Les Liaisons dangereuses, the 1782 novel of sexual intrigue by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, has become one of the most adapted literary classics in the two decades since it was reincarnated as a hit play by the British dramatist Christopher Hampton. The 1988 Stephen Frears film Dangerous Liaisons, a luxurious star-studded screen version of the play, was followed by Miloš Forman’s lightweight Valmont, and then by Cruel Intentions, transplanted into the world of 1990s privileged American teenagers. Add to this Chinese and Korean films, a 2003 French modern-day miniseries, two operas, and several ballets. A revival of Liaisons, imported from London, is currently playing on Broadway, and there is talk of a Christopher Hampton-scripted BBC miniseries based on the novel.
What, then, is this book that acts as such a magnet to the modern imagination? Les Liaisons dangereuses was the first, and only novel, by Laclos, an army officer from the minor nobility. It caused an international scandal, and with reason: Its two main characters, Parisian aristocrats the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, are amoral libertines who toy with people and ruin lives for sport. Yet in this epistolary novel, their voices largely dominate. Smart, witty, charming, Laclos’s villains are almost as seductive to the reader as to their victims. Perhaps no other literary work—except for Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, another scandalous bestseller—does such a disconcertingly good job of taking you inside the mind of a monster (or two) and making you enjoy your stay.
Former lovers, Valmont and Merteuil are secret allies in sexual gamesmanship. At the start of the novel, Valmont is pursuing Madame de Tourvel, a young wife of such renowned virtue that seducing her would be a major coup. The stakes are raised when a tryst with Merteuil becomes his promised reward for success. Meanwhile, the marquise also seeks to enlist him in her scheme to get even with a man who once left her—no man breaks up with Merteuil, unless she wants him to think he did—by corrupting his bride-to-be, 15-year-old convent-bred Cécile.
And so the games begin, escalating inexorably toward their tragic end (spoilers ahead). Tourvel succumbs to Valmont, is brutally abandoned at Merteuil’s instigation, has a breakdown, and dies; the used and deceived Cécile retires to a convent. The Valmont/Merteuil alliance frays and turns to war: Valmont is mortally wounded in a Merteuil-engineered duel with Cécile’s sweetheart Danceny, but lives long enough to expose and ruin the marquise.
If Liaisons has a moral message, as Laclos took pains to stress, it is also a deeply pessimistic one. The good suffer, and is evil truly punished? Valmont dies honorably and is roundly mourned, and his place is quickly taken by another, equally depraved rake. Merteuil’s downfall is compounded by losing her fortune to a long-pending lawsuit and her looks to smallpox. Yet she flees with her jewelry and silver, and our only knowledge of her disfigurement is a second-hand report by an often-clueless letter-writer.
The subtler moral of the story may be that its protagonist-villains are undone by the very feelings their libertine philosophy scorns as weakness. Valmont’s faked love for Tourvel becomes real, but he will go to any lengths to prove to Merteuil (and to himself) that he is not in love. Merteuil, the master schemer, slips up because of her own twisted love for Valmont. This is a common reading, embraced by the play, and still more explicitly by the Frears film; yet in the novel, it too remains uncertain: Valmont’s professions of regret could have an ulterior motive, and Merteuil’s fury at losing her hold over him could be simply about ego and power.
Such layers of ambiguity and nuance make Les Liaisons dangereuses a riveting psychological thriller—a too-modern term, perhaps, but the novel’s multiple and frequently unreliable narrators give it a startlingly modern feel nearly two centuries before Rashomon. The voices are flawlessly individualized and real. Not only Merteuil and Valmont but the kind, passionate Tourvel, entrapped by her attraction to Valmont and the self-flattering hope of reforming him with her chaste friendship; the airheaded, sexually curious Cécile, and the sentimental Danceny; Valmont’s indulgent old aunt and Cecile’s fussy mother. Even marginal characters, such as Valmont’s snobbish valet.
The novel’s themes, like its psychological realism, often feel strikingly ahead of their time. Valmont’s and Merteuil’s self-images as masters of their fates, rising above the mass of lesser people, has Nietzschean overtones. The sparring between Valmont and Merteuil delves into what can only be called sexual politics: his displays of male privilege—and insecurity—versus her one-woman feminism. Openly critical of women’s subjection, Merteuil, who enjoys considerable autonomy as a rich widow, boasts of beating men at their game and even of being “born to avenge [her] sex,” despite her most unsisterly treatment of other women. (It is worth noting that Laclos’s post-Liaisons writings includ three unfinished proto-feminist essays on women’s education.)
No play under three hours long can fully capture the book’s complexities, but Hampton’s Liaisons does remarkable justice to its source. Most of the letter-writing is understandably replaced by face-to-face interaction, which mostly works well—with one exception. In the novel, Merteuil directs Valmont’s rejection of Tourvel by composing a diabolically cruel breakup letter for him—with the refrain “It is not my fault”—under the guise of telling a story about a man finally ridding himself of an embarrassing mistress. Valmont, taking the challenge, sends Tourvel an exact copy. In the play and film, Merteuil’s only cue is the story and the phrase “It’s beyond my control” as the man’s rebuff to his mistress. Valmont goes to Tourvel and acts it out. Here, letter-writing and reading as a stage device would have been far better: The Hampton version lacks both Merteuil’s literal scripting of the breakup and its horrifying coldness. (The late Alan Rickman, whom I saw in the play’s Broadway debut, played the breakup scene with such passion that Tourvel surely had to doubt Valmont’s claim to be bored with their affair.)
The current production has offered a superb Merteuil in the stage and screen veteran Janet McTeer, who brings to the part not only glamour, grace, and deviousness but a steely strength and ferocious will: ice goddess, Delilah, and Amazon, all in one. When the marquise, responding to Valmont’s warning that refusing him will be a declaration of war, says, “All right—war,” McTeer delivers the last word as a battle cry. Next to her, the usually excellent Liev Schreiber pales a little, or at least did in the performance I saw; his Valmont had too much blasé sarcasm and not enough sensuality and danger, though his energy picked up toward the end when Valmont is increasingly at war with both Merteuil and himself.
Besides McTeer, the real star of this revival has been the staging by Josie Rourke of London’s Donmar Warehouse and the set design by Tom Scutt. The backdrop is an aristocratic mansion that bears marks of decay and abandonment—crumbling walls, sheets of plastic—with the furnishings and decorations gradually stripped away as the play progresses. (For the scene changes, the stage darkens and the actors and costumed extras move the props while gliding in a dance.) It gives the production a haunting air, as if we were watching ghosts reenact a tragicomedy long past. Two moments are particularly striking: the brilliant choreographed duel, in which Valmont’s halting, lurching movements suggest suicide by Danceny; and the prelude to Valmont’s more-rape-than-seduction of Cécile, when the sleeping girl, in her white nightdress, lies on her bed completely covered with a plastic sheet, a heartbreaking sacrificial victim.
Les Liaisons dangereuses is still awaiting a truly great adaptation, probably as a miniseries with enough time to give the rich source material its due. In the meantime, the play’s return to Broadway, despite its flaws, has made for a satisfying night at the theater.
Cathy Young is a columnist for Real Clear Politics and a contributing editor to Reason.
