# Letter 161: The Presidente de Tourvel explained — Dangerous Liaisons

> Chapter companion for Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos.

## 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.

## Character check-ins

### 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 lines

> 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._

## Links

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