[Heppenstall was an English novelist, critic, and autobiographer who wrote extensively of his experiences with such literary figures as George Orwell and Dylan Thomas. In the following excerpt from an essay first published in 1963, he gives an overview of Crébillon's works.]

In the course of our general reading we somehow contrive to pick up the name of Crébillon fils. It may be from Antic Hay, or it may be from the letters of Horace Walpole. Claude-Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon, son of Prosper Jolyot, Sieur de Crébillon, was, we gather, a witty but licentious minor French novelist of the eighteenth century. As to Crébillon père, it is understood that he wrote unreadable classical tragedies, which some people in his time thought better than Voltaire's.

To put his hand on an actual book by Crébillon fils is not so easy for the English reader. In general, 'licentious' authors are more known about than read. The most obvious case is no doubt the Marquis de Sade, but how many of us have read Aretino? And in fact, without recourse to a great library, it is difficult enough for a Frenchman to lay hold of Crébillon. Only the original of the present work is normally to be found in print in France. To find much else, you have to go back to Pierre Lièvre's five volumes of 1929, and we ourselves, going back only two years more, may at least find Bonamy Dobrée's translation of The Sofa.

Until the publication in 1930 of the Tchémerzine bibliography, it was even rather difficult to discover just how much Crébillon had written, for no two earlier lists of his books agree. Three or four of the dozen or so unprinted by Lièvre rouse one's interest by their mere titles, but I have not read them. To me, what is printed by Lièvre is canonical. In addition to The Wayward Head and Heart (1736–38) and The Sofa (written during those years but unpublished till 1742), Lièvre gives us an early story, The Sylph (1730), a novel in epistolary form, The Letters of the Marquise de M——to the Comte de R——(1732), The Skimmer (1734), and two dialogues, Night and the Moment (published 1755, but written as much as seventeen years earlier) and The Opportunities of the Fireside (1763). Like The Sofa, The Skimmer is an Oriental romance with contemporary satirical reference. For publishing The Skimmer, Crébillon, then aged twenty-seven, was imprisoned for a week or more at Vincennes, as, eight years later, he was to be rusticated for The Sofa.

The skimmer of the title is held to have represented the papal bull, Unigenitus, which had led to much persecution of Jansenists, Protestants, and Quietists in the previous reign and of which the effects had again been felt in the early years of the reign of Louis XV, who is himself recognizably present as the unfortunate young Tanzai, the hideous fairy Cucumber being, it was understood, the Duchesse du Maine. The skimmer has to be licked, its broad handle rammed into certain mouths. The satire in The Skimmer is a good deal tougher than it was to be in The Sofa, whose main theme, at any rate, is merely saucy, the teller of the various tales being a Hindu whose soul had been forced to transmigrate from one sofa to another until it found one upon which two virgins should yield each other the first-fruits of their love.

The Skimmer and The Sofa were evidently not Crébillon's only Oriental romances, but they stand apart from the rest of his work in the Lièvre canon. To my mind, that kind of thing, even when it is by Voltaire or Dr. Johnson, soon palls, however amusing it may be piecemeal. But so, I find, nowadays do all those early works of fiction whose form is purely serial and episodic, including true picaresque, including Sorel and Le Sage and even Cervantes. The nineteenth-century novel accustomed us to the overall structure, the organization of material, the careful plotting of incident and placing of dialogue, from one end of a book to the other, which keep our responses and expectations steady. The importance of Crébillon lies, I suggest, in those of his writings which bear directly on the development of the novel in Europe.

His first recorded work, the story The Sylph, is told in the form of a letter from one noble lady to another. His first novel, The Letters of the Marquise de M——to the Comte de R——, is wholly conceived in epistolary form. It ante-dates Richardson's Pamela by eight years, Clarissa by sixteen and Dangerous Acquaintances by fifty years. Pamela was translated into French by the Abbé Prévost, author of Manon Lescaut. That makes a nice little pocket of Anglo-French influences. The important point is, however, that The Letters of the Marquise de M——to the Comte de R——was, if not quite the first novel of sensibility to be told in the form of letters, yet the first altogether confident and successful exercise in the form. There had, of course, been the Portuguese Letters and Montesquieu's Persian Letters, but they were not at all the same thing.

The novel by exchange of letters did not remain long in fashion. At the beginning of the present century, Swinburne returned to it in Love's Cross Currents. Thriller-writers, American humourists, and M. Michel Butor have all toyed with it. The masterpiece in the form I take to be still Dangerous Acquaintances. Formally, it seems likely that Choderlos de Laclos took as his model Clarissa, Richardson was not a well-read man, and I do not suppose that he knew The Letters of the Marquise de M——to the Comte de R——at first hand. He may have heard of it, but a modest project of his own, to compose model letters for the daughters of tradesmen, seems to have led him on to attempt a first novel. In any case, Richardson added something of his own. The Crébillon Letters are all from the Marquise. Though spaced in time, the narrative is unilateral, as it is, say, in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which is really in diary form, an offshoot which has thrived more effectively into our time, especially in France.

The Letters, in fact, lack the polyphony which has become so rich, so carefully managed and timed, in Dangerous Acquaintances and which makes the epistolary form so challengingly difficult to handle (hence, perhaps, its early demise). And so a direct cross-Channel transmission of impulses, from Crébillon fils to Samuel Richardson, from Richardson to Laclos, is not perhaps to be thought of. I do not underestimate the importance of purely formal innovation. As a practising novelist and as the friend of practising novelists, I think that it produces sharper effects, and is thus more important in literary history, than mere critics (who at present make rather a point of playing-down literary history) like to admit. I attach, for instance, far more importance to Édouard Dujardin's We'll to the Woods No More than any Joyce authority will admit (I charitably assume that they have read it). But the debt to Crébillon of Dangerous Acquaintances seems to me to be of a more general nature and markedly to concern the present work, as well as the two later dialogues.

There are fairly distinct indications that The Wayward Head and Heart was never finished according to its author's original plan. It is an incomplete work in that sense. It is also, I suggest, incomplete in this sense, that the preoccupations of Crébillon, in The Wayward Head and Heart and in the dialogues, require Dangerous Acquaintances to complete them, to show where they lead. I further suggest that Laclos, a man of the highest intelligence but not, in any large sense, a man of letters, had studied Crébillon fils and was concerned to show where that led rather than where the observed customs of his own day led. True, the observed customs of his own day may well have included much reading of Crébillon fils and some attempt to apply his principles to the noble art of seduction, which in Crébillon never leads to horrid consequences.

There is, to begin with, a similarity in the grouping of characters. We need not find exact parallels, of Madame de Lursay with the Présidente, of Versac with Valmont, of Hortense with Cécile, of Madame de Senanges with Madame de Merteuil and so on, but the grouping is similar. In the greater part of half a century, the society in which the two sets of characters flourish has not much changed. In Crébillon's world, very little but vanity is hurt. Laclos was the severer moralist.

Crébillon may perhaps be described as a sentimental amoralist, like, for instance, Mr. Kingsley Amis. Certainly, there is no lack of sentiment, underneath all that hard stuff, underneath all that intelligent systematization. There is a hierarchy of human feelings. We must more highly value 'amour' than mere 'goût' ('amour-passion', Stendhal would later say, than 'amour-goût'), but 'goût' itself is friendly, pleasant, and considerate, even steady, not simply crude 'désir'. We should certainly hope for 'plaisir', but cannot guarantee it and may have to make do with 'transports' or mere 'volupté'. A woman who is 'sensible' is, as we should say, sexually responsive and thus alone capable of 'plaisir'. Many a woman is more than usually 'galante' (i.e., promiscuous) precisely from a lack of sensibility (i.e., as we should say, because she is frigid). The psychology seems almost post-Freudian. The hierarchy of sentiments is markedly different from the romantic one. It may not have been worse or less kind.

But love or, rather, gallantry is a game played according to rules, which are systematically discussed in the two later dialogues. These are decidedly licentious, but they are also extremely brilliant. Most of the discussion in Night and the Moment takes place, between one set-to and another, in the bed of Cidalise, into which Clitandre has introduced himself without permission. In The Opportunities of the Fireside, the hurly-burly on the chaise longue takes place between the Duc and Célie during the absence of the Marquise who is Célie's close friend and who is loved (with 'amour') by the Duc, Célie's point of honour being to make the Duc say that he loves herself and the Duc's being not to say it, since it is untrue. The Duc wins, of course.

The Wayward Head and Heart, as the reader will discover, is not so very licentious. But, indeed, neither in the dialogues nor in The Sofa is there any of that rhapsodical description with which nowadays the Home Secretary is teased. The nearest we ever come to physical detail is that a 'jambe' is commended, a 'gorge' admired, further 'charmes' revealed. When nowadays the question arises, as it so frequently does, about the distinction between pornography and serious literature, lavish and minute description of the act of sex usually gets by as literature. It is the 'suggestive' which is always frowned upon. The eighteenth century would have found this surprising. Anything beyond mere suggestion would have been thought vulgar in the extreme.

In some ways, this is a pity. After all, when a nineteenth-century dairymaid was seduced by the young squire, she had a baby. The ladies of the eighteenth-century French upper classes were clearly subject to no such inconvenience. Little is known about what made the game so unflaggingly possible. But indeed, in Crébillon fils, as generally in eighteenth-century novels, there is not much local colour of any kind. We know little enough about real-life conversation at that time. Perhaps the ladies and gentlemen of that world spoke pretty well as Crébillon makes them speak. It seems more likely that his dialogue was conceived rather as Miss Compton-Burnett conceives hers. The reader will certainly find that the great scenes in this novel are pure dialogue.