Dangerous Connections

Dangerous Connections is the English title of Les Liaisons dangereuses, an epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, first published in France in 1782.

The Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont are former lovers who now work together. Merteuil asks Valmont to ruin Cécile de Volanges, a girl newly out of the convent and promised to a man Merteuil means to punish. Valmont has chosen a harder target of his own: Madame de Tourvel, a married woman known for her virtue, and the price he names for succeeding is Merteuil herself.

Everything reaches the reader as a letter. The flattery sent to a victim arrives alongside the report explaining how it was written, so the seduction and the account of the seduction are read together. Nobody is described from outside: every character is known only through what they choose to write, and to whom.

Both conspirators get what they set out to get, and neither survives it. When Valmont's interest in Madame de Tourvel stops being a performance, the alliance turns into a war fought with the same weapon that built it: the letters themselves.

The novel was an immediate scandal and an immediate success. Laclos, an artillery officer by profession, never published another. Its structure has been borrowed ever since, most widely in the films Dangerous Liaisons (1988) and Cruel Intentions (1999).

This edition of Dangerous Connections is the English translation printed in London in 1812.

Content note: coercive control and sexual violence.