“When one woman strikes at the heart of another, she seldom misses, and the wound is invariably fatal.”
― Les Liaisons dangereuses
In the novel Dangerous Liaisons, which shocked the French public with its depiction of the cruelty and degeneracy of the nobility, two aristocrats plot to corrupt a teenage girl who is engaged to marry an older nobleman. This nobleman had earlier jilted the Marquise, who thus asks the Vicomte to help her gain revenge by deflowering the girl before her wedding. The Vicomte, a ruthless seducer, at first schemes to have the girl sleep with her young music teacher, but growing impatient with the hesitations of the latter, he changes his mind and does the job himself. In shock, the morning after the rake has forced himself on her, the distraught girl, named Cécile, turns to Valmont’s partner-in-crime, the Marquise herself, for solace and counsel. But instead of showing sympathy for her plight or expressing indignation at her violation, Merteuil scolds the girl for being upset in the first place. Few men, she reminds her, are as romantic and as charismatic as the Vicomte. Far from being upset at the loss of her virtue, Cécile should look ahead to the enjoyment waiting for her in the future. “The shame caused by love is like the pain, you experience it only once,” declares the Marquise, “yet the pleasure remains, and that is something.” Merteuil goes as far as to propose that a friendship with Valmont, a ”difficult man to keep and a dangerous one to leave,” will help her to fool her disapproving mother and to win the undying love of her naïve music teacher, the Chevalier Danceny.
Cécile’s reply reveals a total and even enthusiastic acceptance of her corrupter’s counsel. What she had first believed to be a violation and a misfortune is now something she avidly enjoys. While overcome on occasion by sad thoughts about her earnest admirer, Danceny, she nevertheless enjoys the nightly visits Valmont makes to her room, in which the rake amuses her with stories about the sexual escapades of her mother in her younger years. Cécile even declares that she is no longer worried about wedding a much older man, because, thanks to the wise words of the Marquise, she has come to realize that “marriage” means “having more freedom” to love other men. But the ease with which Cécile accepts the views foisted on her by Merteuil and Valmont provokes in the libertines not relief or delight but deep revulsion. Merteuil describes the girl in the most scathing terms: she has “weakness of character,” which, in the view of the Marquise, is “worst defect a woman can have.” Cécile’s eagerness to go along with whatever she and Valmont propose, far from indicating a capacity to adapt to new situations, instead masks an ineradicable obstinacy that renders her ineducable. In Merteuil’s view, she is the type of woman who gives herself to others indiscriminately, without any concern for why or how she is being pursued.
The opinions that Marquise and the Vicomte express and pretend to espouse in the presence of Cécile, who makes these views her own, accord with modern sexual mores. Moral restraints on sex are both unhealthy and unnecessary and so ought to be disregarded. Sex is a game where, if one is to succeed, one must keep one’s partner guessing. Just as important as what one feels are the emotions one feigns to throw one’s rivals off the scent. If Merteuil fails to recognize the importance of consent when she chastises Cécile for being upset about the loss of her innocence, she makes up for this lapse by exhorting the girl to free herself of the dreary religious morality she learned in the convent to fulfill what resembles a very modern ideal: the empowered woman in full control of her sexuality. Yet Merteuil decides to wash her hands of Cécile after learning that the girl is following her advice unreservedly. Indeed, she judges the girl with far greater severity than the religious authorities would have shown her. Whereas the nuns would allow for Cécile to regain their approval by repenting of her transgressions, the libertines show no such leniency. Why do Merteuil and Valmont take such a harsh and unforgiving view of the girl? It is not because she is sexually promiscuous, since they are so themselves. Rather, what repels them most is the view that Cécile takes of sex, which is for her a form of recreation. This strikingly modern attitude toward sex, which is nothing more than the means to experience physical pleasure, is what they find utterly objectionable. For the libertines no less than for the Church, the practice of sexuality involves the highest ethical stakes. While the Church holds that an individual’s sexual behavior is bound up with the salvation of his or her soul, sexuality for the libertines must be an avenue for the expansion of one’s vital powers.
The novel finds the deceitful pair at a time of peace when they find the victims for their predatory designs within the social circles they inhabit. But in times of conflict with hostile powers, it is harder to imagine men and women who would be capable of rendering more valuable services than the libertine. The techniques of seduction and deception that wreak psychological havoc and destroy the reputations of their victims would then become the most reliable means by which the kingdom could gain vital information about its adversaries and rivals. Who, other than an expert libertine, would be best suited to penetrating the court of a foreign power and wringing from it its secrets? The preternatural ability of Merteuil to divine the weaknesses of others, which enables her successfully to deceive and betray rivals as well as lovers, would become a most effective skill in helping her side to triumph over its adversaries. The link between pleasure and power for the libertines makes them capable of rising above selfish and private interests and, indeed, endows them with the burning ambition to do so, when the occasion arises. The glory they achieve in serving their lord or the state moreover serves to magnify their charisma as well as to intensify the pleasures they will reap from the enhancement of their aura.
But such great subjective riches are beyond the reach of those who are bereft of the imagination that would drive them to pursue ever more intense and ever more elusive pleasures. A wholly sensuous creature like Cécile is unsuited for an education in “intrigue,” to which the Marquise and the Vicomte had thought to provide for her. Her obstinacy thus has to do with her attitude that sex cannot be anything but a matter of private pleasure, in which such concerns as power and virtuosity, and meaning and glory, enter not at all. The figure of the libertine, in his defiance of religious morality and readiness to break moral taboos, serves as a prototype of the modern emancipated, self-fashioning subject. Yet it is a striking irony to see the libertines in Dangerous Liaisons objecting to what amounts to the modern belief in sexual freedom with a severity that exceeds that of the religious moralists. For such beliefs that sexual freedom is healthy, normal, and “empowering” correspond in their eyes to the dullness of spirit and the incapacity to discriminate between what is fine and what is coarse, what is exalted and what is brutish, and what is extraordinary and what is common. For Merteuil and Valmont are the products of a refined and sophisticated civilization, in which moral restrictions are not seen as irrational limits on one’s freedom but as incentives to unfold one’s talents, strengthen one’s willpower, and steel one’s nerve.
The reader may object to the perhaps excessively negative characterization of a minor character in the novel, one who is moreover still young and immature. Yet, it remains the case that modern conceptions of freedom, sexuality, and ethical behavior are intended for people who lack any higher conception of their lives. Thus, from the standpoint of the libertines as well as of Christian believers, it is no wonder that the pleasures of the emancipated way of life quickly grow dull and that defensiveness, bitterness, and loneliness are the order of the day for too many in the present. From this standpoint, the pleasures and freedoms of modern society have become too diluted and mechanistic to support the civilization that has enshrined and abused ideas such as tolerance, human rights, and group identity.
