The definition that Merteuil gives of love is very telling: "Don't you recall that love is, like medicine, only the art to help nature?" (Letter 10) the feelings that come naturally must be repressed or transformed by the art of love. It is the advice that Merteuil herself follows in her affairs. When she describes the moments she shares with her lovers, her feelings are always half premeditation, half sentiment:

There, half out of premeditation, half from sentiment, I threw my arms around him and fell at his knees. 'To prepare you the surprise of this moment,' I said, 'I reproach myself for having troubled you with an appearance of ill-humour, with having veiled for an instant my heart from your gaze. Forgive these faults, I will expiate them by my love.' You may imagine the effect of that sentimental discourse. The happy Chevalier raised me and my pardon was sealed on the same ottoman upon which you and I so gaily and in the same way sealed our eternal separation."(Letter 10)

However, the novel's strength comes in contrasting this king of selfish and dominating love, with the other variant, also given in Blake's poem:

Love seeketh not Itself to please,

Nor for itself hath any care;

But for another gives its ease,

And builds a heaven in Hell's despair."(Blake, 211)

The love that does not seek to please itself but is genuine and sincere is primarily that of other characters in the novel, like Cecile, at least in the beginning, and Madame de Tourvel. However, this understanding of love is also valid, in a way, in the case of the Marquise and the Vicomte. It is easily noticeable that the two actually force themselves into embracing the other ideal of love which seems to gratify their dominating natures. It is an act of will on their part, and they are their own creations, as Merteuil notices: "I carried this zeal so far as voluntarily to inflict pains upon myself while looking...

I worked on myself with the same care to repress the symptoms of an unexpected joy." (Letter 81) Behind the masks that they choose for themselves and the games they play with the others, they seem to play a game between themselves that could be based on genuine feeling: "Pray be careful, Vicomte, and treat my extreme timidity with more caution! How do you expect me to endure the crushing idea of incurring your indignation and, especially, not to succumb to the fear of your vengeance? The more so since, as you know, if you do anything cruel to me it would be impossible for me to revenge it! (Letter 152) Both Merteuil and Valmont are jealous on the other's games and relationships, but their similar and dominating natures do not allow them to succumb and to be united. The fact that at the end Valmont tries to convince Merteuil to give up her relationship with Danceny is very significant: the two are in fact two proud and too narcissistic to give in to love, which they consider a weakness: "Come, my fair friend, as long as you share yourself between several, I am not in the least jealous; I simply see your lovers as the successors of Alexander, incapable of holding among them all that empire where I reigned alone. But that you should give yourself entirely to one of them! That there should exist another man as happy as I! I will not endure it; do not think that I will endure it."(Letter 15)
They prefer war to love, and they opt for the definition of love that the pebble gives in Blake's poem, because of their impulse to dominate and conquer. It can be said that there is a war between them from the start, and that all the other games and plots are aimed at masking their true feelings, which they consider too weak.

Works Cited

Blake, William. Complete Writings. London: Oxford University Press, 1972.

Laclos, Pierre Choderlos. Les Liaisons Dangereuses. London: Oxford Paperbacks, 1998.