The mirror, together with the mask, is one of the chief symbols of 18th century society. As Gaston Bachelard has said, 'les miroirs sont des objects trop civilisés, trop maniables, trop géométriques, ils sont avec trop d'évidence des outils de rêve pour s'adapter d'eux-mêmes à la vie onirique'. So in reality the mirror creates a dream-world. Crébillon makes use of the dream itself as a mirror in his first work Le Sylphe ou songe de mme. de R——, demonstrating that the comment is capable of inversion.

The sylph is an ideal man for mme de R., and he can read her thoughts, her eyes mirror her heart. What he sees there is the reflection of her own desire and his recognition of this gives him the knowledge to exercise control over her. What he sees is only the reflection of herself, her gaze turned inwards to her own desire, but the dream gives her no control over the other and the sylph exploits his superior position through language. The conversation that ensues between them is a demonstration of the way that language becomes a weapon of control over the other. It is used to show mastery of social convention and limit the freedom of the other. To reject the arguments used by the seducer would involve rejection of the social conventions of that society because the arguments are expressed as self-evident truths about human behaviour and particularly about the normal behaviour of men and women within that society. The conflict between virtue and inclination is dismissed as an irrelevance and this expresses an attitude that Crébillon will continue to express and satirize in later works. The sylph uses the language of the 'amant courtois', but the lady fears, with reason, the physical brutality that may underlie it, she fears that the sous-entendus latent in the argumentation of the sylph, and which constitute her moral victimisation, will in due course become physical victimisation. Crébillon will express this more bluntly in later works as the theory from the Ars amatoris of Ovid that the lady prefers the use of physical force to the timidity of her admirer because it avoids her own moral questioning. But even if the physical culmination to the conversation is not achieved by force, as indeed it rarely is in Crébillon's work, it is nevertheless an expression of the control over one individual by another, an attempt to limit the latter's freedom. With all his theorising, and indeed because of it, as the lady will conform to the accepted values of her world, the Sylph achieves his conquest of mme de R., for her dream mirrors her own heart's desire and her mind is seduced by the language of the seducer. Crébillon's demonstration is that the mirror is multifaceted, the dream centred on the ego encompasses the dream centred on the ideal other that she has created.

This creative element is also found in the one-sided Letters de la marquise de M—— au comte de R——, for the marquise creates in her lover the ideal of her imagination, she never recognises him to be as he is and the mirror distorts for the benefit of her desire. The reader can imagine her sitting writing these letters at such a desk as the one given to the comtesse Du Barri by Louis XV and of which she writes: 'C'était un composé de vermeille et de plaques de porcelaine admirablement peintes. Lorsque je l'ouvrais, une glace se levait pour réfléchir mes traits'. In these letters language has a seductive effect, for while writing, the marquise is seducing herself into believing that she needs her lover and the portrait she gives of her husband establishes in her mind the normal conventions of her society. This is the only work in which Crébillon bluntly gives a tragic outcome to a novel. The marquise dies because of the sincerity of her own feelings, her image is a true reflection of that sincerity and those of the other characters are distorted. In this way, the marquise becomes a victim of her society, whose values cause her death. The truth of her reflection implies the falsehood of society.

The dialogue is particularly well suited to Crébillon's purpose, indeed almost all his work is a series of dialogues in different guises. In the conversation between Clitandre and Cidalise, the protagonists of La Nuit et le moment, the reader sees reflected, through the words spoken, an intimate game of attack and defence. The language of 'galanterie' and the anecdotes relating past seductions here conceal a situation in which both actors are equally willing to remove their masks, equally experienced in the attempt to satisfy their desires and equally aware that they are giving nothing and taking nothing, the relationship remains ephemeral and has no reason to last. The two mirrors of their personalities reflect themselves alone, their own inner desire, there is no movement outwards, they remain opaque, self-absorbed, narcissistic. At the same time, there is no control exercised over the other, they are partners in a dance of set movements and an anticipated conclusion.

The conversation between the duke and Célie in Le Hasard du coin du feu is different in form and in intention and it is far more complex. Célie wishes to gain control over the duke and remove him from the marquise. She reflects only desire and her conversation, allied with her gestures in the stage-directions included in the dialogue, show that her intention is to exercise control through her physical charms. The duke recognises this from the beginning and plays his part. In the final gesture, the act of love, there is a mingling of knowledge, each has reflected the mirror-image of the other's desire. But desire on Célie's part is unsatisfied. Crébillon writes elsewhere of women bringing to the sexual encounter 'plus de sentiment que de désir'. Control eludes her because she is not loved and the duke has expressed no feeling of love for her, by remaining silent he has retained mastery over himself. So that Célie expresses clearly her disillusionment: 'Ah! toujours des éloges! pensez-vous qu'ils me tiennent lieu de ce que vous ne m'avez pas encore dit? S'ils suffisent à la vanité, qu'ils sont peu faits pour contenter le cœur!' In the mingling of knowledge, the attempted satisfaction of desire, has come for her the dissatisfaction of seeing that the mirror held only her own desire, it reflected no feeling for her on the part of the other and she is as much alone, separated as she was before. What was acceptable to Cidalise is not acceptable to Célie and she cries out against the opaque reflection of the mirror. The duke is then able to exercise control on his own terms. The pretext he gives for this is once again the conventions of their society, which she cannot deny without excluding herself from it. He will not give up the marquise for her, but accepts to continue with Célie. It is at her suggestion that he does this, but there is constantly an attempt on her part to force an admission of feeling from him: 'Puis-je raisonnablement me flatter que le goût que vous avez pour moi devienne jamais un sentiment?' The pathos of her inquiry, underlined by his negative reply, shows the weakness of her position and her recognition of it. An arrangement is made by which she will take an extra lover of both their choice and she cannot activate his jealousy on that count. The conclusion of the duke is that there is little difference between 'goût' and 'sentiment'. Crébillon comments as author in conclusion on the 'différence trop réelle qu'il y a, quoi qu'il en dise, entre ces deux mouvements,' for the language conceals the emptiness of the heart that lies beneath that 'contact de deux épidémies'. There are moments in this scene, however, where the language does become brutal, the truth of indifference is revealed and the delicate glass of the mirror reflects a heart that could break if pressed too far to recognise that truth.

The main intention in writing those tales that have a fashionable oriental setting seems to have been to satirize French social conventions in an exotic milieu. The repetitive form of Le Sopha comes from putting together a series of dialogues between couples abandoned to the pleasure of being alone, but secretly observed. The watcher holds the mirror that gives him total observation, but he can see and cannot be controlled. The double aspect of this mirror has been shown by Michel Foucault. The watcher sees only his own desire, the secret of his own heart, the mirror merely reflects.

The language of the protagonists in the dialogues and the report of the observer are imbued with the obscure feeling that the watcher does not know he sees only himself, the participants know they are alone and yet have the sense of being watched. The adult fairy-tale that ridicules the duc de Richelieu is on another level an erotic demonstration that desire remains unsatisfied even at the point where the two sides of the mirror meet, the observer and the observed, for what is desired cannot in the final gesture, the act of love, be controlled and escapes, as does Zéïnis from the soul of the sopha.

The allegory with the Japanese setting satirizes the political machinations in France surrounding the papal bull Unigenitus, but from another viewpoint the story is concerned with the young couple Tanzaï and Néadarné and their journey to gain experience of the meaning of loyalty and fidelity to each other as an essential concomitant of their love. The ridicule directed at the young prince is a social attack he must overcome, for nothing is more important to him than the truth of their reciprocated love. Their infidelities to each other with Concombre and Moustache are shown as relatively unimportant because they had no other choice and because their own feelings were not involved. Crébillon gives in this tale a rare example of the mirror reflecting a single image for the young couple, one in which they could see each other's reflection.

The Athenian letters describe a strange, perhaps subconsciously homosexual world in which Alcibiade discusses his conquests with his companions in his letters, thus achieving a more truly erotic pleasure. We rejoin the comments of Jean Luc Seylaz [in his La Création romanesque chez Laclos, 1958] on Laclos: 'Un être érotique ne s'abandonne jamais dans le plaisir; au contraire tout se passe comme s'il se dédoublait sans cesse et que ce fût à la partie de lui qui est en quelque sorte spectatrice de l'autre que dût être réservé le plaisir. L'amour est chez lui perpétuellement pensé et 'cérébralisé.' The letters here depict the exercise of control over victims and the reflection is an image of loneliness, a constantly repeated seduction process that seeks to prove ad infinitum the virility of the 'grand-maître'. The social attack is often explicit in this work: ' … si nous avons encore le même orgueil, qu'il s'en faut que nous ayons ces vertus que nous admirons dans nos pères et que peut-être nous n'y révérons tant que parce que nous nous sentons moins en nous-mêmes la possibilité de les égaler!' The attack on sexual pretence is expressed to Alcibiade by Némée: ' … vous m'avez, vous, dégoûtée du goût.' The association of Athenian and French decadence is an obvious one and the characters are left at the end of this work in an image of sadness. Alcibiade himself comments: 'si les hommes les plus jaloux de ma gloire savaient, et ce qu'elle me coûte, et combien souvent elle m'ennuie, ils cesseraient bientôt de m'envier une si onéreuse célébrite.' The Athenian is saying the same as Versac, as lord Durham, in the Heureux orphelins, indeed as any of the accomplished masters depicted by Crébillon. The letter-form acts as a mirror reflecting the purposelessness of the fictional writer's existence, the fictional writer comes to reflect his society.

Les Egarements du cœur et de l'esprit is a novel of initiation into society. The narrator recounts his initiation and reveals to himself the distance between what he was then and what he has become. The mirror here is turned to reflect the past and to reinterpret for Meilcour the circumstances and people that formed him. From his past come the conversation and behaviour of the only people he knew, his equals in society. It is striking that the most highly developed scene is Versac's set of instructions to the youth, which will enable him to exercise control over women and establish the reputation that they will make for him. The pathos of his situation, even at 17, is revealed to himself and to the reader at the outset: 'Je voulais m'étourdir en vain sur l'ennui intérieur dont je me sentais accablé; le commerce des femmes pouvait seul le dissiper.' The love of reciprocal feeling represented by Hortense is not developed, it remains unreal in the memory of the narrator, who sees his unrealised happiness through a glass darkly. Her place is taken in all realism by the woman who is all desire and who responds to the desire that motivates most strongly the thoughts and behaviour of the youth. Yet even she, at their moment of truth, looses the cri de cœur 'et je suis perdue, si je ne suis pas heureuse.' Desire remains unsatisfied and his initiation marks the prelude to a career that makes him into a second Versac. In this case the dissatisfaction moves beyond the inability to find satisfaction in the senses, for the narrator, in measuring the distance he has traversed, is dissatisfied with what he is, what his Society has made of him. In this novel, the mirror-image reaches its ideal profundity, the distance between intention and achievement in a human life.

Les Lettres de la duchesse de —— au duc de —— is filled with sadness. The letters reflect the fears of the duchess and the final letter is an echo of the Princesse de Clèves: 'le ton de cette lettre doit vous dire que, quelque pouvoir que vous y avez encore, rien ne peut me déterminer jamais à accepter l'offre que vous me faites de votre main … votre façon de penser que rien, même le voulussiez-vous sincèrement, ne peut réformer'. The duchess has realised to her cost that the duke, whom she loves, is nothing more than an accomplished seducer, he is the replica of the duke of the dialogue, of Versac, of lord Durham in the Heureux orphelins, of so many others. He has been formed by his society to mirror in his thinking and his behaviour the libertin ethic of that society. The paradox of love within his society that Crébillon expresses with sadness is that through control there is no possession, there is only the destructive force of separation and loneliness.