Ilse’s Reviews > Les liaisons dangereuses > Status Update

Enjoy, Ilse!🤗

Fran wrote: "Enjoy, Ilse!🤗"
Thank you, Fran! Glad I am finally getting to it, a copy has been waiting on the shelves for decades...

Happy, happy reading Ilse! :) Letter XXXI brings back fond memories :) My preferred novel on the French literature curriculum for the second year of my high school!

P.E. wrote: "Happy, happy reading Ilse! :) Letter XXXI brings back fond memories :) My preferred novel on the French literature curriculum for the second year of my high school!"
Thank you very much, P-E! I have a soft spot for the epistolary genre, so it's about time I am reading this. And please, tell me more about your lovely memories of that particular letter, you made me very curious :))! It struck me as a clever illustration of the Dutch saying, "You give them a finger and they want/grab the whole hand/arm".

Thanks for asking :) Letter LXXXI (not XXXI) is the one when Madame de Merteuil tells Valmont about her deep motivations for being a libertine (an ambiguous noun if there ever was one, designing both a quality of free-thinker and the nature of the depraved). It is certainly the letter where Merteuil unveils the most elements about her origins, her education, the lifelong plan she designed for herself and the means she put to use to fulfill this plan! It commands respect, in spite of the vile deeds she imagined and performed, as she offers an explanation as to what these heinous acts stand for in her mind... You may very well resent her or pity her, for putting her aptitudes to such ends, and yet it is partly understandable (if not excusable), in her position.