooth and clever, but also strangely delusioned, as
if they only see the reality they want to see. Valmont is charming with the
girls, but in his own head he is superhuman and in his interpretation of his
exchanges with other people he only picks up the details that support this self-image.
Probably
telling for the sympathies of the author it is not the impotent and useless morally
upright that defeat Valmont and Merteuil, but their own weapons they turn on
each other in an implosion of self-destruction. The women in particular are
gullible and easy marks.
I was not
blown away by “Dangerous Liaisons”. To be that, I think you need to feel the
naughtiness of observing these shenanigans. The schizophrenic elements felt
disturbing as if Laclos held back or could not make up his own mind and the
epistolary form means a lot of repetition, not necessarily because the same
events are described from several angles, but because the form itself includes
all those tiring forms and protestations, making large chunks of each letter empty
chatter. I did not feel this was scandalous in the way it was intended, but
rather scandalous in the description of the idleness of these people. Whether they
are men with nothing else to do than seducing women or women with nothing else
to do than being bored.
It also
feeds into a sexual moral that allows a lot more freedom for men than for women.
It recognizes some of this unfairness in the dialogues, but seems in the final
judgement to accept a much higher prize for women than for men for digressing
from the morally acceptable path.
It was an
okay book, but not recommendation from me.
