Les Liaisons dangereuses through the eyes of André Malraux

Since its resurrection in the early twentieth century after a long period of near oblivion, Choderlos de Laclos’s novel Les Liaisons dangereuses has come to be regarded as possibly the best French novel of the eighteenth century and one of the outstanding works of European literature. Not surprisingly, there is now a substantial body of critical commentary devoted to the work and among this, interestingly enough, a number of essays by notable French literary figures of the twentieth century such as Jean Giraudoux, Roger Vailland and André Malraux. The present discussion concerns André Malraux’s contribution which provides a particularly illuminating account of Les Liaisons dangereuses, but which, while endorsing the favourable modern response to the work, presents some important challenges to aspects of prevailing critical opinion.

Malraux’s essay on Les Liaisons dangereuses has been published in a number of contexts. It first appeared in a volume entitled Tableau de la littérature française published by Gallimard shortly before World War II (Gide, 1939: 417–28). ¹ Malraux republished it in 1970, together with studies of Goya and the revolutionary leader Saint-Just, in a work entitled Le Triangle noir, adding a preface which included additional reflections on Laclos. The essay has also been used on a number of occasions as a preface to post-war editions of Les Liaisons dangereuses.

Malraux’s analysis has become quite well known and critics have often cited it with approval. As early as 1959, one academic commentator praised Malraux’s ‘profound analysis’ of Les Liaisons dangereuses (Cherpack, 1959: 513), and in 1978 another spoke of Malraux’s ‘famous article’ (Rosbottom, 1978: 64), while a third wrote that Malraux’s essay had been ‘a milestone in the reversal of French critical opinion of Les Liaisons dangereuses’ (Free, 1978: 9). This climate of general approval has continued to the present day, and despite occasional dissenting voices on specific points of interpretation, Malraux’s analysis seems to enjoy continuing respect among most academic commentators. Curiously enough, however, the essay has seldom been considered in any detail, most critics limiting themselves to relatively brief references or perhaps a short quotation. ² In large measure, therefore, the essay remains unexplored territory and one might still legitimately ask precisely what Malraux’s arguments are. If his account throws valuable light on Les Liaisons dangereuses, as critics have said, in what respects is this so? The present article responds to this question. The answer it gives endorses the favourable critical view of Malraux’s analysis, but it suggests, nonetheless, that important aspects of what he has to say have not been fully appreciated. Malraux certainly admires Les Liaisons dangereuses but his reasons for doing so diverge in important ways from those offered by many contemporary commentators. Ultimately, as we shall see, he invites us to see the work in a perspective that is considerably more thought-provoking than the one in which it is conventionally viewed.

In his introductory comments in Le Triangle noir, Malraux offers some brief observations on the cultural transformation that took place in Europe in the century or so preceding the publication of Laclos’s work in 1782. A key feature of Enlightenment Europe, Malraux writes, was its ‘radical abandonment of Christianity’, a process that had commenced a century earlier but whose significance only became fully evident in the course of the eighteenth century (Malraux, 1970: 10). In one sense, of course, this observation is hardly new. It is a commonplace that the discoveries of Newton and the writings of thinkers such as Locke, Hume and the French philosophes, ultimately led the eighteenth century, or at least a major part of its intelligentsia, to embrace rationalist and materialist accounts of the universe, relegating religious faith to a marginal role at best. Malraux, however, is thinking of something of more direct and personal concern than scientific laws and philosophical arguments. He is thinking of the implications of this cultural transformation at the level of individual psychology, and his focus is not science or philosophy but art – and, in the present context, literature.

In the field of literary creation, Malraux argues, a key consequence of the radical abandonment of Christianity was the disappearance of the sense of passion and fatalité essential to the tragic hero. In the Christian world, he writes, ‘It was less important to know why a man had killed another man than to know if the dead man had been saved.’ Each person’s life was ‘a field of combat in which the Devil was the protagonist’, and it was the outcome of this internal struggle, not the psychology of relationships between men and women, that counted first and foremost (Malraux, 1970: 27). The suggestion is not, Malraux adds, that previous writers had been unaware of the psychology of human interaction, but simply that they regarded it as secondary. The crucial concern had been the struggle for the individual’s soul, and one can readily see how this general schema applies not only to Christian thought, with its exhortations to imitate Christ and ward off the Tempter, but also, as Malraux suggests, to the view of the world embodied as late as the seventeenth century in works such as the tragedies of Corneille. In this later context, the struggle is, of course, no longer with the Devil, traditional Christian faith having lost much of its hold; but there remains, nonetheless, an aspiration to ‘higher’ values, such as fidelity, honour and gloire, and a struggle to resist the temptation of their ignominious opposites. Stated more generally, there is still, despite the waning of Christian faith, a powerful notion of transcendence – a belief in something of greater and more enduring value than life’s passing pleasures. In Malraux’s terms, there is still the world of passion and fatalité – the world, for example, of Racine’s Andromache, who resolves to die rather than marry her dead husband’s mortal enemy, or of Corneille’s Horace, for whom patriotism must prevail over personal attachments; or, to choose an example from English literature, the world of Romeo and Juliet, who, young though they are, forsake everything rather than abandon a certain ideal of love.

The eighteenth century, Malraux argues, replaced passion in this sense with mere desire – the simple wish to possess and enjoy. The point is vital to his analysis. Europe’s radical abandonment of Christianity, he suggests, transformed more than its understanding of the physical and social world; it also altered individual men and women’s affective life – the realm of human psychology – and here the sense of transcendence faded as rapidly as it had elsewhere, with consequences no less radical. Enlightenment thought, in short, undermined much more than Christian theology; it also transformed European sensibility, replacing passion with desire.

This meant a major shift in literature’s centre of gravity. Now it was more important to know why a man had killed another than it was to know if the dead man had been saved. Or, in less dramatic terms, since the object of desire was usually the other person, or his or her possessions, or his or her good opinion (merited or not), interactions between men and women (how one might entice someone into bed, induce them to part with their money, or persuade them of one’s worth and consequence) became more important than any internal struggle within the individual. Once again, the claim is not that previous writers had been unaware of these aspects of human psychology. (One has only to think of Iago’s deception of Othello, or the various forms of trickery practised in Boccaccio’s Decameron.) But human interaction, in its multifarious forms, now became the very cloth from which literature was cut. Strictly speaking, as Malraux points out, passions had not disappeared, but their nature had changed and they were shown in a different light: now they were simply a person’s distinguishing psychological characteristic, their obsession, their idée fixe, and thus a blind spot open for exploitation, or possibly an object of comic derision. In the world of desire, in short, an individual’s passions simply become facts to be noted: they might well prove important as a means to gain an advantage but they are not important in themselves.

These elements of Malraux’s analysis throw valuable light on the directions taken by European literature over the course of the eighteenth century. They help explain, for example, the episodic nature of so much of the century’s fiction, clearly evident in a picaresque novel such as Gil Blas, but equally important, if less immediately obvious, in works such as Richardson’s Pamela or Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne. The point can be clarified by means of a contrast. Underlying a Cornelian or Racinian tragedy is an attempt to unify life – a resolve, pivotal to the action, to forsake the world of transitory pleasures in the name of a higher value. The trajectory of such works is tied inescapably to a key moment of decision – a situation to which the tightly focused, time-limited domain of the stage play is, of course, very well suited. Increasingly impervious to higher values, however, the eighteenth century is much more at ease in the world of transitory concerns; and since the world of desire is, in principle at least, endlessly renewable, its literature proceeds not by unification but by proliferation. ³ Hence the attraction of the novel, especially the sprawling, episodic novel in which constraints of time and place play a much reduced role. Hence also the ‘social’ nature of so much of the century’s literature. ‘No matter how profound it may be’, Malraux writes, ‘the Christian experience of the world always culminates in solitude’ (1970: 27), the focus, as we have seen, always on the hero’s internal struggle. In the world of desire, by contrast, interest shifts to relationships between men and women, who now, as Malraux writes, ‘act upon one another’ (1970: 26), the novel deriving its sustenance from the varied contests between those who desire and those who (or whose possessions or good opinion) are the objects of desire.

Moving closer to the concerns of the present essay, this analysis allows us to see why the figure of the libertine bulks so large in the literature of Laclos’s century. Where French literature in particular is concerned, critics have often argued that the libertine, as portrayed for instance in the works of Crébillon fils or Nerciat, is a reflection of declining standards of sexual morality following the death of Louis XIV. There may perhaps be some truth in this claim (although, as Malraux reminds us, it is easy to exaggerate the importance of a historical period’s alleged sexual depravities) ⁴ but the analysis we have been considering suggests a more deep-rooted explanation. Desire as Malraux defines it may obviously take many forms but if a significant fictional character (as distinct from an incidental figure) is to be based on desire, and on a form of desire that does not begin to resemble a passion – as, for example, a single-minded quest for riches might – one obvious choice is the pursuit of the immediate, intense, but transient gratifications provided by sexual pleasure. Seen in this light, the libertine, suitably endowed with personal charm and the requisite degree of cynicism, is a reasonably unsurprising manifestation of the eighteenth-century sensibility we are examining. He (sometimes she) is a natural consequence of the ‘radical abandonment of Christianity’ not just because standards of sexual morality have changed, but because he or she embodies a sensibility that has undergone a fundamental transformation. At the level of individual psychology, the world of passion has evaporated and love is not exempt. Love becomes an (in principle) endless series of physical encounters – desire with no hint of transcendence – and in this sphere the libertine becomes the new sensibility incarnate.

These remarks, as indicated, are based on the introductory sections of Malraux’s comments which briefly outline changes in European culture in the century or so preceding the publication of Les Liaisons dangereuses. The question now is whether Malraux regards Laclos’s novel as essentially a continuation, and perhaps a more complete realization, of the literature of desire – in particular as expressed in the novels of libertinage – or whether he sees it as a new departure, differing in important ways from the literature of that tradition. The verdict of critics on this matter is fairly clear: Laclos’s novel is generally seen as firmly anchored in the tradition of libertine literature and strongly beholden to it. Most critics agree that Les Liaisons dangereuses is markedly superior to its predecessors, particularly in terms of psychological analysis and stylistic sophistication, but the prevailing view, nonetheless, is that it represents a prolongation of this tradition not the beginnings of something importantly new. ⁵ This, however, reveals a rather odd state of affairs. For, despite their generally favourable response to Malraux’s essay, most critics do not seem to have recognized that his interpretation of Les Liaisons dangereuses is very much at variance with this view. Malraux certainly agrees that Laclos’s novel belongs to the eighteenth-century world of desire which we have considered. ‘This book’, he writes, ‘which talks continually about passion, is almost completely devoid of it’, the one exception, he notes, being Mme de Tourvel (Malraux, 1970: 28) (about whom a little more will be said later). Yet while agreeing that Les Liaisons dangereuses shares this important feature of the literature of the times, and even that it occasionally borrows anecdotal material from the novels of libertinage, Malraux nonetheless argues that it introduces major new elements found nowhere else in previous literature and that it links up much more significantly with novels of the future than with those preceding it. The marquise de Merteuil and the vicomte de Valmont, he writes, are creations ‘without precedent’. They are ‘the first [in European literature] whose acts are determined by an ideology. To appreciate their importance, one need only look at their posterity, which includes Julien Sorel and Raskolnikov’ (1970: 30, 31). This claim, about which critics have said very little, is central to Malraux’s analysis of Les Liaisons dangereuses and places the work in a perspective quite different from that adopted by prevailing critical opinion. Let us now consider the arguments Malraux advances in favour of this view.

Early in his essay, Malraux describes Les Liaisons dangereuses as an ‘an architecture of lies’ – a carefully calculated series of manoeuvres designed to mislead and entrap. Ultimately, the marquise de Merteuil and the vicomte de Valmont themselves become casualties of the events they set in motion, and a little more will be said about the novel’s denouement at a later stage. For the present, it is instructive simply to reflect on Malraux’s observation as it stands. The first thing one might say, perhaps, is that deception is nothing new in Western literature. It occurs frequently in Shakespeare, for instance (Iago is probably Shakespeare’s most infamous deceiver), and is a common means of gratifying desire in the literature of Laclos’s own century: Lesage’s Gil Blas has scarcely set foot outside his native Santillane before falling victim to trickery, and Tom Jones is repeatedly wrong-footed by deceivers seeking to profit at his expense. What, then, is new about Les Liaisons dangereuses? What role does deceit play here that it has not already played in the literature of Laclos’s predecessors?

For the marquise de Merteuil and the vicomte de Valmont, Malraux argues, deception and the manipulation of others have become, in effect, a way of life – almost ends in themselves. Iago manipulates Othello because he is consumed with envy and resentment; Gil Blas is tricked by a flatterer who wants to inveigle money out of him; and Tom Jones is deceived to ruin his chances with his beloved Sophia. But while Merteuil and Valmont also have desires to satisfy, in their case these are secondary. Merteuil’s plan to disgrace Cécile Volanges is certainly motivated by her desire to settle scores with her former lover, Gercourt, but as Malraux points out, this is ‘mere information’ for the reader. It provides the necessary trigger for Merteuil’s action, and thus for a major part of the plot, but there is no question of a genuine hatred of Gercourt or of a reaction similar, for example, to Mme de Tourvel’s profound grief after her betrayal by Valmont (Malraux, 1970: 35, 36). Fundamentally, Merteuil deceives not for revenge but because she wishes to live in a world in which she controls the actions of others, and the same applies to Valmont. True, Valmont is attracted to Mme de Tourvel and eventually seems to develop a kind of love for her – even if, as Merteuil tells him, it is merely the kind of love a sultan might feel for his favourite sultana (Laclos, 1979: 326); but ultimately Valmont deceives for the same reason Merteuil deceives – so that he will always act in accordance with what he calls his ‘principles’, ⁶ and those principles, like Merteuil’s, only secondarily concern the satisfaction of desires. First and foremost they concern a particular state of mind – a state of mind akin to that of a skilful general on a field of battle whose aim is not simply to vanquish but never to lose control of his enemy’s movements.

What is the fundamental nature of these ‘principles’? Malraux’s answer to this question brings us to the heart of his analysis. In the preface to Le Triangle noir, he stresses the importance for Laclos (as for Goya and the revolutionary leader Saint-Just) of the core Enlightenment value of Reason; and strange though the proposition might seem on first encounter, Merteuil and Valmont are, in Malraux’s eyes, firm adherents to this Enlightenment value, the important qualification being that, unlike a philosopher for whom Reason expresses itself through abstract argument and general propositions, Laclos’s two central characters have resolved to live the life of Reason – that is, to think and act in their relationships with others in ways that never transgress the requirements of lucid, rational thought.

To bring this point into sharper focus, it is useful to compare Les Liaisons dangereuses with a work of a very different stamp such as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. For both Romeo and Juliet, as for the play’s audience, the love they feel for each other is ultimately beyond explanation: fundamentally, it is simply a fact that they and the audience accept as a key element in their unfolding story (much as, for example, one accepts that the Montagues and the Capulets are bitter enemies). Love in this sense is truly a passion – or a fatalité in Malraux’s terminology – and inseparable from a form of transcendence in the sense that it takes hold and overwhelms, with all the ensuing consequences, but is never fully understood. This is not to suggest that Romeo and Juliet have nothing to say about their love; on the contrary, they, like all lovers, never weary of the topic. But their love for each other, like that of Tristan and Isolde, or the princesse de Clèves and the duc de Nemours, remains, nevertheless, a coup de foudre – a destiny which, while occupying their thoughts to the point of obsession, rules them far more than they rule it.

For Merteuil and Valmont, however, the case is very different. For both characters, the only action worth pursuing is one that is accompanied, and justified, by its explanation, its reason. Romeo and Juliet – to pursue the comparison a little further – are pledged to each other ‘come what may’, for good or ill: their love is their ‘fate’. For Merteuil and Valmont, the idea of fate is anathema – or, rather, it is a fool’s idea. Their guiding principle is precisely that nothing should be left to chance or fate, and that everything should be calculated in advance. ⁷ Not that they are clairvoyants who claim foreknowledge of the future. In fact they, like everyone, are sometimes caught unawares by unwelcome developments, as Valmont is, for example, when Mme de Volanges warns Mme de Tourvel about his disreputable past. The issue at stake is not about predicting the future but about a particular way of thinking and acting. For Merteuil and Valmont, the only action worthy of the name is one that is ‘thought out’ beforehand – an action constructed like a move in a well-played game of chess where nothing is left to the vagaries of fate. ‘Graspable by reason’, Malraux writes, ‘the world is subject to laws’ (Malraux, 1970: 30), and Merteuil’s and Valmont’s manner of thinking and acting does indeed imply that they live in a law-governed world. Not that they claim to discover something one might describe as the ‘general laws of human nature’. They are not philosophers or armchair psychologists seeking to compile a list of abstract propositions about human behaviour. Their ambition is to introduce Reason into the world of human experience – to live and act in a world in which lucidity banishes mystery, unpredictability and ‘fate’; a world which as a matter of felt experience, and not simply as abstract proposition, is a world governed by laws. ⁸ In such a world, moreover, the superior individual – the person of true substance – has the opportunity to distinguish himself. He is the one who, as Malraux writes, ‘establishes these laws’ – whose astute assessments of people and situations, and knowledge of the ‘ways of the world’, give him a mastery of events, while others, such as those blinded by naivety (such as Cécile Volanges) or distracted by an attachment to ‘virtue’ (such as Mme de Tourvel) are condemned to flounder helplessly (Malraux, 1970: 30). ⁹

This is what Malraux means when he says that Merteuil and Valmont are ‘the first [in European literature] whose acts are determined by an ideology’. The term ‘ideology’ is not meant in a political sense. The suggestion is, rather, that these are characters who have ‘taken charge’ of their lives, who have assigned themselves a goal – ‘a conception of man’s purpose’ in Malraux’s phrase (1970: 32) ¹⁰ – pursued that goal with determination, and established their superiority in those terms. Hence the link Malraux sees between these two characters and later figures such as Julien Sorel and Raskolnikov – and, he adds a little later, with Balzac’s Rastignac and Vautrin, and Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov. The feature common to all these characters is that ‘they act in a premeditated way in accordance with a general conception of life’ (Malraux, 1970: 32, emphasis in original). They belong to a new category of fictional figure that Malraux christens the personnage significatif, ¹¹ whom he contrasts with the earlier figure of the hero. The latter is based fundamentally on elements that are simply given for the reader, such as unwavering patriotism (as for Corneille’s Horace) or fidelity in love (as for Racine’s Andromache or Romeo and Juliet). The personnage significatif by contrast constructs his or her life in accordance with a chosen goal. These may, of course, differ markedly. Mme de Merteuil’s goal is clearly not that of Vautrin. But common to all such characters is an initial resolve (express or implied) ¹² and a series of actions consequent on that resolve; or, as Malraux puts it, ‘a conception of man’s purpose, the will to achieve it, and the systematic implementation of this will’ (1970: 32).

The principal difference between the ideologies of Merteuil and Valmont and those of later figures such as Julien Sorel, Vautrin and Raskolnikov, Malraux argues, is the role played by ambition. The configuration of pre-Revolutionary eighteenth-century society was essentially static even for privileged members of the nobility such as Merteuil and Valmont. The Revolution, and especially the dazzling ascent of an obscure second lieutenant of artillery to all-conquering general and emperor of the French, revealed a vast new world of possibilities – a world in which ambition became a value of central importance. But prior to this, in its initial incarnation in Les Liaisons dangereuses, Malraux writes, the personnage significatif

n’est pas un ambitieux: encore que son domaine soit très proche de celui de l’ambition, puisqu’il est celui de l’action sur les êtres. Ni la marquise ni Valmont n’ont envisagé le pouvoir politique comme moyen d’action: la société trop forte encore les contraint à l’hypocrisie, comme Julien, mais non comme les héros de Balzac nés plus tard. (1970: 33)

Merteuil and Valmont, in other words, operate within a more restricted field of action than that available to the ambitieux of the following century. ¹³ Unlike Julien, who draws inspiration from the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène and sets out to scale the social ladder, and unlike Vautrin, for whom the question is not just whether to aim at wealth and power but how to gain them as rapidly and ruthlessly as possible, Merteuil and Valmont inhabit a circumscribed social space in which victories are registered in the much less spectacular form of a successful seduction, and (for Valmont at least) the enhanced status a ‘conquest’ confers within a limited social circle. Merteuil and Valmont, in short, are no less ‘determined by an ideology’ than their nineteenth-century successors, but their ideology is attuned to the dimensions of the world they inhabit.

The elements of Malraux’s analysis examined thus far help identify the differences between Les Liaisons dangereuses and the literature of libertinage, or what he terms ‘les petits érotiques’ of writers such as Crébillon and Nerciat with which, as we have noted, critics often associate Laclos’s work. There are, of course, some similarities. Les Liaisons dangereuses, as we have seen, belongs to the same ‘post-heroic’ world as the libertine novel: Mme de Tourvel aside, there is no trace of genuine passion ¹⁴ or of a transcendental value to which one might sacrifice a life of worldly pleasures. In addition, there are occasional similarities in plots: the central characters in both cases are mostly men and women of the petty nobility; conquests are usually achieved by flattery or false vows of constancy; and the seducers, such as Valmont or Crébillon’s Versac, customarily adopt a tone of disdainful cynicism towards the mores of the social world in which they move. Despite this, however, there are major differences. Above all, one will look in vain in les petits érotiques for characters of the stature of Merteuil and Valmont or even of their principal victims, Mme de Tourvel and Cécile Volanges; and the critic Colette Cazenobe is surely correct when she describes certain representative libertines in the literature of the period as no more than ‘distant and insipid relatives’ of Merteuil and Valmont, lacking their ‘unequalled power and intelligence’ (Cazenobe, 1991: 320). ¹⁵ If we adopt the terms of Malraux’s analysis, the distinction between the two can be stated quite simply. The libertine figures of Laclos’s predecessors are little more than creatures of desire – characters defined essentially by their pursuit of sexual pleasure and a need to satisfy their vanity, and willing to employ the necessary means (often including deception but usually stopping short of violence) to achieve those ends. Merteuil and Valmont are much more than this. Their fundamental aim is not simply to satisfy desire but to construct their lives according to an ideology and, in Malraux’s words, to ‘act according to what they think’ (Malraux, 1970: 30, 31). Desire is certainly an important element of their world (although Malraux argues, as we shall see, that their ideology even transforms the nature of sexual desire itself) but their significance goes well beyond the relatively uncomplicated pursuit of self-gratification exemplified by the typical libertine.

A useful comparison can be made here with Crébillon’s La Nuit et le moment. The libertine in this instance is the handsome Clitandre who gradually overcomes the hesitations of the beautiful Cidalise by entertaining her with tales of his amorous encounters. As scions of the leisured nobility, Clitandre and Cidalise are both well practised in the language of charm and urbane cynicism, but beyond this their characters are almost without substance, the interest of the work, such as it is, depending heavily on anecdotal ingredients, especially Clitandre’s amorous escapades. ¹⁶ So little, in fact, does the reader learn about the psychology of either character, that when, at the conclusion, Cidalise finally yields to Clitandre’s avowals of affection, the reader is quite unable to tell whether he is being sincere for once – or, indeed, if Cidalise’s own protestations of love might not also be largely feigned. ¹⁷ The contrast with Merteuil and Valmont, whose psychology is explored in depth and in detail, could scarcely be starker. In power and complexity Laclos’s characters far outstrip these two representative examples of the libertine (and La Nuit et le moment is often regarded as Crébillon’s best work) whose motivations, here as elsewhere, seldom go beyond vanity and sexual desire.

Moreover, even sexual desire itself, Malraux argues, takes on a deeper – and more ominous – colouration in Les Liaisons dangereuses. The key point to observe here is that, strange as it may seem, the life of Reason (as distinct from philosophies based on Reason) is inseparable from a will to crush and humiliate. The only possible option for Merteuil or Valmont is the calculated pursuit of victory or, if they should happen to blunder or be thwarted by unforeseeable obstacles, the prospect of defeat. Compassion would be mere weakness, feebleness of mind – tantamount to ‘schoolboy’ behaviour in Valmont’s words. ¹⁸ There is simply no place, no use, for pity, and the nature of sexual desire itself in Les Liaisons dangereuses – at least for the two central figures – accurately reflects this state of affairs. Here, Malraux observes, one is not simply witnessing the application of will to sexual ends (as in the typical libertine novel); in Laclos, the will to humiliate, which is intrinsic to the life of Reason, is introduced into sexual experience itself, the two becoming mutually reinforcing (Malraux, 1970: 44–6). Consider Valmont’s description of his planned humiliation of Mme de Tourvel:

Mon projet est … qu’elle sente bien la valeur et l’étendue de chacun des sacrifices qu’elle me fera; de ne pas la conduire si vite, que le remords ne puisse la suivre; de faire expier sa vertu dans une lente agonie; de la fixer sans cesse sur ce désolant spectacle, et de ne lui accorder le bonheur de m’avoir dans ses bras qu’après l’avoir forcée à n’en plus dissimuler le désir. (Laclos, 1979 : 139) ¹⁹

This is what Malraux has in mind when he speaks, in a phrase often quoted by critics (though seldom explained) of the ‘eroticization of the will’ in Les Liaisons dangereuses. Constraint has become part of the very nature of sexual experience and Valmont’s objective is not mere physical enjoyment but the anguished confession by a once virtuous woman that she has abandoned everything to satisfy her desire for him. Humiliation of this kind – sexual conquest feeding on an act of self-vilification – has no parallel in the petits érotiques. Compared with this merciless psychological assault, Clitandre’s seduction of Cidalise seems like innocence itself.

This again serves as a caution against placing too much importance on surface similarities between Les Liaisons dangereuses and the literature of libertinage. Commentators who make such connections frequently point to Crébillon’s Versac, ²⁰ arguing that he exhibits the same cynicism and ruthlessness one finds in Merteuil and Valmont. There is a major difference, however, between a disillusioned roué’s jaded reaction to a social world ruled by vanity and the pursuit of pleasure (and whose own aim, in any case, seems principally to succeed in that world) ²¹ and a psychology based on a merciless will to humiliate through sexual possession. As the petits érotiques illustrate, the cynical pronouncements of the libertine are perfectly compatible with a psychology of mere desire, the cynicism serving merely to legitimize sexual hedonism and perhaps lend it a weightier, quasi-philosophical significance. Similar elements can certainly be found in Les Liaisons dangereuses from time to time, but as Malraux aptly comments, ‘les théories de la marquise, ses allusions à la liberté sexuelle, – une des parties brillantes mais les moins originales, les plus “d’époque” du livre – sont bien orientées vers le simple plaisir; mais rien de ce qui est mis en acte, représenté dans Les Liaisons, ne l’est’ (1970: 44, emphasis in original). Merteuil and Valmont are, in short, much more than disenchanted pleasure-seekers rationalizing their conduct by doses of fashionable cynicism. They are embodiments of a psychology in which that cynicism, allied to an inexorable will to humiliate, is an integral part.

One might perhaps wonder, of course, if such compassionless beings, devoid of all sympathy for their fellows, could ever exist in ‘real life’. Here one encounters what Malraux terms the ‘mythological’ element of Les Liaisons dangereuses – its portrayal of characters who, while firmly grounded in psychological terms, are ‘larger-than-life’ in their uncompromising, single-minded pursuit of their goals. To this mythological element, Malraux argues, belongs the well-known Letter 81 in which Mme de Merteuil recounts her early life and her techniques for schooling herself in strength of will, and to it also belongs her attitude of total self-reliance and her scorn for Valmont when he attempts to give her advice. Viewed in this light, Malraux comments, Merteuil and Valmont might well be described as ‘demiurges’ who have ‘come down from the Olympus of intelligence to deceive mere mortals’ (1970: 35, 47, 48). The point should not, however, be taken out of context. In an often quoted comment on this issue, Malraux writes that ‘If one summarized Les Liaisons, the book would be a mythology’, specifying later that it would be a ‘mythology of the will’ (1970: 35, 47). Unfortunately, critics have sometimes quoted the last phrase in isolation, creating the impression that it contains the essence of Malraux’s interpretation. This, however, overlooks his introductory clause: ‘If one summarized “Les Liaisons” … ’ Taken by itself, the novel’s plot – the sequence of successful deceptions, and Merteuil’s and Valmont’s detached amusement at the suffering they inflict – certainly suggests something demiurgic, and ‘mythological’. And indeed so important is this element to Laclos, Malraux notes, that Merteuil is never shown in defeat: ‘While [Laclos] spares no detail of Mme de Tourvel’s shame and distress’, he writes, ‘the marquise never once writes after her downfall. Let others talk about her: she will speak no more’ (1970: 36, emphasis in original). But Les Liaisons dangereuses is much more than its summary reveals, and Malraux insists that, important though the mythological element is, it is only one of the two main constituents of the work. The other is the distinctive psychology examined above, based on the determination to act ‘according to what one thinks’, to which Malraux assigns at least as much importance. Laclos’s achievement, he writes, is not simply to have created a mythology; it is ‘[to have put] a psychology in the service of a mythology’ (1970: 49) – to combine the will to crush and humiliate arising from the life of Reason (integrated, as we have said, with sexuality) with an apparently superhuman, ‘demiurgic’ capacity to enforce that will.

Malraux makes only a brief comment about the denouement of Les Liaisons dangereuses but it is interesting to reflect on this element of the work in the light of the issues now considered. The final chapters of Les Liaisons dangereuses bring nothing but misfortune to the central characters. Merteuil and Valmont declare war on each other. Valmont dies in a duel with Danceny. The misdeeds of both Merteuil and Valmont are exposed. Merteuil contracts smallpox, loses large sums of money in a lawsuit, and flees to Holland. Not surprisingly, there has been some disagreement among critics about whether this disastrous turn of events – which also sweeps up Cécile, Danceny, and of course Mme de Tourvel – should be construed as the inevitable outcome of Merteuil’s and Valmont’s evil-doings, or whether Laclos, with an eye to the conventional morality of the times, is principally concerned to ensure that his two villains are punished, and seen to be punished.

It is worth noting, first, that whether any aspect of a literary work, including its conclusion, can be deemed ‘inevitable’ is a somewhat ambiguous question. Despite what is sometimes said about a particular character ‘taking over’ a work from its author, nothing is inevitable in the strict sense of the word. Molière could presumably have omitted the sudden, improbable appearance of the ‘Exempt’ – the King’s officer – in the final moments of Tartuffe, even if this meant disappointing his audience by abandoning Orgon and his family to their fate; and Cordelia could have been spared hanging at the end of King Lear (as indeed she was in several later adaptations of the work). Similarly, Laclos could doubtless have engineered his plot in such a way that Merteuil and Valmont did not fall out, that Valmont did not lose his duel with Danceny (an improbable outcome, in any case, as some commentators note, given Danceny’s youthfulness and naivety), and did not therefore feel impelled to reveal his correspondence with Merteuil. And it certainly seems conceivable that Merteuil might have been spared her financial losses and the smallpox. (Malraux comments in this connection that ‘Smallpox is the bogus denouement of the novels of hypocrisy – like Tartuffe’s Exempt’ (1970: 36.) ²² ) Ultimately, however, all this is secondary. The important question in such cases is much less what actually occurs – which the author can, after all, control – than what the logic of the characters makes possible: for example, whether a ‘tragic’ conclusion, in the loose sense of that word, helps reveal the essentially tragic nature of the characters (in the stricter sense of the word) or whether it does little more than bring a work to an end in a reasonably acceptable way. In the case of Les Liaisons dangereuses, Malraux’s analysis suggests that the latter view is preferable and it is instructive to see why.

As discussed, the tragedies of Corneille and Racine depict attempts to ‘unify’ life – to opt for a transcendent, ‘enduring’ value such as fidelity or honour over a life of transient pleasures. Death, or the threat of death, often plays a major role in these works, as it does in Shakespeare’s tragedies, because it ‘brings matters to a head’, so to speak. Death confronts the hero with a decisive choice between this life of fleeting joys and something of greater value, and in so doing often causes him to reveal his deepest convictions, even if, as with Macbeth, it is the grim conclusion that life is ‘a tale told by an idiot’. In such contexts, death is much more than a way of bringing a work to an end. It is an experience implicit in the logic of the character as the moment when his or her most profound elements are brought to light. The question in the case of Les Liaisons dangereuses, then, is whether death, or disaster in some other form (such as Merteuil’s smallpox, financial ruin and exile), plays a similar role. If we accept Malraux’s analysis, the answer is clearly no. The underlying principle governing Merteuil’s and Valmont’s actions involves, as we have seen, a resolve to ‘act according to what one thinks’, to take charge of one’s life and establish one’s superiority in those terms. But, as discussed earlier, Les Liaisons dangereuses, like the literature of libertinage, has lost contact with the realm of transcendental values – values that grasp ‘life as a whole’ and unify it. Thus, while Valmont repents at the last (or at least makes use of his final opportunity to attack Merteuil) he has nothing to say about life as a whole – precisely because such a notion is, by its nature, foreign to him. And Merteuil, as already noted, falls silent after her defeat, not only because, as Malraux suggests, Laclos recognized that nothing could be gained by showing her vanquished, but also because she simply has nothing more to say. The transcendental value for which a Cornelian or Racinian hero stands has a ‘trajectory’: its end is implied in its beginning. The value that Merteuil and Valmont espouse has no trajectory, no implicit end in this sense; it simply continues until it encounters circumstances that force it to cease. ²³ Seen in this light, the proposition that the conclusion of Les Liaisons dangereuses is inevitable (in the deeper sense now in question) seems difficult to sustain. Valmont dies because Laclos needs to bring his novel to a close, and also, very possibly, because he felt that his readership (and perhaps the censor) would not tolerate the spectacle of such wickedness going unpunished; and Merteuil is defeated for the same reason. ²⁴ Mme de Tourvel’s case is of course different. She dies for love. Tourvel, Malraux writes, begins to speak the ‘manic language of passion’ and to this extent, he comments, she is alien to the ‘system’ of the novel even though not to its plot and development which she shapes ‘like a horizon’ (1970: 28, 29). ²⁵ Merteuil and Valmont, however, would not die for anything, for the simple reason that they have no value higher than life to die for. In his excellent essay on ‘Don Juanism’ in Le Mythe de Sisyphe, Albert Camus imagines the Don ‘waiting on that evening at Anna’s house for the Stone Guest who does not arrive’, and ‘who must have felt, after midnight, the terrible bitterness of those who have been right’ (Camus, 1965: 156). If Merteuil were to have had any such metaphysical reflections in her exile in Holland – and not surprisingly there is no sign of them anywhere in the novel – one feels they would have been very much the same. The only retribution she would fear would be of an earthly kind, and, accidents like smallpox aside, she would know how to deal with them. The ‘other world’, the realm of transcendent values, she would have thought, is a dream of fools.

These remarks do not exhaust what Malraux has to say about Les Liaisons dangereuses but they focus on his principal points and examine them in considerably more detail than commentators have done to date. As indicated earlier, there has been a tendency to regard Laclos’s novel as a continuation, perhaps even a kind of apotheosis, of the literature of libertinage. Seen in this light, it relates first and foremost to an existing tradition, its significance springing largely from Laclos’s development and refinement of that tradition. Malraux’s interpretation, as we now see, is quite different. While recognizing that certain aspects of Les Liaisons – anecdotal elements principally – are indebted to les petits érotiques, Malraux argues that the significance of Laclos’s work depends far more on what it initiates than on what it continues. Merteuil and Valmont, in his eyes, are much more than eighteenth-century roués who have taken their craft to new levels of sophistication. They mark the entry of an important new figure into French literature – the personnage significatif. While no longer bound to a transcendent value in the manner of the tragic hero, this figure is nevertheless much more than the denizen of a world defined simply in terms of thwarted or satisfied desire. The personnage significatif orders his life in accordance with a certain conception of man’s purposes and works to establish his superiority in these terms. In the case of Les Liaisons dangereuses this conception is based on Reason and creates a world in which the shrewd and quick-witted distinguish themselves from the naive and foolish (or those blinded by ‘virtue’). It is certainly a world of intrigue and deception but it is, nevertheless, a world in which the individual is much more than a mere creature of desire in the mould of a Clitandre, a Meilcour or a Versac. Surprising though the conclusion may seem, it is a world with a well-defined scale of values through which the superior – and the inferior – man or woman can be readily distinguished.

Paradoxically, therefore, the harsh and pitiless world of Les Liaisons dangereuses, is, if we accept Malraux’s analysis, the consequence of an aspiration to show that an individual man or woman can be ‘worth’ something, and can demonstrate that worth. ²⁶ Even more strangely, the two characters who establish their superiority are among the most abominable figures in eighteenth-century literature, and yet at the same time powerful embodiments of a central Enlightenment value. The Enlightenment, after all, sought to scatter the forces of ignorance and mystery, subject everything to the bright light of Reason, and reveal the general laws that govern the world. Its battle cry is Kant’s injunction: ‘Sapere aude!’: ‘Have the courage to use your own understanding!’ And Merteuil and Valmont do exactly that. Not that, as we have seen, they seek out the ‘general laws of human psychology’. They are not theoreticians of human nature; Reason for them is the shaping principle of experience – of their hopes, fears, joys and sorrows, and the nature of their relationships with others. The unexpected consequence, as Laclos’s novel reveals, is that once established as the wellspring of human action, this quintessentially Enlightenment value leads to forms of human behaviour that seem wholly at variance with anything one might customarily describe as enlightened. Instead of a pursuit of equality one encounters a will to dominate; instead of love of truth one finds a will to deceive; and instead of compassion one discovers an implacable will to humiliate and destroy. In the realm of human sensibility – as distinct from the world of philosophical abstraction – the bright light of Reason quickly assumes a dark and forbidding aspect, nurturing forces and dispositions that are the very reverse of what one might have hoped for or expected.

This perhaps explains why Merteuil and Valmont exert such a disconcerting effect on the reader. Considered as an ‘objective’ fact extracted from the world of Laclos’s novel, their conduct seems to merit unequivocal condemnation. Yet, puzzlingly, both seem somehow to defy this verdict, and, strangely, even to command a kind of respect. The reader would like very much to despise them but feels somehow obliged to accord them a certain esteem, not unmixed perhaps with a degree of apprehension. If we accept Malraux’s analysis, the underlying reason for this is that their actions – especially Merteuil’s, who unlike Valmont, never shows the least sign of faltering – consistently suggest a personal integrity (however incongruous the idea may seem in the context) and the reader recognizes, even if obscurely, that their remorseless cruelty is the natural – indeed the only possible – expression of the value they embody. Here, by a strange paradox, is a world of evil whose underlying source is not intrinsically evil; for despite the deliberate harm they inflict, neither Merteuil nor Valmont regards wickedness itself as their guiding light. ²⁷ They are not at all like Milton’s Satan who proclaims ‘Evil, be thou my good’, ²⁸ or a Faustian figure who forms a pact with the Devil. Both characters simply resolve to live the life of Reason with consistency and distinction, and their actions flow quite naturally from principles which, as Merteuil says, ‘are the fruit of profound reflection’ (Laclos, 1979: 170). ²⁹ Seen in this light, Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, who commits a double murder not, as he says, for his ‘lusts of the flesh’ but for ‘a most magnificent and praiseworthy aim’ (Dostoyevsky, 1951: 292), is perhaps not an unlikely descendant.