or experienced in the theater, tragedy leaves us shaken. We wonder how the world can go on after so much grief. The destruction of Oedipus, Pentheus, Hamlet, or Faustus makes us wonder why fate had to deal with them so brutally. We understand that the Macbeths and Phaedras of tragedy are hideously imperfect individuals guilty of monstrous crimes, but we still find it difficult to balance the idea of justice, human or divine, with the annihilation of these figures and much of the society they inhabit. Even in the case of Romeo and Juliet, any hope for the future or for the redemption of society seems shattered. The ironic possibility that human existence, which we defend tooth and nail and seek to extend by every available means, lacks any significance, that fate toys with us like a cruel child torturing an insect, looms large in our thoughts. At the same time, we wonder if pride, which deludes humans into thinking they are more than human, might not be the source of all our misery.

Pierre-Ambroise-François Choderlos de Laclos (1741-1803) takes these ramifications of tragedy and the ironies of the human condition and inserts them into the world of the novel. The change of genres is all-important, because the novel conceives of human society as a world without end, thus obliterating tragedy’s apocalyptic overtones. The form had begun to take its modern shape during Laclos’s lifetime; it moved in England from the gothic romances of Horace Walpole (1717-1797) and Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), with their ghosts and haunted castles, to the psychological studies of Jane Austen (1775-1817) and Frances (Fanny) Burney (1752-1840), about whose Cecilia; or, Memoirs of an Heiress (1782) Laclos wrote an enthusiastic essay in 1784. The novel mitigates the finality of tragedy by surrounding its characters—much to our relief—with a world that will go on despite the utter destruction of the fascinating lives we have just experienced, no matter how grotesque, heartrending, or happy the characters’ destinies may be. Where the end of dramatic tragedy opens a window onto chaos, the destruction of a novel’s characters, especially in the case of Laclos, opens a door to moral judgment within a social context: Did these characters—who, despite their high rank in society, are psychologically similar to us, their readers—get what they deserved ? Was it some other moral flaw that we are unaware of, or was it pride again that caused them to violate notions of right and wrong that were taken as basic truths by their society?

The 1780s teem with meditations on morality. Laclos publishes Les Liaisons Dangereuses in 1782; Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) paints his Oath of the Horatii, called by one critic a “clarion call to civic virtue and patriotism” (Honour, Neo-Classicism, p. 35; see “For Further Reading”), in 1784; German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) releases Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals in 1785; and Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) stages Don Giovanni, with its telling subtitle L’Empio Punito (“Impiety Punished”), in 1787. In 1789 the long process of the French Revolution begins, with its emphasis on moral rectitude, on the need to root out aristocratic privilege and corruption in order to establish “liberty, equality, and fraternity.”

The real issue for us in the twenty-first century as we experience these literary, philosophic, painterly, musical, and political manifestations of eighteenth-century morality is to identify and define the different kinds of morality each author espouses. That is, Mozart and David look to the past for sources on virtue; they reconfigure stories from another age for their own: Mozart reaches back to seventeenth-century theological speculations on divine grace for his opera, while David finds his example of nationalism in an obscure Roman legend. Kant, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, seeks to postulate a morality free of ties to religion or any other code external to the individual consciousness, while Laclos claims—if we take his epigraph from Rousseau (“I have observed the manners of my times, and I have published these letters”) as a clue to his intentions—that his novel is a response to the moral condition of his time. In this sense, it is important that Laclos, unlike Kant, does allow religion a role in moral redemption—his male villain, the Vicomte de Valmont, receives last rites (p. 391) just before dying, while his female villain, the Marquise de Merteuil, consistently mocks religion (p. 116)—possibly because it is a hint about his basically conservative nature.

Perhaps because it is a quality he personally appears to have lacked, virtue is one of the obsessive