In this episode, Vicomte de Valmont forges the appearance of a letter from Dijon to get his own message before Présidente de Tourvel, who has refused both to meet him and to accept his correspondence. He does not persuade her to welcome the letter: he designs its delivery so that refusing it would itself become conspicuous. The episode makes the household post a stage for their conflict, and Valmont’s account to Marquise de Merteuil presents the deception as a tactical victory even though Tourvel openly rejects the message and its author.

A correspondence under siege

Valmont frames the scheme as part of a continuing contest. Since the earlier affair of the nineteenth, he says, Tourvel has avoided encounters with such skill that his own attempts to reach her have been frustrated. His letters have become another front in the struggle: she does not answer them and refuses to receive them. He recounts having first delivered a letter by a simple trick, then substituted his own for one she had asked him to return. When he tried to offer a third directly, she refused it.

He then tried to make refusal socially difficult. During Tourvel’s toilette, with Madame de Rosemonde and a maid present, Valmont sent the letter in an envelope through his huntsman, who described it as the paper Tourvel had requested. He expected her to accept it rather than risk an explanation that might invite scandal. She took it, but later sent it back unopened, folded in half, in a differently shaped packet. The return showed that her refusal was not merely a difficulty of timing: she was actively guarding the boundary between them. Valmont’s next plan would make that boundary harder to maintain without exposing the act of refusal to the household.

The Dijon disguise

The household’s postal routine offered him an opening. A covered box, kept near the post and roughly like a collection chest, had two keys: one held by the postmaster, the other by Madame de Rosemonde. Residents could place letters in it during the day; the letters were taken to the post in the evening, and the household collected incoming mail the following morning. The task was shared among the servants. Although it was not his servant’s turn, Valmont’s man volunteered to go to the post, giving as his reason that he had business in that direction.

Valmont wrote his letter and disguised the handwriting on its address. He also imitated the Dijon postmark, choosing the city for two reasons. Tourvel had spoken during the day of wanting letters from Dijon, and Valmont reasoned that if he claimed the same privileges as her husband, he might as well write from the same place. The envelope, rather than a false message supposedly written by her husband, supplied the deception: it made Valmont’s letter appear to arrive through the ordinary post from the place Tourvel had mentioned.

The arrangement let Valmont witness the delivery. The household customarily gathered for breakfast and waited for the letters before dispersing. Madame de Rosemonde opened the box and handed Tourvel the letter marked as coming from Dijon. Tourvel immediately noticed that the handwriting was not her husband’s. She broke the seal quickly, glanced at the contents, and visibly changed; Madame de Rosemonde noticed and asked what was wrong. Valmont joined the exchange, using the apparent severity of the letter as an excuse to press her for a response.

A visible refusal, a claimed victory

Tourvel said that the letter contained offensive things, but would not identify its author: it was unsigned, she said, and both the letter and its writer deserved her contempt. She demanded that the subject not be raised again, tore the message, put the pieces in her pocket, stood up, and left. Her response exposed the fraud’s limits. The false postmark had secured access to her hands, but it had not made her accept the letter’s sender or answer his advances; in front of Madame de Rosemonde, she publicly refused to engage with either.

Valmont nevertheless treats the delivery as successful. He reports that, despite her anger, Tourvel had his letter, and leaves its eventual reading to her curiosity. That conclusion is his inference, not confirmation from Tourvel: the scene establishes that she received and glanced at the message, while his belief that she read it through comes from his own account. His certainty thus reveals as much about his desire to claim control as about what Tourvel actually did. He had arranged to observe her first reaction, but could not know what she read after leaving.

Letter-writing as strategy

The episode’s structure sharpens the contrast between a letter’s apparent origin and its actual purpose. The household system depends on routine, shared access, and the trust attached to post; Valmont turns those ordinary conditions into instruments of concealment. He exploits the presence of Madame de Rosemonde not by persuading her to assist in the deception, but by making Tourvel’s refusal more awkward in company. His plot therefore relies on social pressure as well as a forged mark on an envelope.

Because the scene reaches the reader through Valmont’s letter to Marquise de Merteuil, his report is both a record of events and a performance of mastery. He recounts each failed approach before presenting the Dijon device as the clever solution, and he interprets Tourvel’s visible distress as evidence that his tactic worked. Yet her denunciation and departure remain part of the same account, complicating his triumph. The supposed victory secures a moment of access, not her consent or an acknowledged change in their relationship. The letter is at once the object of the contest and Valmont’s chosen weapon: he cannot obtain a reply, so he manipulates the conditions under which Tourvel receives his words.