How I pity you for your fears! How clearly they show my superiority over you! And you want to
teach me, to guide me? Ah, my poor Valmont, what a great distance there still
is between you and me! No, all the pride of your sex would not be enough to bridge
the gap that seperates us. Because you could not carry out my plans, you judge them to be impossible!
It well befits you, you proud, weak creature, to try to measure my means and judge my
resources! Really, Vicmonte, your advice has put me in a bad temper, and I cannot
conceal it from you...
What have you done that I have not surpassed a thousand times? You have seduced, even ruined, many
women; but what difficulties did you have to overcome, what obstacles did you
have to surmount? Where was there any merit that was truly yours?...
Believe me, Vicmonte, one seldom acquires qualities one can do without.
Fighting without risk, you necessarily act without caution. For you mean,
defeats are only so many fewer victories. In that unequal battle, our good fortune is not to lose,
and your misfortune is not to win...
Ah, keep your advice and your fears for those delirious women who claim to be "women of feeling";
whose feverish imagination would make one think nature had placed their senses in their heads; who,
never having reflected, constantly confuse love with a lover; who, in their
foolish illusions, believe that the man with whom they have sought to pleasure
is the sole depository of it; and who, being truly superstitious, give the priest the respect and faith which ought
to be given only to the divinity.
Fear also for those women who, more vain than prudent, do not know how to consent to being abandoned
when necessary.
Tremble above all for those women, active in their idleness, whom you call "sensitive," and of whom love takes possession
so easily and so powerfully...
But what have I in common with those rash women? When have you ever seen me depart from the rules
I hvae laid down for myself, and violate my principles? I call them my principles and I do so
deliberately, for they are not, like those of other women, given at random, received without examination
and followed from habit; they are the fruit of my profound reflections; I have created them, and I can
say that I am my own work...
Can you suppose that after having made so many efforts I shall not enjoy the fruits of them?
That after having raised myself above other women I shall consent to crawl like them between
rashness and timidity? No, Vicmonte, never. I must conquer or perish. As for Prevan, I want
to have him and I shall have him; he wants to tell it and he will not tell it: that,
in a few words, is our whole story. Good-by.
The film Dangerous Liaisons.
