« Les plaisirs du vice et les honneurs de la vertu »

The phrase les plaisirs du vice et les honneurs de la vertu captures a central paradox of Les Liaisons dangereuses: Vicomte de Valmont wants the gratification of transgression and the distinction of appearing to have won a woman’s willing consent. Its force lies in the gap between those aims. Valmont treats virtue not simply as an obstacle to overcome, but as a status whose outward signs can make his conquest seem more valuable—even as his methods compromise the freedom that would make surrender meaningful.

Meaning and Paradox

Valmont uses the phrase while considering how to approach Présidente de Tourvel. After more than two months of pursuing her, he rejects the prospect of gaining access through means he considers foreign to his own strategy. Mere possession would not suffice: he wants her to yield by her own admission and to reach a private encounter without recognizing its danger. In this context, “the pleasures of vice” name the illicit desire he pursues, while “the honors of virtue” point to the moral prestige that would seem to survive if Tourvel appeared to choose him freely.

The formulation is therefore not a simple celebration of wrongdoing. It describes Valmont’s wish to make transgression resemble its opposite. Virtue becomes both the resistance that gives the pursuit its difficulty and the appearance he hopes to preserve in its outcome. The expression also reveals how he measures success: not only by access to Tourvel, but by the manner in which he can claim to have obtained it.

Valmont’s Method and Its Limits

The later account Valmont gives of his encounter with Tourvel shows the strain inside that ideal. He describes staging a dramatic farewell, alternately presenting despair and threat, then feigning departure. When Tourvel stops him and collapses into his arms, he treats the scene as a victory and interprets her condition as submission. His account thus presents her apparent response as the culmination of his design, not as a straightforward expression of unpressured choice.

That discrepancy makes the phrase sharply ironic. Valmont values the appearance of voluntary surrender, yet the episode he narrates depends on calculated emotional pressure. He casts the encounter as a campaign planned through successive maneuvers; the military language lets him present manipulation as skill and the woman’s distress as proof of success. Because the account comes from Valmont himself, his declaration of victory also exposes his self-fashioning: the reader can distinguish his claim to have won willingly given submission from the tactics he says he used to produce it.

Virtue as Social Appearance

The phrase resonates beyond Valmont’s pursuit. In her plan against Comte de Gercourt, Marquise de Merteuil focuses on his preference for a convent education and for the supposed reserve of blond women. She proposes using Cécile Volanges, whom he has chosen as a bride, to make him ridiculous. In this scheme, the signs associated with feminine modesty and virtue are already social currency: Gercourt values them, and Merteuil intends to turn his expectations against him.

The novel’s prefatory voice makes a related satirical point by claiming that the supposedly enlightened present has made men honest and women modest. It challenges that complacent picture by pointing to the unlikely-seeming possibility of a wealthy young woman entering a convent or a young, attractive Présidente de Tourvel dying of grief. Against this insistence that virtue and propriety are secure features of the age, Valmont’s phrase suggests that moral reputation can be manipulated, coveted, and put at odds with conduct.

Choice, Pressure, and the Marriage Plot

The correspondence around Cécile supplies a counterpoint to Valmont’s ideal of willing surrender. When he proposes making a duplicate of her room key, Cécile refuses. She fears that Madame de Volanges will notice the difference, worries about the lasting consequences if the deception is discovered, and says the plan seems wrong; instead, she prefers to be patient and continue receiving letters. Her hesitation makes clear that an apparent opportunity is not the same as consent to its risks.

Madame de Volanges later reconsiders Cécile’s proposed marriage to Gercourt after recognizing her attachment to Chevalier Danceny. She would rather risk weakening her maternal authority than make her daughter marry one man while loving another. Although she acknowledges Gercourt as a strong match, she weighs Cécile’s preference and the prospect of mutual affection against the advantages of wealth and an advantageous arrangement. Her reasoning sets care for a daughter’s choice against the social calculations that Merteuil and Gercourt’s marriage plot puts into play.

Together, these contrasts clarify the phrase’s significance. In Valmont’s pursuit, virtue is a prize whose appearance he wants to retain while he engineers an outcome; in Madame de Volanges’s decision, a young woman’s attachment becomes a reason to reconsider an arrangement made on her behalf. The phrase crystallizes the novel’s scrutiny of reputation and desire, but its irony rests on a concrete contradiction: Valmont celebrates willing surrender while describing methods designed to shape another person’s response.