themes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), whose influence on European thought during the second half of the eighteenth century was all-pervasive. It is not by chance that Laclos quotes Rousseau’s philosophical novel Julie; ou, la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) in the epigraph to Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Rousseau’s concept of morality derives from two conditions: the artificiality of society and the deformed nature of humans obliged to live in it. For Rousseau, society breeds hypocrisy (we believe one thing but practice another; we appear to be one thing but are really something else). At the same time, we live in a world of artificial inequality (neither inherited social rank nor inherited wealth reflects an individual’s innate abilities) and miserable illusion: We can never attain the ambiguous ideals—beauty, freedom, happiness—language gives us because we can never define these elusive ideas. They correspond to nothing concrete in the real world. Our hopeless pursuit of abstractions in a society arbitrarily composed of haves and have-nots renders us mentally unstable: We cannot behave properly because we live in a fiction we take for reality. If we view Laclos’s principal characters through this Rousseauistic optic, we see that even though they are members of France’s highest classes, they are perverted by their social milieu to the point that even their passions are artificial.

That is, within a society Rousseau considers nothing more than a convention, Laclos’s principal villains are so dehumanized that they forget their essential humanity. They are so far “above” ordinary humans (even those of their own social class) that they ascribe godlike powers to themselves. The Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont are guilty of overweening pride, and it is the author’s intention to bring them to justice. At the same time, in depicting their adventures, their clever machinations, and their utter hypocrisy, Laclos makes vice so seductive that moralizing critics damned his novel and sought to suppress it. The moral revulsion his book inspired continued throughout the nineteenth century, and transformed it into a clandestine classic. Small wonder that so many “private” editions with suggestive illustrations appeared in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including this translation, first published in 1898, by the poet Ernest Dowson (1867-1900); it was reprinted many times with an array of provocative illustrations. The result is a baffling paradox: Laclos intended his novel as a condemnation of immorality; his critics, including judges in an 1824 Parisian court, considered it pornographic and banned it; illustrators rendered it truly pornographic with lascivious pictures. Their confusion is perfectly understandable, because it is often difficult to know if Laclos is a serious moralizer or merely a purveyor of the salacious, like Claude Crébillon (1707-1777), alluded to by Merteuil on page 33, whose licentious novel The Letters of Marquise de M*** (1732) lurks in the background of Laclos’s vastly superior text.

Setting aside any possibility of irony, Laclos’s notion of morality, by the standards of Kant, is old-fashioned and very traditional. If we look back to the author who influenced Laclos most (after Rousseau), Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), we find exactly the same kind of moral vision. In Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), also an epistolary novel, Richardson depicts a young lady, Pamela Andrews, who so successfully defends her virtue against the attacks of a young gentleman that he finally falls in love with and marries her. This is a species of capitalist morality in which we invest our virtue and are rewarded on earth for being good. Richardson’s second novel, Clarissa Harlowe (1747-1748), is the tragic version of Pamela: Clarissa runs off with the man she thinks loves her, Lovelace, and is ultimately drugged and raped by him. She dies of chagrin, and Lovelace is killed by her cousin. Here folly and misconduct are punished—again, in this life.

Morality in Richardson, as in Laclos, is a bank. If we save up our virtue, we will be rewarded, but if we squander it, we will be punished. To Kant, as he says in Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, a moral action is one we commit not because we hope to achieve something (a reward, earthly happiness) but because the action embodies a general, irrefutable principle. We must ask ourselves what would happen if everyone in our situation were to do the same thing, indeed, would have to do the same thing by instinct. Kant rejects external moral codes because he wants us to exercise our free will in making moral decisions.

More traditional, Laclos, like Richardson, suggests that unless we adhere to traditional moral codes we are