Pierre-Ambroise-François Choderlos de Laclos wrote Les Liaisons Dangereuses in 1779 while serving in the military. At the time, he was based in Aix and had already tried his hand at writing—producing what is reputed to be a small body of mediocre poetry and some opera librettos. He confided that he wanted to produce a novel that would live on beyond him, that would, in a sense, assure his immortality. Les Liaisons is the only work he produced of any import, and yet it has, indeed, singlehandedly achieved his goal.

Roxanna Hope as Mme. de Tourvel and Gareth Saxe as Valmont. Photo © Gerry Goodstein.

Considered at the time a roman á clef, it was written in the form of a series of letters exchanged between the various characters of the story. Upon its publication in 1782, Les Liaisons Dangereuses produced an uproar and was denounced as fervently as it was selling. Marie-Antoinette herself had it in her library. In 1824, a decree of the cour royale de Paris condemned the book to be destroyed as "dangerous" and this verdict remained official until the late nineteenth century.

Interestingly enough, it was Laclos' ambition to produce a companion piece to Les Liaisons, one in which the merits of marriage and fatherhood were extolled. He had found bliss in his own domestic life and was convinced that it was the key to happiness. The novel was never finished.

Christopher Hampton's 1985 adaptation for the stage produced a brilliant distillation and dramatization of the book, and went on to great success in London, on Broadway and around the world. It has since been adapted into two major films, Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Valmont. One has to think Monsieur de Laclos would be pleased.

My own thoughts about the play, for the purposes of these notes, must of necessity be brief. That is some relief, for the characters and their psychologies are so complex, one doesn't really know where to begin to encapsulate months of work on the dissection of such a piece. Suffice to say that I find myself diametrically opposed to its early critics, who deemed the story immoral, even evil. Yes, it depicts a subculture seemingly devoted to cruelty, deception, psychological brutality and wickedness — a chilling society of "monsters" who seek out the vulnerable and prey upon them; but it is, without question, a story with an intense moral center, a tale of heartbreaking proportion, and like all great stories about the "monsters" amongst us, one that allows us to see a glimpse of the circumstances that created them.

The vulnerable underbelly of our anti-heroes, Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, are as fully exposed in this work as are the vulnerabilities of their victims. These people are not motiveless "bad seeds," nor are they sociopaths. They are people who are idle, rich, exceedingly intelligent, and scornful of societal rules and structures that they find not only repressive but also hypocritical and petty. They are, above all, threatened by everything that surrounds them, so much so that they have constructed a complex series of "fortresses" to protect themselves. With their own societal rules they have created a game — not only to keep themselves amused, but also to keep themselves safe from the all the things they find threatening, especially true passion and true love. And of course, as all the great tales of humanity tell us, we cannot protect ourselves from such things. The great tragedy of these characters unfolds with the same kind of fascinating horror that drives Oedipus Rex; everything they do to prevent the fate they dread brings them closer and closer to it, and in the end they are destroyed by their own tactics, their own "game." It is only in the final moments of the play that their folly is revealed to them, and those moments of revelation are indeed heartbreaking, chilling and tragic, for these are people who, despite their monstrous actions, are not monsters. We find ourselves having a begrudging admiration for them — for their wit and charisma, for their brilliance and expertise at the "game" and for their individualism in a world that does indeed repress them. We find even greater sympathy when we realize that they are just like us, desperately fighting against parts of themselves that they perceive to be painful, vulnerable and dangerous.

Who wins the game at play's end? That is a matter of perception. And the examination of that question and the many others that Les Liaisons Dangereuses provokes make it a work of art that will hopefully inspire much conversation, much deliberation, and much inspiration. For as in all the great classic works, this story of revelation and revolution has no easy answers. The human heart is a vastly complex organ seemingly bent on leading us always into a universe filled with dangerous liaisons, and it is in watching the heart's journey in others that we discover so much about our own.

—Bonnie J. Monte

"Even today Les Liaisons remains the one French novel that gives us an impression of danger: it seems to require a label on its cover reserving it for external use only."

—Jean Giradoux

"If this book burns, it burns as only ice can burn."

—Baudelaire

"For the young man, death represents a release from enormous pain, rejection, dark loneliness; love is something that imprisons the spirit even as it frees it. It is death that achieves the ultimate liberation."

—From the notes on Le Jeune Homme and Le Mort by Mikhail Baryshnikov