Vicomte de Valmont’s departure from Madame de Rosemonde’s country estate marks a consequential separation from Madame de Tourvel, but not a clean emotional break. He announces that he will return to Paris after Tourvel’s resistance and Madame de Volanges’s warnings have made his position at the estate untenable. In his account, the parting becomes a contest between her explicit request for distance and the small gestures he reads as encouragement. Tourvel’s letter the next day confirms his departure while revealing her distress at the separation and her continued reliance on Madame de Volanges’s counsel.

Causes and Decision

Valmont frames the decision against the conflict surrounding his pursuit of Tourvel. In a letter to the Marquise de Merteuil, he blames Madame de Volanges for warning Tourvel about his reputation and says that her advice has forced him to leave. His anger turns that departure into a retaliatory project: since he cannot strike Madame de Volanges directly, he proposes to wound her through what she loves. He specifically considers using Cécile Volanges, while acknowledging that Danceny’s honesty could complicate such a scheme. The departure therefore carries two directions at once: away from Tourvel and toward Paris, where Valmont expects to pursue a separate revenge.

The immediate scene complicates his claim that he is simply being driven away. On the morning he describes, Valmont sees Tourvel again and is especially moved by her beauty. He attributes his heightened response partly to the prospect of losing the pleasure of seeing her. When a courier brings Merteuil’s letter of August 27, he hesitates over whether to keep his word and depart; he says that meeting Tourvel’s eyes makes refusal impossible. The decision is thus presented not as indifference to her, but as a choice made amid continuing attachment and a competing obligation to leave.

The Farewell Encounter

After announcing his departure, Valmont is left alone with Tourvel when Madame de Rosemonde briefly withdraws. Before he can approach, Tourvel rises in alarm and implores him to leave her alone. Valmont reads the fervour of her appeal as evidence of emotion, but his account also makes clear that her words are a refusal, not an invitation. He has reached her while she is asking for distance; his interpretation of her agitation serves his own desire to continue the encounter.

Madame de Rosemonde’s return interrupts the moment. Tourvel takes the hand Valmont offers, and he treats this acceptance as a hopeful sign. As they walk, he tries to hold her hand; she first attempts to withdraw it, then yields when he presses more insistently, without answering either the gesture or his complaints. At the door of her apartment, he tries to kiss her hand. Her resistance weakens when he tenderly invokes his imminent departure, but after the kiss she pulls her hand free and enters her room, where her maid is present. The sequence ends not in reconciliation but in a brief, uneven leave-taking: Tourvel allows contact, yet does not answer his declarations and ultimately retreats.

Departure and Tourvel’s Account

Valmont’s letter, dated August 28, follows the event as it unfolds for him. He adds an evening postscript saying there has been no further private opportunity and that Tourvel has taken care to avoid one. He also reports that her sadness has been as great as propriety allowed. These details sit uneasily beside his confidence that the accepted hand and its kiss bode well: the letter records both her visible distress and her deliberate avoidance, leaving his hopeful reading open to question.

In a letter dated August 29, Tourvel tells Madame de Volanges that Valmont left that morning and informs her because she had seemed so eager for his departure. Tourvel describes Madame de Rosemonde’s sorrow at losing her nephew, and admits that she listened to his praise without contradicting it because much of it was deserved. She feels responsible for the separation and says that her friend’s grief moved her deeply. Her account confirms the departure while shifting its emotional emphasis: what Valmont presents as a charged final encounter, Tourvel describes through regret for the pain caused to Rosemonde and fidelity to the advice she has received.

Consequences and Significance

Valmont’s departure also links the estate’s private drama to a new social arrangement. Madame de Rosemonde sends an invitation to Madame de Volanges to spend time in the country; Tourvel welcomes the prospect, hoping to see her friend and become better acquainted with Cécile Volanges. The invitation makes the separation more than a private exit: Madame de Volanges may take a place at the estate just as Valmont returns to Paris, where he has already contemplated using her daughter against her.

The two accounts preserve a revealing difference in perspective. Valmont dwells on Tourvel’s eyes, her hand, and the kiss he manages before she withdraws; Tourvel reports his departure as a consequence of following Madame de Volanges’s advice and emphasizes the distress it causes Madame de Rosemonde. Her letter does not undo the physical tenderness he recounts, but neither does it endorse his interpretation of that tenderness as consent or renewed intimacy. The event therefore closes Valmont’s immediate access to Tourvel without settling what she feels, while exposing how readily he turns another person’s hesitation into evidence for the outcome he wants.