Dangerous Liaisons · Chapter
Letter 161: The Presidente de Tourvel explained
In a letter dictated to her waiting maid, Madame de Tourvel, now in a convent, addresses Valmont with a mixture of anguish, accusation, and lingering love.
What happens
In a letter dictated to her waiting maid, Madame de Tourvel, now in a convent, addresses Valmont with a mixture of anguish, accusation, and lingering love. She laments her lost innocence and happiness, accuses him of tormenting her even in her retreat, and describes a hallucinatory vision in which he appears both as a monster and as a beloved. Her words oscillate between pleas for pity, expressions of repentance, and desperate cries for comfort, ending with a farewell.
Themes in this chapter
Love, Virtue, and Corruption
Tourvel's letter vividly contrasts her former innocence and happiness with her current guilt and suffering, illustrating the corrupting power of illicit love.
Innocence and Experience
Tourvel mourns the loss of her innocence ('I was happy and innocent') and describes the painful transition to a state of guilty experience brought about by Valmont.
Characters to notice
- Madame de Tourvel
Dictates a letter from the convent, expressing profound despair, guilt, and conflicted feelings toward Valmont.
- Viscount de Valmont
Addressed throughout as the 'cruel and mischievous being' who has tormented and ruined her; appears in her hallucination both as a monster and as a lover.
Key passages
“I was happy and innocent—I gazed on thee and lost my peace—I listened to thee and was guilty.”
I was once content and pure, but looking at you destroyed my tranquility, and heeding your words made me sinful.
Tourvel succinctly traces her fall from innocence to guilt through her encounter with Valmont.
“Leave me my sorrows, and take away the cruel remembrance of the advantages I have lost.”
Let me keep my grief, but spare me the painful memory of the happiness I once had.
She begs Valmont to stop tormenting her with memories of her former virtuous state.
“In vain I strive to fly from him; still he follows me—he is there; incessantly he besets me—How different from himself!”
I try in vain to escape him, but he is always present, haunting me—yet he appears transformed, no longer the man I knew.
Tourvel describes a haunting, hallucinatory presence of Valmont that torments her even in the convent.