Volume 34, Number 13 · August 13, 1987
All Conquers Love
By Luc Sante
Les Liaisons dangereuses
a play by Christopher Hampton, from the novel by Choderlos de Laclos, directed by Howard Davies. at the Music Box Theater, New York City
Les Liaisons dangereuses
by Christopher Hampton
Faber and Faber, 101 pp., $7.95 (paper)
Les Liaisons dangereuses, the novel by Pierre-Ambroise-François Choderlos de Laclos first published in 1782, has managed to keep nearly intact its reputation as a scandalous work. After causing an immediate sensation, inspiring the private delight and public censure of eighteenth-century readers, it went on to be banned in France from 1815 to 1875, and to occupy a prominent place in the Vatican's Index Librorum Prohibitorum until that august reading list was abolished in 1966. Even today, those more acquainted with the outline than with the substance of the text tend vaguely to think of it as a work of courtly pornography. Of course, it has a French title that fairly reeks of sin, and much bed hopping does take place within its covers, albeit in rather circumspect fashion. All this is good publicity, but what really keeps Les Liaisons potent after two hundred years is not so much its depiction of sex as its catalog of corruptions, including but not limited to the corruption of language by polite cant and the corruption of morals by manners. It implicates a whole society so founded on falsehood that a single act of emotional truth is tantamount to an act of subversion. On this basis, Les Liaisons dangereuses would seem particularly ripe for revival at the present moment, but it is not easy to 'revive' a novel. Christopher Hampton has undertaken to solve the problem by translating the complex book into a play, and somehow he has done so successfully.
Review, 2549 words
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