Cécile falls in love with the Chevalier Danceny (her young music tutor), and Merteuil and Valmont pretend to help the secret lovers in order to gain their trust and manipulate them later to benefit their own schemes.

Merteuil promises Valmont that if he seduces Madame de Tourvel and provides her with written proof of seduction, she will spend the night with him.

Valmont befriends Tourvel by convincing her that he has changed his rakish ways and become a virtuous man, but he finds seducing her to be a far greater challenge than his previous conquests.

Desperate with guilt and grief, Madame de Tourvel succumbs to a fever and dies, while Cécile returns to the convent, dishonoured.

It has been suggested that Laclos's intention was the same as that of his fictional author in the novel; to write a morality tale about the French nobility of the Ancien Régime.

All the characters in the story are aristocrats, including the virtuous ones like Madame de Tourvel and Madame de Rosemonde and many royalist and conservative figures enjoyed the book, including Queen Marie Antoinette, which suggests that—despite its scandalous reputation—it was not viewed as a political work until the French Revolution made it appear as such, with the benefit of hindsight.

Wayland Young notes that most critics have viewed the work as ... a sort of celebration, or at least a neutral statement, of libertinism... pernicious and damnable...

Almost everyone who has written about it has noted how perfunctory are the wages of sin..."[1]He argues that ... the mere analysis of libertinism… carried out by a novelist with such a prodigious command of his medium... was enough to condemn it and play a large part in its destruction.