ABSTRACT
The cruelty of the “story” told by the Marquise serves Valmont's own cruel purposes and he “quite simply” copies this model and sends it “quite simply” to the Presidente, his lover. Human cruelty raises all the more questions in that S. Freud perceives in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality the “intimate connection” that exists between “cruelty and the sexual instinct”. In this work, he conceives the sexual act as an element of aggressiveness striving for complete union and notes that the connection established in childhood “between the cruel and the erotogenic instincts” is likely to prove “unbreakable in later life”. Drawing on his reading of Sade, he considers that if each one of recoils from such an injunction, it is on account of the cruelty and jouissance at the expense of the neighbour that it implies, thus of the need to retreat from it as if it were something evil.
