Quote of the Day (Laclos)

“There is nothing more difficult in love than expressing in writing what one does not feel.”-- Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782)

(Pierre Choderlos de Laclos died on this date in 1803, dying on military duty at age 61. Twenty-five years before, while bored stiff while working on the fortifications of Aix off the west coast of France, he decided to take up fiction. Four years later, he had produced an epistolary novel light years removed, in skill and sophistication, from its English progenitor, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740). It has been adapted several times for stage and screen (even as a ballet), including the marvelous Christopher Hampton version I saw at the Roundabout Theatre several months ago. It is inconceivable that such a novel could have been produced in 18th or even 19th-century America. Unfortunately, whatever we have gained in civilization has been accompanied by the jadedness at the heart of this very dark novel.

Military metaphors spring to mind immediately with this novel that really is set nowhere near a battlefield. The two former lovers who spin their webs in this tale, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, are laying siege to the virtue of two young women. It’s an entire carefully plotted campaign, filled with feints and maneuvers.

In the quote above, Merteuil is warning Valmont against one of his particular tactics—his fake love letters sent to the virtuous married woman Madame de Tourvel. Eventually, Merteuil insists, his true intentions—cruel intentions (like the movie title, if you will)—will become apparent and he’ll lose his objective.

Published seven years before the fall of the Bastille, Les Liaisons dangereuses dangereuses is now often read as a dark premonition of the French Revolution. I’m not sure this is quite the case. People of his own time seem to have read this in much the same way Renaissance readers interpreted Machiavelli’s The Prince—less admonitory than descriptive. Even Marie Antoinette, that most clueless of bluebloods, had a copy of this in her library, according to the web site of a novelist who recently wrote of her, Sena Jeter Naslund.

If Laclos’ novel seems prophetic, it might be less because of political turmoil that Laclos anticipated than his understanding that dark passions upend even our most plotted destinies. The author himself never became an example of this. At the height of the French Revolution, even though he engaged in revolutionary activity, he was distrusted as a supporter of the Duke of Orleans. Arrested and jailed a couple of times during the Reign of Terror, he narrowly escaped the guillotine.

After Napoleon Bonaparte promoted this career soldier to general, Laclos died of dysentery and malaria in Taranto, Italy, in the former convent of St. Francis. Unlike Merteuil and Valmont, his last letter was an act of love—a plea to Napoleon that his wife and three children be cared for after his death.

If Laclos thought he had escaped a troubled end, however, he was mistaken. After Napoleon’s fall from power, the Taranto locals destroyed Laclos’ burial tomb and scattered his remains into the sea.)