Prévan's Threefold Seduction and Revenge

M. de Prévan’s threefold scheme turns an admired circle of female friendship into a public scandal. As recounted by Vicomte de Valmont, M. de Prévan first studies three women whose closeness has outlasted the expectations of Parisian society, then uses their coordinated affairs to arrange a simultaneous reckoning with their former lovers. The episode’s reversal is not simply that the women are deceived: the men who have been displaced become collaborators, and the private arrangements that seemed to protect each couple become the means by which all three relationships are exposed.

The circle and its reputation

The story begins with three women, all described as beautiful and accomplished, who have remained closely united since entering society. Their solidarity becomes more conspicuous, not less, when each finds a lover during the same Carnival. They exchange confidences rather than compete, and onlookers who had expected love to divide them instead watch their attachment grow stronger.

That constancy attracts public scrutiny. Unsuccessful suitors and jealous women circulate competing rumors: some allege that the women share everything, even their lovers; others insinuate that the men in the relationships are present only as a respectable cover. The account does not establish these accusations as fact. It emphasizes instead how public opinion first condemns the circle, tires of its own criticism, and then turns its censure into fashionable admiration. The women and their lovers withstand the shift by remaining together, but their reputation is already a spectacle that M. de Prévan can exploit.

M. de Prévan’s three-part design

Admitted readily into the circle, M. de Prévan observes that its celebrated happiness is less secure than its reputation suggests. The women still meet, partly because circumstance brings them together, and preserve the appearance of intimacy. Their lovers, however, increasingly attend to other obligations and are less often present for the evening. M. de Prévan interprets this thinning of the group as evidence that habit and self-regard, rather than strong affection, now hold it together.

He sees that openly choosing one woman would unite the other two against him. Instead, he makes himself available to each in turn, offering attention to whichever is temporarily neglected. Each woman, in Valmont’s account, has reason to be indulgent; each man believes the new suitor is no threat to him. M. de Prévan also benefits from the notoriety of an existing affair with a foreign woman whose refusal of a great prince has drawn attention at court and in the city. The difficulty is to coordinate three advances that must reach their conclusions together. One nearly reaches that point about a fortnight before the others, so he delays it until the plans can converge.

On the appointed day, M. de Prévan divides the woman’s letters into three bundles. Each bundle includes a different intimate keepsake: a portrait, an amorous cipher she had painted, or a lock of hair. He sends each package to one of the former lovers, accompanied by a conspicuous letter ending the relationship. The men independently conclude that they have been discarded for M. de Prévan; without consulting one another, each challenges him to answer for the insult. Their three challenges arrive at his home.

The meeting becomes a trap

M. de Prévan accepts the challenges and assigns all three meetings to the same place and time the next morning, at a gate of the Bois de Boulogne. When the three rivals discover one another there, he addresses them together and acknowledges that each has the same complaint. Rather than fight them in sequence, he offers them another target: the women who have been unfaithful to them. He invites all three men to supper at his small house that evening and asks them to trust his plan.

He returns to Paris and arranges for each woman to visit him alone, with an hour between appointments. Two hesitate, but agree. The three former lovers join M. de Prévan at the house to await the women. He receives each visitor in turn, conducts her to a private room, then withdraws on a pretext so that her former lover can confront her. Each woman believes her encounter is separate from the others. In Valmont’s telling, the former couples reach a reconciliation in private, and the same pattern is repeated with the remaining women.

The deception becomes unmistakable at supper. All three couples gather, and the women realize that they have not been the sole participants in the arrangement. M. de Prévan then returns and, by apologizing to the women in a manner that discloses their secrets, makes clear how thoroughly he has maneuvered them. The gathering nevertheless continues. Resentment remains beneath the company’s tender conversation, while the account describes gaiety giving way to renewed desire. The supper lasts until morning, leaving the women with the impression that their lovers have forgiven them.

Exposure and aftermath

That appearance of reconciliation does not last. The next day, the men end their relationships permanently and publicize what happened. Their revenge therefore reaches beyond the private supper: they make the affair a matter of public knowledge, turning the women’s earlier reputation for inseparable loyalty into a source of humiliation. One of the women enters a convent; the other two live in exile on their estates. The group whose unity had once unsettled society is dispersed, and the publicity that had alternated between condemnation and praise settles into lasting damage.

The story as a lettered account

Valmont presents the episode as a warning to his correspondent, urging caution in a social world where one imprudence can have consequences that cannot be undone. His narrative also marks a limit on what can be known: he says that the evidence for the private events of the night is missing, and distinguishes those uncertain details from the subsequent meeting and public breakups, which he calls more certain. The story is therefore both an account of M. de Prévan’s calculated reversal and a piece of social intelligence whose narrator signals that not every intimate detail is verifiable.