SOURCE: “Face Value and the Value of Face in Les Liaisons dangereuses: The Rhetoric of Form and the Critic's Seduction,” The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 26, No. 3, Fall, 1996, pp. 228-48.

Written by Choderlos de Laclos to pass the time when he was stationed at a boring outpost on the western coast of France, Les Liaisons dangereuses has been the subject of intense debate since its publication in 1782 and has been variously described as both cynical and moralizing, as feminist and misogynist, as counseling hypocrisy and as attacking it, as a textbook of seduction techniques and as a warning not to use them. In a review of the literature on the occasion of the two-hundredth anniversary of the novel's publication, David Coward noted that “Les Liaisons dangereuses has been scrutinized in a bewildering variety of ways. Traditionalists, structuralists, feminists, and others besides have investigated its themes and tensions, analyzed its language and form and set it in contexts both ancient and modern. Les Liaisons dangereuses lends itself admirably to elucidation by virtue of its elusive, ambiguous and ultimately mysterious clarity and it has proved a super malleable material from which to shape theories, angles, and convictions” (1982, 291). Despite the wide range of critical approaches that have been brought to bear on Choderlos de Laclos's novel, the majority of studies seem to take one of two positions: either they foreground the form of the work and thus empty it of content (see, for example, the structural analyses of Todorov 1966, 1967; or the historical-traditional work of Versini 1962), or they focus on content, appropriating the characters for psychoanalysis, politics, or sociology, taking the form for granted and analyzing the behavior of the characters as if they were personages in a modern novel instead of in an epistolary novel of the eighteenth century (see, for example, Barny 1883; Byrne 1989; Jaton 1983a, 1983b; and Miller 1980). However, we only experience these characters through their letters, and gaps in our knowledge are an inevitable consequence of the epistolary form. In the long run, what we do not know about the characters in the novel proves to be more valuable in determining the motives for their behavior than what we do know.

The novel's main characters—the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil—are active participants in the libertine tradition, are supremely experienced, and present themselves as masters of their craft. The rest of the characters are their prey, particularly Cécile de Volanges, the young convent girl seduced by Valmont at Merteuil's request, and Madame de Tourvel, a virtuous married woman whom Valmont also seduces, whether as a challenge, out of boredom, or from sincere attraction. As the novel proceeds, the tension between the Vicomte and the Marquise increases to the point where they begin to prey on each other as well. It is this shift in their affections—and the viciousness with which their war is carried out—that has most intrigued critics of this work. Establishing the motives for their behavior is problematized by the epistolary structure of the narrative, and critics have been at pains to fill in the blanks in the psychological portraits drawn by Laclos. Most critics have nominated the Marquise as the linchpin of the novel and the majority of readings of the novel have concentrated on her.

The central narrative conflict is a relatively simple one: Madame de Merteuil wants the Vicomte to return to Paris from the country where he is staying with his old aunt. The first word of the first letter that Merteuil writes to Valmont is revenez (“come back”). He drags his feet because he is involved in his own affairs, specifically his pursuit of Tourvel. As Merteuil becomes increasingly impatient, her letters generally have two tones: the majority of her letters tease, chide, and berate the Vicomte, but there are others, particularly toward the end of the novel, that express affection for the Vicomte and nostalgia for their past closeness. Critics have always recognized this two-faced quality in Merteuil; where they differ is in their views on which of the two tones is more sincere (or less insincere). In other words, does Merteuil hide her love behind witty banter, or are the loving passages a mask for her deep-seated resentment of the Vicomte?

Readings of Merteuil's character and motivation take mainly two forms. One group of critics suggests that Merteuil regrets the end of her affair with Valmont, and that she is jealous of Tourvel because she loves Valmont and wants him back. She is content to tease Valmont about his pursuit of Tourvel, as long as she sees it as just another sexual conquest. Then, however, in Letter 125, Valmont insults her—he overpraises Tourvel, and speaks of his pleasure outlasting the act of love “for the first time,” words no discarded lover would hear gladly, particularly not one whose amour-propre is as large as the Marquise's. Valmont has got her where it hurts, and she declares war on him and on her rival, Tourvel. Despite Merteuil's boldness, sharp wit, and preternatural self-consciousness, this reading suggests that she is as ruled by her emotions as any heroine of soap opera. Critics who take this approach interpret Valmont's feelings for Tourvel as love and accept Merteuil's punishment as just deserts for the destruction of their relationship and the deaths of the lovers.

The second group of critics sees the Marquise as “not having a heart for love,” as Laclos describes her in a letter to his friend Madame Riccoboni. These critics see Merteuil's conflict with Valmont in terms of competition rather than desire. Their relationship is configured as a rivalry in a sort of libertine's sweepstakes rather than as a shared love that is unrequited from Merteuil's perspective and unrealized from Valmont's. As a fellow libertine, Merteuil seems to have taken it on herself to uphold the rules of the order. Valmont's falling so desperately in love with Tourvel is, in this latter interpretation, treated with contempt by Merteuil rather than with jealousy. Valmont is undone by his own fear for his reputation rather than by the machinations of a woman scorned. The fact that Merteuil presents herself as an equal to Valmont in this reading has made her an attractive model for feminist critics who see her exercising her great power skillfully in a man's world.

This group of critics reads the end of the novel as representing Merteuil's downfall due to her failure to recognize the true strength of male power in her world (see, for example, Byrne 1989). Nancy Miller (1980) describes the male bond as powerful enough to control even the most powerful of women. In fact, Miller suggests that, in acting as if she were powerful, Merteuil is only deluding herself, by accepting as real what Valmont calls “the illusory authority that we [males] appear to let women take” (L. 40).¹ In this reading, Merteuil's arrogant exercise of power is only tolerated for a time by the males in her society. However, Valmont also says that this illusion of power is meant to entrap women by giving them the illusion of freedom, and it is “one of the snares they avoid with the most difficulty,” probably because it is an illusion in which they want most fervently to believe. Inevitably, the trap is sprung, and the men finally decide that they have had enough and turn on her. Merteuil's punishment is based on her having broken the “laws of an economy of circulation intended to protect phallic identity” (Miller 1980, 69-70). Merteuil breaks this law when she attempts to seize the male prerogative of managing her own social and sexual roles.

According to Anne Marie Jaton, since libertinage may be seen as subversive to social mores, rather than simply as decadent and sinful, Merteuil as a female libertine embodies an even more “virulent attack on the integrity of the social order” than that represented by males like Valmont (1983b, 153; my translation). Viewed in political rather than in moral terms, Merteuil's behavior is socially disruptive and justifies her exclusion from society at the end of the novel. As Jaton describes it, the male must publish his exploits, and he arranges to do this by seducing his victim and then, coming to his senses, as it were, by renouncing her. This public renunciation is his entrée back into polite society. Thus the male libertine has his cake and is forgiven for eating it. The female libertine, on the other hand, must remain always discreet. Perhaps we sympathize with Merteuil's desire for appreciation and praise to the extent that we do not question the danger she is in when she writes her sexual exploits down for Valmont.

Regardless of their view of Merteuil's motives, critics of the novel emphasize these exploits—the seduction scenes with Belleroche and Prévan described in Merteuil's letters to Valmont—interpreting those episodes as having a role in Merteuil's master plan, whether that is to make Valmont jealous and thus win him back, or to establish her bona fides as a libertine so convincingly and unequivocally that Valmont will take her contempt of him seriously enough to come to heel. In either case, both groups of critics assume that Merteuil is writing the truth to Valmont about these episodes. I suggest, however, that when lying is a central motif in a novel, as it is in Les Liaisons dangereuses, we can never be certain where the truth is, that there is no point at which we are justified in assuming that a character is not lying, and that the epistolary nature of Les Liaisons dangereuses has seduced the critics into neglecting that possibility. The use of the letters in the novel to deceive the other characters has, of course, long been noted; that the letters also deceive the critics simply adds another layer of irony to a work already bathed in it.

The formal nature of the work certainly creates snares for the unwary. Les Liaisons dangereuses is based on a form, the letter, that has such a quotidian reality for us that its transparency may be taken for granted. In tracing the history of the epistolary novel, Laurent Versini notes the irony that a genre that today seems so artificial was once considered the height of realism. He describes the genre as especially attractive to writers who wanted a more realistic medium: “The epistolary genre suited some writers who were looking for a certificate of authenticity, who had in addition discovered a formula that concerned and was well adapted to the culture of sociability” (1968, 251; my translation). That this greater sense of verisimilitude was enthusiastically desired by the public is also noted by Versini: “The reader of novels in the eighteenth century, distrusting fantasies and other works without verisimilitude, finds in the epistolary novel a quantity of truth and nourishment for his feelings” (252; my translation). The memoir, a genre in which fictional autobiographies were presented as history, was also highly popular in the eighteenth century; and letters were found to be equally convincing of authenticity. Versini also relates the genre's success to its ability to convey emotion with immediacy and believability. The epistolary novel “will find perhaps its triumph in rendering the lie as believable as the truth” (Versini 1968, 263; my translation). In other words, the epistolary form itself creates effects of verisimilitude and authenticity on which the illusion of truth as well as the reality of the lie depend.

The representation of a narrative through letters affects the ways that the events are experienced, the characters are analyzed, and truth value is assigned. Tzvetan Todorov (1967) has listed qualities related to letter-writing that encourage critical trust: their self-reflexive character; direct style; first-person narration; the writer's signature attesting to the truth of the contents; the letter's own physicality, which thus becomes a publishable form of proof; the present tense; and the connection between letter-writing and performative speech acts. The writing of a letter creates an intimate bond between the sender and the receiver. The letters in Les Liaisons dangereuses are not business letters, but letters written from one close friend or confidant to another, an apparently open and frank communication between kindred souls on which the reader is blatantly eavesdropping. Valmont seems to lie to everyone but Merteuil, and his patience with her overbearingness and his respect for her intelligence suggest to the reader that they are a matched pair with a long history of intimacy. One jumps to the assumption that, if he would not lie to her—he says to her, “You have shared all the secrets of my heart” (L. 4)—then she would not lie to him. But why wouldn’t she? Although Valmont says in the fourth letter that he has long confided in Merteuil, Merteuil apparently waits until Letter 81 to reveal her heart to him. Perhaps the candidness of their relationship has not been as reciprocal as Valmont and most critics have supposed.

Letters clearly permit the strategic withholding of information, which not only points up the limitations in a particular character's view of his or her circumstances, but also flatters the reader by implying that the reader occupies a position of omniscience relative to any single character. Thus, we know long before Valmont does that Mme de Volanges is his secret enemy because we have already read the letter in which she warns Tourvel against him. Even after Valmont discovers his accuser's identity, we are still superior in knowledge to him because we know something that he does not: that Mme de Volanges wrote to Mme de Tourvel on the hint of Mme de Merteuil.

Since the withholding of information from one character by another is a basic stratagem of the book, why should the reader be exempt? Why should secrets not be kept from us as well? As Todorov says:

The reader finds himself therefore here superior to the characters, and he is the only one who is all-powerful and omniscient, the characters are only the little pieces on the chessboard of intrigue. … But the same process [of exploiting the possibilities of the epistolary to withhold information] also permits the inverse effect: at certain moments, the reader is plunged into mystery, while the characters know perfectly well what’s going on. (1966, 21; my translation)

In fairness, although the effects of those elements of epistolarity noted by Todorov can be suggestively undermined, their presence generally works to support truth. But the contradictions, reticence, and psychological opacity embodied in the letters in Les Liaisons dangereuses make our usual practice of analyzing texts on the basis of what is present within them an extraordinarily complex and problematic operation. Critics who grapple with this protean text and attempt to assert their dominance over it trust the characters at their own risk, largely because the epistolary form also motivates the absence of elements that are considered basic to the establishment of truth in other sorts of narratives.

First, the epistolary form tends to efface the author, either as creator of the text or as the omniscient narrator whose commentary might be used to guide the reader through it. Since the verisimilitude of the epistolary form depends on an effaced authorial presence, any intrusions that the author does make must be especially marked. Laclos's presence in Les Liaisons dangereuses is limited to the two prefaces, to his footnotes, to the narrative ruptures that he achieves through the order in which the letters are presented, to information that he “neglects” to tell us, and, most tellingly, through those letters that he chooses not to present.

The two prefaces have been commented on by many critics. The “publisher's note,” which is called “L’Avertissement de L’Editeur” in the French, undermines the self-effacing editor's preface and clearly alerts us to the fact that things may not be what they seem: “The Public is notified that despite the title of this work and what is said by the editor in his preface, we do not guarantee the authenticity of the collection and we have good reason to believe it is only a novel” (xv). The French word Avertissement has the sense of “warning” as well as the more common sense of “notice” or “advertisement.” Laclos seems to be warning us not to be naive in linking the letters we are about to read with truth, but the textual marginality of prefaces often leads to their being ignored.

The Editor's Preface foregrounds the editor's power of selection: “this collection … contains only a very small number of the letters composing the whole correspondence from which it is taken. When I was requested to put in order this correspondence, … I have tried to preserve only those letters which seemed to me needed for the understanding of events or to reveal character” (xvii). In assessing the book's chances of success, the editor worries that the book's multiple protagonists will weaken audience identification and involvement and lead readers to pay more attention to the book's faults than they might otherwise. This alienating effect on the reader might have been ameliorated if the book were able to represent sincere feeling, but “since almost all the sentiments here expressed are feigned or dissimulated they can only arouse the interest of curiosity which is always far below the interest of sentiment” (xix). While Laclos, in his personae as publisher and as editor, clearly alerts the reader to expect mis-representation, insincerity, and hypocrisy within the novel, the majority of critics seem to accept as lies only those statements that are explicitly labeled as such.

But the main type of authorial intrusion that provides the basis for my argument is found in the editor's footnotes to the text. One of the most telling examples of the author's explicit manipulation of the knowledge available to the reader occurs in Letter 81, Merteuil's famous self-justification, when she refers obliquely to secrets that she and Valmont share and asks, “whether, of us two, it is I who should be charged with imprudence.” The reader might think little of this remark or might simply relate it to the characters' present situation if not for an “editorial” footnote that says, “It will be seen later, in Letter 152, not what M. de Valmont's secret was, but practically of what kind it was; and the reader will understand that further enlightenment on this subject could not be given” (p. 183). While, as Ronald C. Rosbottom (1982) has argued, secrecy is an aesthetic, social, and cognitive strategy in Les Liaisons dangereuses and the fundamental role in the narrative structure of the book is played by the secret, in this case the reader's desire for information is only partially satisfied. This gesture, so apparently marginal, reminds the reader of the presence of the author behind the text and of that author's absolute power to tantalize and frustrate the reader as well as cater to his or her illusions of omnipotence. More important, the footnote acts as a red flag that marks Merteuil's secret as critical to our understanding of the text. Without that footnote, her comment would likely have little claim on our attention.

The footnote's deferring the revelation of the secret to Letter 152 also foregrounds that letter, which occurs at a key point in the narrative, just after the Marquise and the Vicomte finally meet. One of the novel's ironies is that, although Merteuil seems to have an urgent desire to see Valmont, the two only meet face-to-face once. They miss each other when he returns to Paris; in Letter 59, he writes to her: “Where were you yesterday? I never succeed in seeing you now. Really, it was not worth keeping me in Paris in September. Make up your mind, for I have just received a very pressing invitation from the Comtesse de B … to go and see her in the country.” Finally, they meet at her house, where Valmont barges in on a tête-à-tête between Merteuil and Danceny, the young suitor of Cécile de Volanges. The actual meeting is, of course, not recorded in a letter, and we only have their subsequent responses to it. Valmont's letter expresses offense and anger at Merteuil's not telling him that she was in Paris for four days rather than jealousy about her involvement with Danceny:

You have been four days in Paris; and each day you have seen Danceny and you have seen him alone. To-day even, your door was still shut; and to prevent my coming in upon you, your porter only lacked an assurance equal to your own. But you wrote me that I should be the first to be informed of your arrival, of this arrival whose date you could not tell me, though you wrote to me on the eve of your departure. Will you deny these facts or will you try to excuse yourself? (Letter 151).

Merteuil's response follows immediately in Letter 152, where she accuses Valmont of acting like a husband and reminds him obliquely of that great secret:

Pray be careful, Vicomte, and treat my extreme timidity with more caution! How do you expect me to endure the crushing idea of incurring your indignation and, especially, not to succumb to the fear of your vengeance? The more so since, as you know, if you do anything cruel to me it would be impossible for me to revenge it! Whatever I said, your existence would not be less brilliant or less peaceful. After all, what would you have to fear? To be obliged to leave the country—if you were given time to do so! But do not people live abroad as they do here? After all, provided the Court of France left you in peace at the foreign court you resided at, it would only mean for you that you had changed the scene of your triumphs. After this attempt to make you cool again with these moral considerations, let me come back to our affairs.

Since the topic comes up at about the same time as Valmont's boasting of having impregnated Cécile, and since Merteuil hints that the Court of France would have an interest in Valmont should the secret come out, Henri Coulet (1982) suggests that the secret might impact the legitimacy of the royal line. Like Laclos, I shall ask the reader to be patient, as I must defer the explanation of this secret's importance until later.

Just as a secret depends on the absence of information, the “editor” also asserts in a footnote appended to Letter 7 that he has chosen to delete whole letters that are of little interest because they add no information to the central intrigue or because they repeat events already described in another letter. Since that sort of repetition might provide independent verification of a character's testimony, its absence is an important clue to the letter writer's veracity. The calculated absence of exactly this sort of outside confirmation is a primary invitation to doubt that Merteuil's libertine escapades really happened.

This decision on the part of the editor to eliminate confirmation through repetition is particularly striking because, despite his flagging the practice through several footnotes, he does not always do it. Valmont's charity to the poor family is described by him as well as by Tourvel (Letters 21 and 22). Likewise, Valmont and Cécile both describe their playing post office at Mme de Rosamonde's house (Letters 76 and 77) and their first night of love (Letters 96 and 97), and Mme de Tourvel's seeing Emilie with Valmont at the Opéra is discussed in several letters (Letters 135, 136, 137, and 138) written by Tourvel and the Vicomte. While these repetitions are designed to foreground Valmont's hypocrisy, on the one hand, and the women's naiveté, on the other, and make the discovery of truth truly a subjective issue, these repeated letters are still simple confirmation that the events that the writers describe actually occurred, and thus establish their veracity as reporters.

We do not have this type of “stereoscopic vision,” to use Todorov's term, in the case of Merteuil's love affairs with Belleroche and Prévan. While Belleroche is mentioned briefly in several of Merteuil's letters to Valmont, it is the story that she tells in Letter 10 that serves as a snare to catch Valmont. In that letter, she rehearses a night of love in her petite maison d’amour with the Chevalier, whom she describes as a friend of Valmont. The story is told in immense detail: the elaborate plans, the circuitous route that Belleroche follows to find her, the costume that she wears “of my own invention; it lets nothing be seen and yet allows everything to be guessed at”:

He arrives at last; and surprise and love positively enchant him. To give him time to recover we take a turn in the shrubbery; then I bring him back to the house. He sees a table laid for two and a bed made up: we then go to the boudoir, which has all its decorations displayed. There, half out of premeditation, half from sentiment, I threw my arms around him and fell at his knees. “To prepare you the surprise of this moment,” I said, “I reproach myself for having troubled you with an appearance of ill-humour, with having veiled for an instant my heart from your gaze. Forgive these faults, I will expiate them by my love.” You may imagine the effect of that sentimental discourse. The happy Chevalier raised me and my pardon was sealed on the same ottoman upon which you and I so gaily and in the same way sealed our eternal separation.

Here a key quality of Merteuil's style can be seen: she appeals to the reader's (Valmont's) previous knowledge of her behavior as a point of verification. She insists that her reader fill in the blanks in her description from his own experience, not only of her but of the proper conduct of a seduction. Since Valmont does not question her, we do not either.

She uses the same tactic in Letter 85, which describes her seduction of Prévan:

How convenient it is to have to deal with you “men of principles”! Sometimes a bungling lover disconcerts one by his timidity or embarrasses one by his passionate raptures; it is a fever which, like others, has its cold shiverings and its burning, and sometimes varies in its symptoms. But it is so easy to guess your prearranged advance! The arrival, the bearing, the tone, the remarks—I knew what they would all be the evening before. I shall therefore not tell you our conversation which you will easily supply.

By this tactic she also accomplishes another goal: by linking her supposedly successful seduction of Prévan to Valmont's not-so-successful pursuit of Tourvel, Merteuil can present herself as an object lesson for the recalcitrant Vicomte. But this grounding of a present narration on a previous experience, while apparently conforming to scientific procedures, implies a stability of circumstances and variables that may not indeed apply.

The bare facts of the encounter with Prévan may be deduced by comparing the contents of Letter 85, which Merteuil writes to Valmont, and Letter 87, which she writes to Mme de Volanges: as she says at the end of Letter 85, “You owe this long letter to my solitude. I shall write one to Madame de Volanges [Letter 87], who will surely read it in public, and you will see how the story ought to be told.” In its published form the story is that Prévan secreted himself in the Marquise's boudoir and revealed himself only after her servants had departed for the night. They returned at her outcry and captured Prévan, who was arrested. The story that she tells Valmont in Letter 85 is much more elaborate: how she arranges to sit near him at dinner and at the theatre, how she invites him to her house for dinner and tells him how to enter her room secretly, all without ever being alone with him. Finally,

Can you see me, Vicomte, in my light toilette, walking timidly and carefully, and opening the door to my conqueror with trembling hand? He saw me—a flash is not quicker. How shall I tell you? I was overcome, completely overcome, before I could say a word to stop him or to defend myself. He then wished to put himself into a more comfortable situation, more suitable to the circumstances. He cursed his clothes which, he said, kept him at a distance from me; he wished to combat me with equal weapons, but my extreme timidity opposed this plan and my tender caresses did not leave him time for it. He busied himself with other matters. (L. 85)

The wealth of details that she uses to embroider her story should not blind us to the possibility that she is writing a fiction. While waiting for Belleroche's arrival, as she describes in Letter 10, Merteuil “read a chapter of the Sopha, a letter of Héloïse and two tales of La Fontaine, to rehearse the different tones I desired to take.” In other words, Merteuil is a reader of novels and is self-consciously preoccupied with her own creation and self-presentation, aware of the power of the detail to create a response in her readers. Moreover, as she makes clear, there are no witnesses.

Merteuil's manipulation of the letter's power to persuade may be one reason why she herself is so unconvinced by what she reads. Versini notes that “in the period of Laclos, the epistolary novel enters an ‘era of suspicion.’ Laclos himself installs in the interior of his novel a debate between the partisans of letters, Danceny and Valmont, and their adversary, Mme de Merteuil” (1962, 266; my translation). Danceny and Valmont view the letter as a vehicle for the effective conveyance of feelings, real or counterfeit. Merteuil, on the other hand, has a more skeptical relationship to language than they do. She notes that the major fault of novels is that “the author lashes his sides to warm himself up, but the reader remains cold” (L. 33). This limitation on language's ability to achieve an emotional response from its reader leads Merteuil to assert several times that she does not believe in the letter's powers to seduce. “It is not only out of prudence that the marquise never writes,” as she says in Letter 81, “it is because she does not have confidence in such an indirect method” (Versini 1962, 265; my translation). Her reservations may also be founded on her own experience of how easy it is to lie through letters.

Most important, despite the apparent verisimilitude of Merteuil's account, the key confirmative strategy used in the novel is lacking in both the Belleroche and Prévan episodes: while Valmont's activities are independently confirmed by other letter-writers, Merteuil's are not. Neither of her putative lovers writes to his mistress (or anyone else). Letter 86, the odd enclosure from the Maréchale de **** that Merteuil sends to Valmont along with her Letter 85, describing her entrapment of Prévan, seems at first to confirm the events that Merteuil describes, but it contains the telling phrase, “if what I am told is true.” In the absence of a confirming letter from another source, Letter 85 might be reread as a tale of Potiphar's wife in which the younger man is surprised by the appearance of an older woman in a “light toilette” and incurs her wrath by attempting to flee.

Merteuil's relationship with Danceny needs special treatment since we learn of it through Valmont as well as from the letters exchanged by the Marquise and the young Chevalier. While clearly not created out of whole cloth, as the earlier episodes with Belleroche and Prévan may be, the nature of Merteuil and Danceny's relationship is still open to question. Once Merteuil's earlier affairs with Belleroche and Prévan are cast into doubt, the letters that Merteuil receives from Danceny may be reread as a case of less there than meets the eye. Friendship, not love, is the theme in the majority of them. Merteuil even waits over a month between letters to him (Letters 121 and 146), and the tone of Letter 146 is somewhat sulky and insecure: “When the heroine [Cécile] is on the stage nobody cares about the confidante … Good-bye, Chevalier; it will be a great delight to me to see you again; will you come?” The circumspection with which Merteuil makes her arrangements with Prévan, as described in Letter 85 (“Notice that the affair had been arranged and that nobody had yet seen Prévan alone with me”), makes her explicit invitation to Danceny unlikely to be a seducer's gambit. Danceny responds with the excessive enthusiasm of youth in Letter 148—“O you whom I love! you whom I adore!”—apparently frightening Merteuil so badly that, as he says in Letter 150, she breaks off the correspondence. Merteuil literally disappears from the novel, in the sense that she stops writing letters, after Valmont has ruined her affair with Danceny, not, as one might expect, by revealing her duplicity, but by teasing Danceny, by making fun of Merteuil, and by reminding him of his love for Cécile: “You have a rendezvous for tonight, have you not? With a charming woman whom you adore? For at your age, what woman does one not adore, at least for the first week! The setting of the scene will add even more to your pleasures. A ‘delicious little house,’ ‘which has only been taken for you,’ will embellish the pleasure with the charms of liberty and of mystery” (Letter 155; note that Valmont is rather cattily quoting from Letter 10 in which Merteuil's night with Belleroche is described). By Letter 157, Danceny is writing to Valmont that he has only loved Cécile and will break off his relationship with Merteuil, about which Valmont has teased him.

Once the possibility is admitted that Merteuil has lied to Valmont about her amorous conquests, or has at least recast them in a golden glow of rococo embellishment, one becomes curious to know why lying is necessary. Is Merteuil simply a pathological liar to whom mendacity is as mother's milk? What does she have to gain by lying to Valmont?

Patrick Byrne (1989) has suggested that in Letter 131 above all, where she confesses that she once loved Valmont and was truly happy, but in other places as well, Merteuil is lying, and Valmont's Achilles heel—his vanity—keeps him from seeing it. According to Byrne, Valmont's mistake was in imagining that she did indeed still love him, and that her jealousy of Tourvel was personal and therefore amenable to cajolery and flattery. Byrne argues, however, that Merteuil's motive for lying is her obsession with Gercourt, the absent fiancé of Cécile, who broke off with her a long time ago, and who Byrne contends remains the true object of her love.

I suggest, on the other hand, that Merteuil lies to Valmont for reasons that have more to do with herself than with him or any other man. My argument is again based on the absence of information within the text. I suggest that Merteuil has to lie about her powers of seduction because they are in the process of waning. She is, in fact, at that transition point in her life that every attractive woman dreads, at that point which Merteuil herself describes so bitterly, when a woman's beauty has faded but her sexual desires have not: as she says in Letter 113, “It is not true that ‘the older women are, the more harsh and severe they become.’ It is between forty and fifty that the despair of seeing their beauty fade, the rage of feeling themselves obliged to abandon the pretensions and the pleasures to which they still cling, make almost all women disdainfully prudish and crabbed.” While Merteuil goes on to describe the two possible results of “that great sacrifice”—a Mme de Volanges-like “imbecile apathy,” on the one hand, versus becoming a woman of real character who shifts her attentions from her body to her mind and who is likely to represent Merteuil's own ideal for a postmenopausal self—it is nonetheless likely that, forced to face this transition herself, she is unwilling to admit that she is becoming too old to play the game for real. She is jealous of Tourvel and Cécile, not because they are loved—she wants Valmont as little as she wants Danceny—but because they are young.

The relative absence in the epistolary novel of passages that describe the characters for the reader opens the door for speculation about their appearance. What references do we find to the characters' ages in Les Liaisons dangereuses? In Letter 2, Merteuil asks Valmont irritably, “What can you be doing with an old aunt whose property is entailed on you?,” a comment that seems to indicate a belief that older women have nothing to offer a man besides wealth and, since Valmont is already assured of that, there is no reason for him to seek Mme de Rosamonde's society. In Letter 2, Merteuil also describes Cécile as “only fifteen; a rosebud.” In Letter 5 to Valmont, Merteuil explicitly gives Tourvel's age as well: “Perhaps if you had known this woman sooner you might have made something of her; but she is twenty-two and has been married nearly two years.” Although age is not solely Merteuil's obsession—in Letter 8, for example, Tourvel gives Mme de Rosamonde's age as eighty-eight, and in Letter 39, Cécile says that Gercourt is old, “at least thirty-six”—it is striking that, when ages for the other women in Valmont's circle are given in such precise detail, Merteuil's age is not mentioned at all. The only reference to her appearance (until the denouement) that is not made by a man is made in Letter 14—“I can see that all the men think that she is prettier than I am”—but that is in a letter by Cécile, a naive young girl who thought that her shoemaker was a suitor. Although a minor detail, the explicit absence of description turns into a major question when one decides not to take the text at “face value.” In fact, as Henri Coulet (1982) has pointed out, the primary emotion represented by the letters of Les Liaisons dangereuses may be narcissism rather than hypocrisy, since eighty of the 166 letters in the collection go unanswered.

The engines of Merteuil's vengeance begin grinding when Valmont refuses to come running when she whistles. It must be especially grating for her when he writes, in Letter 6, “I thought my heart withered up and, … I pitied myself for a premature old age. Madame de Tourvel has given me back the charming illusions of youth.” Denied such consolations herself, since society always equates December with the man and May with the woman, Merteuil repeats the phrase “illusions of youth” in Letter 10, italicizing it for emphasis and in scornful recognition of the ease with which men manage to secure for themselves the comforts of love regardless of their actual age. It cannot be an accident that her first great fiction, the night with Belleroche in her petite maison d’amour is appended to that very letter.

Valmont responds to her description of her seduction of Belleroche in Letter 15:

Come, my fair friend, as long as you share yourself between several, I am not in the least jealous; I simply see your lovers as the successors of Alexander, incapable of holding among them all that empire where I reigned alone. But that you should give yourself entirely to one of them! That there should exist another man as happy as I! I will not endure it; do not think that I will endure it. Either take me back or at least take someone else as well; and do not let an exclusive caprice betray the inviolable friendship we have sworn each other.

Merteuil responds to his apparent desire for her by proposing the famous wager in Letter 20: “As soon as you have had your fair devotée [Tourvel], and can furnish me with a proof, come, and I am yours.”

The wager that she makes with Valmont in Letter 20 depends on her desirability. Since it has been a long time since they were lovers (the editor's footnote to Letter 2 tells us that Merteuil and Valmont's affair occurred “much earlier than the events dealt with in these letters” [my italics]), and since Merteuil takes great pains to keep from meeting Valmont when he does return to Paris, a suspicious mind might wonder what she has to hide. If what she is hiding are the early ravages of age, her wager would be an empty one unless she believes that the Belleroche and Prévan episodes could convince Valmont that she was still a worthy trophy for him. The only time when they do meet, however, when Valmont discovers Danceny at the Marquise's house, Valmont hardly acts like a jealous lover and is more interested in embarrassing Danceny than in laying claim to Merteuil as his trophy.

The importance of this “reward” to Valmont has been overstated by many critics. In fact, he does not mention it again until Letter 57, and then not in the context of his winning of Tourvel, or of his desire for Merteuil, but in the context of Merteuil's being unfaithful to Belleroche. Clearly, far from being overcome with desire, he resists her attempt to appropriate his project, to transform him from actor to agent. The contract comes up again in Letter 99, written at the moment of his greatest confidence of success—the night before Tourvel absconds from Mme de Rosamonde's estate—and again the “reward” is phrased in terms of “this infidelity to your chevalier.”

Valmont apparently is willing to go along with Merteuil's increasingly fictional self-presentation, up to a certain point. He flatters her and, possibly with his tongue in his cheek, warns her about Prévan, perhaps to distract her from his attachment to Tourvel. Why, then, does possession of her become such a desperate thing after the breakup with Tourvel? The traditional interpretation is the psychological reading of Valmont's behavior: his guilt about breaking Tourvel's heart requires the legitimation of Merteuil as a reward. Merteuil's refusal of that reward motivates Valmont's betrayal of Merteuil and allows us to see it as justified.

There are two other possible explanations for this change in Valmont's attitude toward Merteuil. First, the great secret referred to in Letter 81 and again in Letter 152 may be motive enough to keep on Merteuil's good side, since its revelation would lead to Valmont's imprisonment or exile. The editor's footnote to Letter 81 seems to underscore this option. Another possibility is offered by Peggy Kamuf. She describes the meeting between Merteuil and Valmont, as expressed in Letter 151, as “an interim between two points of arrival, two projects of seduction, two women” (1982, 128). Since Valmont has broken with Tourvel, but has not yet received his reward from Merteuil, he is apparently in some sort of social limbo. Valmont's desperation to receive this reward even though he, more than anyone, knows how shopworn the goods are, brings up the interesting possibility that, in this society, both men and women needed attachments to be socially valuable. Without an active relationship, a male is highly vulnerable since his exploits must be publicized in order to be credited in the sexual economy governing this society.

To look for Merteuil's motives, one needs to return to Letter 81, that anomalous confessional whose danger to Merteuil is realized in its eventual publication by Danceny. Letter 81 is Merteuil's look back at her conscious self-creation. It is a gesture much more appropriate as a retrospective, made by a woman looking back on her career at the end of her active life. Merteuil has become frustrated at her inability to control Valmont, which has forced her to admit to herself the truth about her fading powers. She now faces an arena in the salon rather than in the boudoir. While power may still be exercised in the salon, it is of a different order, and the satisfactions less personal and immediate, than those obtainable through active sexuality. As Madelyn Gutwirth has said,

Voltaire could speak with malignity of “the societies where some woman always presides who, in the decline of her beauty, makes the halo of her spirit shine instead.” … A salon in the eighteenth century is a little court presided over by a woman at least a little mature. … She can reign with a strict discipline, showing to her familiars the affectionate and tyrannical solicitude of a mother. (1980, 258; my translation)

At the time when Merteuil writes letter 81, being a salonière is the best that she can hope for. She will be able to observe the intrigues of others and gossip about them, but participate in none on her own behalf. Since she already behaves throughout the novel as an observer rather than as a participant, there is a certain irony in her struggle to resist her fate. Instead of accepting the fact that she will be trusted by her society because her appearance and her reality are finally about to match, Merteuil denies that her beauty has been dimmed by her years. Her disfigurement in the denouement, which has been described as simply egregious moralizing, may thus be read as the body's forceful return to her consciousness, from whence she has tried so hard to repress it.

In this reading of the novel, then, Mme de Volanges and Mme de Rosamonde have the last word, not because they are the blind eye of conventional society or the moral center of the novel, but because they have graciously made the transition to asexuality. The younger generation of sexually active women—Cécile, Tourvel, and Merteuil—are unable to do this and return to childhood, die, or live on in a hideously disfigured state neither in society nor out of it. Merteuil does not represent a proto-feminist ideal who struggles against the narrow confines that male power places on her activities, though she does do that; nor is she essentially a victim of male cruelty and selfishness, though she does suffer on that account; nor is she a sentimental romantic, pining away for her one true love, though she may do that, too. She represents instead a more universal female dilemma: every woman's inevitable confrontation with her own body, the final battle to stop time and age that no woman can win.

Notes

1. All quotes from Les Liaisons dangereuses have been taken from the translation by Richard Aldington (New York: Signet, 1962).

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