apt to turn into monsters. It also happens that monsters sometimes do good deeds. Laclos exploits this irony in one of his most memorable episodes. The Vicomte de Valmont, an absolute womanizer, sets his sights on the married, virtuous Présidente de Tourvel. Learning that she is having him followed, Valmont decides to stage an act of charity that will prove to Tourvel that he is a wonderful man. He asks his servant to inform him of a poor family about to be dispossessed for not paying their taxes—he makes sure there are no attractive women in the family so Tourvel will not suspect his charity on that score—and makes it appear to Tourvel’s spy that he is saving the family from disaster.

Valmont, director and actor in this transformation of life into theater, describes the scene as it unfolds after he pays the family’s taxes:

What tears of gratitude poured from the eyes of the aged head of the family.... I was watching this spectacle, when another peasant ... said ... “Let us all fall at the feet of this image of God”; ... I will confess my weakness: my eyes were moistened by tears, and I felt an involuntary but delicious emotion. I am astonished at the pleasure one experiences in doing good; and I should be tempted to believe that what we call virtuous people have not so much merit as they lead us to suppose (pp. 51-52).

Laclos’s irony is manifest: Valmont fools Tourvel, but in perpetrating his fraud, he is moved by his own act of charity, false for him but real to its beneficiaries. He then comments, in an unconsciously Kantian vein, that since he felt pleasure at doing good, so too must many so-called virtuous people. It follows, therefore, that doing good for the sake of feeling this pleasure is not as meritorious as many would like to think.

Robert Rosenblum, in Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art, points out that in 1782, the same year Laclos published Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the English painter Edward Penny exhibited a work at the Royal Academy, London, titled The Generosity of Johnny Pearmain; or, the Widow Costard’s cow and goods, restrained for taxes, are redeemed by the generosity of Johnny Pearmain. Rosenblum notes he was unable to locate “the source of Penny’s story” (p. 59, footnote 31), but it seems reasonable to assume it was part of a popular or folk tradition. In the 1780s, when virtue was fashionable, writers and artists eagerly depicted virtuous acts from any century and involving all social classes. Laclos’s genius is to enfold his version of it in a haze of irony in order to show both Valmont’s susceptibility and his cynicism. Valmont may have been moved by his own bogus virtue, but we readers cannot know if this is a sign that he will ultimately be redeemed. Even his final act of charity—forgiving the man, Danceny, who mortally wounded him in a duel—may be nothing more than a subterfuge to facilitate a posthumous act of revenge.

This incident underscores what is so vexing about Les Liaisons Dangereuses: Even though Laclos’s villains, Valmont and Merteuil, are guilty of overweening pride, there are nuances in their personalities that mitigate their evil. This we often detect in Laclos’s subtle ironies in juxtaposing their letters. That is, if Laclos were writing a traditional statement about virtue in the manner of a morality play, he would make certain that good and evil would be as different as white and black and that some of his characters, especially the principal players, would be redeemed. He does exactly the opposite: His villains are punished, but the only survivor of the Valmont-Merteuil sexual reign of terror, Cécile Volanges, enters a convent, not out of religious zeal but because becoming a nun offers her a way to recover the innocence she had before being seduced. The man she loves, Danceny, also elects celibacy: It is as if both realize that sexuality has made them into fools, that while their calamity is not absolute, it has made them incapable of leading normal lives.

Laclos preaches morality, but his book, at least in the minds of his readers, clearly teeters on the edge of pornography. We see the concrete results of how an ironic reader-author could interpret Les Liaisons Dangereuses—as well as other moralizing literature going all the way back to Samuel Richardson—in the works Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade, better known as Marquis de Sade ( 1740-1814), especially his Justine; or, the Misfortunes of Virtue (1791). Sade’s title