Dangerous Liaisons & the Power of Love Letters

Amorous Epistles are Rhetorical Tools in Choderlos de Laclos's Novel

Aug 22, 2009

Dangerous Liaisons is an epistolary novel about seduction. But the love letters exchanged between its main characters ultimately do little to alter each one's position.

Dangerous Liaisons (Les Liaisons dangereuses) was written by Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos, an eighteenth-century French military officer. The novel is a collection of fictional letters between ancien-régime aristocrats.

The main letter-writers are the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, a pair of serial philanderers; and Madame de Tourvel and Cécile Volanges, whom Merteuil and Valmont are trying to ruin through seduction and scandal.

Choderlos de Laclos understood that in an epistolary novel about seduction, love letters must drive the plot. But the power of such letters is limited in Dangerous Liaisons, thanks to the nature of the novel's characters, and the nature of love letters themselves.

“You should attempt to talk less about what you think,” Merteuil advises Cécile in one letter, “and more about what the person you are writing to will wish to hear.” (258) Merteuil is Dangerous Liaisons’ most openly cynical character. Yet all the novel's correspondents write to push their own agendas.

This is especially true in the case of Dangerous Liaisons’ many love letters, whose object, seduction, is never achieved through honesty or a well-reasoned argument.

Such epistles are instruments of rhetoric in Dangerous Liaisons. Not unlike televised political debates, the love letters are more concerned with restating their authors' positions to wear down their addressees than they are with responding to specific points or with reaching a compromise.

The many exchanges between Valmont and Tourvel illustrate this. Tourvel, in letter 56, writes, “Leave me, do not see me anymore, do not write to me anymore. I beg you. I demand it of you.” (121) In letter 58, Valmont declares that “my utter submission to your slightest wish” (124) informs all he does, yet by that very declaration he is violating Tourvel’s wish.

With similar disingenuousness, Tourvel begins her next letter saying, “I did not intend to answer your letter, Monsieur” (142) – before rationalizing her continued correspondence.

In short, Tourvel is in love with Valmont enough to keep in touch with him, but not enough to be seduced by what he writes. Valmont cannot change her mind, yet neither will he change his own. Their positions, despite the epistolary back-and-forth, remain static.

Significantly, the deadlock between Valmont and Tourvel is only broken outside the rhetorical framework of the letter. In letter 125, Valmont describes to Merteuil how his arguments have seduced Tourvel at last – but he had to make them in person. To "seal the deal" in Dangerous Liaisons, a physical presence is required.

This reveals the limits of love letters' power in Choderlos de Laclos's novel. As in other epistolary works (going back to Ovid's Heroides), the love letters of Dangerous Liaisons are full of protestations and pleading, but they rarely achieve their goals through their arguments alone.

Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos. Dangerous Liaisons. Translated by Helen Constantine. Penguin Classics, 2007. ISBN-13: 978-0140449570.

The copyright of the article Dangerous Liaisons & the Power of Love Letters in European Literature is owned by Luke Arnott. Permission to republish Dangerous Liaisons & the Power of Love Letters in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.