The episode in which the Vicomte de Valmont seizes Madame de Tourvel's letters and decides to take revenge on Madame de Volanges joins an intimate discovery to a calculated change of aim. Valmont enters the scene exulting in what he takes to be Madame de Tourvel’s love; access to her papers seems to confirm that attachment. But the papers also expose the warning that has made her wary of him. His response is not simply to depart as she wishes: he turns the discovery into a reason to return to Paris and strike at Madame de Volanges through her daughter. Told in a letter to the Marquise de Merteuil, the episode reveals both what Valmont has found and how eagerly he shapes his discoveries into a story of victory and retaliation.

The search for the source of Tourvel’s resistance

Madame de Tourvel has allowed Valmont to write to her, but her letter also urges him to leave. He says that he is troubled by the question of who has written against him and tries first to obtain the answer by bribing her maid. He offers ten louis for access to the pockets of her mistress’s clothes, which the maid could take in the evening and replace in the morning. She refuses, and he fears that his attempt may have compromised him. The papers are not yet in his hands; his first approach has failed, and he cannot assume the maid will keep silent.

The opening of the letter therefore makes surveillance, rather than courtship, the immediate business of the episode. Valmont needs to learn what Madame de Tourvel has been told before he can decide how to answer her request that he leave. His account presents this as a practical obstacle, but the proposed intrusion into her papers also shows how readily he treats her private correspondence as something to be acquired and examined.

A staged opportunity and a bargain

Valmont turns to his huntsman, who is having an affair with the maid. From him, Valmont learns that the servant’s room is separated from Madame de Tourvel’s only by a thin partition and that the couple meet there at night. He devises a plan around that arrangement. At two in the morning, carrying a light, he goes to the room on the pretext that he has repeatedly rung for his servant without receiving an answer. The huntsman performs surprise and distress; Valmont sends him away to heat water, leaving the maid embarrassed and alone with him.

Valmont says he deliberately preserves the advantage created by her embarrassment, while keeping his conduct outwardly measured. He does not take liberties with her; instead, he turns the situation into a negotiation. In exchange for keeping the encounter secret, he requires her to bring him her mistress’s pockets the following night, again offering the ten louis. She agrees. The bargain is built on an unequal predicament: the maid’s fear of exposure gives Valmont leverage, and his promise of discretion becomes the price of access to Madame de Tourvel’s private papers.

He then goes hunting for almost the entire next day. He explains that this gives him a pretext for delaying his reply to Madame de Tourvel until he has examined the papers. On his return, he notes that she receives him coolly and interprets her remark about his apparent preference for hunting as evidence that she is piqued by his lack of attention. His descriptions of her mood remain his own readings, offered to the Marquise de Merteuil rather than confirmed by Madame de Tourvel herself.

What the letters reveal

That night, the maid brings the pockets to Valmont. He inspects them carefully, intending to restore everything to its place. Two letters from Madame de Tourvel’s husband contain legal details and expressions of conjugal affection, but, as Valmont reports, nothing about him. The next discovery is more consequential: he finds the fragments of the forged letter from Dijon that he had used to deliver his own letter to Madame de Tourvel. The fragments have been carefully gathered together, and he sees distinct traces of her tears on them.

He also finds his letters kept together and arranged by date. Most striking to him is the first letter, which he had believed Madame de Tourvel had returned to him: she has copied it in her own hand. Valmont describes the handwriting as altered and trembling, and takes it as evidence of her agitation. These objects—the collected fragments, the ordered correspondence, the handwritten copy—give him grounds to believe that Madame de Tourvel is emotionally involved. Yet they do not erase her expressed wish that he leave. The contrast between the papers’ signs of feeling and her request for distance is central to the episode: Valmont reads the former as confirmation of his power and the latter as an obstacle to be overcome.

Discovery becomes revenge

His delight at the papers gives way to anger when he identifies Madame de Volanges as the person who has warned Madame de Tourvel against him. Valmont presents her advice as the cause of Madame de Tourvel’s distrust and of his forced departure. He turns at once from the woman whose letters have moved him to the woman he blames for interrupting his pursuit. Because, in his view, Madame de Volanges is beyond his direct reach, he resolves to wound her through the person she loves most: her daughter, Cécile Volanges.

The plan draws on an existing scheme. The Marquise de Merteuil had already proposed that Valmont help form Cécile, a fifteen-year-old just out of the convent, so that the Comte de Gercourt would be made ridiculous in the marriage arranged for him. Valmont now recasts that project as retaliation against Madame de Volanges. He is displeased that the Chevalier Danceny is involved, since he considers Danceny too honest to make the plan easy, but notes that Danceny is in love and that he sees him often. His letter leaves open how Danceny might be used; it establishes the intention, not a completed scheme.

Valmont still has to announce his departure. The next morning, he sees Madame de Tourvel and says that her presence makes it difficult to keep his word. When he finally tells her he is leaving, Madame de Rosemonde briefly leaves them alone. Madame de Tourvel asks him to leave, and he approaches her with tender complaints before Madame de Rosemonde returns and interrupts them. The moment makes the departure emotionally charged, but it does not undo the decision Valmont has announced or the retaliatory purpose he has formed.

The letter as self-presentation

The episode is narrated by Valmont in a letter to the Marquise de Merteuil, his confidante and accomplice. Its successive reversals—from triumph, to anxious investigation, to elation over the papers, to fury at Madame de Volanges—are arranged as a report of discovery, but also as a performance for an audience who understands his schemes. Valmont casts the maid’s cooperation as the outcome of his ingenuity, reads the preserved letters as proof of Madame de Tourvel’s love, and frames his revenge as a response to injury. The reader can distinguish those claims from the evidence he actually finds: Madame de Tourvel has kept and copied his letters, but she has also asked him to leave.

The stolen correspondence thus has two functions. Within the plot, it gives Valmont evidence of Madame de Tourvel’s feelings and identifies the warning that has affected her judgment. Within the letter, it supplies a new rationale for his return to Paris and for redirecting his attention toward Cécile Volanges. Private writing, gathered and interpreted without its author’s permission, becomes both a source of knowledge and an instrument of control.