Is Sex Necessary? or Valmont at rest

One odd thing about the Vicomte de Valmont is that, for a seducer, he doesn’t seem to actually like sex very much. There are a couple of places where he mentions that he doesn’t get much pleasure from it anymore, and for all that he sleeps with three women in the course of the play and pursues a fourth, he seems to me to have somewhat of a low libido. Part of this, of course, is that sex is, for him, a game, mostly about power. The game is manipulating a woman into having sex with him, the sex itself is not the point.

I’m convinced, though, that part of it is age. He is—what—forty or so at the time of the play? He tells (plausibly, though I think falsely) of having seduced a woman fifteen years previously, and there’s no impression that he was a prodigy. I suspect he is at least thirty-five, likely forty. Old enough, at any rate, for not only the first flush of youth to be long past, but for the mature and patient voraciousness of the twenties to have faded. And, since he has never had a sexual relationship with any one woman long enough to enjoy the deeper pleasures of real and dangerous intimacy, it’s not altogether surprising that variety has, in his case, staled after twenty years or more of sampling the buffet.

Digression: I realize that not every male has either the irrepressible and insistent sexual eagerness I associate with teenagerhood, nor the calmer but deeper appetite I associate with the male twenties, much less the slackening of promiscuous omniverousness I have come to associate with the grupp thirties. I think it’s fairly common, or at any rate common enough to be a recognizable story, in which to place Monsieur the Vicomte. So, Gentle Reader, if your teenage years were not spent in constant and feverish pursuit of sexual release, please do not take my comment as a reflection on your history. Also, if you are in your fifties and still spend your years in constant and feverish pursuit of sexual release, heck, good on you. People are different, one to another, and so on. End digression.

So, if the Vicomte is experiencing a lessening of sexual desire, but has not outgrown his definition as a despoiler of women, that context is (I think) an interesting one for his collapse. What would such a man do? He would, I think, deny to himself his decreasing desire, and throw himself into a new seduction. Moreover, he might well pick a seduction that was unlikely to succeed, or at least to succeed quickly, thus negating or postponing the (he suspects) disappointing consummation. Meanwhile, his behavior with the fifteen-year-old Cécile fits into the context as well. He’s grasping at youth, while taking on a semi-avuncular role as teacher. And, during the scenes themselves, he seems ... not reticent, certainly, but unrushed. “[T]here is no necessity whatsoever for hurry,” he says, before launching into an irrelevant anecdote. Then he begins her instruction in oral sex “with one or two Latin terms”. I wonder the Vicomte is having trouble getting it up. He denies it to Madame the Marquise, of course, but then, he would.

But then, I think, when he does, at last, bed Madame de Tourvel, I think his low expectations are vastly exceeded. He describes it as “unprecedented”, which considering his wide experience is pretty strong. I think, in sexual terms, the surprise is not that he succeeds in the seduction, but that she succeeds in seducing him. I wonder why, and how. Not through tricks, I imagine. Because they are “in love” (vaddevah dat means)? Because she loses herself in him? Because ... perhaps there is no explanation, perhaps it’s just one of those things that happens. And that, too, frightens him, because, of course, he may not be able to repeat it. And, if he does, it still might break him out of his self-definition as a seducer.

So, he goes back to his prostitute and his teenager and his Marquise, but as some Stephen Fry once said, you can’t go home again.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.