Question 1

Is the Marquise de Merteuil a feminist character?

Accepted Answer

The Marquise is one of the most debated characters in eighteenth-century fiction from this perspective. On one reading, she is a feminist avant la lettre — a woman who, in a society that denies women power and subjectivity, has constructed her own power through intelligence and ruthlessness. Her famous letter (Letter 81) in which she explains how she educated herself from childhood by observing, calculating, and concealing is one of the great first-person accounts of female self-construction under patriarchy. On another reading, she is the novel's ultimate villain — the source of every plan that destroys Cécile and Madame de Tourvel — and her power is entirely predicated on the destruction of other women. Laclos himself claimed, implausibly, that he wrote the novel to warn young women about men like Valmont; the Marquise makes this reading impossible to sustain.

Question 2

How does Les Liaisons Dangereuses end?

Accepted Answer

Valmont, in falling genuinely in love with Madame de Tourvel, loses the calculating detachment that is the source of his power. When the Marquise demands that he abandon Madame de Tourvel (whose conquest she has helped engineer) to prove his allegiance to their libertine alliance, he complies — and Madame de Tourvel, destroyed by the withdrawal of his love, dies. Valmont and the Chevalier Danceny fight a duel (provoked by Valmont's seduction of Cécile, with whom Danceny is in love); Valmont is fatally wounded and dies, passing Merteuil's letters to Danceny, who distributes them. Merteuil is socially destroyed, disfigured by smallpox, and loses a lawsuit that costs her her fortune. The ending is explicitly designed as a moral resolution — the libertines are punished — but readers have consistently felt that the punishment is inadequate to the pleasure the novel has given in observing the libertines operate.

Question 3

Is Les Liaisons Dangereuses difficult to read?

Accepted Answer

The epistolary form requires some adjustment — the reader must track multiple correspondences and infer the shape of the plot from letters that are addressed to different recipients and have different purposes. But once the form is familiar, it becomes one of the novel's greatest pleasures: you know something that one character does not, or you see how a character's account of events differs from another's, or you catch a character in a self-deception that their own letter reveals. The prose is eighteenth-century French in style — formal, elaborate, and precise — but the best English translations (Christopher Hampton's stage adaptation, Douglas Parmée's translation) capture it effectively.

Question 4

What are the best film adaptations of Les Liaisons Dangereuses?

Accepted Answer

The 1988 film directed by Stephen Frears (with Glenn Close as Merteuil, John Malkovich as Valmont, and Michelle Pfeiffer as Madame de Tourvel) is generally considered the best English-language adaptation — it captures the novel's tone and its moral architecture better than most. Dangerous Liaisons (1989), directed by Milos Forman and starring Annette Bening and Colin Firth, transfers the setting to the 1990s, which loses something of the novel's social specificity. Valmont (1989), also by Forman and also a more sympathetic Valmont, is a lighter version. The Korean adaptation Untold Scandal (2003), set in the Joseon Dynasty, is the most acclaimed non-Western adaptation.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses Reading Order

Complete Dangerous Liaisons Book List