« On s’ennuie de tout, mon ange, c’est une loi de la nature ; ce n’est pas ma faute. »

« On s’ennuie de tout, mon ange, c’est une loi de la nature ; ce n’est pas ma faute. » is a breakup formula built around evasion: its speaker describes disloyalty as inevitable, then repeats that he bears no responsibility for it. Offered by the Marquise de Merteuil as a remedy for a man who cannot bring himself to end an affair, the letter makes the language of natural law serve as an alibi for calculated conduct.

A letter composed as an excuse

The formula appears in a letter-within-a-letter. The Marquise first describes a man who knows his attachment will damage his reputation but lacks the courage to break it off; he continues acting foolishly and afterward insists that the consequences are not his fault. She then supplies a breakup letter for him, presenting it as a possible cure for his predicament. In the surrounding exchange, she addresses the Vicomte de Valmont, making the proposed text part of her counsel to him.

The draft turns a four-month affair into a sequence of excuses. Its speaker claims that his love has lasted only as long as the recipient’s virtue, admits that he has been unfaithful, and then blames the recipient’s supposedly merciless tenderness for forcing his deception. He next invokes a woman he loves passionately who requires him to abandon the recipient, before advising the abandoned lover to choose someone else. The repeated refrain—« Ce n’est pas ma faute »—returns after each assertion, converting confession into denial.

The closing lines sharpen the cruelty by separating the pleasure of beginning the affair from the ease of ending it: « Adieu, mon ange, je t’ai prise avec plaisir, je te quitte sans regret : je te reviendrai peut-être. Ainsi va le monde. Ce n’est pas ma faute. » The casual possibility of returning leaves the recipient neither a commitment nor a clean ending, while the refrain pretends that this unequal arrangement is simply how the world works.

The rhetoric of natural law

The letter’s argument depends on a telling reversal. Its speaker announces a universal law—everyone grows bored—then uses that generalization to excuse his own specific decision to leave. His infidelity is admitted, but responsibility is displaced onto nature, the recipient’s affection, and the new woman’s demand. The refrain does not deny what he has done; it denies that his actions can fairly be judged as choices.

The appeal to nature also licenses a gendered double standard. The speaker asserts that men have been granted constancy while women have been given obstinacy, making male changeability sound natural and female persistence sound blameworthy. The claim contradicts the letter’s own conduct: the man has been unfaithful, yet it is the abandoned woman whose tenderness is said to have compelled him. The polished symmetry of the excuse disguises an unequal allocation of responsibility.

Counterpoint in the surrounding story

The expression’s fatalism contrasts with other judgments about marriage and choice in the correspondence. The Marquise describes the Comte de Gercourt as prejudiced in favor of girls educated in convents and blonde reserve, and proposes that Cécile Volanges’s sheltered upbringing and wealth make her a target for revenge. In another letter, Madame de Volanges reconsiders the promise she gave to the Comte de Gercourt: because her daughter loves the Chevalier Danceny, she decides she would rather risk her own authority than force a marriage that could compromise her daughter’s virtue. Her deliberation treats inclination and duty as consequential choices, not as effects that can be waved away by invoking nature.

The opening editorial preface likewise mocks the claim that the “century of philosophy” has made men honest and women modest, while arguing that identical causes should produce identical effects. Against that satirical skepticism, the breakup formula offers its own glib natural law: boredom excuses the man, and the woman is left to bear the injury. Its recurring refrain is memorable because it makes the evasion audible each time the speaker approaches an admission of responsibility.